f some fifty miles up a South Carolina
river, in the course of which numerous negroes fled to her. Unlike
Drayton, our captain was rather disconcerted, I think, at having
forced upon him a kind of practical abolition, in carrying off slaves;
but his duty was clear. As for me, it was my first meeting with
slavery; except in the house-servants of Maryland, superficially a
very different condition; and as I looked at the cowed, imbruted faces
of the field-hands, my early training fell away like a cloak. The
process was not logical; I was generalizing from a few instances, but
I was convinced. Knowing how strongly my father had felt, I wondered
how I should break to him my instability; but when we met I found that
he, too, had gone over. Youngster as I still was, I should have
divined the truth, that in assailing the Union his best friend became
his enemy, to down whom abolition was good and fit as any other club.
"My son," he said, "I did not think I could ever again be happy should
our country fall into her present state; but now I am so absorbed in
seeing those fellows beaten that I lose sight of the rest." Peculiar
and personal association enhanced his interest; for, having been then
over thirty years at the Military Academy, there were very few of the
prominent generals on either side who had not been his pupils. The
successful leaders were almost all from that school: Grant, Sherman,
Thomas, Schofield, on the Union side; Lee, Jackson, and the two
Johnstons on the Confederate, were all graduates, not to mention a
host of others only less conspicuous.

In last analysis slavery may have been, probably was, the cause of the
war; but, historically, it was not the motive. Lincoln's words--"I
will save the Union with slavery, or I will save it without slavery,
as the case may demand"--voiced the feeling prevalent in the military
services, and also the will of the great body of the Northern people,
whom he profoundly understood and in his own mental advance
illustrated. I cannot but think that such an aim was more
statesmanlike than would have been the attempt to overturn immediately
and violently an entire social and economical system, for the
establishment of which the current generation was not responsible. In
the long run, to allow the tares of bondage to stand with the wheat of
freedom was wiser than the wish prematurely to uproot. It had become
the definite policy of the enemies of slavery to girdle the tree, by
strict