In the volume which precedes this, The Civil War from a Southern Standpoint, the reader is shown the other side of the picture. In Volume XVI, The Reconstruction Period, Volume XVII, The Rise of the New South, and Volume XVIII, The Development of the North, the history of the country is carried forward after 1865, the close of the War. Happily for America the Nation now knows no North, no South, no East, no West, but only the beneficent realization of Webster's vision:

"Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable." FRANCIS N. THORPE.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

HE who writes on any aspect of the Civil War must of right acknowledge his indebtedness to a great company of writers who precede him, links in the chain binding the present to the past. The enormous number of books about the War preclude the probability that any reader or writer is familiar with their contents, but every one who presumes to write of the War is specially indebted to some group of secondary authorities which for some reason have become familiar to him. Some twenty years ago I began gathering material for a civil history of the United States during the period of the Civil War; I become interested in Confederate and Federal legislation, a rather neglected field,-made exhaustive abstracts of all legislation by Southern States; collected the journals of the secession conventions, also a large number of pamphlets expository of the issues arising during the period. At the time of the death of Jefferson Davis, I had collected for me the editorial comments and reviews on his life and work, some twelve hundred articles, from nearly four hundred principal newspapers of America and Europe, recording the opinion of the world respecting Davis thirty years after the War; I also collected or made abstracts of documents recording the action of Congress regulating political and civil affairs, during this period; finally, I went pretty carefully through the important "Memoirs" and "Narratives" of the chief participants in the War. This material, quite extensive in the aggregate, is the chief original material I have consulted in the preparation of the present volume; but in addition I have freely used a few

secondary authorities, all of whom are named as cited or quoted. Among these, first place belongs to Nicolay and Hay's Lincoln: A History, the most important contribution thus far made to an understanding of the Civil War. This monumental work I have treated practically as a document, because of the peculiar relation of the authors to President Lincoln, their association with the principal public men of war time, and their authoritative, and often exclusive, knowledge of the true course of affairs. Lincoln's works, either in the Century Company's edition in two volumes, or the Tandy edition in twelve, I have used as the primary source of our knowledge of the attitude of the national mind to the great conflict. The plan of the series of which this volume is a part excludes footnotes, and for that reason I have quoted where ordinarily I would have paraphrased and indicated the authority by a footnote. From beginning to end I have had but one thought: to bring home to the reader the best I could obtain for him, ever subordinating myself to him; and whenever an acknowledged authority has recorded affairs in a masterly way, I have not hesitated to give the reader the benefit of the master.

Free use, the reader will discover, has been made of the writings of American statesmen, jurists, and journalists, that the growth of ideas may, as it were, trace itself from generation to generation. Of special usefulness are the Census Reports for 1830, 1840, 1850, 1860, and 1870, which have been sedulously consulted; also The Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Richardson, i-vii; The Federalist; Johnston's edition of American Orations, and also his critical papers on American history in Lalor's Cyclopedia: no writer of his day placed his successors under greater obligations than did Alexander Johnston. Having treated the constitutional history of the period at length in my Constitutional History of the United States, I have drawn from that work the account of the creation and admission of West Virginia, and have utilized its material in the account of the abolition of slavery. The rather long editorial from the London Times

of December 7, 1889, could not well be cut down without doing an injustice to the reader, as the editorial is perhaps the best summary of the War from an English source, and is the more interesting because of the known attitude of the paper toward the Union in 1861-1864. The Civil War was a mighty national adjustment, fundamentally of an economic nature, and the present volume is written as a modest contribution to help to interpret it in that way.

FRANCIS N. THORPE.