EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

In the plan of this HISTORY OF NORTH AMERICA, two volumes are devoted to the Civil War: one written from the Southern, the other, from the Northern standpoint. The war was a conflict between two civilizations, two incompatible ideas, two conceptions of republican government, the one embodied in the word NATION, the other, in the word CONFEDERACY.

From the inception of free government in America these ideas were in conflict, each strengthening itself with the accessories of industrial and political life, and both, not wholly unconsciously, tending toward irrepressible conflict. The history of that conflict from its inception is a history of the intellectual and moral development of the people of the United States. For many years the public mind had only obscure notions of the meaning of nationality: the idea was vast and necessarily corrective of moral and industrial defects. Primarily, the idea was of a free State, but half the American Republic was of slaveholding States. The idea was of industrial efficiency, but half the United States was economically inefficient. The idea was of a moral order, irrespective of race, but in half of the United States the African race was believed to be doomed, by the will of God, to permanent, absolute slavery. Entangled with this misconception of republican institutions was the inevitable confusion of administrative functions and theories of government,-slavery drawing to itself, necessarily, an interpretation favorable to its perpetuity. Therefore

taxation, representation, and the actual direction of the government, State and National, became elements of a continuous dispute, the adherents of slavocracy insisting on concentrating all the powers of the Nation in support of slavery, and notably in expanding it over new regions.

For many years the American people moved, apparently without expostulation from any part of the Union, toward the realization of a vast, slaveholding Confederacy, which promised, ultimately to extend indefinitely southward. But the purposes of men must reckon sooner or later with the laws of nature, and these laws, ever operating regardless of the selfishness of men, had, by the middle of the nineteenth century, quite obliterated slavery from the northern half of the Union. But Congress and States persisted in legislating against the laws of nature and the North awoke to a sense of virtue to which it was hardly entitled by its voluntary acts, for in every State, North as well as South, slavery, either African or Indian, had at some time existed. Had the northern boundary of the United States run along Mason and Dixon's line instead of the Great Lakes, the reaction against slavery must have been long delayed, and secession must have broken out from, rather than for, a Slaveholding Confederacy.

The history of the Civil War is essentially the history of a state of mind which once prevailed, which was shaken, which at last gave way. The war was the most gigantic rebellion in history, and came at a time when the New World was loud in its confession of belief in its own intelligence and morality. It broke out in "the foremost Christian nation," as Americans sometimes modestly described themselves, or, as their English cousins described them, perhaps with less violence to the imagination, “a nation of traders and farmers." It is rather a sad commentary on human nature that the fiercest wars have raged among the most highly civilized people. Perhaps Francis Parkman, the most eminent of American historians, whose classic work is the history of ceaseless warfare in America for

nearly a century and a half, has the true interpretation of civilization, when he writes:

"Since the world began no nation has ever risen to a commanding eminence in the arts of peace, which has not, at some period of its history, been redoubtable in war. And in every well-balanced development of nations, as of individuals, the warlike instinct and the military point of honor are not repressed and extinguished but only refined and civilized. It belongs to the pedagogue, not to the philosopher, to declaim against them as relics of barbarism."

This being true, war is a cleansing process, and a civil war, a process of national purification.

It is as a national, not as a local event, that the Civil War takes on significance. Suppressed rebellions are less interesting, but not necessarily more instructive reading, than successful revolutions. The Civil War in America, as an event in the history of the Nation, was "insurrection and rebellion." Its promoters declared for "independence," and claimed to the end that for this alone they fought; but the parallel they drew with the American Revolution failed at every point, and "independence" resolved itself into what the London Times, at first an ally of the Confederacy, came, at last, to call "the Slaveholders' Rebellion."

President Lincoln, whose accuracy of speech, whose insight into conditions and consequences, and whose sense of right and justice are beyond dispute, ever spoke of the war as "insurrection and rebellion," using a phrase of the Constitution of known and adjudicated meaning. John Fiske, with his habitual directness, remarks in the preface to his The Mississippi Valley in the War:

"It may be observed that this book sometimes alludes to the Confederates as "rebels." I have been surprised to find how generally people seem to think that some sort of stigma. is implied by that word. For my own part, I have sympathized with so many of the great rebellions in history, from the revolt of the Ionian cities against Darius Hystaspes down to the uprising of Cuba against the Spaniards, that I

am quite unable to conceive of "rebel" as a term of reproach. In the present case, it enables one to avoid the excessive iteration of the word "Confederate," while it simply gives expression to the undeniable fact that our Southern friends were trying to cast off an established government. In England, to this day, Cromwell's admirers do not hesitate to speak with pride of the Great Rebellion. While my own sympathies have always been intensely Northern, as befits a Connecticut Yankee, I could still in all sincerity take off my hat to the statue of Lee when I passed it in New Orleans. His devotion to the self-government which seemed to him in mortal peril was no more reprehensible than the loyalty of Falkland to the prerogative of Charles I., though in both cases the sentiments were evoked under circumstances dangerous to the nation's welfare."

Herein we have stated precisely the case before us: an account of the Civil War as an event "dangerous to the Nation's welfare."

The Nation, then, being the chief theme, its aspirations, its efforts, its achievements become the subject of the story. It is not that there was lack of devotion or bravery among the armies of the Confederacy, or that there was devotion and bravery in the armies of the Union; it is the cause of the Confederacy as "dangerous to the Nation's welfare" that here engages us. Tested by the conditions of nationality, that "cause" was baseless. The Northern mind finds itself incapable of discovering any justification for the Confederacy, or the war which it precipitated. The North searches the literature of the New World in vain for an apology for that war which is comparable with the Declaration of Independence, or Lincoln's first inaugural. It sees men of genius at the South diverting its energies into the devastating channel of slavery, seemingly for no moral end; for at last the North came to condemn slavery, repentant amidst the throes of defeat and anguish for its dead. The South, not the North, is entitled to the credit of compelling

the abolition of slavery; the South, not the North, demonstrated the fallacy of the doctrine of State sovereignty and secession: and no false doctrine was ever so ably defended, as by Calhoun in the Senate, by Lee and Johnston in the field. It is not a question of bravery, or of fighting qualities, or of military genius, South or North, but a question of stern, industrial necessity: for the stars in their courses fought for the true economy of the Nation, and the unyielding law of nature was wiser than selfish men. Lincoln expressed the whole in an epigram: "This government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free; it will become all one thing or all the other.”

The state of mind of the American people changed amidst civil war: this is the conclusion of the whole matter.

The present volume is a civil rather than a military history, for the civil victory of the Nation over Confederacy was of far greater import than a merely military conquest. In a national sense, the American people, through the awful experience of civil war, returned to the principles of the Fathers and purified the republic of political corruption. The North does not boast of prowess or achievement; it does not, it cannot look upon the South as having been a conquered country: for the final triumph of national ideas was won against bitter and treacherous foes at the North who, in the judgment of loyal men and women, outclassed the fiercest of Confederates at the South.

Happily for him who attempts to write the history of the Civil War, he has a friend, counsellor, and guide in the foremost man of the age, Abraham Lincoln. The simple perusal of his now published utterances and writings will give the justest idea of what the war meant: and yet probably no person would have been more surprised than Lincoln, had he been told that he had written the best history of the Civil War in America.

It is through Lincoln's eyes that I have tried to see the war. The Nation's "new birth of freedom" is his pacific interpretation of that mighty conflict.