Southern States as
provinces, for that would fatally exasperate, and tend to perpetuate the
contest, increase our expenses, destroy our wealth and revenue, render
our taxes intolerable, and endanger our free institutions. When the
rebellion is crushed, we should seek a real pacification, the close of
the war and its expenses, a cordial restoration of the Union, and return
of that fraternal feeling, which marked the first half century of our
wonderful progress. To insure these great results, the policy of the
Government must be _firm_, _clear_, _unwavering_, and marked by
discriminating justice and perfect candor. The country is in imminent
peril, and nothing but the truth will avail us. _The North and South
must understand each other._ The South must know that we realize the
evident truth, that slavery caused the rebellion. Efforts were made on
other questions to shake the Union, but all had proved impotent in the
past, as they must in the future, until we were divided by slavery, the
only issue which could produce a great rebellion. Nor will angry
denunciations of the discordant elements of slavery and abolition now
save us, for still the fact recurs, that without slavery there would
have been no abolition, and, consequently, no secession. Slavery,
therefore, was the cause, the _causa causans_, and whilst we should use
all wise and _constitutional_ means to secure its gradual disappearance,
yet we should act justly, remembering how, when, and under what flag
slavery was forced upon the protesting and opposing South, then feeble
colonies of England. And yet, for nearly thirty years past, England has
constantly agitated this question here, with a view to dissolve our
Union, and has thus been mainly instrumental in sowing here the seeds of
discord, which fructified in the rebellion.

And then, when the tide of battle seemed adverse, England, giving her
whole moral aid to the rebellion, demanded from us restitution and
apology in the case of the Trent, for an act, which had received the
repeated sanction of her own example. Her press then teemed with
atrocious falsehoods, insulting threats, and exulting annunciations of
our downfall. Her imperious _ultimatum_, excluding arbitrament, was
accompanied by fleets and armies, her cannon thundered on our coast, and
she became the moral ally of that very slavery which she had forced
upon the South, but which, for nearly thirty years past, she made the
theme of fierce denunciation