ved that war, of which they knew nothing, was to come
upon us. The result was that when the southern states, one by one,
seceded, and Fort Sumter was fired upon, and the forts and arsenals
of the south were captured, a new inspiration dawned upon the people
of the north, a determination became general that, cost what it
would, the Union should be preserved to our children and our
children's children. That feeling was not confined to party lines.
I am bound to say that the members of the Democratic party in the
loyal States, in the main, evinced the same patriotic determination
to maintain the cause of the Union, as those of the Republican
party. Their sons and their kindred formed part of every regiment
or force raised in the United States.

At this distance of time from the opening of the Civil War, I have
endeavored to take an impartial retrospect of the causes that led
the south to engage therein. Undoubtedly, the existence of negro
slavery in the south was the governing excitement to war. The
owners of slaves knew that the tenure of such property was feeble.
Besides the danger of escape, there was the growing hostility to
slavery in a preponderance of the people of the United States,
restrained only by its recognition by the constitution. The slave
owners believed that, by secession, they could establish a republic,
founded on slavery, with an ample field in Mexico and Central
America for conquest and expansion. They had cultivated a bitter
sectional enmity, amounting to contempt, for the people of the
north, growing partly out of the subserviency of large portions of
the north to the dictation of the south, but chiefly out of the
wordy violence and disregard of constitutional obligation by the
Abolitionists of the north. They believed in the doctrine of an
irrepressible conflict long before it was announced by Seward.

South Carolina, far in advance of other southern states, led in
promulgating the legal rights of secession, until they came to be
acquiesced in by all these states. They committed themselves to
it in the Charleston convention. Their speakers declared, during
the canvass, that if Lincoln was elected, their states would secede.
When elected, the first gun was fired on Fort Sumter, in South
Carolina, where all the people were determined on war. The struggle
once commenced, the natural sympathy of the southern states was
with South Carolina. The States of Virginia, North Carolina and
Tenne