of bullets was over; that the age of ideas
had come; ... The South opened this door [to the
solution] with cannon-shot, and Lincoln shows himself at
the door. The war, then, is not aggressive, but in
self-defence, and Washington has become the Thermopylae of
Liberty and Justice. Rather than surrender that Capital,
cover every square foot of it with a living body; crowd
it with a million of men, and empty every bank vault at
the North to pay the cost.[4]

[4] W. Phillips, Speeches (Boston, 1884), 396-400.

This speech was surely worth thousands of men to the government, but
such is the constitutional cowardice of professional managing
politicians that those of that day thought it prudent, for the sake of
winning over to loyalty the so-called War Democrats, to have the speech
suppressed, and all the docile daily papers did suppress it. It was
circulated to the number of a hundred thousand as a supplement extra of
the weekly called "The Anglo-African." Even so late as October of that
year the Republican State Convention, according to an exultant
editorial of the "Boston Daily Advertiser," "certainly disavowed any
intention of endorsing the fatal doctrines announced by Mr. Sumner in
that convention," and also buried Rev. James Freeman Clarke's resolution
in favor of freeing the slaves, as the esteemed contemporary of that day
predicted, "never to rise again." By another year the Emancipation
proclamation had issued, and three months later Massachusetts idealists
speaking through Wendell Phillips could say: "A blundering and corrupt
cabinet has made it at last an inevitable necessity,--Liberty or Death.
The cowardice of Webster's followers in the cabinet has turned his empty
rhetoric into solemn truth; and now honest men are not only at liberty,
but bound to live and die under his motto,--'Liberty and Union, now and
forever, one and inseparable.'" The country's baffling search to find
its ground, its rising determination to yield thus far and no farther,
the stand taken at last, the great defeat that first befell, the high
idealism, the spirit of the hour,--all are seen in the brief, intimate
account written for the family circle at home of the experiences and
feelings of one representative Boston youth of twenty, soon after to be
a full-fledged three years' man, a hero who rode in the First
Massachusetts Cavalry from Virginia to Florida and back again.

* * *