The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 1, January, 1864

Excerpt

RETROSPECTIVE.

Time makes many dark things clear, and often in a wonderfully short and decisive way. So we said hopefully two years and more ago in regard to one of the unsolved problems which then pressed on the minds of thoughtful men—how, namely, it was to fare with slavery in the progress and sequel of the war. The history of our national struggle has illustrated the truth and justified the hope. Time has quite nearly solved that problem and some others almost equally perplexing. The stream of historical causes has borne the nation onward on the bosom of its inevitable flow, until we can now almost see clear through to the end; at any rate, we have reached a point where we can look backward and forward with perhaps greater advantage than at any former period. What changes of opinion have been wrought! How many doubts resolved! How many fears dispelled! How many old prejudices and preconceived notions have been abandoned! How many vexed questions put at rest! How many things have safely got an established place among accepted and almost generally acceptable facts, which were once matters of loyal foreboding and of disloyal denunciation! No man of good sense and loyalty now doubts the rightfulness and wisdom of depriving the rebels of the aid derived from their slaves, and making them an element of strength on our side; while the fact that the enfranchised slaves make good soldiers, is put beyond question by an amenability to military discipline and a bravery in battle not surpassed by any troops in the world.

HAS THE WAR GONE SLOWLY?

The work of subduing the rebellion has gone slowly as compared with the impatient demands of an indignant people at the outset; but not slowly if you consider the vast theatre of the war, the immense extent of the lines of military operations, and the prodigious advantages possessed by the rebels at the beginning—partly advantages such as always attend the first outbreak of a revolutionary conspiracy long matured in secret against an unsuspecting and unprepared Government, and partly the extraordinary and peculiar advantages that accrued to them from the traitorous complicity of Buchanan's Administration, through which the conspirators were enabled to rob the national treasury, strip the Government of arms, and possess themselves of national forts, arsenals, and munitions of war, before the conflict began.

NOT TOO SLOW—WHY? SLAVERY.

But either way the war has not gone too slowly with reference to its great end—the establishment of a durable peace. If the rebellion had been crushed at once by overwhelming force, it would have been crushed only to break out anew. Slavery would have been left unimpaired, and that would inevitably have entailed another conflict in no long time. In the interest of slavery the rebels have drawn the sword; let slavery perish by the sword. In the interest of slavery they have attempted to overthrow the National Government and to dismember the national domain; let slavery be overthrown to maintain the Government and to preserve the integrity of the nation. Let the cause of the war perish with the war. Not until slavery is extinguished can there be a lasting peace; for not until then can the conditions of true national unity begin to exist. What wise and good man would wish to save it from extinction? It is as incompatible with the highest prosperity of the South as it is with a true national union between the South and the North. Once extinguished, there will be a thousand-fold increase in every element of Southern welfare, economical, social, and moral; and possibilities of national wealth and strength, greatness and glory, above every nation on the globe, will be established. Let slavery go down. Let us rejoice that in the progress and sequel of this war, it must and will go down.

EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION.

Looking back, we can now see that much that was trying to the patience of the loyal masses of the North in the early stages of the war, has only served to make it more certain that what ought to be will be. Time has done justice to the idiotic policy of fighting the rebellion with one hand and with the other upholding the institution that constituted at once its motive and its strength. Time has brought policy and justice to shake hands together at the right moment on the same road, and made that respectable and acceptable as a military necessity which was once repudiated as a fanaticism. Time has brought out the President's Emancipation Proclamation, and established it on a firm basis in the judgment and consent of all wise and true loyal men, North and South—to the great discomfiture of sundry politicians—the utterances of some of whom not long ago can be no otherwise taken than as the revelation and despairing death wail of disconcerted schemes. Strange that men whose whole lives have been passed in forecasting public opinion for their political uses, should have rushed upon the thick bosses of the great shield of the public will, which begirts the President and his Emancipation Proclamation;—for certainly all the railing at radicalism, which we heard in certain quarters last summer, was in fact nothing but the expression of disappointment and chagrin at the emancipation policy of the President, and that too at a time when that policy had come to be accepted by the great body of the loyal people of the nation (including all the eminent Southern loyalists), as not only indispensable to the national salvation, but desirable in every view....