Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 9.djvu/21

able from our nation. Domestic slavery is not, in my judgment, to be set down as an immoral and irreligious relation. It is a condition of life as well as any other, to be justified by morality, religion and international law." The present generation, after having been drilled into the belief that the late war was a righteous measure to extirpate the horrid crime of slavery, will, as generations yet to come, find it difficult to understand how such a transition of public sentiment could occur in so short a time—from the embodiment of the most cultured and humane thought on the subject as cited above, to the fanaticism which in a few short years has made a saint of John Brown and declared the author of the emancipation proclamation an inspired man. The crusade once begun, grew rapidly from one of mere fanatical zeal and the agitation by voluntary associations and religious organizations, to the deliberate action of State legislatures, fifteen of which nullified the Constitutional provision and the laws passed to enforce the same, by imposing severe penalties upon those who sought to execute the fugitive slave law. In short, it grew from a small germ of sentiment without regard to law to a cruel attempt to incite servile war in Virginia, and finally to a great revolution which brushed aside law, constitutions, and American brotherhood, until a million men were in arms invading the homes and shedding the blood of a people who thought, as all early publicists and the most enlightened later ones maintained, that they were protected against such infraction of right by the very terms of the compact under which they lived. The action of the Southern States, looking to the protection of their constitutional rights from such a tidal wave of fanaticism by the peaceful expedient of withdrawing from the Union and resuming the sovereignty they had surrendered to the Federal government upon well-defined conditions, will not appear so illogical or revolutionary when it is reflected that the tenor of public opinion, as well as judicial