Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/582

 572 J- A. Wood b Him be no negotiation, no parley, no truce until every rebel shall have laid down his arms and submitted to the Government. He was among the first to see that this would not be done until the South was wholly exhausted : Let us not be deceived. Those who talk about peace in sixty days are shallow statesmen. The war will not end until the Government shall more fully recognise the magnitude of the crisis; until they have discovered that this is an internecine war in which one party or the other must be reduced to hopeless feebleness and the power of further effort shall be utterly annihilated. It is a sad but true alternative. The South can never be reduced to that condition so long as the war is prosecuted on its present principles. The North with all its millions of people and its countless wealth can never conquer the South until a new mode of warfare is adopted. So long as these states are left the means of cultivating their fields through forced labor, you may expend the blood of thousands and billions of money, year by year, without being any nearer the end, unless you reach it by your own submission and the ruin of the nation. Slavery gives the South a great advantage in time of war. They need not and do not withdraw a single hand from the cultivation of the soil. Every able bodied white man can be spared for the army. The black man, without lifting a weapon is the mainstay of the war.* Stevens would have no regard for the " sympathizer with trea- son " who would " raise an outcry about a servile insurrection or prate learnedly about the Constitution." He thought a " rebellion of slaves fighting for their freedom was not so abhorrent as a rebellion of freemen fighting to murder the nation." He wished the Northern armies to be " possessed and impelled by the inspiration that comes from the glorious principle of freedom." He thought the North had not shown " the fiery zeal that impelled the South ; nothing of that determined and invincible courage that was inspired in the Revolution by the grand idea of liberty, equality and rights of man." Our statesmen do not seem to know how to touch the hearts of freemen and rouse them to battle. No sound of universal liberty has gone forth from the capital. Our generals have a sword in one hand and shackles in the other. Let it be known that this government is fighting to carry out the great principles of the Declaration of Inde- pendence and the blood of every freeman would boil with enthusiasm and his nerves be strengthened for a holy warfare. Give him the sword in one hand and the book of freedom in the other, and he will soon sweep despotism and rebellion from every corner of this continent. The occasion is forced upon us and the invitation presented to strike the chains from four millions of human beings and create them men; to extinguish slavery on this whole continent ; to wipe out so far as we are concerned the most hateful and infernal blot that ever disgraced the escutcheon of man ; to write a page in the history of the world whose brightness shall eclipse all the records of heroes and sages.' ' Congressional Globe, January 22, 1862. = Ibid.