Page:Confederate Cause and Conduct.djvu/78

 56 become their accidental masters, to give them an opportunity to be heard before this unnatural strife was pushed to a bloody extreme, but there petitions were all spurned with contempt," &c.

Mr. George Lunt, a Boston lawyer, in an able work, published in 1866, entitled "The Origin of the Late War," from which we have before quoted, says of the action of the Northern people:

"But by incessantly working on the popular mind, through every channel through which it could be possibly reached, a state of feeling was produced which led to the enactment of Personal Liberty bills by one after another of the Northern Legislative Assemblies. At length fourteen of the sixteen Free States had provided statutes which rendered any attempt to execute the fugitive slave act so difficult as to be practically impossible, and placed each of those States in an attitude of virtual resistance to the laws of the United States."

If these acts were not nullification, what were they?

We propose to introduce as our last piece of evidence that which it seems to us should satisfy the mind of the most critical and exacting, and which establishes, beyond all future cavil, which side was the aggressor in bringing on this conflict. We propose now to introduce Mr. Lincoln himself. In the latest life of this remarkable man, written by Ida M. Tarbell, and published by Doubleday & McClure Co. in 1900, she introduces a statement made to her by the late Joseph Medill, editor of the Chicago Tribune, of what took place between Mr. Lincoln and a Committee of which he (Medill) was a member, sent from Chicago to Washington, to intercede with the authorities there to be relieved from sending more troops from Cook county, as was required by the new draft Just then ordered, and which, as we know produced riots in several parts of the North. The author makes Medill tell how his Committee first applied for relief to Mr. Stanton, and was refused, how they then went to Mr. Lincoln, who went with them to see Stanton again, and there listened to the reasons assigned pro and con for a change of the draft. He then says: