Page:Confederate Cause and Conduct.djvu/79

 Rh "I shall never forget how he (Lincoln) suddenly lifted his head and turned on us a black and frowning face:

" 'Gentlemen,' he said, in a voice full of bitterness, 'After Boston, Chicago has been the chief instrument in bringing this war on the country. The Northwest has opposed the South, as New England has opposed the South. It is you who are largely responsible for making blood flow as it has. You called for war until we had it. You called for emancipation, and I have given it to you. "Whatever you have asked, you have had. Now you come here begging to be let off. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. I have a right to expect better things of you. Go home and raise your 6,000 extra men.' "

And Medill adds that he was completely silenced by the truth of Lincoln's accusation, and that they went home and raised the 6,000 additional troops. We could multiply testimony of this kind almost indefinitely; but surely we have introduced enough not only to prove that the statement made by Mr. Phillips is utterly without foundation, but to show further, by the testimony of our quondam enemies themselves, that they were the aggressors from every point of view, and that the South only resisted when, as the New York Express said of it at the time, it had, "in self-preservation, been driven to the wall, and forced to proclaim its independence."

"We can only briefly allude to the noble efforts made by Virginia, through the "Peace Congress," to avert the conflict, and how these efforts were rejected almost with contempt by the North. Mr. Lunt, speaking of this noble action on the part of the "Mother of Presidents," as he calls Virginia, says:

"It was like a firebrand suddenly presented at the portals of the Republican Magazine, and the whole energy of the radicals was at once enlisted to make it of no effect."

Several of the Northern States sent no Commissioners to this Congress at all; others, like Massachusetts, only sent them at the last moment, and then sent only such as were known to be opposed to any compromise or conciliation.