Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/297

Rh African. All the powers of the Union were put in operation to induce the people of the Southern States to invest their capital in this species of property. From this review of the slavery evil, it appears that the States in the South cannot be charged with the responsibility of its introduction, nor for the continuance of the slave trade, nor for the extension of it by the increase of negro population in the South, nor for the agitations which on this account disturbed the harmony of the sections, nor for the bloody mode adopted for its extinction.

Jefferson Davis said: &quot; War was not necessary to the abolition of slavery. Years before the agitation began at the North and the menacing acts to the institution, there was a growing feeling all over the South for its abolition. But the abolitionists of the North, both by publications and speech, cemented the South and crushed the feeling in favor of emancipation. Slavery could have been blotted out without the sacrifice of brave men and without the strain which revolution always makes upon established forms of government. I see it stated that I uttered the sentiment, or indorsed it, that slavery is the corner stone of the Confederacy. That is not my utterance. &quot; It is not conceivable,&quot; said General Stephen D. Lee, in 1897, that the statesmen of the Union were in competent to dispose of slavery without war. &quot;

It will become clear to any who will conservatively reflect on the conditions existing at the beginning of the present century, that if the opposition to slavery had been firmly based on the principle that it was a violation of the first law of human brotherhood, and also on its breach of the economic principle that enforced labor should not compete with the labor of the free citizen if the appeal for its discontinuance had been made to the public conscience and the private sense of right, and the just claims of honest free labor, the institution would have passed away in less than a generation from the date of the Declaration of Independence. Had all the New