Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/568

530 patriotic of Northern men said in 1864: &quot;They have been done."

The convention nominated McClellan, a great soldier of unquestioned devotion to the Northern side of the secession question. He did not suit the Maryland delegation on account of certain military orders, but his unmistakable purpose to fight the South unless her States came back into the Union pleased the convention, and those Confederate leaders whose ultimatum was independence took no comfort from his nomination. If they had inclined to indulge a hope of success through McClellan one line in his letter of acceptance would have banished the illusion: "The Union must be preserved at all hazards. But there was one other remark in the same letter which drew the line sharply between McClellan and the party supporting Lincoln. That remark, full of wisdom, is in this language : When any one State is willing to return to the Union it should be received at once with a full guarantee of all its constitutional rights. The utterance was wise, but it was dangerous to the Confederacy, for it avowed a policy which at that juncture might have had responses from some Confederate States or parts of States. It was patriotic and humane; but it beat the brave man who uttered it. It was not in line with the proposed radical reconstruction of the entire theory of constitutional government.

No one who candidly surveys the political field of the Confederate war period will fail to see that the Northern Democrats were compelled by their political interests and by their Union record to be the most incorrigible, unyielding opponents of permanent secession. The party record from the days of Jackson through the period of the Texas annexation, when their freesoil opponents were threatening to cause a New England secession, and through the days of the compromise of 1850, when the party alignment was on concession and conciliation, as against sectional obstinacy; and through the battles of