Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/575

Rh of the State Rights party at the North of the utmost importance to us. With these views you readily perceive how I regarded the action of the Chicago convention as a ray of light, the first ray of real light I had seen from the North since the war began. * * * The issue of this war, in my judgment, was subjugation of independence. I so understood it when the State of Georgia seceded, and it was with a full consciousness of this fact with all its responsibilities, sacrifices and perils, that I pledged my self then and there to stand by her and her fortunes whatever they might be in the course she had adopted.&quot;

But the South was as unable to relax the political grasp of the administration as it now was to resist the great military resources which were pressing it toward inevitable defeat. The elections went on with the usual incidents of a presidential campaign, but also with the additional circumstance that the military began now to be made useful in their management of elections to high civil office. The newly constructed governments of Tennessee and Kentucky found that they had been formed for special political purposes and the Federal military were on duty to see that the ballots were cast to suit. The army vote itself was given almost unanimously for Lincoln, and while in New Hampshire, Connecticut, New York, Deleware, Oregon, New Jersey, Maryland and Pennsylvania the vote was close it yet appeared in the final count that Lincoln had carried all Northern States except New Jersey, together with the votes of Missouri and West Virginia, which were plundered for the occasion. The peace party thus went down in overwhelming disaster.