Page:Historical Essays and Studies.djvu/495

Rh as against Westminster possessed a certain independent force of its own, that northern statesmen of great authority maintained it, that its treatment in successive stages by Calhoun and Stephens forms as essential a constituent in the -"progress of democratic thinking as Rousseau or Jefferson, we are not told. The confederates are presented as men who adopted a certain political theory because it suited their interests and their passions. But beyond this, the immediate cause of secession, the duration of the war, its balanced fortune, its historic grandeur, were very much due to four or five men, most of whom took arms under compulsion of an imperative law, in obedience to duty in its least attractive form. To the cogency of the unwritten law, to the stern power of the disinterested idea for which men died with a passion of sacred joy in the land of the almighty dollar and the cotton-king, justice is not done. That which made the conflict terrible, and involved Europe in its complications, was not the work of premeditating slave-owners, but of men to whom State rights, not slavery, were supreme, who would have given freedom to the slaves in order, by emancipation, to secure independence. Many good officers, before resigning their commission, before, in Douglas's phrase, they checked their baggage and took a through ticket, hesitated like Lee and like A. S. Johnston, who wrote, "I suppose the difficulties now will only be adjusted by the sword. In my humble judgment, that was not the remedy." From the Seven-days' Battle to Appomattox, during three years, the defence of the confederate capital rested upon Lee ; and although M'Clellan believed that he knew him by heartland that the South had better men, without him the end would have come in 1862 or 1863, as surely as it would have come to the revolutionary war in 1796 or 1799 but for Bonaparte and Masséna. General Lee delivered the following opinion : "In addition to the great political advantages that would result to our cause from the adoption of a system of emancipation, it would exercise a salutary influence upon our whole negro population." The History of England has not to estimate the political