Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 26.djvu/202

 192 Southern Historical Society Papers.

thropy. When- proclaimed, it was justified as a thrust at an armed enemy, and declared "to be warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity." It did not include Maryland, Kentucky or Missouri, and expressly excluded portions of Louisiana and a third part of the State of Virginia.

The institution, though in the beginning the North as little as the South, had designed it, was shot down in the angry strife between the sections, like the sturdy oak, between the lines, by bullets sped at other marks, in the " bloody angle" at Spotsylvania.

It is just as absurd to say that the war was fought over the justice or morality of slavery, as it would be to declare that the conflict with the mother country, was a dispute about tea thrown overboard in Boston harbor.

HOW THE SOUTHERNER VIEWED SLAVERY.

The Southerner was as much concerned with the moral aspects of slavery as any of his countrymen. As late as 1831, Virginia, by the narrow margin of one vote, failed to disestablish the institution a result due more to assault without, than to support of the institution within the ancient commonwealth. Even under the unfavorable con- ditions existing in 1861, the number of manumissions in proportion to slaves, was largely on the increase in the Southern States. The ultimate fate of the institution, if it had been left to the South in the earlier half of the century uninfluenced by assault from without can only be told by that Providence which left the Southerner no al- ternative but to maintain the institution against any sudden change, or else confront in his own home, the gravest problem known to government and civilization.

Violent or quick disruption of the relation between the races, would involve both in long misery. If the freedman left the country who was to take his place ? If he remained what was to be the out- come ? How would the civilization of the white man pulsate with the intermingled aspirations and voice of the black man ? Lincoln thought of this, and the remedy for it "in room in South America for colonization ? " The Southerner knew it would be impossible to induce or force the migration of millions of people, not living to- gether in tribal rc-lations in a separate territory of their own, but in- terwoven with the whole social and economic fabric and scattered over a vast country, under the same government with the white pop- ulation. This was the momentous problem, involving his hearth- stone, his honor, and his posterity, in comparison with which slavery