Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/56

50 point in the inner circle, had beaten or baffled the Federal commanders one by one. While Sheridan dealt blow after blow in the Shenandoah Valley, while Grant held Lee immovable before Richmond, while Farragut and Porter thundered on the sea coast, another Federal army, under Sherman, pierced through the circle of the military defences into the heart of the Confederacy, and encountered no popular resistance. This was the end. And never did the moral and intellectual forces more signally prove their ascendency over the physical forces in war. It is too late to deny this now. It is too late now to affect wonder that the Confederacy could hold out so long, after telling us for four years, and persuading men to risk their money on the faith of the prediction, that the task which the Federals had undertaken was hopeless, and that the victory of the Confederates was sure.

The greatest deliverances of Humanity have been wrought by higher agencies than war. But by war no such deliverance of Humanity was ever wrought as this. Not the fields on which Greek intellect and art were saved from the Persian; not the fields on which Roman law and polity were saved from the Carthaginian and the Gaul; not those plains of Tours on which Charles Martel rolled back Islam from the heart of Christendom; not the waters over which the shattered Armada fled; not Leipsic and Lutzen, Marston and Naseby, where, at the hands of Gustavus and Cromwell, the great reaction of the seventeenth century found its doom, will be so consecrated by the gratitude of after ages as Vicksburg and Gettysburg, Atlanta, and those lines before Richmond which saw the final blow.

And how, on the whole, did the North bear itself in this war? how did its love of law, its patriotism, its