Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/58

52 poll on the issue of which hang, as they believed, national life and death. I saw, by proof still more conclusive, that private courtesy survived—with difficulty perhaps, but still it survived—the bitterest political estrangement. Tyranny of opinion! Too much of it no doubt there is in America, and wherever else human nature has not yet thoroughly learnt the highest and hardest of moral lessons—perfect respect for conscientious difference of conviction. But the tyranny of opinion in America in the midst of a dangerous civil war appeared to me, I confess, very like the freedom of opinion which other countries enjoy in time of security and peace.

After the anarchy, there was, as a matter of course, to be a military despotism. It seemed, indeed, from the language used, that the two were existing at the same time. Sages began to whisper in awful tones that the rule of a military despot was the issue to which all the respectable people in the United States were looking forward with melancholy complacency as their only refuge from the horrors of freedom. The first successful general would, without fail, overturn the constitution; and his army would, without hesitation, make itself the instrument of his treason. And it must be confessed that this prediction had all the precedents in its favour. Yet not a shadow of military despotism ever fell upon the scene; not a thought of treasonable usurpation ever, so far as we can see, entered any commander’s mind. When, upon a single occasion, a victorious general stepped beyond a general’s province, and assumed a power of negotiation which belonged only to the civil government, his soldiers, though he was their idol, showed at once that they had been citizens before they were soldiers. These men, as has been pertinently