NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1912 Copyright, 1912, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Published April, 1912 TO MY GRANDCHILDREN THIS LITTLE BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED IN THE HOPE THAT ITS PERUSAL WILL FOSTER IN THEM, AS CITIZENS OF THIS GREAT REPUBLIC, A DUE REGARD FOR THE CONSTITUTION OF THEIR COUNTRY AS THE SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND...

"Livy extolled Pompey in such a panegyric that Augustus called him Pompeian, and yet this was no obstacle to their friendship." That we find in Tacitus. We may therefore picture to ourselves Augustus reading Livy's "History of the Civil Wars" (in which the historian's republican sympathies were freely expressed), and learning therefrom that there were two sides to the strife which rent Rome. As we are more than forty-six years distant from our own Civil War, is it not incumbent on Northerners to

In 1890 Mr. L. E. Chittenden, who had been United States Treasurer under President Lincoln, published an interesting account of $10,000,000 United States bonds secretly sent to England, as he said, in 1862, and he told all about what thereupon took place across the water. It was a reminiscence. General Charles Francis Adams in his recent instructive volume, "Studies Military and Diplomatic," takes up this narrative and, in a chapter entitled "An Historical Residuum," conclusively shows from cont

The Constitution of the United States attempts to define and limit the power of our Federal Government. Lord Brougham somewhere said that such an instrument was not worth the parchment it was written on; people would pay no regard to self-imposed limitations on their own will. When our fathers by that written Constitution established a government that was partly national and partly federal, and that had no precedent, they knew it was an experiment. To-day that government has been in existence on

John Fiske has said in his school history: "Under the government of England before the Revolution the thirteen commonwealths were independent of one another, and were held together juxtaposed, rather than united, only through their allegiance to the British Crown. Had that allegiance been maintained there is no telling how long they might have gone on thus disunited." They won their independence under a very imperfect union, a government improvised for the occasion. The "Articles of Confederatio

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, English, and American vessels brought many thousands of negroes from Africa, and sold them as slaves in the British West Indies and in the British-American colonies. William Goodell, a distinguished Abolitionist writer, tells us [7] that "in the importation of slaves for the Southern colonies the merchants of New England competed with those of New York and the South" (which never had much shipping). "They appear inde

On the first day of January, 1831, there came out in Boston a new paper, The Liberator , William Lloyd Garrison, editor. That was the beginning, historians now generally agree, of "New Abolitionism." The editor of the new paper was the founder of the new sect. Benjamin Lundy was a predecessor of Garrison, on much the same lines as those pursued by the latter. Lundy had previously formed many Abolition societies. The Philanthropist of March, 1828, estimated the number of anti-slavery societies as

Not stronger than the proceedings of a great non-partisan public meeting, or than the action of religious bodies, but going more into detail as to public opinion in the South and the effect upon it of Abolition agitation, is the evidence of a quiet observer, Professor E. A. Andrews, who, in July, 1835, had been sent out as the agent of "The Boston Union for the Relief and Improvement of the Colored Race." His reports from both Northern and Southern States, consisting of letters from various poin

Southerners, save perhaps a few who were wise enough to foresee what the consequences might be, were deeply gratified when they read (1835-1838) of the violent opposition in the North to the desperate schemes of the Abolitionists. Surely these mobs fairly represented public opinion, and that public opinion certainly was a strong guaranty to the South of future peace and security. But the Abolitionists themselves were not dismayed. They may have misread, indeed it is certain they did misunderstan

In 1840 there were 200 Abolition societies, with a membership of over 200,000. Agitation had created all over the North a spirit of hostility to slavery as it existed in the South, and especially to the admission of new slave States into the Union. In 1840 the struggle over the application of Texas for admission into the Union had already, for three years, been mooted. Objections to the admission of the new State were many, such as: American adventurers had wrongfully wrested control of the new

The desire for peace in 1850 was wide-spread. Union loving people, North and South, hoped that the Compromise would result in a cessation of the strife that had so long divided the section; and the election of Franklin Pierce, in 1852, as President, on a platform strongly approving that Compromise, was promising. But anti-slavery leaders, instead of being convinced by such arguments as those of Webster, were deeply offended by the contention that legislators, in passing personal liberty laws, ha

That it was possible for slave States and free States to coexist under our Federal Constitution was the belief of its framers and of most of our people down to 1861. The first to announce the absolute impossibility of such coexistence seems to have been William Lloyd Garrison. In 1840, at Lynn, Massachusetts, the Essex County Anti-Slavery Society adopted this resolution, offered by him: "That freedom and slavery are natural and irreconcilable enemies; that it is morally impossible for them to en

The bitter fruits of anti-slavery agitation were secession and four years of bloody war. The Federal Government waged war to coerce the seceding States to remain in the Union. With the North it was a war for the Union; the South was fighting for independence—denominated by Northern writers as "the Civil War." It was in reality a war between the eleven States which had seceded, as autonomous States, and were fighting for independence, as the Confederate States of America, against the other twenty

President Lincoln's theory was that acts of secession were void, and that when the seceded States came back into the Union those who were entitled to vote, by the laws existing at the date of the attempted secession, and had been pardoned, should have, and should control, the right of suffrage. Mr. Lincoln had acted on this theory in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Texas, and he further advised Congress, in his message of December, 1863, that this was his plan. Congress, after a long debate, responded

For now more than thirty years, whites and blacks, both free, have lived together in the reconstructed States. In some of them there have been local clashes, but in none of them has there been race war, predicted by Jefferson and feared by Lincoln; and there probably never will be such a war, unless it shall come through the intervention of such an outside force as produced in the South the conflict between the races at the polls in 1868-76. Every State government set up under the plan of Congre