INTRODUCTION THE story of the American Civil War presents a subject fraught with interest, not destined to die with the passing years. Even the finality of the verdict then rendered on the issues joined will not abate the desire of men to fix with precision the political and ethical questions involved and the motives which impelled the participants in that deplorable tragedy. The sword may determine the boundaries of empire or the political destinies of a people, but the great assize of the world's thought and conscience tries again and again the merits of controversies and brings victor and vanquished to the bar of its increasingly fair and discriminating judgment. What was the character of the War? Though one of the greatest wars of modern times, having its rise and fall before the eyes of all the world, yet men are to-day in doubt as to the true term by which to describe it. Was it a Civil War? Such a conception omits the claim of the North that the Federal Government as such fought to maintain its constitutional supremacy, and the claim of the South that the seceding states but exercised their constitutional rights in seceding, and as states fought to maintain that principle. A civil war betokens one people, in the same country, subjects of the same power, at war among themselves. Here, though afore-time countrymen, when the battle was joined, there were two rival governments, and the territories of the contending parties 2 CHARACTER OF WAR were distinguished, not by shibboleths and banners, but by rivers and mountain ranges. It was a sectional rather than a community war, a conflict between governments rather than between citizens of the same government. Was it a Rebellion? Such a conflict indicates a revolt of citizens or subjects against their acknowledged sovereign. Whether in the United States the citizen owed allegiance to the Federal Government as against his State Government was a question upon which men had divided since the birth of the Republic. The men of the North responded to the call of the sovereign to whose allegiance they acknowledged fealty-the men of the South did the same. It was a battle between rival conceptions of sovereignty rather than one between a sovereign and its acknowledged citizens. Was it a Revolution? A revolution is a successful movement of citizens or subjects against their sovereign. Here the identity of the Sovereign was in dispute, and the effort, though of unexampled magnitude, was unsuccessful. In addition the parties to the conflict held irreconcilable conceptions as to what constituted the right of revolution-one insisting that it was a God-given right inherent in any people sufficiently numerous to maintain a National existence; the other, that it was a mere power to strike, dependent upon success to prove the legitimacy of the claim. The parties to the Conflict were not rival nations, but compatriots of the same flag; joint inheritors of the English Common Law and the ideals of liberty consecrated by centuries of heroic struggle; descendants of an ancestry knit in political sympathy by their successful battle for independence from the Mother Country, and the achievements by which they made their new-born nation great; |