become their accidental masters, to give them an opportunity to be heard before this unnatural strife was pushed to a bloody extreme, but there petitions were all spurned with contempt," &c.

Mr. George Lunt, a Boston lawyer, in an able work, published in 1866, entitled "The Origin of the Late War," from which we have before quoted, says of the action of the Northern people:

"But by incessantly working on the popular mind, through every channel through which it could be possibly reached, a state of feeling was produced which led to the enactment of Personal Liberty bills by one after another of the Northern Legislative Assemblies. At length fourteen of the sixteen Free States had provided statutes which rendered any attempt to execute the fugitive slave act so difficult as to be practically impossible, and placed each of those States in an attitude of virtual resistance to the laws of the United States."

If these acts were not nullification, what were they?

LINCOLN QUOTED AS PROOF.

We propose to introduce as our last piece of evidence that which it seems to us should satisfy the mind of the most critical and exacting, and which establishes, beyond all future cavil, which side was the aggressor in bringing on this conflict. We propose now to introduce Mr. Lincoln himself. In the latest life of this remarkable man, written by Ida M. Tarbell, and published by Doubleday & McClure Co. in 1900, she introduces a statement made to her by the late Joseph Medill, editor of the Chicago Tribune, of what took place between Mr. Lincoln and a Committee of which he (Medill) was a member, sent from Chicago to Washington, to intercede with the authorities there to be relieved from sending more troops from Cook county, as was required by the new draft just then ordered, and which, as we know produced riots in several parts of the North. The author makes Medill tell how his Committee first applied for relief to Mr. Stanton, and was refused, how they then went to Mr. Lincoln, who went with them to see Stanton again, and there listened to the reasons assigned pro and con for a change of the draft. He then says:

"I shall never forget how he (Lincoln) suddenly lifted his head and turned on us a black and frowning face:

""Gentlemen,' he said, in a voice full of bitterness, 'After Boston, Chicago has been the chief instrument in bringing this war on the country. The Northwest has opposed the South, as New England has opposed the South. It is you who are largely responsible for making blood flow as it has. You called for war until we had it. You called for emancipation, and I have given it to you. Whatever you have asked, you have had. Now you come here begging to be let off. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. I have a right to expect better things of you. Go home and raise your 6,000

And Medill adds that he was completely silenced by the truth of Lincoln's accusation, and that they went home and raised the 6,000 additional troops. We could multiply testimony of this kind almost indifinitely; but surely we have introduced enough not only to prove that the statement made by Mr. Phillips is utterly without foundation, but to show further, by the testimony of our quondam enemies themselves, that they were the aggressors from every point of view, and that the South only resisted when, as the New York Express said of it at the time, it had, "in self-preservation, been driven to the wall, and forced to proclaim its independence.”

VIRGINIA'S EFFORTS FOR PEACE.

We can only briefly allude to the noble efforts made by Virginia, through the "Peace Congress," to avert the conflict, and how these efforts were rejected almost with contempt by the North. Mr. Lunt, speaking of this noble action on the part of the "Mother of Presidents," as he calls Virginia, says:

"It was like a firebrand suddenly presented at the portals of the Republican Magazine, and the whole energy of the radicals was at once enlisted to make it of no effect."

Several of the Northern States sent no Commissioners to this Congress at all; others, like Massachusetts, only sent them at the last moment, and then sent only such as were known to be opposed to any compromise or conciliation.

The following letter of Senator Chandler, of Michigan, indicates too clearly the feelings of the Republican party at that time to require comment. It is dated February 11th, 1861, a week after Congress assembled, and addressed to the Governor of his State. He says:

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Governor Bingham (the other Senator from Michigan) and myself telegraphed to you on Saturday at the request of Massachusetts and New York, to send delegates to the Peace Compromise Congress. They admit that we were right and they were wrong, that no Republican State should have sent delegates; but they are here and can't get away. Ohio, Indiana and Rhode Island are caving in, and there is some danger of Illinois; and now they beg us, for God's sake to come to their rescue and save the Republican party from rupture. I hope you will send stiff-backed men or none. The whole thing was gotten up against my judgment and advice, and will end in thin smoke. Still I hope as a matter of courtesy to some of our erring brethren, that you will send the delegates.

"Truly your friend,

"His Excellency, Austin Blair.”

"Z. CHANDLER."

"P. S.-Some of the Manufacturing States think that a fight would be awful. Without a little blood-letting this Union will not, in my estimation, be worth a curse."

Mr. Lunt says:

"If this truly eloquent and statesmanlike epistle does not express the views of the Republican managers at the time, it does at least. indicate with sufficient clearness their relations towards the 'Peace Conference' and the determined purpose of the radicals to have 'a fight,' and it furthermore foreshadows the actual direction given to future events."

HELD OUT TO THE LAST.

But I cannot protract this discussion further. Suffice it to say, that Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas did not secede until Mr. Lincoln had actually declared war against the seven Cotton and Gulf States, then forming the Southern Confed

eracy, and called on these four States to furnish their quota of the seventy-five thousand troops called for by him to coerce these States. This act, on Mr. Lincoln's part, was without any real authority of law, and nothing short of the most flagrant usurpation, Congress alone having the power to declare war under the Constitution. He refused to convene Congress to consider the grave issues then confronting the country. When it did assemble, on the 4th of July, 1861, he tried to have his illegal usurpation validated; but Congress, although then having a Republican majority, refused to consider the resolution introduced for that purpose. The four States above named, led by Virginia, only left the union then, after exhausting every honorable effort to remain in it, and only when they had to determine to fight with or against their sisters of the South. This was the dire alternative presented to them, and how could they hesitate longer what to do?

In the busy, bustling, practical times in which we live, it will doubtless be asked by many, and, with some show of plausibility, why we gather up, and present to the world, all this array of testimony concerning a cause which is almost universally known as the "lost cause," and a conflict which ended more than thirty-five years ago? Does it not, they ask, only tend to rekindle the embers of sectional strife, and thus can only do harm? You, our comrades, know that such is not our purpose or desire. Our reasons have been very briefly stated. It is the truth that constrains. The apologists for the North, using all the vehicles of falsehood, are insistent in spreading the poison; with it the antidote must go. If others attribute to us wrong motives in this matter, we are sorry, but we have no apologies to make to any such. We admit that the Confederate war is ended; that slavery and secession are, forever dead, and we have no desire to revive them. We recognize, too, that this whole country is one country and our country. We desire that, government and people doing that which is right, it may become in truth a glorious land, and may remain a glorious inheritance to our children and our children's children. But we believe the true way to preserve it as such an inheritance is to perpetuate in it the principles for which the Confederate soldier fought-the principles

of Constitutional liberty, and of local self government- or, as Mr. Davis puts it, "the rights of their sires won in the Revolution, the State sovereignty, freedom and independence, which were left to us, as an inheritance, and to their posterity forever." This definition, a distinguished Massachusetts writer says, is "the whole case, and not only a statement, but a complete justification of the Confederate cause, to all who are acquainted with the origin and character of the American Union."

Yes, we repeat, this is our country, and of it, we would say, with Virginia's dead Laureate at the Yorktown celebration:

At Appomattox, the Confederate flag was furled, and we are content to let it stay so forever. There is enough of glory and sacrifice encircled in its folds, not only to enshrine it in our hearts forever; but the very trump of fame must be silenced when it ceases to proclaim the splendid achievements over which that flag floated.

BATTLE-FIELD, NOT A FORUM.

But Appomattox was not a judicial forum; it was only a battlefield, a test of physical force, where the starving remnant of the Army of Northern Virginia, "wearied with victory," surrendered to

overwhelming numbers and resources." We make no appeal from that judgment, on the issue of force. But when we see the victors in that contest, meeting year by year and using the superior means at their command, to publish to the world, that they were right and that we were wrong in that contest, saying that we were "Rebels " and “traitors,” in defending our homes and firesides against their cruel invasion, that we had no legal right to withdraw from the Union, when we only asked to be let alone, and charge that we brought on that war; we say, when these, and other wicked and false charges are brought against us from year to year, and the attempt is systema