The Battle of Principles | Page 3

intellectual giants and moral heroes. Great men walked in regiments up
and down the land. It was the age of our greatest statesmen of the North
and South,--Webster and Calhoun; of our greatest soldiers,--Grant,
Sherman, Thomas and Sheridan, and of Lee and Stonewall Jackson. It
was the era of our greatest orators, Phillips and Beecher; of our greatest
editors, led by Greeley and Raymond; of our greatest poets and
scholars, Whittier and Lowell and Emerson; and of our greatest
President, the Martyr of Emancipation. So wonderful are those scenes
named Gettysburg, Appomattox, and the room where the Emancipation
Act was signed, that even the most skeptical have felt that the issues of
liberty and life for millions of slaves justified the entrance of a Divine
Figure upon the human battle-field. This Unseen Leader and Captain of
the host had dipped His sword in heaven, and carried a blade that was
red with insufferable wrath against oppression, cruelty and wrong.
Now that fifty years have passed since the Civil War, the events of that
conflict have taken on their true perspective, and movements once
clouded have become clear. For great men and nations alike, the
suggestive hours are the critical hours and epochs. That was a critical
epoch for Athens, when Demosthenes plead the cause of the republic,
and insisted that Athens must defend her liberties, her art, her laws, her
social institutions, and in the spirit of democracy resist the tyrant Philip,
who came with gifts in his hands. That was a critical hour for brave
little Holland, dreaming her dreams of liberty,--when the burghers
resisted the regiments of bloody Alva, and, clinging to the dykes with
their finger-tips, fought their way back to the fields, expelled Philip of
Spain, and, having no fortresses, lifted up their hands and exclaimed,
"These are our bayonets and walls of defense!" Big with destiny also

for this republic was that critical hour when Lincoln, in his first
inaugural, pleaded with the South not to destroy the Union, nor to turn
their cannon against the free institutions that seemed "the last, best
hope of men." But the eyes of the men of the South were holden, and
they were drunk with passion. They lighted the torch that kindled a
conflagration making the Southern city a waste and the rich cotton-field
a desolation.
At the very beginning, the founders and fathers of the nation were
under the delusion that it was possible to unite in one land two
antagonistic principles,--liberty and slavery. It has been said that the
Republic, founded in New England, was nothing but an attempt to
translate into terms of prose the dreams that haunted the soul of John
Milton his long life through. The founders believed that every man
must give an account of himself to God, and because his responsibility
was so great, they felt that he must be absolutely free. Since no king, no
priest, and no master could give an account for him, he must be
self-governing in politics, self-controlling in industry, and free to go
immediately into the presence of God with his penitence and his prayer.
The fathers sought religious and political freedom,--not money or lands.
But the new temple of liberty was to be for the white race alone, and
these builders of the new commonwealth never thought of the black
man, save as a servant in the house. For more than two centuries,
therefore, the wheat and the tares grew together in the soil. When the
tares began to choke out the wheat, the uprooting of the foul growth
became inevitable. Perhaps the Civil War was a necessity,--for this
reason, the disease of slavery had struck in upon the vitals of the nation
and the only cure was the surgeon's knife. Therefore God raised up
soldiers, and anointed them as surgeons, with "the ointment of war,
black and sulphurous."
By a remarkable coincidence, the year that brought a slave ship to
Jamestown, Virginia, brought the Mayflower and the Pilgrim fathers to
Plymouth Rock. It is a singular fact that the star of hope and the orb of
night rose at one and the same hour upon the horizon. At first the rich
men of London counted the Virginia tobacco a luxury, but the weed
soon became a necessity, and the captain of the African ship exchanged

one slave for ten huge bales of tobacco. A second cargo of slaves
brought even larger dividends to the owners of the slave ship. Soon the
story of the financial returns of the traffic began to inflame the avarice
of England, Spain and Portugal. The slave trade was exalted to the
dignity of commerce in wheat and flour, coal and iron. Just as ships are
now built to carry China's tea and silk, India's indigo and spices, so
ships were