The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 | Page 9

the
whites, an irresistible impulse was given to their cause. To the extent
that this charge was credited was the rebellion consolidated and
embittered. Had it been universally believed, there would have been
few dissenting voices throughout the seceding States. All would have
rushed headlong into the rebellion. And even now, every measure
adopted on our part, in the field or in Congress, which can be distorted
as looking to a similar end, must prove to be a strong stimulus in
sustaining and invigorating the enemy. Happily, while the system of
slavery naturally discourages education, and leaves the mass of whites
comparatively uninformed, and peculiarly subject to be deceived and
misled, there are yet many highly intelligent men among the
non-slaveholders, and some liberal and unprejudiced ones among the
slaveholders themselves. These serve to break the force of the appeals
made to the ignorant, and they have had a powerful influence in
maintaining the love of the Union and the true spirit of our institutions,
among considerable numbers, in all parts of the South.

From the foregoing views, it is plain, that only in a certain sense can
slavery be pronounced the cause of the rebellion. It was not the first
and original motive; neither is it the sole end of the conspirators. But in
another sense, it may justly be considered the cause of the war; for
without it, the war could never have taken place.
There was no actual necessity to destroy the Union for the protection of
slavery and for its continued existence. Construed in any rational sense
likely to be adopted, the Constitution afforded ample security--far more,
indeed, than could be found under a separate confederacy. This was
evident to the leaders of the rebellion, though it was their policy to
conceal the truth from the people, by the fierce passions artfully
aroused in the beginning. Slavery could not have been perpetuated,
because its permanence is against the decrees of nature. But it could
have lived out a peaceful and perhaps a prosperous existence, gradually
disappearing without convulsion or bloodshed. Discussion and
agitation could not have been prevented, nor could the inevitable end
have been averted. Yet the whole movement could well have been
controlled and directed, by the adoption of wise and well-considered
measures, not inconsistent with the natural laws governing the case,
whose final operation it was wholly impossible to prevent.
But this system of gradual amelioration, and peaceful development of
ends that must come, did not satisfy the ambition of the conspirators.
They saw their last opportunity for a successful rebellion, and they
determined not to let it pass unimproved. The vast power of the slave
interest; the passions easily to be excited by it; the encouraging
delusions clustering around it; and the fearful apprehensions growing
out of its darker aspects, all contributed to make it the very instrument
for accomplishing the long-cherished design.
Slavery has been the chief means of bringing about the rebellion. It is
the lever, resting upon the fulcrum of State sovereignty, by which the
conspirators have been able, temporarily, to force one section of the
Union from its legitimate connections. Thus used for this unhallowed
purpose, and become tainted with treason and crimsoned with the blood
of slaughtered citizens, slavery necessarily subjects itself to all the

fearful contingencies and responsibilities of the rebellion. Whether the
confederate cause shall succeed or fail, the slave institution, thus fatally
involved in it, cannot long survive. In either event, its doom is fixed.
Like one of those reptiles, which, in the supreme act of hostility,
extinguish their own lives inflicting a mortal wound upon their victims,
slavery, roused to the final paroxysm of its hate and rage, injects all its
venom into the veins of the Union, exhausts itself in the effort, and
inevitably dies.

WORD-MURDER.
The time has come when we must have an entirely new lot of
superlatives--intensifiers of meaning--verifiers of earnestness--asserters
of exactness, etc., etc. The old ones are as dead as herrings; killed off,
too, as herrings are, by being taken from their natural element. What
between passionate men and affected women, all the old stand-bys are
used up, and the only practical question is, Where are the substitutes to
come from? Who shall be trusted to invent them? Not the linguists:
they would make them too long and slim. Not the mob: they would
make them too short and stout.
There are plenty of words made; but in these times they are all nouns,
and what we want are adverbs--'words that qualify verbs, participles,
adjectives, and other adverbs.' We could get along well enough with the
old adjectives, badly as the superlative degree of some of them has
been used. They are capable of being qualified when they become too
weak--or, rather, when our taste becomes too strong--just