Page:Confederate Cause and Conduct.djvu/27

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History Committee, Grand Camp, C. V.
7

in 1861 brought into existence and moved to action the armies of the South.

"In the Sectional War" (not the "Civil War," for that title accords with the extreme national conception and admits that we were not separate States) we were called upon to resist an invasion of soldiers, armed and sent into our country by the concurrent purposes of several fairly distinct parties then and now existing in the North. They came seeking our injury and their own profit. A new invasion, with like double purpose, is being prosecuted by the lineal successors of some of these parties. Two of them chiefly concern us and our work. The one came—or sent representatives to the war—bent upon the destruction of our Southern civilization, the eradication of the personal characteristics, opinions, thought, and mode of life which made our men different, antagonists, and hateful to them. The other preferred war to the loss of material prosperity, which they apprehended in case the South should attain a position beyond the reach of Northern law-makers and Northern tax-collectors. Mr. Lincoln represented the latter, when, in reply to Mr. John Baldwin and Mr. A. H. H. Stuart, who, as representatives of the Virginia Convention, then in session, urged him to delay the action that opened the war, he asked, "What is to become of my revenue in New York if there is a 10 per cent, tariff at Charleston?" The following incident points to the former: About the year 1850 a distinguished Northern statesman said to a party of Southern congressmen, "You gentlemen will have to go home and beat your plow-shares into swords and your pruning-hooks into spears, for the Northern school-mistresses are training a generation to fight the South."


AGAINST TWO PARTIES.


No longer concerning ourselves with the sentimental unionists and honest abolitionists—whose work seems to be over—we still struggle against the two parties we have described. These exist in their successors to-day—their successors who strive to control the opinions of our people, and those who seek to make gain by their association with us.