The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences: Four Periods of American History

NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1912
Copyright, 1912, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Published April, 1912
TO MY GRANDCHILDREN THIS LITTLE BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED IN THE HOPE THAT ITS PERUSAL WILL FOSTER IN THEM, AS CITIZENS OF THIS GREAT REPUBLIC, A DUE REGARD FOR THE CONSTITUTION OF THEIR COUNTRY AS THE SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND

Livy extolled Pompey in such a panegyric that Augustus called him Pompeian, and yet this was no obstacle to their friendship. That we find in Tacitus. We may therefore picture to ourselves Augustus reading Livy's History of the Civil Wars (in which the historian's republican sympathies were freely expressed), and learning therefrom that there were two sides to the strife which rent Rome. As we are more than forty-six years distant from our own Civil War, is it not incumbent on Northerners to endeavor to see the Southern side? We may be certain that the historian a hundred years hence, when he contemplates the lining-up of five and one-half million people against twenty-two millions, their equal in religion, morals, regard for law, and devotion to the common Constitution, will, as matter of course, aver that the question over which they fought for four years had two sides; that all the right was not on one side and all the wrong on the other. The North should welcome, therefore, accounts of the conflict written by candid Southern men.
Mr. Herbert, reared and educated in the South, believing in the moral and economical right of slavery, served as a Confederate soldier during the war, but after Appomattox, when thirty-one years old, he told his father he had arrived at the conviction that slavery was wrong. Twelve years later, when home-rule was completely restored to the South (1877), he went into public life as a Member of Congress, sitting in the House for sixteen years. At the end of his last term, in 1893, he was appointed Secretary of the Navy by President Cleveland, whom he faithfully served during his second administration.