The nucleus from which sprang the new race and nation of thirty millions of unmilitary and unwarlike Americans called suddenly to form the mighty hosts of over three million Confederate and Union warriors, was the Puritans and Cavaliers of Northern Europe, who for conscience's sake exiled themselves from religious, social and political persecution over two hundred years ago to the American wilderness where they hoped, untrammeled by the imperious custom of ages, to raise a new people self-reliant and of universal common interests where all should be schooled in the same ethics politically, socially and morally.
For over a hundred years they kept faith in their purpose in a self-reliant way never known before, being almost wholly self-supporting, having no public factories, each trade making and repairing its own tools and implements, each rural family raising its own flax, wool and cotton and almost universally spinning and weaving its own fabric for clothing. This brought the rearing of children to the mother's fireside, where the moral training of the mother is more pure, effective and lasting than all other methods, including schools and colleges.
They kept this faith until they had increased to a population of three millions of the most earnest, sturdy and conscientious people on the globe, when the principal mother country beginning insidiously to re-establish over them the very evils from which they had fled into exile, they again in 1776 engaged to free themselves, this time in a war for independence and government of their own. In this they succeeded, and by the time of the adoption of the Constitution in 1787 they had established a government more unique in all its leading characteristics than any known to history, its leading feature being that "all just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed."
This Constitution erased from existence all vestige or semblance of a personal and despotic government, such as titles of nobility, established church, primogeniture and entailment of estates, all of which had played so great a part in upholding the cruel and despotic governments of the great nations of civilization, and substituted in their stead a complicated yet symmetrical government with executive, legislative and judicial powers blending—both Federal and State—in one harmonious whole, which amazed the world and set it doubting whether such liberties could long endure.
For 74 years its creators kept the faith of their professions, continuing their Colonial simplicity, universal industry and frugality. In these 74 years the new nation had risen to a population of 30 millions as resourceful, self-reliant, contented and prosperous people as ever lived under one flag. Their labor-saving machinery and devices had led all the rest of the world, so that the genius of the ceaseless and tireless mental workers had by mechanical appliances and organized labor in large factories relieved man's brawn and muscle from perhaps 30 per cent of its arduous toil in the struggle for existence.
But meanwhile political fanatics and moral agitators began to set up strife between the sections North and South concerning an alleged discriminating tariff against the South on cotton goods, with threats of nullification, and later in the recriminating discussion against slavery and its extension and the execution of the Fugitive Slave Law, until in the fifties a small portion of the people, mostly well meant but ill informed, had arrayed the political parties in great bitterness against each other.
So that in 1860 on the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency the Northern agitators claimed it as foretelling forceful abolition and those of the South claimed it foretold the destruction of the rights of the Southern States. Both these classes busied themselves in embittering the sections by raising armed companies of emigrants to the new Territory of Kansas, where they inaugurated a miniature civil war.
The Mayor of New York City called the City Council and proposed an ordinance declaring New York an independent city, which in the temporary frenzy of the time came near passing, giving encouragement to those very few in the South who contemplated secession. In Boston it was declared in public speech "The Union must be dissolved."
Then there was the mob's resistance to the execution of the Fugitive Slave Law, the armed expedition to Harpers Ferry to incite the ignorant slaves to rise in domestic insurrection, and the declaration of a few fanatical orators that our flag represented "A covenant with death and a league with hell."