PARTIES TO CONFLICT
The parties to the Conflict were not rival nations, but compatriots of the same flag; joint inheritors of the English Common Law and the ideals of liberty consecrated by centuries of heroic struggle; descendants of an ancestry knit in political sympathy by their successful battle for independence from the Mother Country, and the achievements by which they made their new-born nation great; children of Puritan and Cavalier, Quaker and Huguenot; Dutchman and Catholic-Frenchman; men of strong individual and community traits, accustomed to rule and untutored in the art of surrender.
CAUSES OF WAR
The causes of the War were deep-seated and complex. They were Old-World antagonisms, religious and political, antedating, and yet surviving, the settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock, New Amsterdam, and New Orleans;—
The early development in the two great divisions of the country, of diverse economic conditions—a land of small farms and multiplied industrial activities confronting one of large plantations and agricultural supremacy;—
The Protective Tariff, at first enacted to secure for American manufactures a chance to compete successfully with those of the Old World, but, in its results, a burdensome system, under which the agriculturists of the South paid onerous tribute to the manufacturers of the North;—
Slavery—an institution which specialized more and more the interests of the South in the great exporting staples of cotton, rice and tobacco, driving manufactures and mining into the more hospitable regions of the North;—an institution whose life or death was within the exclusive power of the separate states where it was legalized, and yet the manifold incidents of whose existence were the subject of frequent National legislation, and hence ever recurring occasions of sectional strife;—an institution which quickened in time among the people of the non-slaveholding states the conviction that it was a sin, with the consequent charge that all responsible for its existence were parties to a crime, thus arousing the bitter resentment of devout men in the slaveholding states, who, protesting their innocence of wrong, challenged the right of their Northern brethren to sit in judgment upon them;—
The Annexation of Texas: A new cause and occasion for sectional jealousy, precipitating the war with Mexico, and bringing additional territory into the Union with fresh disputes over the powers of Congress in regard thereto;—
The Immense Foreign Immigration into the North and West;—thus developing in those sections the strongest sentiments of Nationalism, while the South, unaffected by any such forces, adhered to the early ideals of state pride and state supremacy;—
State Sovereignty versus National Supremacy;—the first, the shield behind which aggrieved minorities sought to curb arrogant majorities and safeguard the rights and interests of community life; the second, the ideal by which the preservation of the Union was to be assured and its dignity and power at home and abroad vindicated;—