Many thousands of the Union soldiers were thinking, reflecting men. There were ministers, professors in colleges, school-teachers, and learned and scientific men. Few there were who could not read and write. Thousands of them had been teachers and scholars in the Sunday schools. They had thought the war all over, and discussed the causes which led to it. They were familiar with the history of events,—of the struggle between Slavery and Freedom; for the possession of Kansas, where men and women were driven out, their buildings burned, or themselves thrown into rivers, or deliberately murdered, for preferring freedom to slavery. They recalled the attempt to compel the people of the North to return the slaves who were escaping to Canada,—also the kidnapping of free citizens of the North; the imprisonment of men and women for teaching a slave to read the Bible. They remembered that a Northern man could not travel with safety in the South before the war, that Slavery was opposed always to Freedom, that the system crushed the poor laboring men without distinction of color, race, or clime or country; that it was overbearing, imperious, aristocratic, arrogant, and cruel; that it kept the people from obtaining knowledge; that it was the foe of industry, the enemy of science, art, and religion.
They remembered the words of Mr. Stephens, of Georgia, the Vice-President of the Confederacy, who in the beginning opposed secession; who said to his associates in the convention which carried his State out of the Union:—
"It is the best and freest government, the most equal in its rights, the most just in its decisions, the most lenient in its measures, and the most inspiring in its principles to elevate the race of man that the sun of heaven ever shone upon. Now for you to attempt to overthrow such a government as this, unassailed, is the height of madness, folly, and wickedness."[10]
They remembered that Mr. Stephens asked those who were plotting treason these questions: "What reasons can you give to the nations of the earth to justify it? They will be calm and deliberate judges in the case; and to what law, to what one overt act, can you point on which to rest the plea of justification? What right has the North assailed? What interest of the South has been invaded? What justice has been denied, or what claim founded in justice and right has been withheld? Can any of you name one governmental act of wrong deliberately and purposely done by the government at Washington of which the South had a right to complain? I challenge the answer."
They remembered that the Secretary of War under President Buchanan, Mr. Floyd of Virginia, had removed all the arms from the Northern arsenals to the South, that the slaveholders might be well prepared for war, and ready to seize the city of Washington.
They remembered that Mr. Toucey of Connecticut, who was President Buchanan's Secretary of the Navy, had sent nearly all the ships of war into foreign seas, that they might not be at hand in the hour of rebellion, when the government should pass into new hands, and that the Secretary of the Treasury stole millions of dollars of public funds intrusted to his care. They reflected that all of these men had forsworn themselves, that they were traitors and robbers, that they had deliberately, through years of power, planned to rebel, to destroy the government, and bring ruin upon the people if they could not have their way. They believed that without cause the Rebels had fired upon the flag, and inaugurated the war, and that to defend the flag and restore the Union, by crushing out the rebellion, was a duty they owed to their country and to God. They recalled the words of Thomas Jefferson, uttered long ago, in his notes on Virginia, who said, in view of the complicity of the South with slavery:—
"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that his justice cannot sleep forever. The Almighty has no attribute that can take side with us in such a contest."[11]
Those thinking men remembered the words of the great man who wrote the Declaration of Independence, and they also remembered that the oppressed and down-trodden of all lands were looking to America,—to the principles of the government of the United States,—as their hope for the future. They did not forget their homes on the breezy hills of the North and in the sunny valleys, nor the church-bell, nor the school-house, and other things dearer to them than life. They must fight to maintain them. Their liberties were assailed. They could not falter in such a contest.
So they reflected as they sat by their camp-fires in the starry night, or lay upon the ground where their fathers achieved the last great victory which secured their independence.
The corps commanded by General Heintzelman, when it came into position before Yorktown, stood upon the ground which General Lincoln had occupied in the siege of 1781. General Sumner's corps had the center, and occupied the ground which Baron Steuben and General Clinton held in that siege. General Keyes's corps came to the Warwick River, at Lee's Mills, almost opposite the spot where General Washington had his head-quarters, while General Franklin was held in reserve to move up York River on transports when the enemy was driven from Yorktown.