The matter of slavery, so called, which was the proximate cause of these irregular movements on both sides, and which ended in the general collision of war, was of infinitely less importance to the seceding States than the recognition of the great principles of constitutional liberty. There was with us no such thing as slavery in the 263 true and proper sense of that word. No people ever lived more devoted to the principles of liberty, secured by free democratic institutions, than were the people of the South. None had ever given stronger proofs of this than they had done. What was called slavery amongst us was but a legal subordination of the African to the Caucasian race. This relation was so regulated by law as to promote, according to the intent and design of the system, the best interests of both races, the black as well as the white, the inferior as well as the superior. Both had rights secured and both had duties imposed. It was a system of reciprocal service and mutual bonds. But even the two thousand million dollars invested in the relations thus established between private capital and the labor of this class of population under system, was but the dust in the balance compared with the vital attributes of the rights of independence and sovereignty on the part of the several States.
VINDICATION OF SOUTHERN CAUSE
[In Southern Historical Papers, pages 332-336.]
Mr. Percy Greg, the justly famous English historian, says: “If the Colonies were entitled to judge their own cause, much more were the Southern States. Their rights—not implied, assumed, or traditional, like those of the Colonies, but expressly defined and solemnly guaranteed by law—had been flagrantly violated; the compact which alone bound them, had beyond question been systematically broken for more than forty years by the States which appealed to it.”
After showing the perfect regularity and legality of the secession movement, he then says: “It was in defence of this that the people of the South sprang to arms ‘to defend their homes and families, their property and their rights, the honor and independence of their States to the last, against five fold numbers and resources a hundred fold greater than theirs.’”
He says of the cause of the North: “The cause seems to me as bad as it well could be—the determination of a mere numerical majority to enforce a bond, which they themselves had flagrantly violated, to impose their own mere arbitrary will, their idea of national greatness, upon a distinct, independent, determined, and almost unanimous people.”
And then he says as Lord Russell did: “The North fought for empire which was not and never had been hers; the South for an independence she had won by the sword, and had enjoyed in law and fact ever since the recognition of the thirteen sovereign and independent States, if not since the foundation of Virginia. Slavery was but the occasion of the rupture, in no sense the object of the war.”
Let me add a statement which will be confirmed by every veteran before me—no man ever saw a Virginia soldier who was fighting for slavery.