Gilmore and Colonel Jaquess were given passage through the lines, went to Richmond and saw Mr. Davis. After listening to the unofficial proposals of the self-appointed envoys, Mr. Davis declared that the South was not struggling to maintain slavery, but to make good “our right to govern ourselves.”
As the terms offered took away this fundamental right from the South, Mr. Davis declined to treat.
How hopeless, at that time, must have seemed the cause for which Jefferson Davis stood! How eternally assured that of Mr. Lincoln! Yet, see how old Father Time works his miracles,—the Jefferson Davis principle has risen from the ashes, a very Phoenix of life immortal. The Lincoln position has been abandoned by the Party which made him its first President. The cause of Home Rule is stronger throughout the world than when the fugitive President of the broken Confederacy faced his official family, at its last Cabinet meeting, in the village of Washington, Georgia, and asked, despairingly, “Is it all over?”
The hateful Amendments, which struck so foul and cruel a blow at “our right to govern ourselves,” are now nothing more than monuments reared by political partisans to their own vindictive passions. The better element throughout the North would be glad to forget them. They have been distorted by the Federal Judiciary and have proven to be a curse to the whole country, in that they are the refuge of the corporations which plunder the people.
Republican leaders look on, acquiescent, while state after state that seceded from the Union puts into practice the principle for which the South fought in the Civil War,—the right to regulate our own domestic concerns.
A Republican President has made an Ex-Confederate soldier the official head of the military establishment of the United States; a Republican President has stood his ground against negro resentment upon the proposition that the South may disfranchise the negroes if she likes; a Republican President-elect manfully held the same position throughout a heated campaign in which niggerites and Bryanites assaulted both Taft and Roosevelt because of this pro-Southern attitude.
“We are fighting, not for slavery, but for the right to govern ourselves.” So said our President; so said our Statesmen; so said our soldiers; so said our civilians. And today we are vindicated.
The insanest war in history, as one studies it, is seen to have been fought for a principle which both sides now admit to have been right, and which Mr. Lincoln repeatedly and most earnestly declared was right, before a shot was fired.
