late period, for private or public effect, for domestic or trans-Atlantic consumption, about their "not fighting for slavery," the world well knows,-the proof comes from the rebels themselves, and we have given it in full,-that "slavery" was the prompting cause which led them first to "secede" for "independence," and then to "fight" in order to establish it.

Our main purpose, however, in referring to these late movements upon peace, is to hold up the fact that it is our nationality which is at stake in the war; that the rebels will not make "peace," though they may constantly clamor for it, except on the condition of a total destruction of the Union. This is their ultimatum, and it has been their position from the first. We are free to say, that as to maintain "the integrity of the whole Union" was the position taken by our Government and people from the first, we hope this position will be held to the end. If on that issue the rebels, in the words of their President, court "extermination," then let them be exterminated.

We have said, as simply indicating our opinion, that we believed there would be no peace till it was conquered by a destruction of the rebel armies, and resulted in the complete triumph of the Government and the re-establishment of the national authority over every foot of the Union. This has been our conviction from the first, and it is our conviction still. And yet, we have many times seen it illustrated since the war began, that it is safest not to prophesy. It is possible that the leading conspirators may be willing to submit to the Government before their military power is totally overthrown, but we doubt it; and it is among the possible eventualities which may occur, as the result of the pending Presidential canvass, that the people may be willing, in order to spare the effusion of

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blood, to submit to a settlement on the basis of a recognition of the Rebel Confederacy; but we have much mistaken what we believe to be their fixed purpose if this shall be finally achieved. We shall therefore adhere to our earliest and present opinions, until the event shall prove them erroneous.

CHAPTER V.

RESPONSIBILITY OF THE SOUTHERN CHURCH FOR THE REBELLION AND THE WAR.

IN charging the full responsibility for the rebellion upon the South, we must go back of the public actors on the political arena to find a proper lodgment for a large share of it.

Immediately upon the result of the Presidential election of 1860 being made known by the electric flash, the treasonable work began.

Upon the sixth of November (the day of the election) [says Dr. Palmer, speaking of the people of the seceded States generally], these masses went to bed as firmly attached to the Union as they had ever been, and awoke on the seventh, after Mr. Lincoln's election, just as determined upon resistance to his rule. The revolution in public opinion was far too sudden, too universal, and too radical, to be occasioned by the craft and jugglery of politicians. It was not their wire-dancing upon party platforms which thus instantaneously broke up the deep foundations of the popular will, and produced this spontaneous uprising of the people in the majesty of their supremacy; casting party hacks aside, who shall have no control over a movement not having its genesis in their machinations.

The substantial truthfulness, in good part, of what is here related, suggests the most painful and humiliating feature which the three years' progress of the rebellion exhibits. The above was published in April, 1861, in the Southern Presbyterian Review, of Columbia, South Carolina, before the attack upon Fort Sumter. At that time the secession of seven States had occurred. As stated in a former chapter, it is well known that a majority of the

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people in nearly every one of the seceded States was at first against secession; that in fact many of the States were carried out by violence, and in direct opposition to the will of the people; and that, as regards the most of them, their ordinances of secession were not submitted to a popular vote. Dr. Palmer's language is therefore altogether too sweeping, as to the suddenness and universality of the change in the popular sentiment of even the seven States to which he refers. It did not become "universal" and "radical" for secession till long afterwards, even if there has not always been, as indeed facts assure us, a strong Union element in the seceded States. Writing in the spring of 1861, he gives the impressions which things then occurring about him made upon his enthusiastic nature, rather than the facts as they existed immediately after the Presidential election.

The Gulf States had then seceded; the Provisional Government at Montgomery had been inaugurated; the batteries of his own native Carolina were thickly gathering around beleagured Sumter; their opening upon the devoted fortress was anxiously awaited, to bring the Old Dominion and other States into the ranks of treason; and already Southern orators were painting the visions of coming glory which would soon burst in full-orbed splendor upon the great Slave Empire of the Gulf. The eloquent divine was too much dazzled by that bewildering present and its glowing future to be a safe chronicler of the events of even the then recent past.

But admitting substantially what he declares on this point (only with abatement as to time), and freely conceding that "the revolution in public opinion" was by no means" occasioned by the craft and jugglery of politicians," we are then led to inquire, what mysterious and potent agency it was which "broke up the deep foundations of

the popular will," and which, if it did not assume, by "casting party hacks aside," absolute control over a movement not having "its genesis in their machinations," did at least furnish the intellectual and moral pabulum upon which the popular appetite was feasted, and the popular strength nerved for the dark deeds which were before it? We would know who is to be held chiefly responsible, when we are told that "the deep foundations of the popular will" were broken up in a single night, and that the great popular heart, hitherto "firmly attached to the Union," was so suddenly, by a "spontaneous uprising of the people in the majesty of their supremacy," brought to abjure the Union, and to love all that was treacherous and perjured and vile!

There must have been some powerful cause for this, of which he does not inform us. The people never act without leaders, in a revolution or in any other great movement. We have no difficulty in finding the secret which perhaps Dr. Palmer's modesty would withhold. His own teachings, in good part, and the teachings of others of his own profession, furnish the mournful answer to these astounding questions.

The real truth of the case deliberately and solemnly holds the Southern Church and the Southern ministry,-or the Southern ministry, with a few influential laymen, leading the Southern Church, and they together leading the more influential portion of the Southern millions,-to a vastly higher responsibility for the inception, advocacy, progress, and the consequences resulting, of this treason and rebellion, than any other class among the Southern people; and, in asserting this, we but agree with Southern statesmen, whose testimony, to be given in due time, corroborates what the palpable facts so fully and lamentably declare.