scarcely be considered as demonstrating popular sentiment. At such an election, all that large class who are at once for the Union and against coercion, would be coerced to vote against the Union."

Such a theory affords a full explanation of the • conduct of the Administration which has been the subject of so much criticism in calling out seventyfive thousand men to serve three months, notwithstanding General Scott's opinion that the conquest of such a country as the South would require two years and two hundred thousand men. For it was not a war of conquest upon which the nation was bent, but a war of deliverance of oppressed millions, who wanted only a fulcrum to enable them to move themselves the mighty lever by which the usurpers would be overthrown.

Of course, under such circumstances, it would* have been idle to suggest that the war could, in any contingency, result in a change of the relations between the general Government and the people of the South, or the injury of any of the citizens of the southern States, except those who might fall in battle, and the few leaders of whom even such a mild and lenient Government as ours, might find it necessary to make an example.

If the suggestion of such a result was made by any doubter in our own midst, it was considered as an indication of the weakness of his intellect or the depravity of his morals, and he was accordingly

either ridiculed or denounced as a sympathizer with the enemy. But it was apprehended that foreign nations might not so readily discover the consistency between the absolute political freedom of the citizen and the reëstablishment of the Government by the bayonet, which this theory involved, and hence, at the very outset of the troubles, care was taken to set them right in that respect.

Before the actual collision of arms, and during the anxious days which elapsed between the sailing of the expedition for the relief of Fort Sumter and the attack upon that fortress, the Secretary of State gave the necessary instructions to Mr. Adams for the information of the English Government. I copy from his dispatch of April 10, 1861.

"He (the President) would not be disposed to reject a cardinal dogma of theirs (the southern States), namely, that the Federal Government could not reduce the seceding States to obedience by conquest, even although he was disposed to question that proposition. But, in fact, the President willingly accepts it as true. Only an imperial or despotic government could subjugate thoroughly disaffected and insurrectionary members of the State. This federal republican system of ours is of all forms of government the very one which is most unfitted for such a labor."

Equal care was taken to prevent the French court from misapprehending the character and

extent of the rebellion, or the work which the eventy-five thousand men were expected to do. Immediately after the call for troops the Secretary wrote to Mr. Dayton a dispatch, dated April 22, 1861, from which I make the following extract:

"There is not even a pretext for the complaint that the disaffected States are to be conquered by the United States if the revolution fails; for the rights of the States, and the condition of every human being in them, will remain subject to exactly the same laws and forms of administration, whether the revolution shall succeed or whether it shall fail. In the one case, the States would be federally connected with the new Confederacy; in the other, they would, as now, be members of the United States; but their constitutions and laws, customs, habits, and institutions in either case will remain the same."

The battle of Bull Run gave a rude shock to the theory under which the war had been prosecuted up to that time; but it took not only weeks but months to shake the faith of the northern people in their favorite theory, that the mass of the people of the South were at heart pining for deliverance from the tyranny of the Confederate Government; and in fact there are many among us who have not yet abandoned that idea. It became very apparent however that the task before us was much more serious than had been at first supposed, and that it

was indispensable to our success that the whole strength of the North should be united in moral and material support of the Government. Nor was any considerable number, either of the people or of their representatives, prepared at that time to sustain any policy looking to the overthrow of political institutions which they had been taught from childhood to regard as the very corner stone of the edifice of public liberty. Under such circumstances Mr. Crittenden had no difficulty in procuring a nearly unanimous vote upon the celebrated resolution which bears his name, which was introduced by him into the House of Representatives a few days before the battle of Bull Run, and passed on the day after that battle, the 22d July, 1861. It reads as follows:

"Resolved by the House of Representatives of the Congress of the United States, That the present civil war has been forced upon the country by the disunionists of the southern States, now in arms against the constitutional Government, and in arms around the capital: that in this national emergency Congress, banishing all feelings of mere passion or resentment, will recollect only its duty to the whole country that this war is not waged on their part in any spirit of oppression, or for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, or purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those States, but to defend and main

tain the supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union, with all the dignity, equality and rights of the several States unimpaired, and that as soon as those objects are accomplished the war ought to cease."

This resolution was passed in the House by a vote of one hundred and seventeen ayes and two nays (Messrs. Riddle, of Ohio, and Potter, of Wisconsin, both republicans). A resolution in the same language was introduced into the Senate on the twenty-fourth of the same month by Mr. Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee, and after a few verbal alterations of no material consequence, passed by a vote of thirty yeas to five nays (Messrs. Breckinridge, secession democrat, of Kentucky; Johnson, democrat, of Missouri; Polk, secession democrat, of Missouri; Powell, democrat, of Kentucky; and Trumbull, republican, of Illinois). Among the ayes in each House, are to be found men of all shades of political opinion, and from all the sections of the country which then adhered to the Union. So anxious did all parties seem to be to place the nation upon the platform of principle which the resolution laid down, that notwithstanding the first part of the resolution was deemed offensive and objectionable by some of the democratic members, because it failed to include abolitionists and others of the North, in pointing out the originators of the war, and an unsuccessful attempt was