The Great Conspiracy: What Led Us to the Civil War by John Alexander Logan

Author:John Alexander Logan [Logan, John Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788027333691
Barnesnoble:
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Great Conspiracy

Bridge,—and who says: “Before reaching the point we designed to occupy (near the Stone Bridge) we were met by another order to march immediately to Manassas Junction, as an attack was apprehended that night.

Although it was now after sunset, and my men had had no food all day, when the command to march to Manassas was given, they cheerfully took the route to that place.”

Colonel Davies, who, as we have seen, commanded McDowell’s stubborn Left Wing, was after all, not far wrong, when, in his testimony before the Committee on the Conduct of the War, he declared, touching the story of the Bull Run Battle: “It ought to have read that we were victorious with the 13,000 troops of the Left Wing, and defeated in the 18,000 of the Right Wing. That is all that Bull Run amounts to.”

In point of fact, the Battle of Bull Run—the first pitched battle of the War—was a drawn battle.

War was now fully inaugurated—Civil War—a stupendous War between two great Sections of one common Country; those of our People, on the one side, fighting for the dissolution of the Union—and incidentally for Free Trade, and for Slavery; those on the other side, fighting for the preservation of the Union—and incidentally for Protection to our Free Industries, and for the Freedom of the Slave.

As soon as the Republican Party controlled both Houses of Congress it provided Protection to our Free Industries, and to the Free Labor engaged in them, by the Morill Tariff Act of 1860—the foundation Act of all subsequent enactments on the subject. In subsequent pages of this work we shall see how the Freedom of the Slave was also accomplished by the same great Party.

CHAPTER XIV. THE COLORED CONTRABAND.

When the first gun was fired at Fort Sumter, its sullen echoes sounded the funeral knell of Slavery. Years before, it had been foretold, and now it was to happen. Years before, it bad been declared, by competent authority, that among the implications of the Constitution was that of the power of the General Government to Emancipate the Slaves, as a War measure. Hence, in thus commencing the War of the Rebellion, the South marched with open eyes upon this, as among other of the legitimate and logical results of such a War.

Patrick Henry, in opposing the ratification by Virginia of the Federal Constitution, had declared to the Slaveholders of that State that “Among ten thousand implied powers” which Congress may assume, “they may, if we be engaged in War, liberate every one of your Slaves, if they please, * * * Have they not power to provide for the General Defense and Welfare? May they not think that these call for the abolition of Slavery?

May they not pronounce all Slaves Free? and will they not be warranted by that power? * * * They have the power, in clear, unequivocal terms, and will clearly and certainly exercise it.”

So, too, in his great speech of May 25, 1836, in the House of

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