20 Was the corn ripe in the early July sun of the first Manassas; was it ripe at New Orleans, or ready to be picked at Shiloh ? Was it mildewed at Ball’s Bluff, or blasted on the Peninsula, or did the husbandry of God come to nought in the sunless and chilly days of the second Manassas ? You cannot mention a single moment in this thunderous war-summer when liberty could have found her crop. If the war had closed with early successes, the cause of the war would have been preserved. Every mistake that we have made, especially the mistake of underrating the power of slavery, every lukewarm general who has been commissioned for the field, every traitor in the cabinet or the camp, every check experienced by our arms, every example of mediocrity holding critical command, has precisely represented our immature and growing condition, and was its logical necessity. Beauregard hammering at Sumter nailed a flag to the mast in every village of the North. But though a Republic ran up all its bunting and had none to spare, it was not till summer and winter had weather-stained those brave flags and almost fretted them from the poles, that they began to signalize the rights of man to every portion of the country, and to stream like a torn aurora with true American influence from the lakes to the gulf. Death and sorrow pry up the lids of the heaviest sleepers ; we are all awake now but when General Banks said to the North, “Raise 600,000 men and hold the South as a conquered province till she is regenerated,” we were astonished at his exaggeration. And when, still later, General Fremont said, “ The strength of slavery is in slave-labor, and the sinews of war are concealed beneath black skins,” the North shuddered at the bold invasion of property in man, and was not prepared to see the country itself the sole owner of its men and women. So that if a Wellington had gained a complete and subjugating victory at any of the points where we fondly expected one, he would have subjugated liberty, and clapped the North again into the harness of compromises and adjustments. The dreariest moments have seemed to me the lightest, because I heard the corn filling with milk under the shadow of the cloud. The bloodiest days have yielded the finest growing weather to liberty.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM4ODY=