plantations and homes to begin the long task of repairing the ravages of war. They had fought a valiant fight. The courage of the men and the self-sacrificing devotion of the women remain a cherished tradition in Dixie Land. But there are few, if any, of the children of those who fought for the "lost cause" who would wish today that the outcome of the Civil War had been different-none who would not now echo the final benediction of Jefferson Davis on our common Union: "Esto perpetua!"

GOVERNMENT AND PEOPLE IN WAR TIME

"In the clash of arms the laws are silent" runs the old Roman proverb. War tends inevitably to increase the power of the executive arm of government, even in democracies. Quick decision, unity of plan, efficiency in action, are the conditions of military success, which ill tolerates the slow deliberations of a legislative body or that insistence on the right of free expression of opinion which is cherished as a fundamental liberty by self-governing peoples. The United States and the Confederate States of America proved no exception to this general rule in the Civil War.

From the fall of Fort Sumter to the meeting of the extra session of Congress nearly three months later, Abraham Lincoln was virtually a "dictator." By executive proclamation he increased the regular army and navy of the United States by some 40,000 men, although he had no constitutional right to add a single man to a regiment or a ship. He proclaimed a blockade of the ports of the cotton states and threatened with the fate of pirates anyone who should molest the commerce of the United States, although a blockade is an incident of war and war had been neither declared nor recognized. He authorized General Scott to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus and make military arrests anywhere on the line between Philadelphia and Washington, although the right to suspend the writ is enumerated among the powers of Congress in the Constitution (Art. I, sect. 9, par. 2), and a decision of Chief Justice Marshall at the

time of the Burr conspiracy had denied it to the executive. When Congress met on July 4, Lincoln confessed the unconstitutionality of his proclamations, which, he said, "were ventured upon under what appeared to be a popular demand and a public necessity." Congress promptly and enthusiastically ratified his actions. A "higher law" had superseded the Constitutionthe law of self-preservation. Throughout the war Congress coöperated with the President, conferring on him the power to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus whenever and wherever he deemed it necessary and allowing him great freedom in the interpretation and execution of its acts.

The administration at Washington was hardly consistent in its attitude toward the South. Lincoln held to the theory that the seceding states had not left the Union and could not leave the Union, but that groups of men in them, too numerous and powerful to be dealt with by the civil authorities, were in insurrection against the United States. To recognize the Confederacy as a belligerent power would be virtually to concede that it was another "nation," and yet to treat the Confederate armies and navies merely as masses of individual "traitors" would have been impossible and ridiculous. Therefore, while maintaining its claim to sovereignty over the citizens of the seceding states (as shown, for example, by the Nonintercourse Act of July 13, 1861, the Confiscation Act of August 6, 1861, and the exemption of parts of the slaveholding states from the application of the Emancipation Proclamation), the government at Washington virtually recognized the sovereignty of the Confederacy over the same citizens by according them the status of a belligerent power, with exchanges of prisoners, paroles, and the reception of overtures for peace. It was inconsistency-but the alternative would have been rank inhumanity.

1 The dilemma was presented in the autumn of 1861, when the crew of the privateer Savannah were brought as captives into New York Harbor. The men were convicted of piracy, in accord with Lincoln's proclamation of blockade. But when President Davis, invoking the lex talionis, threatened to treat an equal number of Union prisoners in the same way as these men were treated, the sentence was never carried out.

The policy of the government in regard to slavery was revolutionized by the war. On the day after the battle of Bull Run both Houses of Congress, in accord with the Republican platform and Lincoln's repeated statements, passed a resolution that "this war is not waged . . . 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 [seceded] states, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution, and to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several states unimpaired; that as soon as these objects are accomplished the war ought to cease." But when it appeared that the slaves were employed in the Confederate army, driving munition wagons, cooking in the camps, and digging at the trenches and fortifications, a Confiscation Act was passed (August 6) declaring such of them as "were required or permitted to work in or upon any fort, navy yard, dock, armory, ship, or intrenchment against the lawful authority of the United States," to be forfeited. This act did not go far enough for those who believed that, since slavery was the cause of the war, the extermination of slavery should be the first object of the war. General Frémont, commander of the Department of the West, issued a proclamation (August 31) emancipating the slaves of all persons in Missouri in rebellion against the United States, but Lincoln ordered him to modify the proclamation to accord with the Confiscation Act. The President's great desire was to win the border states to a policy of compensated emancipation, and to that end he secured the passage of a bill in April, 1862, offering to loyal slaveholders a maximum of $300 for each slave. On July 14 he summoned the members of Congress from the border states to the White House to urge them in person to accept this offer,

1A similar proclamation by General Hunter of the Department of the South, nine months later, emancipated the slaves in the states of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Lincoln repudiated this order too, declaring that he must reserve to himself the responsibility of setting the slaves free in any state, in his capacity as commander in chief of the army and navy.

but to his bitter disappointment they refused.' A week later Lincoln read to his cabinet the draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. On the wise advice of Seward he postponed issuing the proclamation until a Union victory in the field should give it weight. Shortly after Lee's invasion of Maryland was checked at Antietam, Lincoln published the proclamation (September 22), which announced that on January 1, 1863, he would declare "forever free" the slaves in all the states which were in arms against the authority of the Federal government on that day.

The Emancipation Proclamation was not an abolitionist document but a military punishment. It did not alter the actual status of the negro in the South, because it applied to just that part of the South where President Lincoln's authority was not recognized, and explicitly exempted those regions where it was recognized. Only the conquest of the South by arms actually liberated the slaves. Neither did the Proclamation accomplish the legal emancipation of the slaves. Except where it was done by state action (as in Missouri, Maryland, and Tennessee) this waited for the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. If, then, the Emancipation Proclamation meant neither the actual nor the legal abolition of slavery, one may ask why it should be classed with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States as one of the "immortal" documents of our history. The answer is, Because it was the announcement that henceforth the war was to be waged not only for the preservation of the Union but also for the permanent banishment of slavery from its borders. Congress had abolished slavery in the District of Columbia in April, 1862, and in all the territories of the United States in June. From the summer of 1862 on, President Lincoln made the acceptance of a general emancipation program, as well as the restoration of the Union,

1 Unfortunately the conference took place in the days of discouragement just after McClellan's failure before Richmond. James G. Blaine, in his "Twenty Years of Congress" (Vol. I, p. 447), says, "The border state men, becoming doubtful of Union success, preferred to keep their slaves rather than part with them for bonds which would soon become valueless."

a sine qua non of any terms of peace (see the Hampton Roads conference, p. 5891).

The effect of the Emancipation Proclamation upon Europe was wholly favorable to the Union cause. Whether there should be one or two federations of states between Canada and the Gulf of Mexico was of little concern to most of the people across the Atlantic, but a war to abolish slavery roused the hearty response of all the humanitarian sentiment among the liberals of Great Britain and the Continent. A monster mass meeting, held in Exeter Hall in London, on January 29, 1863, acclaimed the Proclamation with cheers. Addresses of congratulation came to Lincoln from antislavery societies and tradeunions. The workers of Manchester, although reduced to poverty by the stoppage of the cotton supply from the Southern states, sent a letter of sympathy, to which Lincoln gratefully replied in his own hand.

At home, however, the results of the Proclamation were disappointing. It tended to unite the South and divide the North. The Southern press cynically referred to it as an attempt to stir up hatred against the slaveholder in order to "atone for defeat in the field";" and malicious newspapers represented the language of the Proclamation as encouragement to negro insurrection. Montgomery Blair, the Postmaster-General, warned

1 From the Emancipation Proclamation to the end of the war 180,000 negroes were enlisted in the Northern armies and fought with conspicuous bravery. The Confederate Congress, on May 1, 1863, passed a resolution to the effect that "every white person being a commissioned officer . . . who shall command negroes or mulattoes in arms against the Confederate States . . . shall be deemed as inciting servile insurrection, and shall if captured be put to death or be otherwise punished at the discretion of the court." Yet toward the end of the war Jefferson Davis himself advised the Southerners to enroll their slaves "as an alternative to subjugation." General Lee approved the plan, believing that the negroes could be made "efficient soldiers," and on March 13, 1865, an act of the Confederate Congress provided for the "enlistment of colored people." The war ended before there were actually any negro regiments in the Southern armies.

2 The autumn of 1862 was the period of the brightest hopes of the South. It was in the very month of the Proclamation that the great triple offensive was launched by the Confederate armies (see page 571).

3 A clause in the document read, "The executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and