Book Description
Excerpt from Military Essays and Recollections, Vol. 3: Papers Read Before the Commandery of the State of Illinois The war of the Rebellion was a contest such as was never before chronicled, because never before paralleled, either in the intensity of the struggle or in the absence of justification. In no record of that eventful period do we find a clearer or more truthful presentation of the underlying principle of the so-called Confederacy, or of the alleged provocation to the unrighteous rebellion, than in the speech of that misguided but master-mind of the South, Alexander H. Stephens, in which he frankly declared as follows: "The new constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions - African slavery as it exists among us - the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization." This, he added, was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Then, in reviewing and criticising the anti-slavery views of Jefferson, he said: "The prevailing ideas entertained by him, and by most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, morally and politically. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
