Our quondam enemies, knowing, as it seems to us they must know, that the evidence on every other point is overwhelmingly against them, and relying on the sentiment of the world now existing against slavery, are prone to charge that the South fought for the perpetuation and extension of that institution; or, to put it in the brief and common form, they charge (as some of our younger people in their ignorance seem to believe) that "slavery was the cause of the war."
It would seem to the unprejudiced mind, that the mere statement of the fact (which, we believe, was a fact) that more than eighty per cent, of the Confederate soldiers owned no slaves, that General Lee, our representative soldier, freed his slaves before the war, whilst General Grant, the representative soldier of the North, held on to his until they were freed by the results of the war, and the further fact that General Lee said at the beginning of the war that if he owned all the slaves in the South and could by freeing them save the Union he would do so with the stroke of his pen, ought to furnish a satisfactory refutation of this unjust charge.
But let us admit, for the sake of the argument only, that the charge is true. How, then, does the case stand as to us both on the law and the facts? It will not be charged by the greatest enemy of the South, that it was in any way responsible, either for the existence of slavery, or for inaugurating that vilest of traffics—the African slave trade. On the contrary, history attests that slavery was forced upon this country by England, against the earnest protests of the South, as well as of the North, when the States were colonies under the control of that country; that "the first statute establishing slavery in America is to be found in the famous Code of Fundamentals or Body of the Liberties of the Massachusetts Colony of New England, adopted in December, 1641," that the "Desire," one of the very first vessels built in Massachusetts, was fitted out for carrying on the slave trade; "that the traffic became so popular that great attention was paid to it by the New England shipowners, and that they practically monopolized it for a number of years." ("The
