UNHOLY COMBINATION.
"The Origin of the Late War," published by the Appleton's in 1866, but out of print for lack of Northern popularity, is a book pre-eminently, worthy of reading. Its author, Mr. George Lunt, of Boston, in Mr. Fiske's own State of Massachusetts, tells us that an unholy combination between Massachusetts Freesoilers and Democrats to defeat the Whigs, with no reference to any principle at all, sent Sumner to Congress and materially contributed to the cause of the war, partly through the Preston Brooks incident, which Mr. Fiske so unfairly describes. "Slavery," this author observes, "was the cause of war, just as property is the cause of robbery." If Mr. Fiske will read the Lincoln and Douglass debates of the time before the war; if he will lay aside preconceived opinion and read the Emancipation Proclamation itself, he will see that not even for Lincoln himself was slavery the cause of action, or its abolition his intent; that emancipation was simply a war measure, not affecting, as you know, the border States that had not seceded; even excluding from its operation certain counties of Virginia; simply intended to disable the fighting States, and more thoroughly to unite the rabid Abolitionists of the North in his own deadly purpose to overthrow the constitutional rights of the States. Just after the battle of Sharpsburg, from which, as you remember, he dated his abolition proclamation, he very clearly indicated his view of the cause or purpose of the war on his part. "If he could save the Union," he said, "by freeing the slaves, he would do it; if he could save it by freeing one-half and keeping the other half in slavery, he would take that plan; if keeping them all in slavery would effect the object, then that would be his course." Further, with respect to the provocation offered to the South that led to the war—so far as slavery was its cause—Mr. Webster, in his speech at Capon Springs in 1851, used these words: "I do not hesitate to say and repeat that if the Northern States refuse willfully and deliberately to carry into effect that part of the Constitution which respects the restoration of fugitive slaves, the South would no longer be bound to keep the compact." Mr Lunt and Mr. Webster were Massachusetts men, like Mr. Fiske. Mr. Webster was a great constitutional lawyer; Mr.
