296 HOW TO GET A FARM 



and horrors could be longer or blacker. These 

 things must be identical with those which closed up 

 the Revolution, only ten times magnified. In those 

 Southern States where loyal men have been out 

 raged by their neighbors, the latter will doubtless 

 be exterminated or driven off by those whom they 

 have persecuted. Blood for blood will be the rule 

 with them. Here, in the North, every local traitor 

 will be marked. Good men will shun him, honest 

 men refuse to trust him, society will keep him at 

 arm s length. His generation will never cease to 

 remember that he was a traitor. The status of 

 these is defined already. Thus history reproduces 

 itself, and we are living witnesses of the instructive 

 truth. 



But underlying and overshadowing these general 

 facts, there remains the great question of American 

 slavery. In all former contests, both foreign and 

 domestic, slavery was passive or incidental. In this, 

 it is confessedly supreme, the sole animating cause 

 of rebellion, giving it impulse at the beginning and 

 vitality during its progress. Had it been struck 

 down at the outset, the rebellion would have been 

 brief and far less sanguinary. There has been no 

 pacification during sixty years of its aggressive ex 

 istence there can- be none so long as it may be con 

 tinued. It has the nation by the throat, and the 

 nation must have the courage to shake it off and 

 destroy it. I have shown how other rebellions have 

 ended, but it is only by universal emancipation that 

 this one ought to be crushed. 



Yet even while the war was being waged, the 



