The Fall of the Confederacy. 603 
The Revolution was untimely, yet, as we have seen, there 
was a prospect of success before the commencement of war. 
The war was precipitate, yet there might have been a chance 
of success but for a perverse policy culminating in a third 
and fatal blunder. The Confederate administration did not 
emancipate the negroes. This, we say, was the crowning 
blunder, and those who will be at the pains to examine the 
solution will be persuaded that the Confederate administra- 
tion lost the last chance of independence in a vain effort 
to uphold the institution of negro slavery. 
CHAPTER V.—NEGRO EMANCIPATION. 
WE were told that the North fought for empire, and the 
South for independence. It was so. We were told by others 
that the North fought for emancipation and the South for 
negro slavery. It was so. ‘The majority of the Northern 
people were intent on the preservation of the Union, and 
strange and unprecedented would it have been if they had 
submitted to the loss of empire without a life and death 
struggle. Mr. Lincoln very well expressed the then popular 
determination, when he said that he would retain negro 
slavery to save the Union, or abolish it to save the Union. It 
must not therefore be supposed that either Mr. Lincoln or 
the majority of the Northern people were pro-slavery. 
Not at all. They were resolved that the area of slavery 
should not be extended by its introduction into the ter- 
ritories of the Union, and they were persuaded that being 
thus hemmed in there would be negro emancipation at no 
distant date. No doubt, at least at the outset, with the bulk 
of the Northern people, the single object of the war was 
empire, or rather the preservation of empire. Hence, when ~ 
Mr. Lincoln issued his celebrated proclamation, he did not 
pronounce for abolition, but rather proclaimed a condition 
on which negro slavery might be continued. If, in January 
1863, the South had chosen to return to the Union the in- 
stitution of negro slavery would have been maintained. 
It is no reproach to the Northern people that their object 
was empire, for their motive was not the hateful lust of 
territory, but the defence of an existing empire. Would 
it be a crime for England to fight for Ireland? Yet Ireland 
is not, geographically or ethnologically, so nearly allied to 
England as the Southern States are to the Northern 
States, and Scotland is not more truly a part of the 
