Let us not for one moment lose sight of this fact. We go into this
war not merely to sustain the government and defend the
Constitution. There is a moral principle involved. How came that
government in danger? What has brought this wicked war, with all its
evils and horrors, upon us? Whence comes the necessity for this
uprising of the people? To these questions, there can be but one
answer. SLAVERY HAS DONE IT. That accursed system, which has already
cost us so much, has at length culminated in this present ruin and
confusion. That system must be put down. The danger must never be
suffered to occur again. The evil must be eradicated, cost what it
may. We are for no half-way measures. So long as the slave system
kept itself within the limits of the Constitution, we were bound to
let it alone, and to respect its legal rights; but when, overleaping
those limits, it bids defiance to all law, and lays its vile hands on
the sacred altar of liberty and the sacred flag of the country, and
would overturn the Constitution itself, thenceforth slavery has no
constitutional rights. It is by its own act an outlaw. It can never
come back again into the temple, and claim a place by right among the
worshippers of truth and liberty. It has ostracised itself, and that
for ever.
Let us not be told, then, that the matter of slavery does not enter
into the present controversy--that it is merely a war to uphold the
government and put down secession. It is not so. So far from this,
slavery is the very heart and head of this whole struggle. The
conflict is between freedom on the one hand, maintaining its rights,
and slavery on the other, usurping and demanding that to which it has
no right. It is a war of principle as well as of self-preservation;
and that is but a miserable and short-sighted policy which looks
merely at the danger and overlooks the cause; which seeks merely to
put out the fire, and lets the incendiary go at large, to repeat the
experiment at his leisure. We must do both--put out the fire, and put
out the incendiary too. We meet the danger effectually only by
eradicating the disease.--Erie True American.