I myself
believe to-day that that war was much one of geography and of lack of
transportation. Not all the common folk of the North or of the South
then knew that it was never so much a war of principle, as they were
taught to think, but rather a war of self-interest between two clashing
commercial parties. We did not know that the unscrupulous kings of the
cotton world, here and abroad, were making deliberate propaganda of
secession all over the South; that secession was not a thing voluntary
and spontaneous, but an idea nourished to wrong growth by a secret and
shrewd commercial campaign, whose nature and extent few dreamed, either
then or afterward. It was not these rich and arrogant planters of the
South, even, men like our kin in the Carolinas, men like those of the
Sheraton family, who were the pillars of the Confederacy, or rather, of
the secession idea. Back of them, enshrouded forever in darkness--then
in mystery, and now in oblivion which cannot be broken--were certain
great figures of the commercial world in this land and in other lands.
These made a victim of our country at that time, even as a few great
commercial figures seek to do to-day, and we, poor innocent fools, flew
at each other's throats, and fought, and slew, and laid waste a land,
for no real principle and to no gain to ourselves.
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