Excerpt from The History of North America, Vol. 15: The Civil War; The National View
In the plan of this History of North America, two volumes are devoted to the Civil War: one written from the Southern, the other, from the Northern standpoint. The war was a conflict between two civilizations, two incompatible ideas, two conceptions of republican government, the one embodied in the word nation, the other, in the word confederacy.
From the inception of free government in America these ideas were in conflict, each strengthening itself with the accessories of industrial and political life, and both, not wholly unconsciously, tending toward irrepressible conflict. The history of that conflict from its inception is a history of the intellectual and moral development of the people of the United States. For many years the public mind had only obscure notions of the meaning of nationality: the idea was vast and necessarily corrective of moral and industrial defects. Primarily, the idea was of a free State, but half the American Republic was of slaveholding States. The idea was of industrial efficiency, but half the United States was economically inefficient. The idea was of a moral order, irrespective of race, but in half of the United States the African race was believed to be doomed, by the will of God, to permanent, absolute slavery. Entangled with this misconception of republican institutions was the inevitable confusion of administrative functions and theories of government, - slavery drawing to itself, necessarily, an interpretation favorable to its perpetuity.
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