From The New-York Times August 22, 1863:
The War and Its Originators.
The difficulties of writing history could hardly be better exemplified than by a comparison of the versions of the origin of the war, given by Mr. DONNELL, the Speaker of the North Carolina House of Commons, and published in our columns on Wednesday, and that which is daily put forward by the rebel sympathizers at the North. According to Mr. DONNELL, who had personal cognizance of most of the steps taken “to precipitate the South into revolution,” the secession movement was due to a determination of certain Southern leaders that the South should be independent at any cost, grievance or no grievance; that they tried to convert the tariff into a pretext for separation, and, failing, fixed on Slavery as “the only question on which the South is likely to unite;” that they then agitated and intrigued in such manner as to make Mr. LINCOLN’s election a certainty; and as soon as he was elected, dragged the Southern people into a revolution upon a series of pretences, which the progress of events have all proved false, and foremost among them was the depreciation of Northern courage and tenacity. He denies, from first to last, that the North had any share in bringing about the war, beyond the fact that it existed and furnished something to separate from, and something to fight with.
The Copperhead version of the matter is, however, that the revolution was planned by HORACE GREELEY, HENRY WARD BEECHER, WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON, WENDELL PHILLIPS, and a few other lecturers and editors of country newspapers; that these people found YANCEY, TOOMBS, DAVIS and WISE, et hoc genus omne, peaceably reposing on their plantations, intent upon growing cotton and leading a quiet life, and occasionally enlightening the country by a speech; that they proceeded willfully to goad these good men to madness by discourses on Slavery delivered in New-England, and articles upon it written in New-York, and which nobody in the South ever read or dared to read; and that, after long and patient endurance of the infliction, these gentlemen called their countrymen to arms, as the only mode of deliverance.
Happily, the historian will not have much difficulty in choosing between the two stories. The causes assigned by Mr. DONNELL are natural and ordinary ones; those assigned by the SEYMOURS and TILDEN, are novel, strange and extraordinary. The rebellion has been brought about, either by substantial grievances or else through the machinations of designing or ambitious demagogues. No political revolution has ever yet been caused in one community by articles and speeches published in another, even if they were read by the malcontents. The idea is absurd and ridiculous on the face of it; doubly so when, as in this case, the lucubrations which are generally assigned as the cause of all our woes, never circulated among those whom they are alleged to have goaded to madness; when no Southerner would have them in his possession, or know anything whatever of their tenor, except what he learned from the bunkum harrangues of his own agitators. How many men at the South, we should like to know, had ever heard or read an abolitionist lecture for twenty years before this war broke out? …
I doubt if the causes of the war were quite so black and white.
The July 16, 1863 letter to the editor of the Raleigh Standard from “A Southern Man” was attributedRichard Spaight Donnell. You can read it here
