The Bedford Gazette

The Cause of the War.

Some of the Jacobin journals, with whose editors it is a kind of second nature to saddle upon the shoulders of their political opponents, every thing that goes wrong in governmental affairs, are now trying to make it appear that they were entirely innocent, and the Democratic party immeasurably guilty, as respects the state of things which produced the Southern rebellion. They know that, the war being over, passion and resentment will subside and reason and reflection rule the public mind, in their stead. They know that when popular interest is no longer centred upon raids and battles and sieges, and anxiety concerning present perils no more obscures recollection of past difficulties, the causes of our national troubles will be fully canvassed and clearly discerned by an intelligent and impartial public. Therefore, they think it prudent to "take time by the forelock," and forestall, if possible, the judgment which they fear will be rendered against them by the people.

But in this attempt they must fail. The truth of history is against them, and all their special pleading, and all their appeals to the prejudice of the time, will not avail them. It is a part of their record that they threw the first stone. They first set the laws of the Union at defiance. They first resisted and murdered U. S. officers in discharge of official duty. They first levied war against the Federal Government. Are we asked when or how they were guilty of these things? We point to the history of that Boston riot, in which a U. S. officer was slain by them, when in the act of performing his duty in arresting a fugitive slave; to the Christiana riots, in this state, in which a citizen of Maryland lost his life, whilst endeavoring to reclaim a fugitive from service; to the rebellion in Kansas, which set up a government in opposition to that of the United States, striving to maintain it by force of arms, and which Gen. Sumner, with U. S. troops, was sent to suppress; and, lastly, to the invasion of Virginia, and the seizure of the U. S. arsenal at Harper's Ferry, by John Brown.

All these things lie at the door of the Jacobin Abolition party, and even the destructive besom of civil war, cannot sweep them away. There they are and there they will remain in history. But these were only the out-croppings of the hatred which this party bore the people and institutions of the South. Their antipathy to slavery and slaveholders, was preached from every pulpit they controlled, tinctured every political speech their orators delivered, pervaded every public law their legislators enacted, and finally broke up national party organizations, and crystallized itself in a sectional organization, which, from its avowed hostility to Southern institutions, could not gain a foot-hold in a single slave-holding state. In this manner many Southerners were embittered against the people of the North, and when Mr. Lincoln was elected in 1860, there were but few of the former that did not either feel resentful toward the party about to take the reins of government, or that were not filled with doubt and alarm as to the security of their civil rights. Thus, the revolutionary Abolition party produced a state of mind in the South, which enabled the few original Secessionists to gain the confidence of the masses and to persuade them to join them in their scheme of Southern independence. Besides, such men as Greeley and Banks and their confreres, had publicly declared, that if the Southern States seceded from the Union, they would be willing to let them "slide." This misled the Southern people into the belief that they could go out of the Union with impunity. After such assurances from the leading spirits of the dominant party, they never dreamed that secession would be regarded as treason.

Hence, the conclusion must inevitably be reached, that the Abolitionists are responsible, in the premises, for the horrible war which has deluged our country in fraternal blood. But we do not wish to be understood as holding the Southerners blameless. They had no right to secede. They acted rashly and criminally in firing upon Sumter. They did a grievous wrong not only to the government, but to their own people, by precipitating the commencement of hostilities and grievously have they answered it. The South has been awfully punished for Secession. The North, too, has been terribly visited on account of the wantonness of Abolition.

Secession leaders are about to be tried and punished. Will it be asking too much of the people, that the Abolition demagogues, by way of retribution, be also "hung up to dry," not physically, but politically?