Identifier: redeemingrepubli00incoff (find matches)
Title: Redeeming the republic : the third period of the war of the rebellion, in the year 1864
Year: 1889 (1880s)
Authors: Coffin, Charles Carleton, 1823-1896
Subjects: Coffin, Charles Carleton, 1823-1896
Publisher: New York : Harper & Bros.
Contributing Library: Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection
Digitizing Sponsor: The Institute of Museum and Library Services through an Indiana State Library LSTA Grant

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say just what their rights were. There were to be other wearymarches, more battles, more outpouring of blood, before the fading awayof the glamour which obscured their vision. Only by final defeat andexhaustion would they come to see that they had endured hardship andsuffered defeat for the maintenance of slavery. One of the newspapers of Richmond contained a long article uponthe beneficence of slavery. It is a system, it said, in which the raceenslaved has been brought to the highest condition of hap-piness and religious and social cultivation of which it iscapable. It is an order of society, moreover, found to be peculiarlyfavorable to the development and permanency of republican institutions,relieving the State of all those dangers which have their birth in thepassions of the mob.(6) The Confederate Government was organized to maintain that insti-tution. The Government of the United States, on the other hand, andthe Union soldiers at the beginning of the war, had but one aim—the
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OPENING OF THE YEAR 1864. 9 restoration of the authority of the United States; but in the progress ofevents the end in view had become the overthrow of the institutionwhich was the corner-stone of the Confederacy. When the war began, the few vessels composing the navy of theUnited States had been scattered far and wide by President BuchanansSecretary of the Navy. (See Drum-beat of the Nation, p. 29.) Throughthe three years of the struggle the Government had done what it couldto create a navy which would effectually close by blockade every port ofthe Confederacy. So efficient had the navy become that at the begin-ning of 1864 the only ports which the blockade-runners of England couldarrive at or depart from were Wilmington and Savannah, on the Atlan-tic coast, and Mobile, Galveston, and the mouth of the Rio Grande, onthe Gulf of Mexico. Only by taking advantage of nights when there was no moon, orwhen clouds shut out the stars, was there much chance for eluding thevessels lying off tho

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