(If successful, this attempt might--I am not sure, but it might--have
destroy'd not only our American republic, in anything like first-class
proportions, in itself and its prestige, but for ages at least, the
cause of Liberty and Equality everywhere--and would have been the
greatest triumph of reaction, and the severest blow to political and
every other freedom, possible to conceive. Its worst result would
have inured to the southern States themselves.) That our national
democratic experiment, principle, and machinery, could triumphantly
sustain such a shock, and that the Constitution could weather it, like
a ship a storm, and come out of it as sound and whole as before, is
by far the most signal proof yet of the stability of that experiment,
Democracy, and of those principles, and that Constitution.
Of the war itself, we know in the ostent what has been done. The
numbers of the dead and wounded can be told or approximated, the debt
posted and put on record, the material events narrated, &c. Meantime,
elections go on, laws are pass'd, political parties struggle, issue
their platforms, &c., just the same as before. But immensest results,
not only in politics, but in literature, poems, and sociology, are
doubtless waiting yet unform'd in the future. How long they will wait
I cannot tell. The pageant of history's retrospect shows us, ages
since, all Europe marching on the crusades, those arm'd uprisings of
the people, stirr'd by a mere idea, to grandest attempt--and, when
once baffled in it, returning, at intervals, twice, thrice, and again.
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