JANUARY 22, 1862:
U.S. Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, leader of the Radical Republicans, calls for total war
against the C.S.A.:
"Let us not be
deceived. Those who talk about peace in sixty days are shallow statesmen. The
war will not end until the government shall more fully recognize the magnitude
of the crisis; until they have discovered that this is an internecine war in
which one party or the other must be reduced to hopeless feebleness and the
power of further effort shall be utterly annihilated. It is a sad but true
alternative. The South can never be reduced to that condition so long as the
war is prosecuted on its present principles. The North with all its millions of
people and its countless wealth can never conquer the South until a new mode of
warfare is adopted. So long as these states are left the means of cultivating
their fields through forced labor, you may expend the blood of thousands and
billions of money year by year, without being any nearer the end, unless you
reach it by your own submission and the ruin of the nation. Slavery gives the
South a great advantage in time of war. They need not, and do not, withdraw a
single hand from the cultivation of the soil. Every able-bodied white man can
be spared for the army. The black man, without lifting a weapon, is the
mainstay of the war. How, then, can the war be carried on so as to save the
Union and constitutional liberty? Prejudices may be shocked, weak minds
startled, weak nerves may tremble, but they must hear and adopt it. Universal
emancipation must be proclaimed to all. Those who now furnish the means of war,
but who are the natural enemies of slaveholders, must be made our allies. If
the slaves no longer raised cotton and rice, tobacco and grain for the rebels,
this war would cease in six months, even though the liberated slaves would not
raise a hand against their masters. They would no longer produce the means by
which they sustain the war."
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