In retrospect, the Great Rebellion seems the mightiest battle and the
most glorious victory in the annals of time. The battle-field was a
thousand miles in length; the combatants numbered two million men; the
struggle was protracted over four years; the hillsides of the whole
South were made billowy with the country's dead; a million men were
killed or wounded in the two thousand two hundred battles; thousands of
gifted boys who might have permanently enriched the North and South
alike, through literature, art or science, were cut off as unfulfilled
prophecies in the beginning of their career, and what is more pathetic,
another million women, desolate and widowed, remained to look with
altered eyes upon an altered world, while alone they walked their Via
Dolorosa. In the physical realm the black shadow of the sun's eclipse
remains but for a few minutes, but through four awful years the nation
dwelt in blackness and dreadful night, while fifty more years passed,
and the shadow has not yet disappeared fully from the land.

Strictly speaking, the Civil War began with the debate between Daniel
Webster and Calhoun in 1830. These intellectual giants set the battle
lines in array in the halls of the Senate. The warfare that began with
arguments in Congress was soon transferred to the lyceum and lecture
hall, then to the pulpit and press, then to the assembly rooms of State
legislatures, until finally it was submitted to the soldiers. At last
Grant, Sherman and Thomas witnessed to the truth of Webster's argument,
that the Union is one and inseparable, that it should endure now and
forever, but the endorsement was written with the sword's point, and in
letters of blood. The conflict raged, therefore, for thirty-five years,
and some of the most desperate battles were fought not with guns and
cannon, but with arguments, in the presence of assembled thousands, who
listened to the intellectual attack and defense. In their famous debate,
Lincoln and Douglas were over against one another like two fortresses,