A MONOGRAPH.

The causes of the present Rebellion, the personal history of its leaders, and the incidents immediately preceding the breaking out of the conspiracy, will ever remain objects of chief interest to the historian of the present period of the Republic.  Influenced by a desire to obtain unimpeachable information upon these topics from unprejudiced sources, the writer of the following article, then a student at Yale College, availed himself of the vacation in December, 1860, and January, 1861, to visit the National capital, and while there to improve the reasonably ready access with which most public men are approached, whenever the object is either to give or to receive information, for the purpose of studying a period then promising to exceed in importance anything in the past history of the nation.  It has been suggested to the writer, that certain interviews, such as younger men, when collegians, were then allowed with the frank Southern leaders, and which he has occasionally sketched in conversation, have had the seal of privacy removed by the tide of events, and should now be described for the public, as aiding to unmask, from unquestionable authority, the real causes and origin of the Rebellion, and contributing something, perhaps, to sustain public sentiment in the defence of the nation against a conspiracy which the statements of these Southern apologists themselves prove to have been conceived in the most reckless disregard of honor and law, and which, if successful, will give birth to a neighboring nation actuated by the same spirit.

The more important interviews alluded to were with the Honorable Robert Toombs, the Honorable R.M.T.  Hunter, and the Honorable Jefferson Davis, at that time prominent members, as is well known, of the United States Senate, from the States respectively of Georgia, Virginia, and Mississippi.  The communications of the Senators are proved to have been sincere by their subsequent speeches and by public events.  The writer is by no means insensible to the breach of privilege, of which, under ordinary circumstances, notwithstanding the unfolding of events, he would be guilty, in detailing in print private conversations; but he believes that the public will sustain the propriety of the present revelations, now that the persons chiefly concerned have become enemies of the nation and of mankind.

Not, as he may possibly be accused, with the purpose of adding a syllable of unnecessary length to the narrative, but for the sake of vividness in presenting the idea of the personnel of the Southern leaders, soon to be known only as historical characters, and of scrupulous accuracy in representing their sentiments, to which, in this case, a notice of time, place, and manner seems as necessary as that of matter, the writer has taken not a little pains, through all the usual means, to remember, and will endeavor to state, the conversations, always with logical, and nearly always, he believes, with verbal accuracy, in order that the conclusions to be drawn from them by the reader may have the better support.