of Slavery was brutal, barbarous, and treacherous; and so the whole history of the slave power during the war has been full of ways of warfare brutal, barbarous, and treacherous, beyond anything that men bred in freedom could have been driven to by the most hateful passions.  It is not to be marvelled at.  It is not to be set down as the special sin of the war.  It goes back beyond that.  It is the sin of the system.  It is the barbarism of Slavery.  When Slavery went to war to save its life, what wonder if its barbarism grew barbarous a hundred-fold!

One would be attempting a task which once was almost hopeless, but which now is only needless, if he set himself to convince a Northern congregation that Slavery was a barbarian institution.  It would be hardly more necessary to try to prove how its barbarism has shown itself during this war.  The same spirit which was blind to the wickedness of breaking sacred ties, of separating man and wife, of beating women till they dropped down dead, of organizing licentiousness and sin into commercial systems, of forbidding knowledge and protecting itself with ignorance, of putting on its arms and riding out to steal a State at the beleaguered ballot-box away from freedom—­in one word (for its simplest definition is its worst dishonor), the spirit that gave man the ownership in man in time of peace, has found out yet more terrible barbarisms for the time of war.  It has hewed and burned the bodies of the dead.  It has starved and mutilated its helpless prisoners.  It has dealt by truth, not as men will in a time of excitement, lightly and with frequent violations, but with a cool, and deliberate, and systematic contempt.  It has sent its agents into Northern towns to fire peaceful hotels where hundreds of peaceful men and women slept.  It has undermined the prisons where its victims starved, and made all ready to blow with one blast their wretched life away.  It has delighted in the lowest and basest scurrility even on the highest and most honorable lips.  It has corrupted the graciousness of women and killed out the truth of men.

I do not count up the terrible catalogue because I like to, nor because I wish to stir your hearts to passion.  Even now, you and I have no right to indulge in personal hatred to the men who did these things.  But we are not doing right by ourselves, by the President that we have lost, or by God who had a purpose in our losing him, unless we know thoroughly that it was this same spirit which we have seen to be a tyrant in peace and a savage in war, that has crowned itself with the working of this final woe.  It was the conflict of the two American natures, the false and the true.  It was Slavery and Freedom that met in their two representatives, the assassin and the President; and the victim of the last desperate struggle of the dying Slavery lies dead to-day in Independence Hall.