“The triumph of the Confederacy would be a victory of the powers of evil,” said John Stuart Mill, the English philosopher. A year earlier, Russia had freed its serfs. Support for the American South meant support for slavery, nothing more. The peripheral reasons for breaking up the Union—states’ rights and defending a way of life—looked like a cloak for something civilized people would no longer tolerate. “Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed,” Lincoln said; “without slavery it could not continue.”
