The war had now (September, 1862) been in progress almost a year and a half; and nearly twenty thousand men had been shot dead on the battlefield, and upward of eighty thousand wounded, while an unknown number had died of disease contracted {182} in the service, or been carried away into captivity. The money that had been spent by the United States Government alone amounted to about one billion dollars. All this time there was not an intelligent man in the country but knew the cause of the war, and yet more than a hundred thousand American citizens were killed or mangled before a single blow was delivered directly at that cause. General Frémont had aimed at it; General Hunter had aimed at it; but in each case the arm was struck up by the Administration. One would naturally suppose, from the thoroughness with which the slavery question had been discussed for thirty years, that when the time came for action there would be little doubt or hesitation on either side. On the Confederate side there was neither doubt nor hesitation. On the National side there was both doubt and hesitation, and it took a long time to arrive at a determination to destroy slavery in order to preserve the Union. The old habit of compromise and conciliation half paralyzed the arm of war, and thousands of well-meaning citizens were unable to comprehend the fact that we were dealing with a question that it was useless to compromise and a force that it was impossible to conciliate. Mr. Lincoln had hated slavery ever since, when a young man, he made a trip on a flat-boat to New Orleans, and there saw it in some of its more hideous aspects. That he realized its nature and force as an organized institution and a power in politics, appears from one of his celebrated speeches, delivered in 1858, wherein he declared that as a house divided against itself cannot stand, so our Government could not endure permanently half slave and half free. "Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South." Why, then, hating slavery personally, and understanding it politically, and knowing it to be the cause of the war, did he not sooner declare it abolished?