The negro's freedom was accidental and merely incidental to the main purpose of the war. When the alternative was secession or war, the sentiment of the most rabid abolitionists was voiced by Horace Greeley, who was willing that the "erring sisters depart in peace." Many abolitionists were sincere, though fanatical, and they had too often invoked the doctrine of secession, for the North, to consistently object when the South invoked it. Abraham Lincoln (a shrewd, practical Western countryman, put into his high office to hold the agricultural West against the agricultural South) put the war exclusively upon the ground of saving the Union. He would save the Union, he said, whether it enslaved the negro or freed him. In his inaugural address, March, 1861, he said: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." Eight days before, Sumner, the abolition leader, had said in Congress: "I take this occasion to declare most explicitly that I do not think Congress has any right to interfere with slavery in a State." Neither Lincoln nor Sumner, if they are to be credited with any sincerity, had stumbled upon the policy of freeing the negro; and, if they had, it would have been very impolitic to have then disclosed it, for all the border States would then have joined the South. The negro was freed as a means to an end. The emancipation proclamation was a "war measure," and, as such, a master-stroke, for it took two hundred and fifty thousand laborers out of the South and put muskets into the hands of nearly two hundred thousand colored troops. This was the difference between success and failure, and was the turning point in the war, as was admitted by Lincoln in his message to Congress, in which he said: * * * * "and for a long time it had been hoped that the rebellion could be suppressed without resorting to it [the policy of emancipation] as a military measure." The negro incidentally caused the defeat of the South; and he was also incidentally a cause of the war, but not the causing cause--_that lies deeper, and must be rightly understood at the peril of the nation_. The war was about taxation--the usual cause of revolution. A century ago it was taxation without representation; a generation ago it was unequal, discriminating, sectional, and class taxation. Out of this still grows the political strife whose quadrennial flood rises higher and higher at each election: income taxes successfully resisted by the rich; rate, fare, and tariff taxes unsuccessfully resisted by the poor--these are the fruitful causes of war--fought with ballots first, and finally, if no remedy can be found, with bullets.