We are aware that such a statement at first sight seems extravagant, if not wild; but if the reader will carefully weigh each factor of the problem, and follow out the relation which each bears to the other; and then if he will suspend judgment until he shall have read the last chapter and last line of this book--so that he shall have all the facts before him, all the secret springs which were so adroitly worked, but of which nobody even suspected the existence, all the villanies of men singly and of men united in political and religious associations--we have no doubt at all but what he will reach the same conclusion that we have reached in the above paragraph. Facts and figures never lie when properly placed; but men are so disposed to shut their eyes against unpleasant facts, and so inclined to place figures in such a way as will bring the result they wish for, that the most palpable truths are often hid, and kept hid, from the public, until by some accident or incident the secrets are revealed, as in this volume. [Illustration: 283] CHAPTER XVII. FACTS, FIGURES, AND FAIR INFERENCES. |WHEN, on the 15th of April, 1861, Abraham Lincoln, as President of the United States, called for 75,000 men, for three months, to suppress the rebellion, he did it after repeated consultations with every member of his Cabinet, both when assembled in council and privately with each individual member. That Cabinet was one of the ablest, if not the very ablest, that any President of the United States ever had about him. William H. Seward had been Governor of New York, had long been United States Senator, and understood the strength and resources of each individual State, and of the whole Union, as well, probably, as any man then living. Salmon P. Chase had been Governor of Ohio, long a United States Senator, was a thorough statistician, mathematician, and financier, and had made the resources of both States and nation a long and faithful study. Simon Cameron had been a statistician and banker nearly his whole life, had long been a United States Senator, was a man of unusually strong common sense, and had, from a political stand-point, made the Southern States and their peculiar institutions and resources a special study. Wells and Smith were good, strong, practical-sensed men; while Blair and Bates were both Southern men, were thoroughly conversant with the institutions, with the leading men, with the wealth, and with the resources of every Southern State. One would have thought the combined wisdom of such a body of men as near perfection, as near certainty in political prophecy, as it was possible for men to attain, when judging of the future by inferences drawn from actual knowledge of the past and present; and yet, subsequent events proved that never were men wider from the mark than were these men in advising the President to call out 75,000 men for three months to subdue the rebellion. Why this great error of calculation and judgment?