ABSTRACT
When Edwin Ruffin, white-haired and mad, fired the first gun at Fort Sumter, he freed the slaves. It was the last thing he meant to do but that was because he was so typically a Southern oligarch. And so war came. War is murder, force, anarchy and debt. Its end is evil, despite all incidental good. Freedom for slaves furnished no such slogan. Not one-tenth of the Northern white population would have fought for any such purpose. The South counted on Negroes as laborers to raise food and money crops for civilians and for the army, and even in a crisis, to be used for military purposes. Transforming itself suddenly from a problem of abandoned plantations and slaves captured while being used by the enemy for military purposes, the movement became a general strike against the slave system on the part of all who could find opportunity.
