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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: until the season of anguish and meditation had unblinded thousands
besides himself, and thus had placed behind him enough of the North to
struggle on to that saving of the Union and that freeing of the slave
which was consummated more than two years later by Lee's surrender to
Grant at Appomattox.
But it was during that interim of anguish and meditation that England did
us most of the harm which our memories vaguely but violently treasure.
Until the Emancipation, we gave our English friends no public, official
grounds for their sympathy, and consequently their influence over our
English enemies was hampered. Instantly after January 1, 1863, that
sympathy became the deciding voice. Our enemies could no longer say to
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