In August of 1865, four months after the end of the Civil War, the American minister in Austria wrote to a friend in the distant United States. That diplomat was John Lothrop Motley, the famous historian who had made a life’s work writing of the struggle for independence of another republic, Holland. At this moment, however, the late American conflict was uppermost in Motley’s mind; his observations, slightly edited for clarity, are reproduced here through the courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

… I can’t very well talk to you of politics for I suppose that chasms wider and deeper than the Atlantic separate your thoughts from mine; and as I always desire to show the respect which I feel for those who are capable of thinking for themselves and from whom I am so unfortunate as to differ I am apt to think it best to hold my tongue. Being one of the most obstinate and infuriated conservatives of America—believing in no government but that of the People, respecting no institutions but democratic institutions, … I have naturally but little patience with those insane radicals who have been trying these four years to uproot the strongest and most reasonable commonwealth that ever existed, in the hope of planting upon its ruins that vilest and most poisonous of systems ever imagined by human creatures, the slave confederacy.

Well, it was a horrible dream of blood and fire from which we have at last awakened, as I for one never doubted even in the darkest hour that we should do.

Thank God Slavery is abolished and the accursed oligarchy based upon it—that hideous caricature of an aristocracy, having all the defects and none of the essentials of an aristocracy—has gone to the nether regions along with it, and we who believe in liberty and civilisation and human progress can look forward through the immediate present to an almost unlimited future of prosperity and power for the great Republic.

I am an optimist, as you see, in regard to the war. If I ever trembled at all it was once in a while at the possibility of peace—before the work has thoroughly done; but my profound faith in the American People always kept me up and made me feel that the danger was chimerical. After all, it is the cheapest war ever waged. The precious blood that it has cost can never be overvalued, I know—but it has been shed in the noblest cause that men have ever died for. … As for the 3000 millions of money, what is that when the only alternative, the only way to save the money, was for our great nation to commit suicide? … How I envy those who have fought—yea even those who have died in this great argument—in this great contest with Lucifer. Next to them, … I think I envy those of the next generation, who will write the history of their deeds when the great results are patent to the world. The