War & Peace Quote by Robert Dale Owen

A velvet-gloved threat: Owen flatters the reader’s restraint while smuggling in a radical outcome. The sentence is built to feel like a legal memo and land like a cannon shot. “Due exercise,” “official power,” “strictest accordance” aren’t just bureaucratic padding; they’re rhetorical armor. Owen is telling an anxious officeholder (almost certainly Lincoln-era federal authority) that the boldest move is not lawless, but the purest expression of law. He pre-emptively stages the defense argument inside the prose.

The subtext is unmistakably Civil War: the “enemy” is the Confederacy, and the thing that “above all else” gives them “aid and comfort” is enslaved labor and the social order built on it. Owen’s phrasing dodges the moral vocabulary of abolition and instead frames emancipation as strategic deprivation. That’s intentional. In a country where constitutional scruples were both genuine and weaponized, he recasts freedom as a military necessity and a constitutional act, not a sentimental crusade.

The line also turns a notorious charge on its head. “Aid and comfort” echoes the constitutional definition of treason. Owen implies that tolerating slavery’s wartime utility is the real indulgence of treasonous power. The target audience isn’t the plantation class; it’s the cautious center - the officials who want to win the war without rupturing the legal order. Owen offers them a way to do both, making the Constitution sound less like a restraint than a lever.