The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V
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Title: The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V
Author: James Russell Lowell
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Riverside Edition
THE WRITINGS OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL IN PROSE AND POETRY
VOLUME V
Political Essays
by
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
[Illustration: _Mr. Lowell in 1881_]
London
MacMillan and Co.
1898
CONTENTS
THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY 1
THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER 17
E PLURIBUS UNUM 45
THE PICKENS-AND-STEALIN'S REBELLION 75
GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT 92
THE REBELLION: ITS CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES 118
McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN 153
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 177
RECONSTRUCTION 210
SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT? 239
THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP 264
THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 283
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL AT THE AGE OF 62.
ENGRAVED ON STEEL, BY J. A. J. WILCOX _Frontispiece_
MAJOR ROBERT ANDERSON 56
GENERAL GEORGE B. McCLELLAN 92
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 178
ANDREW JOHNSON 264
WILLIAM H. SEWARD 302
POLITICAL ESSAYS
THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY
1858
There was no apologue more popular in the Middle Ages than that of the
hermit, who, musing on the wickedness and tyranny of those whom the
inscrutable wisdom of Providence had intrusted with the government of
the world, fell asleep, and awoke to find himself the very monarch
whose abject life and capricious violence had furnished the subject of
his moralizing. Endowed with irresponsible power, tempted by passions
whose existence in himself he had never suspected, and betrayed by the
political necessities of his position, he became gradually guilty of
all the crimes and the luxury which had seemed so hideous to him in his
hermitage over a dish of water-cresses.
The American Tract Society from small beginnings has risen to be the
dispenser of a yearly revenue of nearly half a million. It has become a
great establishment, with a traditional policy, with the distrust of
change and the dislike of disturbing questions (especially of such as
would lessen its revenues) natural to great establishments. It had been
poor and weak; it has become rich and powerful. The hermit has become
king.
If the pious men who founded the American Tract Society had been told
that within forty years they would be watchful of their publications,
lest, by inadvertence, anything disrespectful might be spoken of the
African Slave-trade,--that they would consider it an ample equivalent
for compulsory dumbness on the vices of Slavery, that their colporteurs
could awaken the minds of Southern brethren to the horrors of St.
Bartholomew,--that they would hold their peace about the body of Cuffee
dancing to the music of the cart-whip, provided only they could save
the soul of Sambo alive by presenting him a pamphlet, which he could
not read, on the depravity of the double shuffle,--that they would
consent to be fellow members in the Tract Society with him who sold
their fellow members in Christ on the auction block, if he agreed with
them in condemning Transubstantiation (and it would not be difficult
for a gentleman who ignored the real presence of God in his brother man
to deny it in the sacramental wafer),--if those excellent men had been
told this, they would have shrunk in horror, and exclaimed, "Are thy
servants dogs, that they should do these things?"
Yet this is precisely the present position of the Society.
There are two ways of evading the responsibility of such inconsistency.
The first is by an appeal to the Society's Constitution, and by
claiming to interpret it strictly in accordance with the rules of law
as applied to contracts, whether between individuals or States. The
second is by denying that Slavery is opposed to the genius of
Christianity, and that any moral wrongs are the necessary results of
it. We will not be so unjust to the Society as to suppose that any of
its members would rely on this latter plea, and shall therefore confine
ourselves to a brief consideration of the other.
In order that the same rules of interpretation should be considered
applicable to the Constitution of the Society and to that of the United
States, we must attribute to the former a solemnity and importance
which involve a palpable absurdity. To claim for it the verbal accuracy
and the legal wariness of a mere contract is equally at war with common
sense and the facts of the case; and even were it not so, the party to
a bond who should attempt to escape its ethical obligation by a legal
quibble of construction would be put in coventry by all honest men. In
point of fact, the Constitution was simply the minutes of an agreement
among certain gentlemen, to define the limits within which they would
accept trust funds, and the objects for which they should expend them.
But if we accept the alternative offered by the advocates of strict
construction, we shall not find that their case is strengthened.
Claiming that where the meaning of an instrument is doubtful, it should
be interpreted according to the contemporary understanding of its
framers, they argue that it would be absurd to suppose that gentlemen
from the Southern States would have united to form a society that
included in its objects any discussion of the moral duties arising from
the institution of Slavery. Admitting the first part of their
proposition, we deny the conclusion they seek to draw from it. They are
guilty of a glaring anachronism in assuming the same opinions and
prejudices to have existed in 1825 which are undoubtedly influential in
1858. The Anti-slavery agitation did not begin until 1831, and the
debates in the Virginia Convention prove conclusively that six years
after the foundation of the Tract Society, the leading men in that
State, men whose minds had been trained and whose characters had been
tempered in that school of action and experience which was open to all
during the heroic period of our history, had not yet suffered such
distortion of the intellect through passion and such deadening of the
conscience through interest, as would have prevented their discussing
either the moral or the political aspects of Slavery, and precluded
them from uniting in any effort to make the relation between master and
slave less demoralizing to the one and less imbruting to the other.
Again, it is claimed that the words of the Constitution are conclusive,
and that the declaration that the publications of the Society shall be
such as are "satisfactory to all Evangelical Christians" forbids by
implication the issuing of any tract which could possibly offend the
brethren in Slave States. The Society, it is argued, can publish only
on topics about which all Evangelical Christians are agreed, and must,
therefore, avoid everything in which the question of politics is
involved. But what are the facts about matters other than Slavery?
Tracts have been issued and circulated in which Dancing is condemned as
sinful; are all Evangelical Christians agreed about this? On the
Temperance question, against Catholicism,--have these topics never
entered into our politics? The simple truth is that Slavery is the only
subject about which the Publishing Committee have felt Constitutional
scruples. Till this question arose, they were like men in perfect
health, never suspecting that they had any constitution at all; but
now, like hypochondriacs, they feel it in every pore, at the least
breath from the eastward.
If a strict construction of the words "all Evangelical Christians" be
insisted on, we are at a loss to see where the committee could draw the
dividing line between what might be offensive and what allowable. The
Society publish tracts in which the study of the Scriptures is enforced
and their denial to the laity by Romanists assailed. But throughout the
South it is criminal to teach a slave to read; throughout the South no
book could be distributed among the servile population more incendiary
than the Bible, if they could only read it. Will not our Southern
brethren take alarm? The Society is reduced to the dilemma of either
denying that the African has a soul to be saved, or of consenting to
the terrible mockery of assuring him that the way of life is to be
found only by searching a book which he is forbidden to open.
If we carry out this doctrine of strict construction to its legitimate
results, we shall find that it involves a logical absurdity. What is
the number of men whose outraged sensibilities may claim the
suppression of a tract? Is the _taboo_ of a thousand valid? Of a
hundred? Of ten? Or are tracts to be distributed only to those who will
find their doctrine agreeable, and are the Society's colporteurs to be
instructed that a Temperance essay is the proper thing for a
total-abstinent infidel, and a sermon on the Atonement for a distilling
deacon? If the aim of the Society be only to convert men from sins they
have no mind to, and to convince them of errors to which they have no
temptation, they might as well be spending their money to persuade
schoolmasters that two and two make four, or geometricians that there
cannot be two obtuse angles in a triangle. If this be their notion of
the way in which the gospel is to be preached, we do not wonder that
they have found it necessary to print a tract upon the impropriety of
sleeping in church.
But the Society are concluded by their own action; for in 1857 they
unanimously adopted the following resolution: "That those moral duties
which grow out of the existence of Slavery, as well as those moral
evils and vices which it is known to promote and which are condemned in
Scripture, and so much deplored by Evangelical Christians, undoubtedly
do fall within the province of this Society, and can and ought to be
discussed in a fraternal and Christian spirit." The Society saw clearly
that it was impossible to draw a Mason and Dixon's line in the world of
ethics, to divide Duty by a parallel of latitude. The only line which
Christ drew is that which parts the sheep from the goats, that great
horizon-line of the moral nature of man, which is the boundary between
light and darkness. The Society, by yielding (as they have done in
1858) to what are pleasantly called the "objections" of the South
(objections of so forcible a nature that we are told the colporteurs
were "forced to flee") virtually exclude the black man, if born to the
southward of a certain arbitrary line, from the operation of God's
providence, and thereby do as great a wrong to the Creator as the
Episcopal Church did to the artist when without public protest they
allowed Ary Scheffer's _Christus Consolator_, with the figure of the
slave left out, to be published in a Prayer-Book.
The Society is not asked to disseminate Anti-slavery doctrines, but
simply to be even-handed between master and slave, and, since they have
recommended Sambo and Toney to be obedient to Mr. Legree, to remind him
in turn that he also has duties toward the bodies and souls of his
bondmen. But we are told that the time has not yet arrived, that at
present the ears of our Southern brethren are closed against all
appeals, that God in his good time will turn their hearts, and that
then, and not till then, will be the fitting occasion to do something
in the premises. But if the Society is to await this golden opportunity
with such exemplary patience in one case, why not in all? If it is to
decline any attempt at converting the sinner till after God has
converted him, will there be any special necessity for a tract society
at all? Will it not be a little presumptuous, as well as superfluous,
to undertake the doing over again of what He has already done? We fear
that the studies of Blackstone, upon which the gentlemen who argue thus
have entered in order to fit themselves for the legal and
constitutional argument of the question, have confused their minds, and
that they are misled by some fancied analogy between a tract and an
action of trover, and conceive that the one, like the other, cannot be
employed till after an actual conversion has taken place.
The resolutions reported by the Special Committee at the annual meeting
of 1857, drawn up with great caution and with a sincere desire to make
whole the breach in the Society, have had the usual fate of all
attempts to reconcile incompatibilities by compromise. They express
confidence in the Publishing Committee, and at the same time impliedly
condemn them by recommending them to do precisely what they had all
along scrupulously avoided doing. The result was just what might have
been expected. Both parties among the Northern members of the Society,
those who approved the former action of the Publishing Committee and
those who approved the new policy recommended in the resolutions, those
who favored silence and those who favored speech on the subject of
Slavery, claimed the victory, while the Southern brethren, as usual,
refused to be satisfied with anything short of unconditional
submission. The word Compromise, as far as Slavery is concerned, has
always been of fatal augury. The concessions of the South have been
like the "With all my worldly goods I thee endow" of a bankrupt
bridegroom, who thereby generously bestows all his debts upon his wife,
and as a small return for his magnanimity consents to accept all her
personal and a life estate in all her real property. The South is
willing that the Tract Society should expend its money to convince the
slave that he has a soul to be saved so far as he is obedient to his
master, but not to persuade the master that he has a soul to undergo a
very different process so far as he is unmerciful to his slave.
We Americans are very fond of this glue of compromise. Like so many
quack cements, it is advertised to make the mended parts of the vessel
stronger than those which have never been broken, but, like them, it
will not stand hot water,--and as the question of slavery is sure to
plunge all who approach it, even with the best intentions, into that
fatal element, the patched-up brotherhood, which but yesterday was
warranted to be better than new, falls once more into a heap of
incoherent fragments. The last trial of the virtues of the Patent
Redintegrator by the Special Committee of the Tract Society has ended
like all the rest, and as all attempts to buy peace at too dear a rate
must end. Peace is an excellent thing, but principle and pluck are
better; and the man who sacrifices them to gain it finds at last that
he has crouched under the Caudine yoke to purchase only a contemptuous
toleration, that leaves him at war with his own self-respect and the
invincible forces of his higher nature.
But the peace which Christ promised to his followers was not of this
world; the good gift he brought them was not peace, but a sword. It was
no sword of territorial conquest, but that flaming blade of conscience
and self-conviction which lightened between our first parents and their
lost Eden,--that sword of the Spirit that searcheth all things,--which
severs one by one the ties of passion, of interest, of self-pride, that
bind the soul to earth,--whose implacable edge may divide a man from
family, from friends, from whatever is nearest and dearest,--and which
hovers before him like the air-drawn dagger of Macbeth, beckoning him,
not to crime, but to the legitimate royalties of self-denial and
self-sacrifice, to the freedom which is won only by surrender of the
will. Christianity has never been concession, never peace; it is
continual aggression; one province of wrong conquered, its pioneers are
already in the heart of another. The mile-stones of its onward march
down the ages have not been monuments of material power, but the
blackened stakes of martyrs, trophies of individual fidelity to
conviction. For it is the only religion which is superior to all
endowment, to all authority,--which has a bishopric and a cathedral
wherever a single human soul has surrendered itself to God. That very
spirit of doubt, inquiry, and fanaticism for private judgment, with
which Romanists reproach Protestantism, is its stamp and token of
authenticity,--the seal of Christ, and not of the Fisherman.
We do not wonder at the division which has taken place in the Tract
Society, nor do we regret it. The ideal life of a Christian is possible
to very few, but we naturally look for a nearer approach to it in those
who associate together to disseminate the doctrines which they believe
to be its formative essentials, and there is nothing which the enemies
of religion seize on so gladly as any inconsistency between the conduct
and the professions of such persons. Though utterly indifferent to the
wrongs of the slave, the scoffer would not fail to remark upon the
hollowness of a Christianity which was horror-stricken at a dance or a
Sunday drive, while it was blandly silent about the separation of
families, the putting asunder whom God had joined, the selling
Christian girls for Christian harems, and the thousand horrors of a
system which can lessen the agonies it inflicts only by debasing the
minds and souls of the race on which it inflicts them. Is your
Christianity, then, he would say, a respecter of persons, and does it
condone the sin because the sinner can contribute to your coffers? Was
there ever a simony like this,--that does not sell, but withholds, the
gift of God for a price?
The world naturally holds the Society to a stricter accountability than
it would insist upon in ordinary cases. Were they only a club of
gentlemen associated for their own amusement, it would be very natural
and proper that they should exclude all questions which would introduce
controversy, and that, however individually interested in certain
reforms, they should not force them upon others who would consider them
a bore. But a society of professing Christians, united for the express
purpose of carrying both the theory and the practice of the New
Testament into every household in the land, has voluntarily subjected
itself to a graver responsibility, and renounced all title to fall back
upon any reserved right of personal comfort or convenience.
We say, then, that we are glad to see this division in the Tract
Society; not glad because of the division, but because it has sprung
from an earnest effort to relieve the Society of a reproach which was
not only impairing its usefulness, but doing an injury to the cause of
truth and sincerity everywhere. We have no desire to impugn the motives
of those who consider themselves conservative members of the Society;
we believe them to be honest in their convictions, or their want of
them; but we think they have mistaken notions as to what conservatism
is, and that they are wrong in supposing it to consist in refusing to
wipe away the film on their spectacle-glasses which prevents their
seeing the handwriting on the wall, or in conserving reverently the
barnacles on their ship's bottom and the dry-rot in its knees. We yield
to none of them in reverence for the Past; it is there only that the
imagination can find repose and seclusion; there dwells that silent
majority whose experience guides our action and whose wisdom shapes our
thought in spite of ourselves;--but it is not length of days that can
make evil reverend, nor persistence in inconsistency that can give it
the power or the claim of orderly precedent. Wrong, though its
title-deeds go back to the days of Sodom, is by nature a thing of
yesterday,--while the right, of which we became conscious but an hour
ago, is more ancient than the stars, and of the essence of Heaven. If
it were proposed to establish Slavery to-morrow, should we have more
patience with its patriarchal argument than with the parallel claim of
Mormonism? That Slavery is old is but its greater condemnation; that we
have tolerated it so long, the strongest plea for our doing so no
longer. There is one institution to which we owe our first allegiance,
one that is more sacred and venerable than any other,--the soul and
conscience of Man.
What claim has Slavery to immunity from discussion? We are told that
discussion is dangerous. Dangerous to what? Truth invites it, courts
the point of the Ithuriel-spear, whose touch can but reveal more
clearly the grace and grandeur of her angelic proportions. The
advocates of Slavery have taken refuge in the last covert of desperate
sophism, and affirm that their institution is of Divine ordination,
that its bases are laid in the nature of man. Is anything, then, of
God's contriving endangered by inquiry? Was it the system of the
universe, or the monks, that trembled at the telescope of Galileo? Did
the circulation of the firmament stop in terror because Newton laid his
daring finger on its pulse? But it is idle to discuss a proposition so
monstrous. There is no right of sanctuary for a crime against humanity,
and they who drag an unclean thing to the horns of the altar bring it
to vengeance, and not to safety.
Even granting that Slavery were all that its apologists assume it to
be, and that the relation of master and slave were of God's appointing,
would not its abuses be just the thing which it was the duty of
Christian men to protest against, and, as far as might be, to root out?
Would our courts feel themselves debarred from interfering to rescue a
daughter from a parent who wished to make merchandise of her purity, or
a wife from a husband who was brutal to her, by the plea that parental
authority and marriage were of Divine ordinance? Would a police-justice
discharge a drunkard who pleaded the patriarchal precedent of Noah? or
would he not rather give him another month in the House of Correction
for his impudence?
The Anti-slavery question is not one which the Tract Society can
exclude by triumphant majorities, nor put to shame by a comparison of
respectabilities. Mixed though it has been with politics, it is in no
sense political, and springing naturally from the principles of that
religion which traces its human pedigree to a manger, and whose first
apostles were twelve poor men against the whole world, it can dispense
with numbers and earthly respect. The clergyman may ignore it in the
pulpit, but it confronts him in his study; the church-member, who has
suppressed it in parish-meeting, opens it with the pages of his
Testament; the merchant, who has shut it out of his house and his
heart, finds it lying in wait for him, a gaunt fugitive, in the hold of
his ship; the lawyer, who has declared that it is no concern of his,
finds it thrust upon him in the brief of the slave-hunter; the
historian, who had cautiously evaded it, stumbles over it at Bunker
Hill. And why? Because it is not political, but moral,--because it is
not local, but national,--because it is not a test of party, but of
individual honesty and honor. The wrong which we allow our nation to
perpetrate we cannot localize, if we would; we cannot hem it within the
limits of Washington or Kansas; sooner or later, it will force itself
into the conscience and sit by the hearthstone of every citizen.
It is not partisanship, it is not fanaticism, that has forced this
matter of Anti-slavery upon the American people; it is the spirit of
Christianity, which appeals from prejudices and predilections to the
moral consciousness of the individual man; that spirit elastic as air,
penetrative as heat, invulnerable as sunshine, against which creed
after creed and institution after institution have measured their
strength and been confounded; that restless spirit which refuses to
crystallize in any sect or form, but persists, a Divinely commissioned
radical and reconstructor, in trying every generation with a new
dilemma between ease and interest on the one hand, and duty on the
other. Shall it be said that its kingdom is not of this world? In one
sense, and that the highest, it certainly is not; but just as certainly
Christ never intended those words to be used as a subterfuge by which
to escape our responsibilities in the life of business and politics.
Let the cross, the sword, and the arena answer, whether the world, that
then was, so understood its first preachers and apostles. Caesar and
Flamen both instinctively dreaded it, not because it aimed at riches or
power, but because it strove to conquer that other world in the moral
nature of mankind, where it could establish a throne against which
wealth and force would be weak and contemptible. No human device has
ever prevailed against it, no array of majorities or respectabilities;
but neither Caesar nor Flamen ever conceived a scheme so cunningly
adapted to neutralize its power as that graceful compromise which
accepts it with the lip and denies it in the life, which marries it at
the altar and divorces it at the church-door.
THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER
1860
While all of us have been watching, with that admiring sympathy which
never fails to wait on courage and magnanimity, the career of the new
Timoleon in Sicily; while we have been reckoning, with an interest
scarcely less than in some affair of personal concern, the chances and
changes that bear with furtherance or hindrance upon the fortune of
united Italy, we are approaching, with a quietness and composure which
more than anything else mark the essential difference between our own
form of democracy and any other yet known in history, a crisis in our
domestic policy more momentous than any that has arisen since we became
a nation. Indeed, considering the vital consequences for good or evil
that will follow from the popular decision in November, we might be
tempted to regard the remarkable moderation which has thus far
characterized the Presidential canvass as a guilty indifference to the
duty implied in the privilege of suffrage, or a stolid unconsciousness
of the result which may depend upon its exercise in this particular
election, did we not believe that it arose chiefly from the general
persuasion that the success of the Republican party was a foregone
conclusion.
In a society like ours, where every man may transmute his private
thought into history and destiny by dropping it into the ballot-box, a
peculiar responsibility rests upon the individual. Nothing can absolve
us from doing our best to look at all public questions as citizens, and
therefore in some sort as administrators and rulers. For though during
its term of office the government be practically as independent of the
popular will as that of Russia, yet every fourth year the people are
called upon to pronounce upon the conduct of their affairs.
Theoretically, at least, to give democracy any standing-ground for an
argument with despotism or oligarchy, a majority of the men composing
it should be statesmen and thinkers. It is a proverb, that to turn a
radical into a conservative there needs only to put him into office,
because then the license of speculation or sentiment is limited by a
sense of responsibility; then for the first time he becomes capable of
that comparative view which sees principles and measures, not in the
narrow abstract, but in the full breadth of their relations to each
other and to political consequences. The theory of democracy
presupposes something of these results of official position in the
individual voter, since in exercising his right he becomes for the
moment an integral part of the governing power.
How very far practice is from any likeness to theory, a week's
experience of our politics suffices to convince us. The very government
itself seems an organized scramble, and Congress a boy's debating-club,
with the disadvantage of being reported. As our party-creeds are
commonly represented less by ideas than by persons (who are assumed,
without too close a scrutiny, to be the exponents of certain ideas) our
politics become personal and narrow to a degree never paralleled,
unless in ancient Athens or mediaeval Florence. Our Congress debates and
our newspapers discuss, sometimes for day after day, not questions of
national interest, not what is wise and right, but what the Honorable
Lafayette Skreemer said on the stump, or bad whiskey said for him, half
a dozen years ago. If that personage, outraged in all the finer
sensibilities of our common nature, by failing to get the contract for
supplying the District Court-House at Skreemeropolisville City with
revolvers, was led to disparage the union of these States, it is seized
on as proof conclusive that the party to which he belongs are so many
Cat_a_lines,--for Congress is unanimous only in misspelling the name of
that oft-invoked conspirator. The next Presidential Election looms
always in advance, so that we seem never to have an actual Chief
Magistrate, but a prospective one, looking to the chances of reelection,
and mingling in all the dirty intrigues of provincial politics with an
unhappy talent for making them dirtier. The cheating mirage of the
White House lures our public men away from present duties and
obligations; and if matters go on as they have gone, we shall need a
Committee of Congress to count the spoons in the public plate-closet,
whenever a President goes out of office,--with a policeman to watch
every member of the Committee. We are kept normally in that most
unprofitable of predicaments, a state of transition, and politicians
measure their words and deeds by a standard of immediate and temporary
expediency,--an expediency not as concerning the nation, but which, if
more than merely personal, is no wider than the interests of party.
Is all this a result of the failure of democratic institutions? Rather
of the fact that those institutions have never yet had a fair trial,
and that for the last thirty years an abnormal element has been acting
adversely with continually increasing strength. Whatever be the effect
of slavery upon the States where it exists, there can be no doubt that
its moral influence upon the North has been most disastrous. It has
compelled our politicians into that first fatal compromise with their
moral instincts and hereditary principles which makes all consequent
ones easy; it has accustomed us to makeshifts instead of statesmanship,
to subterfuge instead of policy, to party-platforms for opinions, and
to a defiance of the public sentiment of the civilized world for
patriotism. We have been asked to admit, first, that it was a necessary
evil; then that it was a good both to master and slave; then that it
was the corner-stone of free institutions; then that it was a system
divinely instituted under the Old Law and sanctioned under the New.
With a representation, three fifths of it based on the assumption that
negroes are men, the South turns upon us and insists on our
acknowledging that they are things. After compelling her Northern
allies to pronounce the "free and equal" clause of the preamble to the
Declaration of Independence (because it stood in the way of enslaving
men) a manifest absurdity, she has declared, through the Supreme Court
of the United States, that negroes are not men in the ordinary meaning
of the word. To eat dirt is bad enough, but to find that we have eaten
more than was necessary may chance to give us an indigestion. The
slaveholding interest has gone on step by step, forcing concession
after concession, till it needs but little to secure it forever in the
political supremacy of the country. Yield to its latest demand,--let it
mould the evil destiny of the Territories,--and the thing is done past
recall. The next Presidential Election is to say _Yes_ or _No_.
But we should not regard the mere question of political preponderancy
as of vital consequence, did it not involve a continually increasing
moral degradation on the part of the Non-slaveholding States,--for Free
States they could not be called much longer. Sordid and materialistic
views of the true value and objects of society and government are
professed more and more openly by the leaders of popular outcry,--for
it cannot be called public opinion. That side of human nature which it
has been the object of all lawgivers and moralists to repress and
subjugate is flattered and caressed; whatever is profitable is right;
and already the slave-trade, as yielding a greater return on the
capital invested than any other traffic, is lauded as the highest
achievement of human reason and justice. Mr. Hammond has proclaimed the
accession of King Cotton, but he seems to have forgotten that history
is not without examples of kings who have lost their crowns through the
folly and false security of their ministers. It is quite true that
there is a large class of reasoners who would weigh all questions of
right and wrong in the balance of trade; but we cannot bring ourselves
to believe that it is a wise political economy which makes cotton by
unmaking men, or a far-seeing statesmanship which looks on an immediate
money-profit as a safe equivalent for a beggared public sentiment. We
think Mr. Hammond even a little premature in proclaiming the new
Pretender. The election of November may prove a Culloden. Whatever its
result, it is to settle, for many years to come, the question whether
the American idea is to govern this continent, whether the Occidental
or the Oriental theory of society is to mould our future, whether we
are to recede from principles which eighteen Christian centuries have
been slowly establishing at the cost of so many saintly lives at the
stake and so many heroic ones on the scaffold and the battle-field, in
favor of some fancied assimilation to the household arrangements of
Abraham, of which all that can be said with certainty is that they did
not add to his domestic happiness.
We believe that this election is a turning-point in our history; for,
although there are four candidates, there are really, as everybody
knows, but two parties, and a single question that divides them. The
supporters of Messrs. Bell and Everett have adopted as their platform
the Constitution, the Union, and the enforcement of the Laws. This may
be very convenient, but it is surely not very explicit. The cardinal
question on which the whole policy of the country is to turn--a
question, too, which this very election must decide in one way or the
other--is the interpretation to be put upon certain clauses of the
Constitution. All the other parties equally assert their loyalty to
that instrument. Indeed, it is quite the fashion. The removers of all
the ancient landmarks of our policy, the violators of thrice-pledged
faith, the planners of new treachery to established compromise, all
take refuge in the Constitution,--
"Like thieves that in a hemp-plot lie,
Secure against the hue and cry."
In the same way the first Bonaparte renewed his profession of faith in
the Revolution at every convenient opportunity; and the second follows
the precedent of his uncle, though the uninitiated fail to see any
logical sequence from 1789 to 1815 or 1860. If Mr. Bell loves the
Constitution, Mr. Breckinridge is equally fond; that Egeria of our
statesmen could be "happy with either, were t' other dear charmer
away." Mr. Douglas confides the secret of his passion to the
unloquacious clams of Rhode Island, and the chief complaint made
against Mr. Lincoln by his opponents is that he is _too_ Constitutional.
Meanwhile, the only point in which voters are interested is, What do
they mean by the Constitution? Mr. Breckinridge means the superiority
of a certain exceptional species of property over all others; nay, over
man himself. Mr. Douglas, with a different formula for expressing it,
means practically the same thing. Both of them mean that Labor has no
rights which Capital is bound to respect,--that there is no higher law
than human interest and cupidity. Both of them represent not merely the
narrow principles of a section, but the still narrower and more selfish
ones of a caste. Both of them, to be sure, have convenient phrases to
be juggled with before election, and which mean one thing or another,
or neither one thing nor another, as a particular exigency may seem to
require; but since both claim the regular Democratic nomination, we
have little difficulty in divining what their course would be after the
fourth of March, if they should chance to be elected. We know too well
what regular Democracy is, to like either of the two faces which each
shows by turns under the same hood. Everybody remembers Baron Grimm's
story of the Parisian showman, who in 1789 exhibited the _royal_ Bengal
tiger under the new character of _national_, as more in harmony with
the changed order of things. Could the animal have lived till 1848,
he would probably have found himself offered to the discriminating
public as the _democratic_ and _social_ ornament of the jungle. The
Pro-slavery party of this country seeks the popular favor under even
more frequent and incongruous _aliases_: it is now _national_, now
_conservative_, now _constitutional_; here it represents
Squatter-Sovereignty, and there the power of Congress over the
Territories; but, under whatever name, its nature remains unchanged,
and its instincts are none the less predatory and destructive.
Mr. Lincoln's position is set forth with sufficient precision in the
platform adopted by the Chicago Convention; but what are we to make of
Messrs. Bell and Everett? Heirs of the stock in trade of two defunct
parties, the Whig and Know-Nothing, do they hope to resuscitate them?
or are they only like the inconsolable widows of Pere la Chaise, who,
with an eye to former customers, make use of the late Andsoforth's
gravestone to advertise that they still carry on business at the old
stand? Mr. Everett, in his letter accepting the nomination, gave us
only a string of reasons why he should not have accepted it at all; and
Mr. Bell preserves a silence singularly at variance with his
patronymic. The only public demonstration of principle that we have
seen is an emblematic bell drawn upon a wagon by a single horse, with a
man to lead him, and a boy to make a nuisance of the tinkling symbol as
it moves along. Are all the figures in this melancholy procession
equally emblematic? If so, which of the two candidates is typified in
the unfortunate who leads the horse?--for we believe the only hope of
the party is to get one of them elected by some hocus-pocus in the
House of Representatives. The little boy, we suppose, is intended to
represent the party, which promises to be so conveniently small that
there will be an office for every member of it, if its candidate should
win. Did not the bell convey a plain allusion to the leading name on
the ticket, we should conceive it an excellent type of the hollowness
of those fears for the safety of the Union, in case of Mr. Lincoln's
election, whose changes are so loudly rung,--its noise having once or
twice given rise to false alarms of fire, till people found out what it
really was. Whatever profound moral it be intended to convey, we find
in it a similitude that is not without significance as regards the
professed creed of the party. The industrious youth who operates upon
it has evidently some notion of the measured and regular motion that
befits the tongues of well-disciplined and conservative bells. He does
his best to make theory and practice coincide; but with every jolt on
the road an involuntary variation is produced, and the sonorous
pulsation becomes rapid or slow accordingly. We have observed that the
Constitution was liable to similar derangements, and we very much doubt
whether Mr. Bell himself (since, after all, the Constitution would
practically be nothing else than his interpretation of it) would keep
the same measured tones that are so easy on the smooth path of
candidacy, when it came to conducting the car of State over some of the
rough places in the highway of Manifest Destiny, and some of those
passages in our politics which, after the fashion of new countries, are
rather _corduroy_ in character.
But, fortunately, we are not left wholly in the dark as to the aims of
the self-styled Constitutional party. One of its most distinguished
members, Governor Hunt of New York, has given us to understand that its
prime object is the defeat at all hazards of the Republican candidate.
To achieve so desirable an end, its leaders are ready to coalesce, here
with the Douglas, and there with the Breckinridge faction of that very
Democratic party of whose violations of the Constitution, corruption,
and dangerous limberness of principle they have been the lifelong
denouncers. In point of fact, then, it is perfectly plain that we have
only two parties in the field: those who favor the extension of
slavery, and those who oppose it,--in other words, a Destructive and a
Conservative party.
We know very well that the partisans of Mr. Bell, Mr. Douglas, and Mr.
Breckinridge all equally claim the title of conservative: and the fact
is a very curious one, well worthy the consideration of those foreign
critics who argue that the inevitable tendency of democracy is to
compel larger and larger concessions to a certain assumed communistic
propensity and hostility to the rights of property on the part of the
working classes. But the truth is, that revolutionary ideas are
promoted, not by any unthinking hostility to the _rights_ of property,
but by a well-founded jealousy of its usurpations; and it is Privilege,
and not Property, that is perplexed with fear of change. The
conservative effect of ownership operates with as much force on the man
with a hundred dollars in an old stocking as on his neighbor with a
million in the funds. During the Roman Revolution of '48, the beggars
who had funded their gains were among the stanchest reactionaries, and
left Rome with the nobility. No question of the abstract right of
property has ever entered directly into our politics, or ever
will,--the point at issue being, whether a certain exceptional kind of
property, already privileged beyond all others, shall be entitled to
still further privileges at the expense of every other kind. The
extension of slavery over new territory means just this,--that this one
kind of property, not recognized as such by the Constitution, or it
would never have been allowed to enter into the basis of
representation, shall control the foreign and domestic policy of the
Republic.
A great deal is said, to be sure, about the rights of the South; but
has any such right been infringed? When a man invests money in any
species of property, he assumes the risks to which it is liable. If he
buy a house, it may be burned; if a ship, it may be wrecked; if a horse
or an ox, it may die. Now the disadvantage of the Southern kind of
property is--how shall we say it so as not to violate our Constitutional
obligations?--that it is exceptional. When it leaves Virginia, it is a
thing; when it arrives in Boston, it becomes a man, speaks human
language, appeals to the justice of the same God whom we all
acknowledge, weeps at the memory of wife and children left behind,--in
short, hath the same organs and dimensions that a Christian hath, and
is not distinguishable from ordinary Christians, except, perhaps, by a
simpler and more earnest faith. There are people at the North who
believe that, beside _meum_ and _tuum_, there is also such a thing as
_suum_,--who are old-fashioned enough, or weak enough, to have their
feelings touched by these things, to think that human nature is older
and more sacred than any claim of property whatever, and that it has
rights at least as much to be respected as any hypothetical one of our
Southern brethren. This, no doubt, makes it harder to recover a
fugitive chattel; but the existence of human nature in a man here and
there is surely one of those accidents to be counted on at least as
often as fire, shipwreck, or the cattle-disease; and the man who
chooses to put his money into these images of his Maker cut in ebony
should be content to take the incident risks along with the advantages.
We should be very sorry to deem this risk capable of diminution; for we
think that the claims of a common manhood upon us should be at least as
strong as those of Freemasonry, and that those whom the law of man
turns away should find in the larger charity of the law of God and
Nature a readier welcome and surer sanctuary. We shall continue to
think the negro a man, and on Southern evidence, too, so long as he is
counted in the population represented on the floor of Congress,--for
three fifths of perfect manhood would be a high average even among
white men; so long as he is hanged or worse, as an example and terror
to others,--for we do not punish one animal for the moral improvement
of the rest; so long as he is considered capable of religious
instruction,--for we fancy the gorillas would make short work with a
missionary; so long as there are fears of insurrection,--for we never
heard of a combined effort at revolt in a menagerie. Accordingly, we do
not see how the particular right of whose infringement we hear so much
is to be made safer by the election of Mr. Bell, Mr. Breckinridge, or
Mr. Douglas,--there being quite as little chance that any of them would
abolish human nature as that Mr. Lincoln would abolish slavery. The
same generous instinct that leads some among us to sympathize with the
sorrows of the bereaved master will always, we fear, influence others
to take part with the rescued man.
But if our Constitutional Obligations, as we like to call our
constitutional timidity or indifference, teach us that a particular
divinity hedges the Domestic Institution, they do not require us to
forget that we have institutions of our own, worth maintaining and
extending, and not without a certain sacredness, whether we regard the
traditions of the fathers or the faith of the children. It is high time
that we should hear something of the rights of the Free States, and of
the duties consequent upon them. We also have our prejudices to be
respected, our theory of civilization, of what constitutes the safety
of a state and insures its prosperity, to be applied wherever there is
soil enough for a human being to stand on and thank God for making him
a man. Is conservatism applicable only to property, and not to justice,
freedom, and public honor? Does it mean merely drifting with the
current of evil times and pernicious counsels, and carefully nursing
the ills we have, that they may, as their nature it is, grow worse?
To be told that we ought not to agitate the question of Slavery, when
it is that which is forever agitating us, is like telling a man with
the fever and ague on him to stop shaking, and he will be cured. The
discussion of Slavery is said to be dangerous, but dangerous to what?
The manufacturers of the Free States constitute a more numerous class
than the slaveholders of the South: suppose they should claim an equal
sanctity for the Protective System. Discussion is the very life of free
institutions, the fruitful mother of all political and moral
enlightenment, and yet the question of all questions must be tabooed.
The Swiss guide enjoins silence in the region of avalanches, lest the
mere vibration of the voice should dislodge the ruin clinging by frail
roots of snow. But where is our avalanche to fall? It is to overwhelm
the Union, we are told. The real danger to the Union will come when the
encroachments of the Slave-Power and the concessions of the Trade-Power
shall have made it a burden instead of a blessing. The real avalanche
to be dreaded,--are we to expect it from the ever-gathering mass of
ignorant brute force, with the irresponsibility of animals and the
passions of men, which is one of the fatal necessities of slavery, or
from the gradually increasing consciousness of the non-slaveholding
population of the Slave States of the true cause of their material
impoverishment and political inferiority? From one or the other source
its ruinous forces will be fed, but in either event it is not the Union
that will be imperilled, but the privileged Order who on every occasion
of a thwarted whim have menaced its disruption, and who will then find
in it their only safety.
We believe that the "irrepressible conflict"--for we accept Mr.
Seward's much-denounced phrase in all the breadth of meaning he ever
meant to give it--is to take place in the South itself; because the
Slave System is one of those fearful blunders in political economy
which are sure, sooner or later, to work their own retribution. The
inevitable tendency of slavery is to concentrate in a few hands the
soil, the capital, and the power of the countries where it exists, to
reduce the non-slaveholding class to a continually lower and lower
level of property, intelligence, and enterprise,--their increase in
numbers adding much to the economical hardship of their position and
nothing to their political weight in the community. There is no
home-encouragement of varied agriculture,--for the wants of a slave
population are few in number and limited in kind; none of inland trade,
for that is developed only by communities where education induces
refinement, where facility of communication stimulates invention and
variety of enterprise, where newspapers make every man's improvement in
tools, machinery, or culture of the soil an incitement to all, and
bring all the thinkers of the world to teach in the cheap university of
the people. We do not, of course, mean to say that slaveholding States
may not and do not produce fine men; but they fail, by the inherent
vice of their constitution and its attendant consequences, to create
enlightened, powerful, and advancing communities of men, which is the
true object of all political organizations, and is essential to the
prolonged existence of all those whose life and spirit are derived
directly from the people. Every man who has dispassionately endeavored
to enlighten himself in the matter cannot but see, that, for the many,
the course of things in slaveholding States is substantially what we
have described, a downward one, more or less rapid, in civilization and
in all those results of material prosperity which in a free country
show themselves in the general advancement for the good of all, and
give a real meaning to the word Commonwealth. No matter how enormous
the wealth centred in the hands of a few, it has no longer the
conservative force or the beneficent influence which it exerts when
equably distributed,--even loses more of both where a system of
absenteeism prevails so largely as in the South. In such communities
the seeds of an "irrepressible conflict" are surely if slowly ripening,
and signs are daily multiplying that the true peril to their social
organization is looked for, less in a revolt of the owned labor than in
an insurrection of intelligence in the labor that owns itself and finds
itself none the richer for it. To multiply such communities is to
multiply weakness.
The election in November turns on the single and simple question,
Whether we shall consent to the indefinite multiplication of them; and
the only party which stands plainly and unequivocally pledged against
such a policy, nay, which is not either openly or impliedly in favor of
it,--is the Republican party. We are of those who at first regretted
that another candidate was not nominated at Chicago; but we confess
that we have ceased to regret it, for the magnanimity of Mr. Seward
since the result of the Convention was known has been a greater
ornament to him and a greater honor to his party than his election to
the Presidency would have been. We should have been pleased with Mr.
Seward's nomination, for the very reason we have seen assigned for
passing him by,--that he represented the most advanced doctrines of his
party. He, more than any other man, combined in himself the moralist's
oppugnancy to Slavery as a fact, the thinker's resentment of it as a
theory, and the statist's distrust of it as a policy,--thus summing up
the three efficient causes that have chiefly aroused and concentrated
the antagonism of the Free States. Not a brilliant man, he has that
best gift of Nature, which brilliant men commonly lack, of being always
able to do his best; and the very misrepresentation of his opinions
which was resorted to in order to neutralize the effect of his speeches
in the Senate and elsewhere was the best testimony to their power. Safe
from the prevailing epidemic of Congressional eloquence as if he had
been inoculated for it early in his career, he addresses himself to the
reason, and what he says sticks. It was assumed that his nomination
would have embittered the contest and tainted the Republican creed with
radicalism; but we doubt it. We cannot think that a party gains by not
hitting its hardest, or by sugaring its opinions. Republicanism is not
a conspiracy to obtain office under false pretences. It has a definite
aim, an earnest purpose, and the unflinching tenacity of profound
conviction. It was not called into being by a desire to reform the
pecuniary corruptions of the party now in power. Mr. Bell or Mr.
Breckinridge would do that, for no one doubts their honor or their
honesty. It is not unanimous about the Tariff, about State-Rights,
about many other questions of policy. What unites the Republicans is a
common faith in the early principles and practice of the Republic, a
common persuasion that slavery, as it cannot but be the natural foe of
the one, has been the chief debaser of the other, and a common resolve
to resist its encroachments everywhen and everywhere. They see no
reason to fear that the Constitution, which has shown such pliant
tenacity under the warps and twistings of a forty-years' pro-slavery
pressure, should be in danger of breaking, if bent backward again
gently to its original rectitude of fibre. "All forms of human
government," says Machiavelli, "have, like men, their natural term, and
those only are long-lived which possess in themselves the power of
returning to the principles on which they were originally founded."
It is in a moral aversion to slavery as a great wrong that the chief
strength of the Republican party lies. They believe as everybody
believed sixty years ago; and we are sorry to see what appears to be an
inclination in some quarters to blink this aspect of the case, lest the
party be charged with want of conservatism, or, what is worse, with
abolitionism. It is and will be charged with all kinds of dreadful
things, whatever it does, and it has nothing to fear from an upright
and downright declaration of its faith. One part of the grateful work
it has to do is to deliver us from the curse of perpetual concession
for the sake of a peace that never comes, and which, if it came, would
not be peace, but submission,--from that torpor and imbecility of faith
in God and man which have stolen the respectable name of Conservatism.
A question which cuts so deep as that which now divides the country
cannot be debated, much less settled, without excitement. Such
excitement is healthy, and is a sign that the ill humors of the body
politic are coming to the surface, where they are comparatively
harmless. It is the tendency of all creeds, opinions, and political
dogmas that have once defined themselves in institutions to become
inoperative. The vital and formative principle, which was active during
the process of crystallization into sects, or schools of thought, or
governments, ceases to act; and what was once a living emanation of the
Eternal Mind, organically operative in history, becomes the dead
formula on men's lips and the dry topic of the annalist. It has been
our good fortune that a question has been thrust upon us which has
forced us to reconsider the primal principles of government, which has
appealed to conscience as well as reason, and, by bringing the theories
of the Declaration of Independence to the test of experience in our
thought and life and action, has realized a tradition of the memory
into a conviction of the understanding and the soul. It will not do for
the Republicans to confine themselves to the mere political argument,
for the matter then becomes one of expediency, with two defensible
sides to it; they must go deeper, to the radical question of right and
wrong, or they surrender the chief advantage of their position. What
Spinoza says of laws is equally true of party platforms,--that those
are strong which appeal to reason, but those are impregnable which
compel the assent both of reason and the common affections of mankind.
No man pretends that under the Constitution there is any possibility of
interference with the domestic relations of the individual States; no
party has ever remotely hinted at any such interference; but what the
Republicans affirm is, that in every contingency where the Constitution
can be construed in favor of freedom, it ought to be and shall be so
construed. It is idle to talk of sectionalism, abolitionism, and
hostility to the laws. The principles of liberty and humanity cannot,
by virtue of their very nature, be sectional, any more than light and
heat. Prevention is not abolition, and unjust laws are the only serious
enemies that Law ever had. With history before us, it is no treason to
question the infallibility of a court; for courts are never wiser or
more venerable than the men composing them, and a decision that
reverses precedent cannot arrogate to itself any immunity from
reversal. Truth is the only unrepealable thing.
We are gravely requested to have no opinion, or, having one, to
suppress it, on the one topic that has occupied caucuses, newspapers,
Presidents' messages, and Congress for the last dozen years, lest we
endanger the safety of the Union. The true danger to popular forms of
government begins when public opinion ceases because the people are
incompetent or unwilling to think. In a democracy it is the duty of
every citizen to think; but unless the thinking result in a definite
opinion, and the opinion lead to considerate action, they are nothing.
If the people are assumed to be incapable of forming a judgment for
themselves, the men whose position enables them to guide the public
mind ought certainly to make good their want of intelligence. But on
this great question, the wise solution of which, we are every day
assured, is essential to the permanence of the Union, Mr. Bell has no
opinion at all, Mr. Douglas says it is of no consequence which opinion
prevails, and Mr. Breckinridge tells us vaguely that "all sections have
an equal right in the common Territories." The parties which support
these candidates, however, all agree in affirming that the election of
its special favorite is the one thing that can give back peace to the
distracted country. The distracted country will continue to take care
of itself, as it has done hitherto, and the only question that needs an
answer is, What policy will secure the most prosperous future to the
helpless Territories, which our decision is to make or mar for all
coming time? What will save the country from a Senate and Supreme Court
where freedom shall be forever at a disadvantage?
There is always a fallacy in the argument of the opponents of the
Republican party. They affirm that all the States and all the citizens
of the States ought to have equal rights in the Territories.
Undoubtedly. But the difficulty is that they cannot. The slaveholder
moves into a new Territory with his _institution_, and from that moment
the free white settler is virtually excluded. _His_ institutions he
cannot take with him; they refuse to root themselves in soil that is
cultivated by slave-labor. Speech is no longer free; the post-office is
Austrianized; the mere fact of Northern birth may be enough to hang
him. Even now in Texas, settlers from the Free States are being driven
out and murdered for pretended complicity in a plot the evidence for
the existence of which has been obtained by means without a parallel
since the trial of the Salem witches, and the stories about which are
as absurd and contradictory as the confessions of Goodwife Corey.
Kansas was saved, it is true; but it was the experience of Kansas that
disgusted the South with Mr. Douglas's panacea of "Squatter
Sovereignty."
The claim of _equal_ rights in the Territories is a specious fallacy.
Concede the demand of the slavery-extensionists, and you give up every
inch of territory to slavery, to the absolute exclusion of freedom. For
what they ask (however they may disguise it) is simply this,--that
their _local law_ be made the law of the land, and coextensive with the
limits of the General Government. The Constitution acknowledges no
unqualified or interminable right of property in the labor of another;
and the plausible assertion, that "that is property which the law makes
property" (confounding _a_ law existing anywhere with _the_ law which
is binding everywhere), can deceive only those who have either never
read the Constitution, or are ignorant of the opinions and intentions
of those who framed it. It is true only of the States where slavery
already exists; and it is because the propagandists of slavery are well
aware of this, that they are so anxious to establish by positive
enactment the seemingly moderate title to a right of existence for
their institution in the Territories,--a title which they do not
possess, and the possession of which would give them the oyster and
the Free States the shells. Laws accordingly are asked for to protect
Southern property in the Territories,--that is, to protect the
inhabitants from deciding for themselves what their frame of government
shall be. Such laws will be passed, and the fairest portion of our
national domain irrevocably closed to free labor, if the on-slaveholding
States fail to do their duty in the present crisis.
But will the election of Mr. Lincoln endanger the Union? It is not a
little remarkable that, as the prospect of his success increases, the
menaces of secession grow fainter and less frequent. Mr. W. L. Yancey,
to be sure, threatens to secede; but the country can get along without
him, and we wish him a prosperous career in foreign parts. But Governor
Wise no longer proposes to seize the Treasury at Washington,--perhaps
because Mr. Buchanan has left so little in it. The old Mumbo-Jumbo is
occasionally paraded at the North, but, however many old women may be
frightened, the pulse of the stock-market remains provokingly calm.
General Cushing, infringing the patent-right of the late Mr. James, the
novelist, has seen a solitary horseman on the edge of the horizon. The
exegesis of the vision has been various, some thinking that it means a
Military Despot,--though in that case the force of cavalry would seem
to be inadequate,--and others the Pony Express. If it had been one
rider on two horses, the application would have been more general and
less obscure. In fact, the old cry of Disunion has lost its terrors, if
it ever had any, at the North. The South itself seems to have become
alarmed at its own scarecrow, and speakers there are beginning to
assure their hearers that the election of Mr. Lincoln will do them no
harm. We entirely agree with them, for it will save them from
themselves.
To believe any organized attempt by the Republican party to disturb the
existing internal policy of the Southern States possible presupposes a
manifest absurdity. Before anything of the kind could take place, the
country must be in a state of forcible revolution. But there is no
premonitory symptom of any such convulsion, unless we except Mr.
Yancey, and that gentleman's throwing a solitary somerset will hardly
turn the continent head over heels. The administration of Mr. Lincoln
will be conservative, because no government is ever intentionally
otherwise, and because power never knowingly undermines the foundation
on which it rests. All that the Free States demand is that influence in
the councils of the nation to which they are justly entitled by their
population, wealth, and intelligence. That these elements of prosperity
have increased more rapidly among them than in communities otherwise
organized, with greater advantages of soil, climate, and mineral
productions, is certainly no argument that they are incapable of the
duties of efficient and prudent administration, however strong a one it
may be for their endeavoring to secure for the Territories the single
superiority that has made themselves what they are. The object of the
Republican party is not the abolition of African slavery, but the utter
extirpation of dogmas which are the logical sequence of attempts to
establish its righteousness and wisdom, and which would serve equally
well to justify the enslavement of every white man unable to protect
himself. They believe that slavery is a wrong morally, a mistake
politically, and a misfortune practically, wherever it exists; that it
has nullified our influence abroad and forced us to compromise with our
better instincts at home; that it has perverted our government from its
legitimate objects, weakened the respect for the laws by making them
the tools of its purposes, and sapped the faith of men in any higher
political morality than interest or any better statesmanship than
chicane. They mean in every lawful way to hem it within its present
limits.
We are persuaded that the election of Mr. Lincoln will do more than
anything else to appease the excitement of the country. He has proved
both his ability and his integrity; he has had experience enough in
public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a
politician. That he has not had more will be no objection to him in the
eyes of those who have seen the administration of the experienced
public functionary whose term of office is just drawing to a close. He
represents a party who know that true policy is gradual in its
advances, that it is conditional and not absolute, that it must deal
with facts and not with sentiments, but who know also that it is wiser
to stamp out evil in the spark than to wait till there is no help but
in fighting fire with fire. They are the only conservative party,
because they are the only one based on an enduring principle, the only
one that is not willing to pawn to-morrow for the means to gamble with
to-day. They have no hostility to the South, but a determined one to
doctrines of whose ruinous tendency every day more and more convinces
them.
The encroachments of Slavery upon our national policy have been like
those of a glacier in a Swiss valley. Inch by inch, the huge dragon
with its glittering scales and crests of ice coils itself onward, an
anachronism of summer, the relic of a by-gone world where such monsters
swarmed. But it has its limit, the kindlier forces of Nature work
against it, and the silent arrows of the sun are still, as of old,
fatal to the frosty Python. Geology tells us that such enormous
devastators once covered the face of the earth, but the benignant
sunlight of heaven touched them, and they faded silently, leaving no
trace, but here and there the scratches of their talons, and the gnawed
boulders scattered where they made their lair. We have entire faith in
the benignant influence of Truth, the sunlight of the moral world, and
believe that slavery, like other worn-out systems, will melt gradually
before it. "All the earth cries out upon Truth, and the heaven blesseth
it; ill works shake and tremble at it, and with it is no unrighteous
thing."
E PLURIBUS UNUM
1861
We do not believe that any government--no, not the Rump Parliament on
its last legs--ever showed such pitiful inadequacy as our own during
the past two months. Helpless beyond measure in all the duties of
practical statesmanship, its members or their dependants have given
proof of remarkable energy in the single department of peculation; and
there, not content with the slow methods of the old-fashioned
defaulter, who helped himself only to what there was, they have
contrived to steal what there was going to be, and have peculated in
advance by a kind of official post-obit. So thoroughly has the credit
of the most solvent nation in the world been shaken, that an
administration which still talks of paying a hundred millions for Cuba
is unable to raise a loan of five millions for the current expenses of
government. Nor is this the worst: the moral bankruptcy at Washington
is more complete and disastrous than the financial, and for the first
time in our history the Executive is suspected of complicity in a
treasonable plot against the very life of the nation.
Our material prosperity for nearly half a century has been so
unparalleled that the minds of men have become gradually more and more
absorbed in matters of personal concern; and our institutions have
practically worked so well and so easily that we have learned to trust
in our luck, and to take the permanence of our government for granted.
The country has been divided on questions of temporary policy, and the
people have been drilled to a wonderful discipline in the manoeuvres
of party tactics; but no crisis has arisen to force upon them a
consideration of the fundamental principles of our system, or to arouse
in them a sense of national unity, and make them feel that patriotism
was anything more than a pleasant sentiment,--half Fourth of July and
half Eighth of January,--a feeble reminiscence, rather than a living
fact with a direct bearing on the national well-being. We have had long
experience of that unmemorable felicity which consists in having no
history, so far as history is made up of battles, revolutions, and
changes of dynasty; but the present generation has never been called
upon to learn that deepest lesson of polities which is taught by a
common danger, throwing the people back on their national instincts,
and superseding party-leaders, the peddlers of chicane, with men
adequate to great occasions and dealers in destiny. Such a crisis is
now upon us; and if the virtue of the people make up for the imbecility
of the Executive, as we have little doubt that it will, if the public
spirit of the whole country be awakened in time by the common peril,
the present trial will leave the nation stronger than ever, and more
alive to its privileges and the duties they imply. We shall have
learned what is meant by a government of laws, and that allegiance to
the sober will of the majority, concentrated in established forms and
distributed by legitimate channels, is all that renders democracy
possible, is its only conservative principle, the only thing that has
made and can keep us a powerful nation instead of a brawling mob.
The theory that the best government is that which governs least seems
to have been accepted literally by Mr. Buchanan, without considering
the qualifications to which all general propositions are subject. His
course of conduct has shown up its absurdity, in cases where prompt
action is required, as effectually as Buckingham turned into ridicule
the famous verse,--
"My wound is great, because it is so small,"
by instantly adding,--
"Then it were greater, were it none at all."
Mr. Buchanan seems to have thought, that, if to govern little was to
govern well, then to do nothing was the perfection of policy. But there
is a vast difference between letting well alone and allowing bad to
become worse by a want of firmness at the outset. If Mr. Buchanan,
instead of admitting the right of secession, had declared it to be, as
it plainly is, rebellion, he would not only have received the unanimous
support of the Free States, but would have given confidence to the
loyal, reclaimed the wavering, and disconcerted the plotters of treason
in the South.
Either we have no government at all, or else the very word implies the
right, and therefore the duty, in the governing power, of protecting
itself from destruction and its property from pillage. But for Mr.
Buchanan's acquiescence, the doctrine of the right of secession would
never for a moment have bewildered the popular mind. It is simply
mob-law under a plausible name. Such a claim might have been fairly
enough urged under the old Confederation; though even then it would
have been summarily dealt with, in the case of a Tory colony, if the
necessity had arisen. But the very fact that we have a National
Constitution, and legal methods for testing, preventing, or punishing
any infringement of its provisions, demonstrates the absurdity of any
such assumption of right now. When the States surrendered their power
to make war, did they make the single exception of the United States,
and reserve the privilege of declaring war against them at any moment?
If we are a congeries of mediaeval Italian republics, why should the
General Government have expended immense sums in fortifying points
whose strategic position is of continental rather than local
consequence? Florida, after having cost us nobody knows how many
millions of dollars and thousands of lives to render the holding of
slaves possible to her, coolly proposes to withdraw herself from the
Union and take with her one of the keys of the Mexican Gulf, on the
plea that her slave-property is rendered insecure by the Union.
Louisiana, which we bought and paid for to secure the mouth of the
Mississippi, claims the right to make her soil French or Spanish, and
to cork up the river again, whenever the whim may take her. The United
States are not a German Confederation, but a unitary and indivisible
nation, with a national life to protect, a national power to maintain,
and national rights to defend against any and every assailant, at all
hazards. Our national existence is all that gives value to American
citizenship. Without the respect which nothing but our consolidated
character could inspire, we might as well be citizens of the
toy-republic of San Marino, for all the protection it would afford us.
If our claim to a national existence was worth a seven years' war to
establish, it is worth maintaining at any cost; and it is daily
becoming more apparent that the people, so soon as they find that
secession means anything serious, will not allow themselves to be
juggled out of their rights, as members of one of the great powers of
the earth, by a mere quibble of Constitutional interpretation.
We have been so much accustomed to the Buncombe style of oratory, to
hearing men offer the pledge of their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor
on the most trivial occasions, that we are apt to allow a great
latitude in such matters, and only smile to think how small an advance
any intelligent pawnbroker would be likely to make on securities of
this description. The sporadic eloquence that breaks out over the
country on the eve of election, and becomes a chronic disease in the
two houses of Congress, has so accustomed us to dissociate words and
things, and to look upon strong language as an evidence of weak
purpose, that we attach no meaning whatever to declamation. Our
Southern brethren have been especially given to these orgies of
loquacity, and have so often solemnly assured us of their own courage,
and of the warlike propensities, power, wealth, and general superiority
of that part of the universe which is so happy as to be represented by
them, that, whatever other useful impression they have made, they
insure our never forgetting the proverb about the woman who talks of
her virtue. South Carolina, in particular, if she has hitherto failed
in the application of her enterprise to manufacturing purposes of a
more practical kind, has always been able to match every yard of
printed cotton from the North with a yard of printed fustian, the
product of her own domestic industry. We have thought no harm of this,
so long as no Act of Congress required the reading of the
"Congressional Globe." We submitted to the general dispensation of
long-windedness and short-meaningness as to any other providental
visitation, endeavoring only to hold fast our faith in the divine
government of the world in the midst of so much that was past
understanding. But we lost sight of the metaphysical truth, that,
though men may fail to convince others by a never so incessant
repetition of sonorous nonsense, they nevertheless gradually persuade
themselves, and impregnate their own minds and characters with a belief
in fallacies that have been uncontradicted only because not worth
contradiction. Thus our Southern politicians, by dint of continued
reiteration, have persuaded themselves to accept their own flimsy
assumptions for valid statistics, and at last actually believe
themselves to be the enlightened gentlemen, and the people of the Free
States the peddlers and sneaks they have so long been in the habit of
fancying. They have argued themselves into a kind of vague faith that
the wealth and power of the Republic are south of Mason and Dixon's
line; and the Northern people have been slow in arriving at the
conclusion that treasonable talk would lead to treasonable action,
because they could not conceive that anybody should be so foolish as to
think of rearing an independent frame of government on so visionary a
basis. Moreover, the so often recurring necessity, incident to our
system, of obtaining a favorable verdict from the people has fostered
in our public men the talents and habits of jury-lawyers at the expense
of statesmanlike qualities; and the people have been so long wonted to
look upon the utterances of popular leaders as intended for immediate
effect and having no reference to principles, that there is scarcely a
prominent man in the country so independent in position and so clear of
any suspicion of personal or party motives that they can put entire
faith in what he says, and accept him either as the leader or the
exponent of their thoughts and wishes. They have hardly been able to
judge with certainty from the debates in Congress whether secession
were a real danger, or only one of those political feints of which they
have had such frequent experience.
Events have been gradually convincing them that the peril was actual
and near. They begin to see how unwise, if nothing worse, has been the
weak policy of the Executive in allowing men to play at Revolution till
they learn to think the coarse reality as easy and pretty as the
vaudeville they have been acting. They are fast coming to the
conclusion that the list of grievances put forward by the secessionists
is a sham and a pretence, the veil of a long-matured plot against
republican institutions. And it is time the traitors of the South
should know that the Free States are becoming every day more united in
sentiment and more earnest in resolve, and that, so soon as they are
thoroughly satisfied that secession is something more than empty
bluster, a public spirit will be aroused that will be content with no
half-measures, and which no Executive, however unwilling, can resist.
The country is weary of being cheated with plays upon words. The United
States are a nation, and not a mass-meeting; theirs is a government,
and not a caucus,--a government that was meant to be capable, and is
capable, of something more than the helpless _please don't_ of a
village constable; they have executive and administrative officers that
are not mere puppet-figures to go through the motions of an objectless
activity, but arms and hands that become supple to do the will of the
people so soon as that will becomes conscious and defines its purpose.
It is time that we turned up our definitions in some more trustworthy
dictionary than that of avowed disunionists and their more dangerous
because more timid and cunning accomplices. Rebellion smells no sweeter
because it is called Secession, nor does Order lose its divine
precedence in human affairs because a knave may nickname it Coercion.
Secession means chaos, and Coercion the exercise of legitimate
authority. You cannot dignify the one nor degrade the other by any
verbal charlatanism. The best testimony to the virtue of coercion is
the fact that no wrongdoer ever thought well of it. The thief in jail,
the mob-leader in the hands of the police, and the murderer on the drop
will be unanimous in favor of this new heresy of the unconstitutionality
of constitutions, with its Newgate Calendar of confessors, martyrs, and
saints. Falstaff's famous regiment would have volunteered to a man for
its propagation or its defence. Henceforth let every unsuccessful
litigant have the right to pronounce the verdict of a jury sectional,
and to quash all proceedings and retain the property in controversy by
seceding from the court-room. Let the planting of hemp be made penal,
because it squints toward coercion. Why, the first great secessionist
would doubtless have preferred to divide heaven peaceably, would have
been willing to send commissioners, must have thought Michael's
proceedings injudicious, and could probably even now demonstrate the
illegality of hell-fire to any five-year-old imp of average education
and intelligence. What a fine world we should have, if we could only
come quietly together in convention, and declare by unanimous
resolution, or even by a two-thirds vote, that edge-tools should
hereafter cut everybody's fingers but his that played with them; that,
when two men ride on one horse, the hindmost shall always sit in front;
and that, when a man tries to thrust his partner out of bed and gets
kicked out himself, he shall be deemed to have established his title to
an equitable division, and the bed shall be thenceforth his as of
right, without detriment to the other's privilege in the floor!
If secession be a right, then the moment of its exercise is wholly
optional with those possessing it. Suppose, on the eve of a war with
England, Michigan should vote herself out of the Union and declare
herself annexed to Canada, what kind of a reception would her
commissioners be likely to meet in Washington, and what scruples should
we feel about coercion? Or, to take a case precisely parallel to that
of South Carolina, suppose that Utah, after getting herself admitted to
the Union, should resume her sovereignty, as it is pleasantly called,
and block our path to the Pacific, under the pretence that she did not
consider her institutions safe while the other States entertained such
unscriptural prejudices against her special weakness in the patriarchal
line. Is the only result of our admitting a Territory on Monday to be
the giving it a right to steal itself and go out again on Tuesday? Or
do only the original thirteen States possess this precious privilege of
suicide? We shall need something like a Fugitive Slave Law for runaway
republics, and must get a provision inserted in our treaties with
foreign powers, that they shall help us catch any delinquent who may
take refuge with them, as South Carolina has been trying to do with
England and France. It does not matter to the argument, except so far
as the good taste of the proceeding is concerned, at what particular
time a State may make her territory foreign, thus opening one gate of
our national defences and offering a bridge to invasion. The danger of
the thing is in her making her territory foreign under any
circumstances; and it is a danger which the government must prevent, if
only for self-preservation. Within the limits of the constitution two
sovereignties cannot exist; and yet what practical odds does it make,
if a State may become sovereign by simply declaring herself so? The
legitimate consequence of secession is, not that a State becomes
sovereign, but that, so far as the general government is concerned, she
has outlawed herself, nullified her own existence as a State, and
become an aggregate of riotous men who resist the execution of the
laws.
We are told that coercion will be civil war; and so is a mob civil war,
till it is put down. In the present case, the only coercion called for
is the protection of the public property, and the collection of the
federal revenues. If it be necessary to send troops to do this, they
will not be sectional, as it is the fashion nowadays to call people who
insist on their own rights and the maintenance of the laws, but federal
troops, representing the will and power of the whole Confederacy. A
danger is always great so long as we are afraid of it; and mischief
like that now gathering head in South Carolina may soon become a
danger, if not swiftly dealt with. Mr. Buchanan seems altogether too
wholesale a disciple of the _laissez-faire_ doctrine, and has allowed
activity in mischief the same immunity from interference which is true
policy only in regard to enterprise wisely and profitably directed. He
has been naturally reluctant to employ force, but has overlooked the
difference between indecision and moderation, forgetting the lesson of
all experience, that firmness in the beginning saves the need of force
in the end, and that forcible measures applied too late may be made to
seem violent ones, and thus excite a mistaken sympathy with the
sufferers by their own misdoing. The feeling of the country has been
unmistakably expressed in regard to Major Anderson, and that not merely
because he showed prudence and courage, but because he was the first
man holding a position of trust who did his duty to the nation. Public
sentiment unmistakably demands that, in the case of Anarchy _vs._
America, the cause of the defendant shall not be suffered to go by
default. The proceedings in South Carolina, parodying the sublime
initiative of our own Revolution with a Declaration of Independence
that hangs the franchise of human nature on the kink of a hair, and
substitutes for the visionary right of all men to the pursuit of
happiness the more practical privilege of some men to pursue their own
negro,--these proceedings would be merely ludicrous, were it not for
the danger that the men engaged in them may so far commit themselves as
to find the inconsistency of a return to prudence too galling, and to
prefer the safety of their pride to that of their country.
[Illustration: _Major Anderson_]
It cannot be too distinctly stated or too often repeated that the
discontent of South Carolina is not one to be allayed by any
concessions which the Free States can make with dignity or even safety.
It is something more radical and of longer standing than distrust of
the motives or probable policy of the Republican party. It is neither
more nor less than a disbelief in the very principles on which our
government is founded. So long as they practically retained the
government of the country, and could use its power and patronage to
their own advantage, the plotters were willing to wait; but the moment
they lost that control, by the breaking up of the Democratic party, and
saw that their chance of ever regaining it was hopeless, they declared
openly the principles on which they have all along been secretly
acting. Denying the constitutionality of special protection to any
other species of property or branch of industry, and in 1832
threatening to break up the Union unless their theory of the
Constitution in this respect were admitted, they went into the late
Presidential contest with a claim for extraordinary protection to a
certain kind of property already the only one endowed with special
privileges and immunities. Defeated overwhelmingly before the people,
they now question the right of the majority to govern, except on their
terms, and threaten violence in the hope of extorting from the fears of
the Free States what they failed to obtain from their conscience and
settled convictions of duty. Their quarrel is not with the Republican
party, but with the theory of Democracy.
The South Carolina politicians have hitherto shown themselves adroit
managers, shrewd in detecting and profiting by the weaknesses of men;
but their experience has not been of a kind to give them practical
wisdom in that vastly more important part of government which depends
for success on common sense and business habits. The members of the
South Carolina Convention have probably less knowledge of political
economy than any single average Northern merchant whose success depends
on an intimate knowledge of the laws of trade and the world-wide
contingencies of profit and loss. Such a man would tell them, as the
result of invariable experience, that the prosperity of no community
was so precarious as that of one whose very existence was dependent on
a single agricultural product. What divinity hedges cotton, that
competition may not touch it,--that some disease, like that of the
potato and the vine, may not bring it to beggary in a single year, and
cure the overweening conceit of prosperity with the sharp medicine of
Ireland and Madeira? But these South Carolina economists are better at
vaporing than at calculation. They will find to their cost that the
figures of statistics have little mercy for the figures of speech,
which are so powerful in raising enthusiasm and so helpless in raising
money. The eating of one's own words, as they must do, sooner or later,
is neither agreeable nor nutritious; but it is better to do it before
there is nothing else left to eat. The secessionists are strong in
declamation, but they are weak in the multiplication-table and the
ledger. They have no notion of any sort of logical connection between
treason and taxes. It is all very fine signing Declarations of
Independence, and one may thus become a kind of panic-price hero for a
week or two, even rising to the effigial martyrdom of the illustrated
press; but these gentlemen seem to have forgotten that, if their
precious document should lead to anything serious, they have been
signing promises to pay for the State of South Carolina to an enormous
amount. It is probably far short of the truth to say that the taxes of
an autonomous palmetto republic would be three times what they are now.
To speak of nothing else, there must be a military force kept
constantly on foot; and the ministers of King Cotton will find that the
charge made by a standing army on the finances of the new empire is
likely to be far more serious and damaging than can be compensated by
the glory of a great many such "spirited charges" as that by which
Colonel Pettigrew and his gallant rifles took Fort Pinckney, with its
garrison of one engineer officer and its armament of no guns. Soldiers
are the most costly of all toys or tools. The outgo for the army of the
Pope, never amounting to ten thousand effective men, in the cheapest
country in the world, has been half a million of dollars a month. Under
the present system, it needs no argument to show that the
non-slaveholding States, with a free population considerably more than
double that of the slaveholding States, and with much more generally
distributed wealth and opportunities of spending, pay far more than the
proportion predicable on mere preponderance in numbers of the expenses
of a government supported mainly by a tariff on importations. And it is
not the burden of this difference merely that the new Cotton Republic
must assume. They will need as large, probably a larger, army and navy
than that of the present Union; as numerous a diplomatic establishment;
a postal system whose large yearly deficit they must bear themselves;
and they must assume the main charges of the Indian Bureau. If they
adopt free trade, they will alienate the Border Slave States, and even
Louisiana; if a system of customs, they have cut themselves off from
the chief consumers of foreign goods. One of the calculations of the
Southern conspirators is to render the Free States tributary to their
new republic by adopting free trade and smuggling their imported goods
across the border. But this is all moonshine; for, even if smuggling
could not be prevented as easily as it now is from the British
Provinces, how long would it be before the North would adapt its tariff
to the new order of things? And thus thrown back upon direct taxation,
how many years would it take to open the eyes of the poorer classes of
Secessia to the hardship of their position and its causes? Their
ignorance has been trifled with by men who cover treasonable designs
with a pretence of local patriotism. Neither they nor their misleaders
have any true conception of the people of the Free States, of those
"white slaves" who in Massachusetts alone have a deposit in the Savings
Banks whose yearly interest would pay seven times over the four hundred
thousand dollars which South Carolina cannot raise.
But even if we leave other practical difficulties out of sight, what
chance of stability is there for a confederacy whose very foundation is
the principle that any member of it may withdraw at the first
discontent? If they could contrive to establish a free trade treaty
with their chief customer, England, would she consent to gratify
Louisiana with an exception in favor of sugar? Some of the leaders of
the secession movement have already become aware of this difficulty,
and accordingly propose the abolition of all State lines,--the first
step toward a military despotism; for, if our present system have one
advantage greater than another, it is the neutralization of numberless
individual ambitions by adequate opportunities of provincial
distinction. Even now the merits of the Napoleonic system are put
forward by some of the theorists of Alabama and Mississippi, who
doubtless have as good a stomach to be emperors as ever Bottom had to a
bottle of hay, when his head was temporarily transformed to the
likeness of theirs,--and who, were they subjects of the government that
looks so nice across the Atlantic, would, ere this, have been on their
way to Cayenne, a spot where such red-peppery temperaments would find
themselves at home.
The absurdities with which the telegraphic column of the newspapers has
been daily crowded, since the vagaries of South Carolina finally
settled down into unmistakable insanity, would give us but a poor
opinion of the general intelligence of the country, did we not know
that they were due to the necessities of "Our Own Correspondent." At
one time, it is Fort Sumter that is to be bombarded with floating
batteries mounted on rafts behind a rampart of cotton-bales; at
another, it is Mr. Barrett, Mayor of Washington, announcing his
intention that the President-elect shall be inaugurated, or Mr.
Buchanan declaring that he shall cheerfully assent to it. Indeed! and
who gave them any choice in the matter? Yesterday, it was General Scott
who would not abandon the flag which he had illustrated with the
devotion of a lifetime; to-day, it is General Harney or Commodore
Kearney who has concluded to be true to the country whose livery he has
worn and whose bread he has eaten for half a century; to-morrow, it
will be Ensign Stebbins who has been magnanimous enough not to throw up
his commission. What are we to make of the extraordinary confusion of
ideas which such things indicate? In what other country would it be
considered creditable to an officer that he merely did not turn traitor
at the first opportunity? There can be no doubt of the honor both of
the army and navy, and of their loyalty to their country. They will do
their duty, if we do ours in saving them a country to which they can be
loyal.
We have been so long habituated to a kind of local independence in the
management of our affairs, and the central government has fortunately
had so little occasion for making itself felt at home and in the
domestic concerns of the States, that the idea of its relation to us as
a power, except for protection from without, has gradually become vague
and alien to our ordinary habits of thought. We have so long heard the
principle admitted, and seen it acted on with advantage to the general
weal, that the people are sovereign in their own affairs, that we must
recover our presence of mind before we see the fallacy of the
assumption, that the people, or a bare majority of them, in a single
State, can exercise their right of sovereignty as against the will of
the nation legitimately expressed. When such a contingency arises, it
is for a moment difficult to get rid of our habitual associations, and
to feel that we are not a mere partnership, dissolvable whether by
mutual consent or on the demand of one or more of its members, but a
nation, which can never abdicate its right, and can never surrender it
while virtue enough is left in the people to make it worth retaining.
It would seem to be the will of God that from time to time the manhood
of nations, like that of individuals, should be tried by great dangers
or by great opportunities. If the manhood be there, it makes the great
opportunity out of the great danger; if it be not there, then the great
danger out of the great opportunity. The occasion is offered us now of
trying whether a conscious nationality and a timely concentration of
the popular will for its maintenance be possible in a democracy, or
whether it is only despotisms that are capable of the sudden and
selfish energy of protecting themselves from destruction.
The Republican party has thus far borne itself with firmness and
moderation, and the great body of the Democratic party in the Free
States is gradually being forced into an alliance with it. Let us not
be misled by any sophisms about conciliation and compromise.
Discontented citizens may be conciliated and compromised with, but
never open rebels with arms in their hands. If there be any concessions
which justice may demand on the one hand and honor make on the other,
let us try if we can adjust them with the Border Slave States; but a
government has already signed its own death-warrant, when it consents
to make terms with law-breakers. First re-establish the supremacy of
order, and then it will be time to discuss terms; but do not call it a
compromise, when you give up your purse with a pistol at your head.
This is no time for sentimentalisms about the empty chair at the
national hearth; all the chairs would be empty soon enough, if one of
the children is to amuse itself with setting the house on fire,
whenever it can find a match. Since the election of Mr. Lincoln, not
one of the arguments has lost its force, not a cipher of the statistics
has been proved mistaken, on which the judgment of the people was made
up. Nobody proposes, or has proposed, to interfere with any existing
rights of property; the majority have not assumed to decide upon any
question of the righteousness or policy of certain social arrangements
existing in any part of the Confederacy; they have not undertaken to
constitute themselves the conscience of their neighbors; they have
simply endeavored to do their duty to their own posterity, and to
protect them from a system which, as ample experience has shown, and
that of our present difficulty were enough to show, fosters a sense of
irresponsibleness to all obligation in the governing class, and in the
governed an ignorance and a prejudice which may be misled at any moment
to the peril of the whole country.
But the present question is one altogether transcending all limits of
party and all theories of party policy. It is a question of national
existence; it is a question whether Americans shall govern America, or
whether a disappointed clique shall nullify all government now, and
render a stable government difficult hereafter; it is a question, not
whether we shall have civil war under certain contingencies, but
whether we shall prevent it under any. It is idle, and worse than idle,
to talk about Central Republics that can never be formed. We want
neither Central Republics nor Northern Republics, but our own Republic
and that of our fathers, destined one day to gather the whole continent
under a flag that shall be the most august in the world. Having once
known what it was to be members of a grand and peaceful constellation,
we shall not believe, without further proof, that the laws of our
gravitation are to be abolished, and we flung forth into chaos, a
hurlyburly of jostling and splintering stars, whenever Robert Toombs or
Robert Rhett, or any other Bob of the secession kite, may give a flirt
of self-importance. The first and greatest benefit of government is
that it keeps the peace, that it insures every man his right, and not
only that, but the permanence of it. In order to this, its first
requisite is stability; and this once firmly settled, the greater the
extent of conterminous territory that can be subjected to one system
and one language and inspired by one patriotism, the better. That there
should be some diversity of interests is perhaps an advantage, since
the necessity of legislating equitably for all gives legislation its
needful safeguards of caution and largeness of view. A single empire
embracing the whole world, and controlling, without extinguishing,
local organizations and nationalities, has been not only the dream of
conquerors, but the ideal of speculative philanthropists. Our own
dominion is of such extent and power, that it may, so far as this
continent is concerned, be looked upon as something like an approach to
the realization of such an ideal. But for slavery, it might have
succeeded in realizing it; and in spite of slavery, it may. One
language, one law, one citizenship over thousands of miles, and a
government on the whole so good that we seem to have forgotten what
government means,--these are things not to be spoken of with levity,
privileges not to be surrendered without a struggle. And yet while
Germany and Italy, taught by the bloody and bitter and servile
experience of centuries, are striving toward unity as the blessing
above all others desirable, we are to allow a Union, that for almost
eighty years has been the source and the safeguard of incalculable
advantages, to be shattered by the caprice of a rabble that has out-run
the intention of its leaders, while we are making up our minds what
coercion means! Ask the first constable, and he will tell you that it
is the force necessary for executing the laws. To avoid the danger of
what men who have seized upon forts, arsenals, and other property of
the United States, and continue to hold them by military force, may
choose to call civil war, we are allowing a state of things to gather
head which will make real civil war the occupation of the whole country
for years to come, and establish it as a permanent institution. There
is no such antipathy between the North and the South as men ambitious
of a consideration in the new republic, which their talents and
character have failed to secure them in the old, would fain call into
existence by asserting that it exists. The misunderstanding and dislike
between them is not so great as they were within living memory between
England and Scotland, as they are now between England and Ireland.
There is no difference of race, language, or religion. Yet, after a
dissatisfaction of near a century and two rebellions, there is no part
of the British dominion more loyal than Scotland, no British subjects
who would be more loath to part with the substantial advantages of
their imperial connection than the Scotch; and even in Ireland, after a
longer and more deadly feud, there is no sane man who would consent to
see his country irrevocably cut off from power and consideration to
obtain an independence which would be nothing but Donnybrook Fair
multiplied by every city, town, and village in the island. The same
considerations of policy and advantage which render the union of
Scotland and Ireland with England a necessity apply with even more
force to the several States of our Union. To let one, or two, or half a
dozen of them break away in a freak of anger or unjust suspicion, or,
still worse, from mistaken notions of sectional advantage, would be to
fail in our duty to ourselves and our country, would be a fatal
blindness to the lessons which immemorial history has been tracing on
the earth's surface, either with the beneficent furrow of the plough,
or, when that was unheeded, the fruitless gash of the cannon ball.
When we speak of coercion, we do not mean violence, but only the
assertion of constituted and acknowledged authority. Even if seceding
States could be conquered back again, they would not be worth the
conquest. We ask only for the assertion of a principle which shall give
the friends of order in the discontented quarters a hope to rally
round, and the assurance of the support they have a right to expect.
There is probably a majority, and certainly a powerful minority, in the
seceding States, who are loyal to the Union; and these should have that
support which the prestige of the General Government can alone give
them. It is not to the North nor to the Republican party that the
malcontents are called on to submit, but to the laws and to the benign
intentions of the Constitution, as they were understood by its framers.
What the country wants is a permanent settlement; and it has learned,
by repeated trial, that compromise is not a cement, but a wedge. The
Government did not hesitate to protect the doubtful right of property
of a Virginian in Anthony Burns by the exercise of coercion, and the
loyalty of Massachusetts was such that her own militia could be used to
enforce an obligation abhorrent, and, as there is reason to believe,
made purposely abhorrent, to her dearest convictions and most venerable
traditions; and yet the same Government tampers with armed treason, and
lets _I dare not_ wait upon _I would_, when it is a question of
protecting the acknowledged property of the Union, and of sustaining,
nay, preserving even, a gallant officer whose only fault is that he has
been too true to his flag. While we write, the newspapers bring us the
correspondence between Mr. Buchanan and the South Carolina "Commissioners;"
and surely never did a government stoop so low as ours has done, not
only in consenting to receive these ambassadors from Nowhere, but in
suggesting that a soldier deserves court-martial who has done all he
could to maintain himself in a forlorn hope, with rebellion in his
front and treachery in his rear. Our Revolutionary heroes had
old-fashioned notions about rebels, suitable to the straightforward
times in which they lived,--times when blood was as freely shed to
secure our national existence as milk-and-water is now to destroy it.
Mr. Buchanan might have profited by the example of men who knew nothing
of the modern arts of Constitutional interpretation, but saw clearly
the distinction between right and wrong. When a party of the Shays
rebels came to the house of General Pomeroy, in Northampton, and asked
if he could accommodate them,--the old soldier, seeing the green sprigs
in their hats, the badges of their treason, shouted to his son, "Fetch
me my hanger, and I'll _accommodate_ the scoundrels!" General Jackson,
we suspect, would have accommodated rebel commissioners in the same
peremptory style.
While our Government, like Giles in the old rhyme, is wondering whether
it is a government or not, emissaries of treason are cunningly working
upon the fears and passions of the Border States, whose true interests
are infinitely more on the side of the Union than of slavery. They are
luring the ambitious with visionary promises of Southern grandeur and
prosperity, and deceiving the ignorant into the belief that the
principles and practice of the Free States were truly represented by
John Brown. All this might have been prevented, had Mr. Buchanan in his
Message thought of the interests of his country instead of those of his
party. It is not too late to check and neutralize it now. A decisively
national and patriotic policy is all that can prevent excited men from
involving themselves so deeply that they will find "returning as
tedious as go o'er," and be more afraid of cowardice than of
consequences.
Slavery is no longer the matter in debate, and we must beware of being
led off upon that side-issue. The matter now in hand is the
reestablishment of order, the reaffirmation of national unity, and the
settling once for all whether there can be such a thing as a government
without the right to use its power in self-defence. The Republican
party has done all it could lawfully do in limiting slavery once more
to the States in which it exists, and in relieving the Free States from
forced complicity with an odious system. They can be patient, as
Providence is often patient, till natural causes work that conviction
which conscience has been unable to effect. They believe that the
violent abolition of slavery, which would be sure to follow sooner or
later the disruption of our Confederacy, would not compensate for the
evil that would be entailed upon both races by the abolition of our
nationality and the bloody confusion that would follow it. More than
this, they believe that there can be no permanent settlement except in
the definite establishment of the principle, that this Government, like
all others, rests upon the everlasting foundations of just
Authority,--that that authority, once delegated by the people, becomes
a common stock of Power to be wielded for the common protection, and
from which no minority or majority of partners can withdraw its
contribution under any conditions,--that this power is what makes us a
nation, and implies a corresponding duty of submission, or, if that be
refused, then a necessary right of self-vindication. We are citizens,
when we make laws; we become subjects, when we attempt to break them
after they are made. Lynch-law maybe better than no law in new and
half-organized communities, but we cannot tolerate its application in
the affairs of government. The necessity of suppressing rebellion by
force may be a terrible one, but its consequences, whatever they may
be, do not weigh a feather in comparison with those that would follow
from admitting the principle that there is no social compact binding on
any body of men too numerous to be arrested by a United States marshal.
As we are writing these sentences, the news comes to us that South
Carolina has taken the initiative, and chosen the arbitrament of war.
She has done it because her position was desperate, and because she
hoped thereby to unite the Cotton States by a complicity in blood, as
they are already committed by a unanimity in bravado. Major Anderson
deserves more than ever the thanks of his country for his wise
forbearance. The foxes in Charleston, who have already lost their tails
in the trap of Secession, wished to throw upon him the responsibility
of that second blow which begins a quarrel, and the silence of his guns
has balked them. Nothing would have pleased them so much as to have one
of his thirty-two-pound shot give a taste of real war to the boys who
are playing soldier at Morris's Island. But he has shown the discretion
of a brave man. South Carolina will soon learn how much she has
undervalued the people of the Free States. Because they prefer law to
bowie-knives and revolvers, she has too lightly reckoned on their
caution and timidity. She will find that, though slow to kindle, they
are as slow to yield, and that they are willing to risk their lives for
the defence of law, though not for the breach of it. They are beginning
to question the value of a peace that is forced on them at the point of
the bayonet, and is to be obtained only by an abandonment of rights and
duties.
When we speak of the courage and power of the Free States, we do not
wish to be understood as descending to the vulgar level of meeting brag
with brag. We speak of them only as among the elements to be gravely
considered by the fanatics who may render it necessary for those who
value the continued existence of this Confederacy as it deserves to be
valued to kindle a back-fire, and to use the desperate means which God
has put into their hands to be employed in the last extremity of free
institutions. And when we use the term coercion, nothing is farther
from our thoughts than the carrying of blood and fire among those whom
we still consider our brethren of South Carolina. These civilized
communities of ours have interests too serious to be risked on a
childish wager of courage,--a quality that can always be bought cheaper
than day-labor on a railway-embankment. We wish to see the Government
strong enough for the maintenance of law, and for the protection, if
need be, of the unfortunate Governor Pickens from the anarchy he has
allowed himself to be made a tool of by evoking. Let the power of the
Union be used for any other purpose than that of shutting and barring
the door against the return of misguided men to their allegiance. At
the same time we think legitimate and responsible force prudently
exerted safer than the submission, without a struggle, to unlawful and
irresponsible violence.
Peace is the greatest of blessings, when it is won and kept by manhood
and wisdom; but it is a blessing that will not long be the housemate of
cowardice. It is God alone who is powerful enough to let His authority
slumber; it is only His laws that are strong enough to protect and
avenge themselves. Every human government is bound to make its laws so
far resemble His that they shall be uniform, certain, and
unquestionable in their operation; and this it can do only by a timely
show of power, and by an appeal to that authority which is of divine
right, inasmuch as its office is to maintain that order which is the
single attribute of the Infinite Reason that we can clearly apprehend
and of which we have hourly example.
THE PICKENS-AND-STEALIN'S REBELLION
1861
Had any one ventured to prophesy on the Fourth of March that the
immediate prospect of Civil War would be hailed by the people of the
Free States with a unanimous shout of enthusiasm, he would have been
thought a madman. Yet the prophecy would have been verified by what we
now see and hear in every city, town, and hamlet from Maine to Kansas.
With the advantage of three months' active connivance in the cabinet of
Mr. Buchanan, with an empty treasury at Washington, and that reluctance
to assume responsibility and to inaugurate a decided policy, the common
vice of our politicians, who endeavor to divine and to follow popular
sentiment rather than to lead it, it seemed as if Disunion were
inevitable, and the only open question were the line of separation. So
assured seemed the event that English journalists moralized gravely on
the inherent weakness of Democracy. While the leaders of the Southern
Rebellion did not dare to expose their treason to the risk of a popular
vote in any one of the seceding States, _The Saturday Review_, one
of the ablest of British journals, solemnly warned its countrymen to
learn by our example the dangers of an extended suffrage.
Meanwhile, the conduct of the people of the Free States, during all
these trying and perilous months, had proved, if it proved anything,
the essential conservatism of a population in which every grown man
has a direct interest in the stability of the national government.
So abstinent are they by habit and principle from any abnormal
intervention with the machine of administration, so almost
superstitious in adherence to constitutional forms, as to be for a
moment staggered by the claim to a _right_ of secession set up by all
the Cotton States, admitted by the Border Slave States, which had the
effrontery to deliberate between their plain allegiance and their
supposed interest, and but feebly denied by the Administration then in
power. The usual panacea of palaver was tried; Congress did its best to
add to the general confusion of thought; and, as if that were not
enough, a Convention of Notables was called simultaneously to thresh
the straw of debate anew, and to convince thoughtful persons that men
do not grow wiser as they grow older. So in the two Congresses the
notables talked,--in the one those who ought to be shelved, in the
other those who were shelved already,--while those who were too
thoroughly shelved for a seat in either addressed Great Union Meetings
at home. Not a man of them but had a compromise in his pocket, adhesive
as Spalding's glue, warranted to stick the shattered Confederacy
together so firmly that, if it ever broke again, it must be in a new
place, which was a great consolation. If these gentlemen gave nothing
very valuable to the people of the Free States, they were giving the
Secessionists what was of inestimable value to them,--Time. The latter
went on seizing forts, navy-yards, and deposits of Federal money,
erecting batteries, and raising and arming men at their leisure; above
all, they acquired a prestige, and accustomed men's minds to the
thought of disunion, not only as possible, but actual. They began to
grow insolent, and, while compelling absolute submission to their
rebellious usurpation at home, decried any exercise of legitimate
authority on the part of the General Government as _Coercion_,--a new
term, by which it was sought to be established as a principle of
constitutional law, that it is always the Northern bull that has gored
the Southern ox.
During all this time, the Border Slave States, and especially Virginia,
were playing a part at once cowardly and selfish. They assumed the
right to stand neutral between the government and rebellion, to
contract a kind of morganatic marriage with Treason, by which they
could enjoy the pleasant sin without the tedious responsibility, and to
be traitors in everything but the vulgar contingency of hemp. Doubtless
the aim of the political managers in these States was to keep the North
amused with schemes of arbitration, reconstruction, and whatever other
fine words would serve the purpose of hiding the real issue, till the
new government of Secessia should have so far consolidated itself as to
be able to demand with some show of reason a recognition from foreign
powers, and to render it politic for the United States to consent to
peaceable separation. They counted on the self-interest of England and
the supineness of the North. As to the former, they were not wholly
without justification,--for nearly all the English discussions of the
"American Crisis" which we have seen have shown far more of the
shop-keeping spirit than of interest in the maintenance of free
institutions; but in regard to the latter they made the fatal mistake
of believing our Buchanans, Cushings, and Touceys to be representative
men. They were not aware how utterly the Democratic party had divorced
itself from the moral sense of the Free States, nor had they any
conception of the tremendous recoil of which the long-repressed
convictions, traditions, and instincts of a people are capable.
Never was a nation so in want of a leader; never was it more plain
that, without a head, the people "bluster abroad as beasts," with
plenty of the iron of purpose, but purpose without coherence, and with
no cunning smith of circumstance to edge it with plan and helve it with
direction. What the country was waiting for showed itself in the
universal thrill of satisfaction when Major Anderson took the
extraordinary responsibility of doing his duty. But such was the
general uncertainty, so doubtful seemed the loyalty of the Democratic
party as represented by its spokesmen at the North, so irresolute was
the tone of many Republican leaders and journals, that a powerful and
wealthy community of twenty millions of people gave a sigh of relief
when they had been permitted to install the Chief Magistrate of their
choice in their own National Capital. Even after the inauguration of
Mr. Lincoln, it was confidently announced that Jefferson Davis, the
Burr of the Southern conspiracy, would be in Washington before the
month was out; and so great was the Northern despondency that the
chances of such an event were seriously discussed. While the nation was
falling to pieces, there were newspapers and "distinguished statesmen"
of the party so lately and so long in power base enough to be willing
to make political capital out of the common danger, and to lose their
country, if they could only find their profit. There was even one man
found in Massachusetts, who, measuring the moral standard of his party
by his own, had the unhappy audacity to declare publicly that there
were friends enough of the South in his native State to prevent the
march of any troops thence to sustain that Constitution to which he had
sworn fealty in Heaven knows how many offices, the rewards of almost as
many turnings of his political coat. There was one journal in New York
which had the insolence to speak of _President_ Davis and _Mister_
Lincoln in the same paragraph. No wonder the "dirt-eaters" of the
Carolinas could be taught to despise a race among whom creatures might
be found to do that by choice which they themselves were driven to do
by misery.
Thus far the Secessionists had the game all their own way, for their
dice were loaded with Northern lead. They framed their sham
constitution, appointed themselves to their sham offices, issued their
sham commissions, endeavored to bribe England with a sham offer of low
duties and Virginia with a sham prohibition of the slave-trade,
advertised their proposals for a sham loan which was to be taken up
under intimidation, and levied real taxes on the people in the name of
the people whom they had never allowed to vote directly on their
enormous swindle. With money stolen from the Government, they raised
troops whom they equipped with stolen arms, and beleaguered national
fortresses with cannon stolen from national arsenals. They sent out
secret agents to Europe, they had their secret allies in the Free
States, their conventions transacted all important business in secret
session;--there was but one exception to the shrinking delicacy
becoming a maiden government, and that was the openness of the
stealing. We had always thought a high sense of personal honor an
essential element of chivalry; but among the _Romanic_ races, by which,
as the wonderful ethnologist of _De Bow's Review_ tells us, the
Southern States where settled, and from which they derive a close
entail of chivalric characteristics, to the exclusion of the vulgar
Saxons of the North, such is by no means the case. For the first time
in history the deliberate treachery of a general is deemed worthy of a
civic ovation, and Virginia has the honor of being the first State
claiming to be civilized that has decreed the honors of a triumph to a
cabinet officer who had contrived to gild a treason that did not
endanger his life with a peculation that could not further damage his
reputation. Rebellion, even in a bad cause, may have its romantic side;
treason, which had not been such but for being on the losing side, may
challenge admiration; but nothing can sweeten larceny or disinfect
perjury. A rebellion inaugurated with theft, and which has effected its
entry into national fortresses, not over broken walls, but by breaches
of trust, should take Jonathan Wild for its patron saint, with the run
of Mr. Buchanan's cabinet for a choice of sponsors,--godfathers we
should not dare to call them.
Mr. Lincoln's Inaugural Speech was of the kind usually called "firm,
but conciliatory,"--a policy doubtful in troublous times, since it
commonly argues weakness, and more than doubtful in a crisis like ours,
since it left the course which the Administration meant to take
ambiguous, and, while it weakened the Government by exciting the
distrust of all who wished for vigorous measures, really strengthened
the enemy by encouraging the conspirators in the Border States. There
might be a question as to whether this or that attitude were expedient
for the Republican party; there could be none as to the only safe and
dignified one for the Government of the Nation. Treason was as much
treason in the beginning of March as in the middle of April; and it
seems certain now, as it seemed probable to many then, that the country
would have sooner rallied to the support of the Government, if the
Government had shown an earlier confidence in the loyalty of the
people. Though the President talked of "repossessing" the stolen forts,
arsenals, and custom-houses, yet close upon this declaration followed
the disheartening intelligence that the cabinet were discussing the
propriety of evacuating not only Fort Sumter, which was of no strategic
importance, but Fort Pickens, which was the key to the Gulf of Mexico,
and to abandon which was almost to acknowledge the independence of the
Rebel States. Thus far the Free States had waited with commendable
patience for some symptom of vitality in the new Administration,
something that should distinguish it from the piteous helplessness of
its predecessor. But now their pride was too deeply outraged for
endurance; indignant remonstrances were heard from all quarters, and
the Government seemed for the first time fairly to comprehend that it
had twenty millions of freemen at its back, and that forts might be
taken and held by honest men as well as by knaves and traitors. The
nettle had been stroked long enough; it was time to try a firm grip.
Still the Administration seemed inclined to temporize, so thoroughly
was it possessed by the notion of conciliating the Border States. In
point of fact, the side which those States might take in the struggle
between Law and Anarchy was of vastly more import to them than to us.
They could bring no considerable reinforcement of money, credit, or
arms to the rebels; they could at best but add so many mouths to an
army whose commissariat was already dangerously embarrassed. They could
not even, except temporarily, keep the war away from the territory of
the seceding States, every one of which had a sea-door open to the
invasion of an enemy who controlled the entire navy and shipping of the
country. The position assumed by Eastern Virginia and Maryland was of
consequence only so far as it might facilitate a sudden raid on
Washington, and the policy of both these States was to amuse the
Government by imaginary negotiations till the plans of the conspirators
were ripe. In both States men were actively recruited and enrolled to
assist in attacking the capital. With them, as with the more openly
rebellious States, the new theory of "Coercion" was ingeniously
arranged like a valve, yielding at the slightest impulse to the passage
of forces for the subversion of legitimate authority, closing
imperviously, so that no drop of power could ooze through in the
opposite direction. Lord De Roos, long suspected of cheating at cards,
would never have been convicted but for the resolution of an adversary,
who, pinning his hand to the table with a fork, said to him blandly,
"My Lord, if the ace of spades is not under your Lordship's hand, why,
then, I beg your pardon!" It seems to us that a timely treatment of
Governor Letcher in the same energetic way would have saved the
disasters of Harper's Ferry and Norfolk,--for disasters they were,
though six months of temporizing had so lowered the public sense of
what was due to the national dignity that people were glad to see the
Government active at length, even if only in setting fire to its own
house.
We are by no means inclined to criticise the Administration, even if
this were the proper time for it; but we cannot help thinking that
there was great wisdom in Napoleon's recipe for saving life in dealing
with a mob,--"First fire grape-shot _into_ them; after that, over their
heads as much as you like." The position of Mr. Lincoln was already
embarrassed when he entered upon office, by what we believe to have
been a political blunder in the leaders of the Republican party.
Instead of keeping closely to the real point, and the only point, at
issue, namely, the claim of a minority to a right of rebellion when
displeased with the result of an election, the bare question of
Secession, pure and simple, they allowed their party to become divided,
and to waste themselves in discussing terms of compromise and
guaranties of slavery which had nothing to do with the business in
hand. Unless they were ready to admit that popular government was at an
end, those were matters already settled by the Constitution and the
last election. Compromise was out of the question with men who had gone
through the motions, at least, of establishing a government and
electing an anti-president. The way to insure the loyalty of the Border
States, as the event has shown, was to convince them that disloyalty
was dangerous. That revolutions never go backward is one of those
compact generalizations which the world is so ready to accept because
they save the trouble of thinking; but, however it may be with
revolutions, it is certain that rebellions most commonly go backward
with disastrous rapidity, and it was of the gravest moment, as
respected its moral influence, that Secession should not have time
allowed it to assume the proportions and the dignity of revolution; in
other words, of a rebellion too powerful to be crushed. The secret
friends of the secession treason in the Free States have done their
best to bewilder the public mind and to give factitious prestige to a
conspiracy against free government and civilization by talking about
the _right_ of revolution, as if it were some acknowledged principle of
the Law of Nations. There is a right and sometimes a duty of rebellion,
as there is also a right and sometimes a duty of hanging men for it;
but rebellion continues to be rebellion until it has accomplished its
object and secured the acknowledgment of it from the other party to the
quarrel, and from the world at large. The Republican Party in the
November elections had really effected a peaceful revolution, had
emancipated the country from the tyranny of an oligarchy which had
abused the functions of the Government almost from the time of its
establishment, to the advancement of their own selfish aims and
interests; and it was this legitimate change of rulers and of national
policy by constitutional means which the Secessionists intended to
prevent. To put the matter in plain English, they resolved to treat the
people of the United States, in the exercise of their undoubted and
lawful authority, as rebels, and resorted to their usual policy of
intimidation in order to subdue them. Either this magnificent empire
should be their plantation, or it should perish. This was the view even
of what were called the moderate slaveholders of the Border States; and
all the so-called compromises and plans of reconstruction that were
thrown into the caldron where the hell-broth of anarchy was brewing had
this extent, no more,--What terms of _submission_ would the people make
with their natural masters? Whatever other result may have come of the
long debates in Congress and elsewhere, they have at least convinced
the people of the Free States that there can be no such thing as a
moderate slaveholder,--that moderation and slavery can no more coexist
than Floyd and honesty, or Anderson and treason.
We believe, then, that conciliation was from the first impossible,--that
to attempt it was unwise, because it put the party of law and loyalty
in the wrong,--and that, if it was done as a mere matter of policy in
order to gain time, it was a still greater mistake, because it was the
rebels only who could profit by it in consolidating their organization,
while the seeming gain of a few days or weeks was a loss to the
Government, whose great advantage was in an administrative system
thoroughly established, and, above all, in the vast power of the
national idea, a power weakened by every day's delay. This is so true
that already men began to talk of the rival governments at Montgomery
and Washington, and Canadian journals to recommend a strict neutrality,
as if the independence and legitimacy of the mushroom despotism of New
Ashantee were an acknowledged fact, and the name of the United States
of America had no more authority than that of Jefferson Davis and
Company, dealers in all kinds of repudiation and anarchy. For more than
a month after the inauguration of President Lincoln there seemed to be
a kind of interregnum, during which the confusion of ideas in the
Border States as to their rights and duties as members of the "old"
Union, as it began to be called, became positively chaotic. Virginia,
still professing neutrality, prepared to seize the arsenal at Harper's
Ferry and the navy-yard at Norfolk; she would prevent the passage of
the United States' forces "with a serried phalanx of her gallant sons,"
two regiments of whom stood looking on while a file of marines took
seven wounded men in an engine-house for them; she would do everything
but her duty,--the gallant Ancient Pistol of a commonwealth. She
"resumed her sovereignty," whatever that meant; her Convention passed
an ordinance of secession, concluded a league offensive and defensive
with the rebel Confederacy, appointed Jefferson Davis commander-in-chief
of her land-forces and somebody else of the fleet she meant to steal at
Norfolk, and then coolly referred the whole matter back to the people
to vote three weeks afterwards whether they _would_ secede three weeks
before. Wherever the doctrine of Secession has penetrated, it seems to
have obliterated every notion of law and precedent.
The country had come to the conclusion that Mr. Lincoln and his cabinet
were mainly employed in packing their trunks to leave Washington, when
the "venerable Edward Ruffin of Virginia" fired that first gun at Fort
Sumter which brought all the Free States to their feet as one man. That
shot is destined to be the most memorable one ever fired on this
continent since the Concord fowling-pieces said, "That bridge is ours,
and we mean to go across it," eighty-seven Aprils ago. As these began a
conflict which gave us independence, so that began another which is to
give us nationality. It was certainly a great piece of good-luck for
the Government that they had a fort which it was so profitable to lose.
The people were weary of a masterly inactivity which seemed to consist
mainly in submitting to be kicked. We know very well the difficulties
that surrounded the new Administration; we appreciate their reluctance
to begin a war the responsibility of which was as great as its
consequences seemed doubtful; but we cannot understand how it was hoped
to evade war, except by concessions vastly more disastrous than war
itself. War has no evil comparable in its effect on national character
to that of a craven submission to manifest wrong, the postponement of
moral to material interests. There is no prosperity so great as
courage. We do not believe that any amount of forbearance would have
conciliated the South so long as they thought us pusillanimous. The
only way to retain the Border States was by showing that we had the
will and the power to do without them. The little Bopeep policy of
"Let them alone, and they'll all come home
Wagging their tails behind them"
was certainly tried long enough with conspirators who had shown
unmistakably that they desired nothing so much as the continuance of
peace, especially when it was all on one side, and who would never have
given the Government the great advantage of being attacked in Fort
Sumter, had they not supposed they were dealing with men who could not
be cuffed into resistance. The lesson we have to teach them now is,
that we are thoroughly and terribly in earnest. Mr. Stephens's theories
are to be put to a speedier and sterner test than he expected, and we
are to prove which is stronger,--an oligarchy built _on_ men, or a
commonwealth built _of_ them. Our structure is alive in every part with
defensive and recuperative energies; woe to theirs, if that vaunted
corner-stone which they believe patient and enduring as marble should
begin to writhe with intelligent life!
We have no doubt of the issue. We believe that the strongest battalions
are always on the side of God. The Southern army will be fighting for
Jefferson Davis, or at most for the liberty of self-misgovernment,
while we go forth for the defence of principles which alone make
government august and civil society possible. It is the very life of
the nation that is at stake. There is no question here of dynasties,
races, religions, but simply whether we will consent to include in our
Bill of Rights--not merely as of equal validity with all other rights,
whether natural or acquired, but by its very nature transcending and
abrogating them all--the Right of Anarchy. We must convince men that
treason against the ballot-box is as dangerous as treason against a
throne, and that, if they play so desperate a game, they must stake
their lives on the hazard. The one lesson that remained for us to teach
the political theorists of the Old World was, that we are as strong to
suppress intestine disorder as foreign aggression, and we must teach it
decisively and thoroughly. The economy of war is to be tested by the
value of the object to be gained by it. A ten years' war would be cheap
that gave us a country to be proud of, and a flag that should command
the respect of the world because it was the symbol of the enthusiastic
unity of a great nation.
The Government, however slow it may have been to accept the war which
Mr. Buchanan's supineness left them, is acting now with all energy and
determination. What they have a right to claim is the confidence of the
people, and that depends in good measure on the discretion of the
press. Only let us have no more weakness under the plausible name of
Conciliation. We need not discuss the probabilities of an
acknowledgment of the Confederated States by England and France; we
have only to say, "Acknowledge them at your peril." But there is no
chance of the recognition of the Confederacy by any foreign
governments, so long as it is without the confidence of the brokers.
There is no question on which side the strength lies. The whole tone of
the Southern journals, so far as we are able to judge, shows the
inherent folly and weakness of the secession movement. Men who feel
strong in the justice of their cause, or confident in their powers, do
not waste breath in childish boasts of their own superiority and
querulous depreciation of their antagonists. They are weak, and they
know it. And not only are they weak in comparison with the Free States,
but we believe they are without the moral support of whatever deserves
the name of public opinion at home. If not, why does their Congress, as
they call it, hold council always with closed doors, like a knot of
conspirators? The first tap of the Northern drum dispelled many
illusions, and we need no better proof of which ship is sinking than
that Mr. Caleb Cushing should have made such haste to come over to the
old Constitution, with the stars and stripes at her mast-head.
We cannot think that the war we are entering on can end without some
radical change in the system of African slavery. Whether it be doomed
to a sudden extinction, or to a gradual abolition through economical
causes, this war will not leave it where it was before. As a power in
the state, its reign is already over. The fiery tongues of the
batteries in Charleston harbor accomplished in one day a conversion
which the constancy of Garrison and the eloquence of Phillips had
failed to bring about in thirty years. And whatever other result this
war is destined to produce, it has already won for us a blessing worth
everything to us as a nation in emancipating the public opinion of the
North.
GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT
1864
We can conceive of no object capable of rousing deeper sympathy than a
defeated commander. Though the first movement of popular feeling may be
one of wrathful injustice, yet, when the ebb of depression has once
fairly run out, and confidence begins to set back, hiding again that
muddy bed of human nature which such neap-tides are apt to lay bare,
there is a kindly instinct which leads all generous minds to seek every
possible ground of extenuation, to look for excuses in misfortune
rather than incapacity, and to allow personal gallantry to make up, as
far as may be, for want of military genius. There is no other kind of
failure which comes so directly home to us, none which appeals to so
many of the most deeply rooted sentiments at once. Want of success in
any other shape is comparatively a personal misfortune to the man
himself who fails; but how many hopes, prides, sacrifices, and heroisms
are centred in him who wields the embattled manhood of his country! An
army is too multitudinous to call forth that personal enthusiasm which
is a necessity of the heart. The imagination needs a single figure
which it can invest with all those attributes of admiration that become
vague and pointless when divided among a host. Accordingly, we
impersonate in the general, not only the army he leads, but whatever
qualities we are proud of in the nation itself. He becomes for the
moment the ideal of all masculine virtues, and the people are eager to
lavish their admiration on him. His position gives him at a bound what
other men must spend their lives in winning or vainly striving to win.
If he gain a battle, he flatters that pride of prowess which, though it
may be a fault of character in the individual man, is the noblest of
passions in a people. If he lose one, we are all beaten with him, we
all fall down with our Caesar, and the grief glistens in every eye, the
shame burns on every cheek. Moralize as we may about the victories of
peace and the superiority of the goose-quill over the sword, there is
no achievement of human genius on which a country so prides itself as
on success in war, no disgrace over which it broods so inconsolably as
military disaster.
[Illustration: _General McClellan_]
There is nothing more touching than the sight of a nation in search of
its great man, nothing more beautiful than its readiness to accept a
hero on trust. Nor is this a feeble sentimentality. It is much rather a
noble yearning of what is best in us, for it is only in these splendid
figures which now and then sum up all the higher attributes of
character that the multitude of men can ever hope to find their blind
instinct of excellence realized and satisfied. Not without reason are
nations always symbolized as women, for there is something truly
feminine in the devotion with which they are willing to give all for
and to their ideal man, and the zeal with which they drape some
improvised Agamemnon with all the outward shows of royalty from the
property-room of imagination. This eagerness of loyalty toward
first-rate character is one of the conditions of mastery in every
sphere of human activity, for it is the stuff that genius works in.
Heroes, to be sure, cannot be made to order, yet with a man of the
right fibre, who has the stuff for greatness in him, the popular
enthusiasm would go far toward making him in fact what he is in fancy.
No commander ever had more of this paid-up capital of fortune, this
fame in advance, this success before succeeding, than General
McClellan. That dear old domestic bird, the Public, which lays the
golden eggs out of which greenbacks are hatched, was sure she had
brooded out an eagle-chick at last. How we all waited to see him stoop
on the dove-cote of Richmond! Never did nation give such an example of
faith and patience as while the Army of the Potomac lay during all
those weary months before Washington. Every excuse was invented, every
palliation suggested, except the true one, that our chicken was no
eagle, after all. He was hardening his seres, he was waiting for his
wings to grow, he was whetting his beak; we should see him soar at last
and shake the thunder from his wings. But do what we could, hope what
we might, it became daily clearer that, whatever other excellent
qualities he might have, this of being aquiline was wanting.
Disguise and soften it as we may, the campaign of the Peninsula was a
disastrous failure,--a failure months long, like a bad novel in weekly
instalments, with "To be continued" grimly ominous at the end of every
part. So far was it from ending in the capture of Richmond that nothing
but the gallantry of General Pope and his little army hindered the
Rebels from taking Washington. And now comes Major-General George B.
McClellan, and makes affidavit in one volume[1] octavo that he is a
great military genius, after all. It should seem that this genius is of
two varieties. The first finds the enemy, and beats him; the second
finds him, and succeeds in getting away. General McClellan is now
attempting a change of base in the face of public opinion, and is
endeavoring to escape the consequences of having escaped from the
Peninsula. For a year his reputation flared upward like a rocket,
culminated, burst, and now, after as long an interval, the burnt-out
case comes down to us in this Report.
[1] _Letter of the Secretary of War, transmitting Report on the
Organization of the Army of the Potomac, and of the Campaigns in
Virginia and Maryland under the Command of Major-General George
B. McClellan, from July 26, 1861, to November 7, 1862._
Washington: Government Printing-Office. 1864. 8vo, pp. 242.
There is something ludicrously tragic, as our politics are managed, in
seeing an Administration compelled to print a campaign document (for
such is General McClellan's Report in a double sense) directed against
itself. Yet in the present case, had it been possible to escape the
penance, it had been unwise, for we think that no unprejudiced person
can read the volume without a melancholy feeling that General McClellan
has foiled himself even more completely than the Rebels were able to
do. He should have been more careful of his communications, for a line
two hundred and forty-two pages long is likely to have its weak points.
The volume before us is rather the plea of an advocate retained to
defend the General's professional character and expound his political
opinions than the curt, colorless, unimpassioned statement of facts
which is usually so refreshing in the official papers of military men,
and has much more the air of being addressed to a jury than to the War
Department at Washington. It is, in short, a letter to the people of
the United States, under cover to the Secretary of War. General
McClellan puts himself upon the country, and, after taking as much time
to make up his mind as when he wearied and imperilled the nation in his
camp on the Potomac, endeavors to win back from public opinion the
victory which nothing but his own over-caution enabled the Rebels to
snatch from him before Richmond. He cannot give us back our lost time
or our squandered legions; but how nice it would be if we would give
him back his reputation, which has never been of any great use to us,
and yet would be so convenient for him! It was made for him, and
accordingly fits him better than it would any one else. But it is
altogether too late. There is no argument for the soldier but success,
no wisdom for the man but to acknowledge defeat and be silent under it.
The Great Captain on his sofa at Longwood may demonstrate how the
Russian expedition might, could, would, and should have ended
otherwise; but meanwhile its results are not to be reasoned with,--the
Bourbons are at the Tuileries, and he at St. Helena. There is hardly
anything that may not be made out of history by a skilful manipulator.
Characters may be white-washed, bigotry made over into zeal, timidity
into prudence, want of conviction into toleration, obstinacy into
firmness; but the one thing that cannot be theorized out of existence,
or made to look like anything else, is a lost campaign.
We have had other unsuccessful generals, but not one of them has ever
been tempted into the indecorum of endeavoring to turn a defeat in the
field to political advantage. Not one has thought of defending himself
by imputations on his superiors. Early in the war General McDowell set
an example of silence under slanderous reproach that won for him the
sympathy and respect of whoever could be touched by self-reliant
manliness. It is because General McClellan has seen fit to overstep the
bounds of a proper official reserve, because, after more than a year
for reflection, he has repeated charges of the grossest kind against
those under whose orders he was acting, and all this from a political
motive, that we think his Report deserving of more than usual
attention. It will be no fault of his if he be not put in nomination
for the Presidency, and accordingly it becomes worth our while to
consider such evidences of character and capacity as his words and
deeds afford us.
We believe that General McClellan has been ruined, like another general
whose name began with Mac, by the "All hail hereafter" of certain
political witches, who took his fortunes into their keeping after his
campaign in Western Virginia. He had shown both ability and decision in
handling a small force, and he might with experience have shown similar
qualities in directing the operations of a great army, had not the
promise of the Presidency made him responsible to other masters than
military duty and unselfish patriotism. Thenceforward the soldier was
lost in the politician. He thought more of the effect to be produced by
his strategy on the voters behind him than on the enemy in his front.
What should have been his single object--the suppression of the
rebellion for the sake of the country--was now divided with the desire
of merely ending it by some plan that should be wholly of his own
contrivance, and should redound solely to his own credit and
advancement. He became giddy and presumptuous, and lost that sense of
present realities, so essential to a commander, in contemplating the
mirage that floated the White House before his eyes. At an age
considerably beyond that of General Bonaparte when he had triumphantly
closed his first Italian campaign, he was nick-named "the _young_
Napoleon," and from that time forth seems honestly to have endeavored,
like Toepffer's Albert, to resemble the ideal portrait which had been
drawn for him by those who put him forward as their stalking-horse. And
it must be admitted that these last managed matters cleverly, if a
little coarsely. They went to work deliberately to Barnumize their
prospective candidate. No _prima donna_ was ever more thoroughly
exploited by her Hebrew _impresario_. The papers swarmed with
anecdotes, incidents, sayings. Nothing was too unimportant, and the new
commander-in-chief pulled on his boots by telegram from Maine to
California, and picked his teeth by special despatch to the Associated
Press. We had him warm for supper in _the very latest_ with three
exclamation marks, and cold for breakfast in _last evening's
telegraphic news_ with none. Nothing but a patent pill was ever so
suddenly famous.
We are far from blaming General McClellan for all this. He probably
looked upon it as one of the inevitable discomforts of distinction in
America. But we think that it insensibly affected his judgment, led him
to regard himself as the representative of certain opinions, rather
than as a general whose whole duty was limited to the army under his
command, and brought him at last to a temper of mind most unfortunate
for the public interests, in which he could believe the administration
personally hostile to himself because opposed to the political
principles of those who wished to profit by his "availability." It was
only natural, too, that he should gradually come to think himself what
his partisans constantly affirmed that he was,--the sole depositary of
the country's destiny. We form our judgment of General McClellan solely
from his own Report; we believe him to be honest in his opinions, and
patriotic so far as those opinions will allow him to be; we know him to
be capable of attaching those about him in a warm personal friendship,
and we reject with the contempt they deserve the imputations on his
courage and his military honor; but at the same time we consider him a
man like other men, with a head liable to be turned by a fame too
easily won. His great misfortune was that he began his first important
campaign with a reputation to save instead of to earn, so that he was
hampered by the crowning disadvantage of age in a general without the
experience which might neutralize it. Nay, what was still worse, he had
two reputations to keep from damage, the one as soldier, the other as
politician.
He seems very early to have misapprehended the true relation in which
he stood to the government. By the operation of natural causes, as
politicians would call them, he had become heir presumptive to the
chair of state, and felt called on to exert an influence on the policy
of the war, or at least to express an opinion that might go upon record
for future convenience. He plunged into that Dismal Swamp of
constitutional hermeneutics, in which the wheels of government were
stalled at the outbreak of our rebellion, and from which every
untrained explorer rises with a mouth too full of mud to be
intelligible to Christian men. He appears to have thought it within the
sphere of his duty to take charge of the statesmanship of the President
no less than of the movements of the army, nor was it long before there
were unmistakable symptoms that he began to consider himself quite as
much the chief of an opposition who could dictate terms as the military
subordinate who was to obey orders. Whatever might have been his
capacity as a soldier, this divided allegiance could not fail of
disastrous consequences to the public service, for no mistress exacts
so jealously the entire devotion of her servants as war. A mind
distracted with calculations of future political contingencies was not
to be relied on in the conduct of movements which above all others
demand the constant presence, the undivided energy, of all the
faculties, and the concentration of every personal interest on the one
object of immediate success. A general who is conscious that he has an
army of one hundred and fifty thousand voters at his back will be
always weakened by those personal considerations which are the worst
consequence of the elective system. General McClellan's motions were
encumbered in every direction by a huge train of political baggage.
This misconception of his own position, or rather his confounding the
two characters of possible candidate and actual general, forced the
growth of whatever egotism was latent in his nature. He began erelong
to look at everything from a personal point of view, to judge men and
measures by their presumed relation to his own interests, and at length
fairly persuaded himself that the inevitable results of his own want of
initiative were due to the hostile combination against him of Mr.
Lincoln, Mr. Stanton, and General Halleck. Regarding himself too much
in considering the advantages of success, he regards others too little
in awarding the responsibility of failure.
The intense self-consciousness of General McClellan and a certain aim
at effect for ulterior and unmilitary purposes show themselves early.
In October, 1861, addressing a memorial to Mr. Cameron, then Secretary
of War, he does not forget the important constituency of Buncombe. "The
unity of this nation," he says, "the preservation of our institutions,
are so dear to me that I have willingly sacrificed my private happiness
with the single object of doing my duty to my country. When the task is
accomplished, I shall be glad to retire to the obscurity from which
events have drawn me. Whatever the determination of the government may
be, I will do the best I can with the Army of the Potomac, and will
share its fate, whatever may be the task imposed upon me." Not to speak
of taste, the utter blindness to the true relations of things shown in
such language is startling. What sacrifice had General McClellan made
which had not been equally made by every one of the hundred and fifty
thousand men of his army? Educated at the expense of the country, his
services were a debt due on demand. And what was the sacrifice of which
a soldier speaks so pathetically? To be raised from the management of a
railway to one of the most conspicuous and inspiring positions of
modern times, to an opportunity such as comes rarely to any man, and
then only as the reward of transcendent ability transcendently
displayed! To step from a captaincy of engineers to the command in
chief of a great nation on fire with angry enthusiasm, spendthrift of
men, money, devotion, to be the chosen champion of order, freedom, and
civilization,--this is indeed a sacrifice such as few men have been
called upon to make by their native land! And of what is General
McClellan thinking when he talks of returning to obscurity? Of what are
men commonly thinking when they talk thus? The newspapers would soon
grow rich, if everybody should take to advertising what he did not
want. And, moreover, to what kind of obscurity can a successful general
return? An obscurity made up of the gratitude and admiration of his
countrymen, a strange obscurity of glory! Nor is this the only occasion
on which the General speaks of his willingness to share the fate of his
army. What corporal could do less? No man thoroughly in earnest, and
with the fate of his country in his hands and no thought but of that,
could have any place in his mind for such footlight phrases as these.
General McClellan's theory from the first seems to have been that a
large army would make a great general, though all history shows that
the genius, decision, and confidence of a leader are the most powerful
reinforcement of the troops under his command, and that an able captain
makes a small army powerful by recruiting it with his own vigor and
enthusiasm. From the time of his taking the command till his removal,
he was constantly asking for more men, constantly receiving them, and
constantly unable to begin anything with them after he got them. He
could not move without one hundred and fifty thousand pairs of legs,
and when his force had long reached that number, the President was
obliged by the overtaxed impatience of the country to pry him up from
his encampment on the Potomac with a special order. What the army
really needed was an addition of one man, and that at the head of it;
for a general, like an orator, must be moved himself before he can move
others. The larger his army, the more helpless was General McClellan.
Like the magician's _famulus_, who rashly undertook to play the
part of master, and who could evoke powers that he could not control,
he was swamped in his own supplies. With every reinforcement sent him
on the Peninsula, his estimate of the numbers opposed to him increased.
His own imagination faced him in superior numbers at every turn. Since
Don Quixote's enumeration of the armies of the Emperor Alifanfaron and
King Pentapolin of the Naked Arm, there has been nothing like our
General's vision of the Rebel forces, with their ever-lengthening list
of leaders, gathered for the defence of Richmond. His anxiety swells
their muster-roll at last to two hundred thousand. We say his anxiety,
for no man of ordinary judgment can believe that with that number of
men the Rebel leaders would not have divided their forces, with one
army occupying General McClellan, while they attempted the capital he
had left uncovered with the other.
The first plan proposed by General McClellan covered operations
extending from Virginia to Texas. With a main army of two hundred and
seventy-three thousand he proposes "not only to drive the enemy out of
Virginia and occupy Richmond, but to occupy Charleston, Savannah,
Montgomery, Pensacola, Mobile, and New Orleans; in other words, to move
into the heart of the enemy's country and crush the rebellion in its
very heart." We do not say that General McClellan's ambition to be the
one man who should crush the rebellion was an unworthy one, but that
his theory that this was possible, and in the way he proposed, shows
him better fitted to state the abstract problems than to apprehend the
complex details of their solution when they lie before him as practical
difficulties. For when we consider the necessary detachments from this
force to guard his communications through an enemy's country, as he
wishes the President to do, in order to justify the largeness of the
force required, we cannot help asking how soon the army for active
operations would be reduced to a hundred and fifty thousand. And how
long would a general be in reaching New Orleans, if he is six months in
making up his mind to advance with an army of that strength on the
insignificant fortifications of Manassas, manned, according to the best
information, with forty thousand troops? At the same time General
McClellan assigns twenty thousand as a force adequate for opening the
Mississippi. This plan, to be sure, was soon abandoned, but it is an
illustration of the want of precision and forethought which
characterizes the mind of its author. A man so vague in his conceptions
is apt to be timid in action, for the same haziness of mind may,
according to circumstances, either soften and obscure the objects of
thought, or make them loom with purely fantastic exaggeration. There is
a vast difference between clearness of head on demand and the power of
framing abstract schemes of action, beautiful in their correctness of
outline and apparent simplicity. It is a perception of this truth, we
believe, which leads practical men always to suspect plans supported by
statistics too exquisitely conclusive.
It was on precisely such a specious basis of definite misinformation
that General McClellan's next proposal for the campaign by way of the
Peninsula rested,--precise facts before he sets out turning to
something like precise no-facts when he gets there,--beautiful
completeness of conception ending in hesitation, confusion, and
failure. Before starting, "the roads are passable at all seasons of the
year, the country much more favorable for offensive operations than
that in front of Washington, much more level, the woods less dense, the
soil more sandy" (p. 47). After arriving, we find "the roads
impassable," "very dense and extensive forests, the clearings being
small and few;" and "the comparative flatness of the country and the
alertness of the enemy, everywhere in force, rendered thorough
reconnoissances slow, dangerous, and difficult" (p. 79). General
McClellan's mental constitution would seem to be one of those, easily
elated and easily depressed, that exaggerate distant advantages and
dangers near at hand,--minds stronger in conception than perception,
and accordingly, as such always are, wanting that faculty of swift
decision which, catching inspiration from danger, makes opportunity
success. Add to this a kind of adhesiveness (we can hardly call it
obstinacy or pertinacity) of temper, which can make no allowance for
change of circumstances, and we think we have a tolerably clear notion
of the causes of General McClellan's disasters. He can compose a good
campaign beforehand, but he cannot improvise one out of the events of
the moment, as is the wont of great generals. Occasion seldom offers
her forelock twice to the grasp of the same man, and yet General
McClellan, by the admission of the Rebels themselves, had Richmond at
his mercy more than once.
He seems to attribute his misfortunes mainly to the withdrawal of
General McDowell's division, and its consequent failure to cooperate
with his own forces. But the fact is patent that the campaign was lost
by his sitting down in front of Yorktown, and wasting a whole month in
a series of approaches whose scientific propriety would have delighted
Uncle Toby, to reduce a garrison of eight thousand men. Without that
delay, which gave the Rebels time to send Jackson into the Shenandoah
valley, General McDowell's army would have been enabled to come to his
assistance. General McClellan, it is true, complains that it was not
sent round by water, as he wished; but even if it had been, it could
only have been an addition of helplessness to an army already too
unwieldy for its commander; for he really made the Rebel force double
his own (as he always fancied it) by never bringing more than a quarter
of his army into action at once. Yet during the whole campaign he was
calling for more men, and getting them, till his force reached the
highest limit he himself had ever set. When every available man, and
more, had been sent him, he writes from Harrison's Bar to Mr. Stanton,
"To accomplish the great task of capturing Richmond and putting an end
to this rebellion, reinforcements should be sent to me _rather much
over than less than one hundred thousand men_." This letter General
McClellan has not seen fit to include in his Report. Was the government
to be blamed for pouring no more water into a sieve like this?
It certainly was a great mistake on Mr. Lincoln's part to order General
McDowell off on a wild-goose chase after Jackson. The cooperation of
this force might have enabled General McClellan even then to retrieve
his campaign, and we do not in the least blame him for feeling bitterly
the disappointment of wanting it. But it seems to us that it was mainly
his own fault that there was anything to retrieve, and the true
occasion to recover his lost ground was offered him after his bloody
repulse of the enemy at Malvern Hill, though he did not turn it to
account. For his retreat we think he would deserve all credit, had he
not been under the necessity of making it. It was conducted with great
judgment and ability, and we do not love that partisan narrowness of
mind that would grudge him the praise so fairly earned. But at the same
time it is not ungenerous to say that the obstinate valor shown by his
army under all the depression of a backward movement, while it proves
how much General McClellan had done to make it an effective force,
makes us regret all the more that he should have wanted the decision to
try its quality under the inspiration of attack. It is impossible that
the spirit of the army should not have been affected by the doubt and
indecision of their general. They fought nobly, but they were always on
the defensive. Had General McClellan put them at once on the
aggressive, we believe his campaign would have been a triumphant one.
With truly great generals resolve is instinctive, a deduction from
premises supplied by the eye, not the memory, and men find out the
science of their achievements afterwards, like the mathematical law in
the Greek column. The stiffness rather than firmness of mind, the
surrender of all spontaneous action in the strait-waistcoat of a
preconceived plan, to which we have before alluded, unfitted him for
that rapid change of combinations on the great chess-board of battle
which enabled General Rosecrans at Murfreesboro to turn defeat into
victory, an achievement without parallel in the history of the war.
General McClellan seems to have considered the President too careful of
the safety of the capital; but he should measure the value of
Washington by what he himself thought of the importance of taking
Richmond. That, no doubt, would be a great advantage, but the loss of a
recognized seat of government, with its diplomatic and other
traditions, would have been of vastly more fatal consequence to us than
the capture of their provisional perch in Virginia would have been to
the Rebel authorities. It would have brought foreign recognition to the
Rebels, and thrown Maryland certainly, and probably Kentucky, into the
scale against us. So long as we held Washington, we had on our side the
two powerful sentiments of permanence and tradition, some insensible
portions of which the Rebels were winning from us with every day of
repose allowed them by General McClellan. It was a clear sense of this
that both excited and justified the impatience of the people, who saw
that the insurrection was gaining the coherence and prestige of an
established power,--an element of much strength at home and abroad.
That this popular instinct was not at fault, we have the witness of
General Kirby Smith, who told Colonel Fremantle "that McClellan might
probably have destroyed the Southern army with the greatest ease during
the first winter, and without much risk to himself, as the Southerners
were so much over-elated by their easy triumph at Manassas, and their
army had dwindled away."
We have said that General McClellan's volume is rather a plea in
abatement of judgment than a report. It was perfectly proper that he
should endeavor to put everything in its true light, and he would be
sure of the sympathy of all right-minded men in so doing; but an _ex
parte_ statement at once rouses and justifies adverse criticism. He
has omitted many documents essential to the formation of a just
opinion; and it is only when we have read these also, in the Report of
the Committee on the Conduct of the War, that we feel the full weight
of the cumulative evidence going to show the hearty support in men and
confidence that he received from the Administration, and, when there
were no more men to be sent, and confidence began to yield before
irresistible facts, the prolonged forbearance with which he was still
favored. Nothing can be kinder or more cordial than the despatches and
letters both of the President and Mr. Stanton, down to the time when
General McClellan wrote the following sentences at the end of an
official communication addressed to the latter: "If I save this army
now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you, or to any other
persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this
army." (28th June, 1862.) We shall seek no epithet to characterize
language like this. All but the most bigoted partisans will qualify it
as it deserves. We have here a glaring example of that warping of good
sense and good feeling which the consciousness of having a political
stake at risk will produce in a gallant soldier and a courteous
gentleman. Can General McClellan, after a year to grow cool in, either
himself believe, or expect any one else to believe, that the President
and the Secretary of War would "do their best to sacrifice" an army of
a hundred and fifty thousand brave men, in order to lessen his possible
chances as a candidate for the Presidency? It was of vastly more
importance to them than to him that he should succeed. The dignified
good temper of Mr. Lincoln's answer to this wanton insult does him
honor: "I have not said you were ungenerous for saying you needed
reinforcements; I thought you were ungenerous in assuming that I did
not send them as fast as I could. I feel any misfortune to you and your
army quite as keenly as you feel it yourself." Mr. Stanton could only
be silent; and whatever criticisms may be made on some traits of his
character, he is quite safe in leaving the rebuke of such an imputation
to whoever feels that earnestness, devotion, and unflagging purpose are
high qualities in a public officer.
If General McClellan had been as prompt in attacking the enemy as he
showed himself in this assault on his superiors, we think his campaign
in the Peninsula would have ended more satisfactorily. We have no doubt
that he would conduct a siege or a defence with all the science and all
the proprieties of warfare, but we think he has proved himself
singularly wanting in the qualities which distinguish the natural
leaders of men. He had every theoretic qualification, but no ardor, no
leap, no inspiration. A defensive general is an earthen redoubt, not an
ensign to rally enthusiasm and inspire devotion. Caution will never
make an army, though it may sometimes save one. We think General
McClellan reduced the efficiency and lowered the tone of his soldiers
by his six months' dose of prudence. With every day he gave the enemy,
he lessened his chances of success, and added months to the duration of
the war. He never knew how to find opportunity, much less to make it.
He was an accomplished soldier, but lacked that downright common sense
which is only another name for genius with its coat off for actual work
in hand.
Were General McClellan's Report nothing more than a report, were the
General himself nothing more than an officer endeavoring to palliate a
failure, we should not have felt called on to notice his plea, unless
to add publicity to any new facts he might be able to bring forward.
But the Report is a political manifesto, and not only that, but an
attack on the administration which appointed him to the command,
supported him with all its resources, and whose only fault it was not
sooner to discover his incapacity to conduct aggressive movements.
General McClellan is a candidate for the Presidency, and as he has had
no opportunity to show his capacity in any civil function, his claim
must rest on one of two grounds,--either the ability he has shown as a
general, or the specific principles of policy he is supposed to
represent. Whatever may be the success of our operations in the field,
our Chief Magistracy for the next four years will demand a person of
great experience and ability. Questions cannot fail to arise taxing
prudence of the longest forecast and decision of the firmest quality.
How far is General McClellan likely to fulfill these conditions? What
are the qualities of mind of which both his career and his Report give
the most irrefragable evidence?
General McClellan's mind seems to be equally incapable of appreciating
the value of time as the material of action, and its power in changing
the relations of facts, and thus modifying the basis of opinion. He is
a good maker of almanacs, but no good judge of the weather. Judging by
the political counsel which he more than once felt called upon to offer
the President, and which, as he has included it in his Report, we must
presume to represent his present opinions, he does not seem even yet to
appreciate the fact that this is not a war between two nations, but an
attempt at revolution within ourselves, which can be adequately met
only by revolutionary measures. And yet, if he were at this moment
elevated to the conduct of our affairs, he would find himself
controlled by the same necessities which have guided Mr. Lincoln, and
must either adopt his measures, or submit to a peace dictated by the
South. No side issue as to how the war shall be conducted is any longer
possible. The naked question is one of war or submission, for
compromise means surrender; and if the choice be war, we cannot afford
to give the enemy fifty in the game, by standing upon scruples which he
would be the last to appreciate or to act upon. It is one of the most
terrible features of war that it must be inexorable by its very nature.
Great statesmanship and great generalship have been more than once
shown by the same man, and, naturally enough, because they both result
from the same qualities of mind, an instant apprehension of the demand
of the moment, and a self-confidence that can as instantly meet it, so
that every energy of the man is gathered to one intense focus. It is
the faculty of being a present man, instead of a prospective one; of
being ready, instead of getting ready. Though we think great injustice
has been done by the public to General McClellan's really high merits
as an officer, yet it seems to us that those very merits show precisely
the character of intellect to unfit him for the task just now demanded
of a statesman. His capacity for organization may be conspicuous; but,
be it what it may, it is one thing to bring order out of the confusion
of mere inexperience, and quite another to retrieve it from a chaos of
elements mutually hostile, which is the problem sure to present itself
to the next administration. This will constantly require precisely that
judgment on the nail, and not to be drawn for at three days' sight, of
which General McClellan has shown least.
Is our path to be so smooth for the next four years that a man whose
leading characteristic is an exaggeration of difficulties is likely to
be our surest guide? If the war is still to be carried on,--and surely
the nation has shown no symptoms of slackening in its purpose,--what
modifications of it would General McClellan introduce? The only
information that is vouchsafed us is, that he is to be the
"conservative" candidate, a phrase that may mean too little or too
much. As well as we can understand it, it is the convenient formula by
which to express the average want of opinions of all who are out of
place, out of humor, or dislike the dust which blinds and chokes
whoever is behind the times. Sometimes it is used as the rallying-cry
of an amiable class of men, who still believe, in a vague sort of way,
that the rebels can be conciliated by offering them a ruler more
_comme il faut_ than Mr. Lincoln, a country where a flatboat-man
may rise to the top, by virtue of mere manhood, being hardly the place
for people of truly refined sensibilities. Or does it really mean
nothing more nor less than that we are to try to put slavery back again
where it was before (only that it is not quite convenient just now to
say so), on the theory that teleologically the pot of ointment was made
to conserve the dead fly?
In the providence of God the first thoughtless enthusiasm of the nation
has settled to deep purpose, their anger has been purified by trial
into a conviction of duty, and they are face to face with one of those
rare occasions where duty and advantage are identical. The man who is
fit for the office of President in these times should be one who knows
how to advance, an art which General McClellan has never learned. He
must be one who comprehends that three years of war have made vast
changes in the relative values of things. He must be one who feels to
the very marrow of his bones that this is a war, not to conserve the
forms, but the essence, of free institutions. He must be willing to
sacrifice everything to the single consideration of success, because
success means truth and honor; to use every means, though they may
alarm the fears of men who are loyal with a reservation, or shock the
prejudices of would-be traitors. No middle course is safe in troubled
times, and the only way to escape the dangers of revolution is by
directing its forces and giving it useful work to do.
THE REBELLION: ITS CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES
1864
In spite of the popular theory that nothing is so fallacious as
circumstantial evidence, there is no man of observation who would not
deem it more trustworthy than any human testimony, however honest,
which was made up from personal recollection. The actors in great
affairs are seldom to be depended on as witnesses, either to the order
of events or their bearing upon results; for even where selfish
interest is not to be taken into account, the mythic instinct erelong
begins to shape things as they ought to have been, rather than as they
were. This is true even of subjects in which we have no personal
interest, and not only do no two men describe the same street-scene in
the same way, but the same man, unless prosaic to a degree below the
freezing-point of Tupper, will never do it twice in the same way. Few
men, looking into their old diaries, but are astonished at the
contrast, sometimes even the absolute unlikeness, between the matters
of fact recorded there and their own recollection of them. Shortly
after the battle of Lexington it was the interest of the Colonies to
make the British troops not only wanton, but unresisted, aggressors;
and if primitive Christians could be manufactured by affidavit, so
large a body of them ready to turn the other cheek also was never
gathered as in the minute-men before the meeting-house on the 19th of
April, 1775. The Anglo-Saxon could not fight comfortably without the
law on his side. But later, when the battle became a matter of local
pride, the muskets that had been fired at the Redcoats under Pitcairn
almost rivalled in number the pieces of furniture that came over in the
Mayflower. Indeed, whoever has talked much with Revolutionary
pensioners knows that those honored veterans were no less remarkable
for imagination than for patriotism. It should seem that there is,
perhaps, nothing on which so little reliance is to be placed as facts,
especially when related by one who saw them. It is no slight help to
our charity to recollect that, in disputable matters, every man sees
according to his prejudices, and is stone-blind to whatever he did not
expect or did not mean to see. Even where no personal bias can be
suspected, contemporary and popular evidence is to be taken with great
caution, so exceedingly careless are men as to exact truth, and such
poor observers, for the most part, of what goes on under their eyes.
The ballad which was hawked about the streets at the execution of
Captain Kidd, and which was still to be bought at street-stalls within
a few years, affirms three times in a single stanza that the pirate's
name was Robert. Yet he was commissioned, indicted, convicted, and
hanged as William Kidd. Nor was he, as is generally supposed, convicted
of piracy, but of murder. The marvels of Spiritualism are supernatural
to the average observer, who is willing to pay for that dulness from
another world which he might have for nothing in this, while they seem
mere legerdemain, and not of the highest quality, to the trained organs
of scientific men.
History, we are told, is philosophy teaching by example. But how if the
example does not apply? Le Verrier discovers Neptune when, according to
his own calculations, the planet should not have been in the place
where his telescope found it. Does the example redound to the credit of
luck or of mathematics? The historian may give a thoroughly false view
of an event by simply assuming that _after_ means _in consequence of_,
or even by the felicitous turn of a sentence. Style will find readers
and shape convictions, while mere truth only gathers dust on the shelf.
The memory first, and by degrees the judgment, is enslaved by the
epigrams of Tacitus or Michelet. Our conception of scenes and men is
outlined and colored for us by the pictorial imagination of Carlyle.
Indeed, after reading history, one can only turn round, with Montaigne,
and say, _What know I?_ There was a time when the reputation of Judas
might have been thought past mending, but a German has whitewashed him
as thoroughly as Malone did Shakespeare's bust, and an English poet
made him the hero of a tragedy, as the one among the disciples who
believed too much. Call no one happy till he is dead? Rather call no
one safe, whether in good repute or evil, after he has been dead long
enough to have his effigy done in historical wax-work. Only get the
real clothes, that is, only be careful to envelop him in a sufficiently
probable dressing of facts, and the public will be entirely satisfied.
What's Hecuba to us, or we to Hecuba? Or is Thackeray's way any nearer
the truth, who strips Louis the Great of all his stage-properties, and
shows him to us the miserable forked radish of decrepitude?
There are many ways of writing what is called history. The earliest and
simplest was to record in the form of annals, without investigating,
whatever the writer could lay hold of, the only thread of connection
being the order of time, so that events have no more relation to each
other than so many beads on a string. Higher then this, because more
picturesque, and because living men take the place of mere names, are
the better class of chronicles, like Froissart's, in which the scenes
sometimes have the minute vividness of illumination, and the page seems
to take life and motion as we read. The annalist still survives, a kind
of literary dodo, in the "standard" historian, respectable,
immitigable,--with his philosophy of history, and his stereotyped
phrase, his one Amurath succeeding another, so very dead, so unlike
anything but historical characters, that we can scarce believe they
ever lived,--and only differing from his ancient congener of the
monastery by his skill in making ten words do the duty of one. His are
the fatal books without which no gentleman's library can be complete;
his the storied pages which ingenuous youth is invited to turn, and is
apt to turn four or five together. With him something is still always
sure to transpire in the course of these negotiations, still the
traditional door is opened to the inroad of democratic innovation,
still it is impossible to interpret the motives which inspired the
conduct of so-and-so in this particular emergency. So little does he
himself conceive of any possible past or future life in his characters
that he periphrases death into a disappearance from the page of
history, as if they were bodiless and soulless creatures of pen and
ink; mere names, not things. Picturesqueness he sternly avoids as the
Delilah of the philosophic mind, liveliness as a snare of the careless
investigator; and so, stopping both ears, he slips safely by those
Sirens, keeping safe that sobriety of style which his fellow-men call
by another name. Unhappy books, which we know by heart before we read
them, and which a mysterious superstition yet compels many unoffending
persons to read! What has not the benevolent reader had to suffer at
the hands of the so-called impartial historian, who, wholly
disinterested and disinteresting, writes with as mechanic an industry
and as little emotion as he would have brought to the weaving of calico
or the digging of potatoes, under other circumstances! Far truer, at
least to nature and to some conceivable theory of an immortal soul in
man, is the method of the poet, who makes his personages luminous from
within by an instinctive sympathy with human motives of action, and a
conception of the essential unity of character through every change of
fate.
Of late years men have begun to question the prescriptive right of this
"great gyant Asdryasdust, who has choked many men," to choke them also
because he had worked his wicked will on their fathers. It occurred to
an inquiring mind here and there that if the representation of men's
action and passion on the theatre could be made interesting, there was
no good reason why the great drama of history should be dull as a
miracle-play. Need philosophy teaching by example be so tiresome that
the pupils would rather burst in ignorance than go within earshot of
the pedagogue? Hence the historical romance, sometimes honestly called
so, and limited by custom in number of volumes; sometimes not called
so, and without any such limitation. This latter variety admits several
styles of treatment. Sometimes a special epoch is chosen, where one
heroic figure may serve as a centre round which events and subordinate
characters group themselves, with no more sacrifice of truth than is
absolutely demanded by artistic keeping. This may be called the epic
style, of which Carlyle is the acknowledged master. Sometimes a period
is selected, where the facts, by coloring and arrangement, may be made
to support the views of a party, and history becomes a political
pamphlet indefinitely prolonged. Here point is the one thing
needful,--to be attained at all hazards, whether by the turn of a
sentence or the twisting of a motive. Macaulay is preeminent in this
kind, and woe to the party or the man that comes between him and his
epigrammatic necessity! Again, there is the new light, or perhaps, more
properly, the forlorn-hope method, where the author accepts a brief
against the _advocatus diaboli_, and strives to win a reverse of
judgment, as Mr. Froude has done in the case of Henry VIII. The latest
fashion of all is the _a priori_, in which a certain dominant principle
is taken for granted, and everything is deduced from _x_, instead of
serving to prove what _x_ may really be. The weakness of this heroic
treatment, it seems to us, is in allowing too little to human nature as
an element in the problem. This would be a fine world, if facts would
only be as subservient to theory in real life as in the author's
inkstand. Mr. Buckle stands at the head of this school, and has just
found a worthy disciple in M. Taine, who, in his _Histoire de la
Litterature Anglaise_, having first assumed certain ethnological
postulates, seems rather to shape the character of the literature to
the race than to illustrate that of the race by the literature.
In short, whether we consider the incompetence of men in general as
observers, their carelessness about things at the moment indifferent,
but which may become of consequence hereafter (as, for example, in the
dating of letters), their want of impartiality, both in seeing and
stating occurrences and in tracing or attributing motives, it is plain
that history is not to be depended on in any absolute sense. That
smooth and indifferent quality of mind, without a flaw of prejudice or
a blur of theory, which can reflect passing events as they truly are,
is as rare, if not so precious, as that artistic sense which can hold
the mirror up to nature. The fact that there is so little historical or
political prescience, that no man of experience ventures to prophesy,
is enough to prove, either that it is impossible to know all the terms
of our problem, or that history does not repeat itself with anything
like the exactness of coincidence which is so pleasing to the
imagination. Six months _after_ the _coup d'etat_ of December, 1851,
Mr. Savage Landor, who knew him well, said to us that Louis Napoleon
had ten times the political sagacity of his uncle; but who foresaw or
foretold an Augustus in the dull-eyed frequenter of Lady Blessington's,
the melodramatic hero of Strasburg and Bologne, with his cocked hat and
his eagle from Astley's? What insurance company would have taken the
risk of his hare-brained adventure? Coleridge used to take credit to
himself for certain lucky vaticinations, but his memory was always
inexact, his confounding of what he did and what he thought he meant to
do always to be suspected, and his prophecies, when examined, are
hardly more precise than an ancient oracle or a couplet of Nostradamus.
The almanac-makers took the wisest course, stretching through a whole
month their "about this time expect a change of weather."
That history repeats itself has become a kind of truism, but of as
little practical value in helping us to form our opinions as other
similar labor-saving expedients to escape thought. Sceptical minds see
in human affairs a regular oscillation, hopeful ones a continual
progress, and both can support their creeds with abundance of pertinent
example. Both seem to admit a law of recurrence, but the former make it
act in a circle, the latter in a spiral. There is, no doubt, one
constant element in the reckoning, namely, human nature, and perhaps
another in human nature itself,--the tendency to reaction from all
extremes; but the way in which these shall operate, and the force they
shall exert, are dependent on a multitude of new and impredicable
circumstances. Coincidences there certainly are, but our records are
hardly yet long enough to furnish the basis for secure induction. Such
parallelisms are merely curious, and entertain the fancy rather than
supply precedent for the judgment. When Tacitus tells us that
gladiators have not so much stomach for fighting as soldiers, we
remember our own roughs and shoulder-hitters at the beginning of the
war, and are inclined to think that Macer and Billy Wilson illustrated
a general truth. But, unfortunately, Octavius found prize-fighters of
another metal, not to speak of Spartacus. Perhaps the objections to our
making use of colored soldiers (_hic niger est, hunc tu, Romane,
caveto_) will seem as absurd one of these days as the outcry that Caesar
was degrading the service by enlisting Gauls; but we will not hazard a
prophecy. In the alarm of the Pannonian revolt, his nephew recruited
the army of Italy by a conscription of slaves, who thereby became free,
and this measure seems to have been acquiesced in by the unwarlike
citizens, who preferred that the experiment of death should be made _in
corpore vili_ rather than in their own persons.
If the analogies between past and present were as precise as they are
sometimes represented to be, if Time really dotes and repeats his old
stories, then ought students of history to be the best statesmen. Yet,
with Guizot for an adviser, Louis Philippe, himself the eyewitness of
two revolutions, became the easy victim of a third. Reasoning from what
has been to what will be is apt to be paralogistic at the best. Much
influence must still be left to chance, much accounted for by what
pagans called Fate, and we Providence. We can only say, _Victrix
causa diis placuit_, and Cato must make the best of it. What is
called poetical justice, that is, an exact subservience of human
fortunes to moral laws, so that the actual becomes the liege vassal of
the ideal, is so seldom seen in the events of real life that even the
gentile world felt the need of a future state of rewards and
punishments to make the scale of Divine justice even, and satisfy the
cravings of the soul. Our sense of right, or of what we believe to be
right, is so pleased with an example of retribution that a single
instance is allowed to outweigh the many in which wrong escapes
unwhipped. It was remarked that sudden death overtook the purchasers of
certain property bequeathed for pious uses in England, and sequestered
at the Reformation. Fuller tells of a Sir Miles Pateridge, who threw
dice with the king for Jesus' bells, and how "the ropes after catched
about his neck," he being hanged in the reign of Edward VI. But at
least a fifth of the land in England was held by suppressed
monasteries, and the metal for the victorious cannon of revolutionary
France once called to the service of the Prince of Peace from
consecrated spires. We err in looking for a visible and material
penalty, as if God imposed a fine of mishap for the breach of his
statutes. Seldom, says Horace, has penalty lost the scent of crime,
yet, on second thought, he makes the sleuth-hound lame. Slow seems the
sword of Divine justice, adds Dante, to him who longs to see it smite.
The cry of all generations has been, "How long, O Lord?" Where crime
has its root in weakness of character, that same weakness is likely to
play the avenger; but where it springs from that indifference as to
means and that contempt of consequences which are likely to be felt by
a strong nature, intent upon its end, it would be hardy to reckon on
the same dramatic result. And if we find this difficulty in the cases
of individual men, it is even more rash to personify nations, and deal
out to them our little vials of Divine retribution, as if we were the
general dispensaries of doom. Shall we lay to a nation the sins of a
line of despots whom it cannot shake off? If we accept too blindly the
theory of national responsibility, we ought, by parity of reason, to
admit success as a valid proof of right. The moralists of fifty years
ago, who saw the democratic orgies of France punished with Napoleon,
whose own crimes brought him in turn to the rock of Prometheus, how
would they explain the phenomenon of Napoleon III.? The readiness to
trace a too close and consequent relation between public delinquencies
and temporal judgments seems to us a superstition holding over from the
time when each race, each family even, had its private and tutelary
divinity,--a mere refinement of fetichism. The world has too often seen
"captive good attending captain ill" to believe in a providence that
sets man-traps and spring-guns for the trespassers on its domain, and
Christianity, perhaps, elevated man in no way so much as in making
every one personally, not gregariously, answerable for his doings or
not-doings, and thus inventing conscience, as we understand its
meaning. But just in proportion as the private citizen is enlightened
does he become capable of an influence on that manifold result of
thought, sentiment, reason, impulse, magnanimity, and meanness which,
as Public Opinion, has now so great a share in shaping the destiny of
nations. And in this sense does he become responsible, and out of the
aggregate of such individual responsibilities we can assume a common
complicity in the guilt of common wrongdoing.
But surely the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth; and though we do not
believe in his so immediate interference in events as would satisfy our
impatience of injustice, yet he achieves his ends and brings about his
compensations by having made Good infinitely and eternally lovely to
the soul of man, while the beauty of Evil is but a brief cheat, which
their own lusts put upon the senses of her victims. And it is surely
fixed as the foundations of the earth that faithfulness to right and
duty, self-sacrifice, loyalty to that service whose visible reward is
often but suffering and baffled hope, draw strength and succor from
exhaustless springs far up in those Delectable Mountains of trial which
the All-knowing has set between us and the achievement of every noble
purpose. History teaches, at least, that wrong can reckon on no
alliance with the diviner part of man, while every high example of
virtue, though it led to the stake or the scaffold, becomes a part of
the reserved force of humanity, and from generation to generation
summons kindred natures to the standard of righteousness as with the
sound of a trumpet. There is no such reinforcement as faith in God, and
that faith is impossible till we have squared our policy and conduct
with our highest instincts. In the loom of time, though the woof be
divinely foreordained, yet man supplies the weft, and the figures of
the endless web are shaped and colored by our own wisdom or folly. Let
no nation think itself safe in being merely right, unless its captains
are inspired and sustained by a sense thereof.
We do not believe that history supplies any trustworthy data for
casting the horoscope of our war. America is something without
precedent Moreover, such changes have been going on in the social and
moral condition of nations as to make the lessons of even comparatively
recent times of little import in forming conclusions on contemporary
affairs. Formerly a fact,
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