The Brothers' War
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Title: The Brothers' War
Author: John C. Reed
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THE BROTHERS' WAR
THE BROTHERS' WAR
BY JOHN C. REED
OF GEORGIA
AUTHOR OF "AMERICAN LAW STUDIES," "CONDUCT OF LAWSUITS"
"THE OLD AND NEW SOUTH"
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1905
_Copyright, 1905_,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
_All rights reserved_
Published October, 1905
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
PREFACE
I would explain the real causes and greater consequences of the bloody
brothers' war. I pray that all of us be delivered, as far as may be, from
bias and prejudice. The return of old affection between the sections
showed gracious beginning in the centennial year. In the war with Spain
southerners rallied to the stars and stripes as enthusiastically as
northerners. Reconcilement has accelerated its pace every hour since. But
it is not yet complete. The south has these things to learn:
1. A providence, protecting the American union, hallucinated Garrison,
Wendell Phillips, Mrs. Stowe, Sumner, and other radical abolitionists, as
to the negro and the effect of southern slavery upon him, its purpose
being to destroy slavery because it was the _sine qua non_ of southern
nationalization, the only serious menace ever made to that union. This
nationalization was stirring strongly before the federal constitution was
adopted. The abolitionists, as is the case with all forerunners of great
occurrences, were trained and educated by the powers directing evolution,
and they were constrained to do not their own will but that of these
mighty powers.
2. The cruel cotton tax; the constitution amended to prevent repentance of
uncompensated emancipation, which is the greatest confiscation on record;
the resolute effort to put the southern whites under the negroes; and
other such measures; were but natural outcome of the frenzied
intersectional struggle of twenty-five years and the resulting terrible
war. Had there been another event, who can be sure that the south would
not have committed misdeeds of vengeance against citizens of the north?
3. We of the south ought to tolerate the freest discussion of every phase
of the race question. We should ungrudgingly recognize that the difference
of the northern masses from us in opinion is natural and honest. Let us
hear their expressions with civility, and then without warmth and show of
disrespect give the reasons for our contrary faith. This is the only way
for us to get what we need so much, that is, audience from our brothers
across the line. Consider some great southerners who have handled most
exciting sectional themes without giving offence. There is no invective in
Calhoun's speech, of March 4, 1850, though he clearly discerned that
abolition was forcing the south into revolution. Stephens, who had been
vice-president of the Confederate States, reviewed in detail soon after
the brothers' war the conflict of opinion which caused it, and yet in his
two large volumes he spoke not a word of rancor. When congress was doing
memorial honor to Charles Sumner, it was Lamar, a southerner of
southerners, that made the most touching panegyric of the dead. And the
other day was Dixon's masterly effort to prove that the real, even if
unconscious, purpose of the training at Tuskegee is ultimately to promote
fusion, which the southern whites deem the greatest of evils. His language
is entirely free from passion or asperity. He wonders in admiration at the
marvellous rise of Booker Washington from lowest estate to unique
greatness. And he gives genuine sympathy to Professor DuBois, in whose
book, "The Souls of Black Folk," as he says, "for the first time we see
the naked soul of a negro beating itself to death against the bars in
which Aryan society has caged him."
These examples of Calhoun, Stephens, Lamar, and Dixon should be the
emulation of every southerner speaking to the nation upon any subject that
divides north and south. This done, we will get the audience we seek. It
was this which not long ago gave Clark Howell's strong paper opposing
negro appointments to office in the south prominent place in _Collier's_,
and which last month obtained for Dixon's article just mentioned the first
pages of the _Saturday Evening Post_. When we get full audience, other
such discussions as those of Howell and Dixon, and that in which Tom
Watson, in the June number of his magazine, showed Dr. Booker Washington a
thing or two, will be digested by the northern public, to the great
advantage of the whole country.
The last I have to say here is as to differing opinions upon social
recognition of prominent negroes. We of the south give them great honor
and respect. Could not Mr. Roosevelt have said to us of Georgia protesting
against his entertainment of Booker Washington, "Have I done worse than
you did when you had him to make that address at the opening of your
Exposition in 1895, and applauded it to the echo?" Suppose, as is true,
that hardly a man in the south would eat at the same table with Dr.
Washington or Professor DuBois, how can that justify us in heaping
opprobrium upon a northern man who does otherwise because he has been
taught to believe it right? What has been said in denunciation of the
president and Mr. Wanamaker for their conduct towards Booker Washington
seems to me rather a hullabaloo of antediluvian moss-backs than the voice
of the best and wisest southerners.
Amid all her gettings let the south get complete calmness upon everything
connected with the race question--complete deliverance from morbid
sensitiveness and intemperate speech in its discussion.
Now here is what the north should learn:
1. Slavery in America was the greatest benefit that any large part of the
negro race ever received; and sudden and unqualified emancipation was woe
inexpressible to nearly all the freedmen. The counter doctrine of the
abolitionists who taught that the negro is equal to the Caucasian worked
beneficently to save the union, but it ought now to be rejected by all who
would understand him well enough to give him the best possible
development. The fifteenth amendment was a stupendous blunder. It took for
granted that the southern negroes were as ready for the ballot as the
whites. The fact is that they were as a race in a far lower stage of
evolution. Consider the collective achievement of this race, not in savage
West Africa, but where it has been long in contact with civilization, in
Hayti, and the south. Hayti has been independent for more than a hundred
years. "Sir Spencer St. John ... formerly British Minister Resident in
Hayti, after personally knowing the country for over twenty years, claims
that it is ... in rapid decadence, and regards the political future of the
Haytians as utterly hopeless. At the termination of his service on the
island, he said: 'I now quite agree with those who deny that the negro can
ever originate a civilization, and who assert that with the best of
educations he remains an inferior type of man.'
"According to Sir Spencer, Hayti is sunk in misery, bloodshed,
cannibalism, and superstition of the most sensual and degrading character.
Ever since the republic has been established Haytians have been opposed to
progress, but of recent years retrogression has been particularly
rapid."[1]
In the south, where reversion to West African society has been checked by
white government, this is a full catalogue of the main institutions
evolved by the freedmen. They have provided themselves with cheaply built
churches, in which their frequent and long worship is mainly sound and
fury. In the pinch of crop cultivation or gathering they flock away from
the fields to excursion trains and "protracted meetings." Perhaps their
most noticeable institutions are "societies," some prohibiting hiring as
domestic servants, except where subsistence cannot otherwise be had, and
others providing the means of decent burial. Compare these feeble negro
race performances with such white institutions, made in the same territory
and at the same time, as Memorial Day, which the north has adopted; the Ku
Klux Klan; enactment of stock laws when the freedmen's refusal to split
rails made much fencing impossible; and the white primary.
Institutions--what I have just called the collective achievement of a
race--mark in their character its capacity for improvement, and also its
plane of development. When the negro, with his self-evolved institutions,
is compared with the race which has furnished itself with fit organs of
self-government all the way up from town-meeting to federal constitution,
and is now about to crown its grand work with direct legislation, it is
like comparing the camel dressed to counterfeit an elephant, of which dear
old Peter Parley told us in his school history, with a real elephant, or
trying to make a confederate dollar in an administrator's return of 1864
count as a gold one.
And yet the negro, Professor Kelly Miller, replying to Tom Watson, assumes
that Franks, Britons, Germans, Russians, and Aztecs have severally been in
historical times as incapable as West Africans of rising from savagery and
crossing barbarism into civilization. He outdoes even this--he would have
it believed that Hayti is now a close second behind Japan in striding
progress.
Surely the good people of the north ought to learn the difference between
the negro race and the white. There is a small class of exceptional
negroes which is assumed by a great many at the north to be most fair
samples of the average negro of the south. Dr. Washington and Professor
DuBois severally lead the opposing sections of this class. It consists of
authors, editors, preachers, speakers, some who with small capital in
banking, farming, and other business, have each by Booker Washington's
blazon been exalted into a national celebrity, and others. Its
never-sleeping resolve, fondly cherished by the greater part, is to "break
into" white society and some day fuse with it. Its members are nearly all
at least half white, and many are more than half white. But when a Bourbon
snub to one of them is received, as it often is, with dignity and proper
behavior, Mr. Louis F. Post, and a few more, exclaim to the country, "See
how this coal-black and pure negro excels his would-be superiors!" This
man, almost white, is to them a coal-black, genuine, unmixed negro. Ought
not attention to facts incontrovertibly cardinal to rule here as
everywhere else? To what is due the great accomplishment of Dumas,
Douglass, and Booker Washington--to their negro blood or to their white
blood? If half negro blood can do so well, why is it that pure negro blood
does not do far better?
I have seen it asserted that Professor Kelly Miller is pure negro. His
head has the shape of a white man's. The greyhound crossed once with the
bull-dog, as Youatt tells, and each succeeding generation of offspring
recrossed with pure greyhound until not a suggestion of bull-dog was
visible, occurs to me. Thus there was bred a greyhound, possessing the
desired trait of the bull-dog. Who can say that there is not among the
professor's American ancestors one of half white blood? If there is in
fact no such, he is, in his high attainment, almost a _lusus naturae_.
The north, by due attention, will discern that the small number
constituting what I provisionally name the upper class of negroes, is
hardly involved in the race question.
The negroes in the south outside of the upper class--the latter not
amounting to more than five percent of the entire black population--are
slowly falling away from the benign elevation above West Africa wrought by
slavery. That they are here, is felt every year to be more injurious. They
greatly retard the evolution of a white-labor class, which has become the
head-spring of all social amelioration in enlightened communities. There
appears to be but one salvation for them if they stay, which is fusion
with the whites. Though Herbert Foster, and a few others, confidently
assume that our weakening Caucasian strain would be bettered by infusion
of African blood, we see that while amalgamation would bless the negro it
would incalculably injure us. It would be stagnation and blight for
centuries, not only to the south but to the north also. Northerners are
more and more attracted to the south by climate and other advantages, and
intermarriage between the natives of each section increases all the while.
The powers, protecting America, inscrutably to contemporaries kept busy
certain agencies that saved the union. It seems to me that these same
powers are now in both sections increasing white hostility to the blacks,
of purpose to prevent their getting firm foothold and becoming desirable
in marriage to poorer whites. One will think at once of the frequent
lynchings in the south. But let him also think of how the strikers in
Chicago were moved to far greater passion by the few black than the many
white strike-breakers, the late inexplicable anti-negro riot in New York
City, and the negro church dynamited the other day in Carlisle, Indiana.
These powers, who have protected our country from the first settlement of
the English upon the Atlantic coast down to the present time, appear to
speak more plainly every day the fiat, "If Black and White are not
separated, Black shall perish utterly." I am convinced that at the close
of the century, if this separation has not been made long before,
Professor Willcox's apparently conservative estimate of what will then be
their numbers will prove to be gross exaggeration. In my judgment he comes
far short of allowing the anti-fusion forces their full destructiveness.
Let the north purge itself from all delusion as to the negro, and help the
south do him justice and loving kindness, by transplanting him into
favorable environment.
2. It is high time that the Ku Klux be understood. When in 1867 it was
strenuously attempted to give rule to scalawags and negroes, the very best
of the south led the unanimous revolt. Their first taste of political
power incited the negroes to license and riot imperilling every condition
of decent life. In the twinkling of an eye the Ku Klux organized. It
mustered, not assassins, thugs, and cutthroats, as has been often alleged,
but the choicest southern manhood. Every good woman knew that the order
was now the solitary defence of her purity, and she consecrated it with
all-availing prayers. In Georgia we won the election of December, 1870, in
the teeth of gigantic odds. This decisive deliverance from the most
monstrous and horrible misrule recorded among Anglo-Saxons was the
achievement of the Ku Klux. Its high mission performed, the Klan, burning
its disguises, ritual, and other belongings, disbanded two or three months
later. Its reputation is not to be sullied by what masked men--bogus Ku
Klux, as we, the genuine, called them--did afterwards. The exalted
glorification of Dixon is not all of the Klan's desert. It becomes dearer
in memory every year. I shall always remember with pride my service in the
famous 8th Georgia Volunteers. I was with it in the bloody pine thicket at
First Manassas, where it outfought four times its own number; at
Gettysburg, where, although thirty-two out of its thirty-six officers were
killed or wounded, there was no wavering; and in many other perilous
places, the last being Farmville, two days before Appomattox, where this
regiment and its sworn brother, the 7th Georgia, of Anderson's brigade,
coming up on the run, grappled hand-to-hand with a superior force pushing
back Mahone, and won the field. But I am prouder of my career in the Ku
Klux Klan. The part of it under my command rescued Oglethorpe county, in
which the negroes had some thousand majority, at the presidential election
of 1868,--the very first opportunity,--and held what had been the home of
William H. Crawford, George R. Gilmer, and Joseph H. Lumpkin, until
permanent victory perched upon the banners of the white race in Georgia.
3. I observe that the north begins in some sort the learning of the two
lessons above mentioned. But now comes one which seems hard indeed.
Calhoun, Toombs, Davis, and the other pro-slavery leaders, ought to be
thoroughly studied and impartially estimated. They were not agitators, nor
factionists, nor conspirators. They were the extreme of conservatism.
Their conscientious faithfulness to country has never been surpassed.
Their country was the south, whose meat and bread depended upon slavery.
The man whose sight can pierce the heavy mists of the slavery struggle
still so dense cannot find in the world record of glorious stands for
countries doomed by fate superiors in moral worth and great exploit. In
their careers are all the comfort, dignity, and beauty of life, supreme
virtue, and happiness of that old south, inexpressibly fair, sweet and
dear to us who lived in it; and in these careers are also all the varied
details of its inexpressibly pathetic ruin. What is higher humanity than
to grieve with those who grieve? Brothers and sisters of the north, you
will never find your higher selves until you fitly admire the titanic
fight which these champions made for their sacred cause, and drop genuine
tears over their heart-breaking failure.
The foregoing summarizes the larger obstacles which bar true sight of the
south and the north. The devastation attending Sherman's march beyond
Atlanta, the alleged inhumanity at Andersonville, and many other things
that were bitterly complained of during the brothers' war, and afterwards,
by one side or the other, seem to me almost forgotten and forgiven.
Brothers who wore the gray with me, brothers who wore the blue against me,
I would have all of you freed from the delusions which still keep you from
that perfect love which Webster, Lincoln, and Stephens gave south and
north alike. I am sure that you must make the corrections indicated above
before you can rightly begin the all-important subject of this book. With
this admonition I commit you to the opening chapter, which I hope you will
find to be a fit introduction.
JOHN C. REED.
ATLANTA, GA.,
September, 1905.
Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY 1
II. A BEGINNING MADE WITH SLAVERY 35
III. UNAPPEASABLE ANTAGONISM OF FREE AND SLAVE LABOR 45
IV. GENESIS, COURSE, AND GOAL OF SOUTHERN NATIONALIZATION 51
V. AMERICAN NATIONALIZATION, AND HOW IT MADE THE BOND OF
UNION STRONGER AND STRONGER 62
VI. ROOT-AND-BRANCH ABOLITIONISTS AND FIRE-EATERS 84
VII. CALHOUN 93
VIII. WEBSTER 130
IX. "UNCLE TOM'S CABIN" 161
X. SLAVERY IMPELLED INTO A DEFENSIVE AGGRESSIVE 208
XI. TOOMBS 212
XII. HELP TO THE UNION CAUSE BY POWERS IN THE UNSEEN 282
XIII. JEFFERSON DAVIS 296
XIV. THE CURSE AND BLESSING OF SLAVERY 330
XV. THE BROTHERS ON EACH SIDE WERE TRUE PATRIOTS AND
MORALLY RIGHT--BOTH THOSE WHO FOUGHT FOR THE UNION
AND THOSE WHO FOUGHT FOR THE CONFEDERACY 346
XVI. THE RACE QUESTION: GENERAL AND INTRODUCTORY 359
XVII. THE RACE QUESTION: THE SITUATION IN DETAIL 378
APPENDIX 429
INDEX 451
THE BROTHERS' WAR
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
The inhabitants of the English colonies in Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand are all of the same race, language, religion, and institutions of
government. Such homogeneousness, as has long been recognized, works
powerfully for the political coalescence of separate communities. With the
adjacent ones of the colonies just mentioned there has always been trend
to such coalescence, as is impressively illustrated by the recent
establishment of the Australian Federation. The thirteen colonies out of
which the United States developed were likewise English, and there was the
same homogeneousness in their population, which made in due time, and also
maintained for a few generations, a union of them all--a continental
union. But there had crept in a heterogeneity, overlooked for many years,
during which time it acquired such force that it at last overcame the
homogeneousness just emphasized and carried a part of the inhabitants of
the United States out of the continental union. African slavery dying out
in the north, but prospering in the south, was this heterogeneity. By a
most natural course the south grew into a nation--the Confederate
States--whose end and purpose was to protect slavery, which had become
its fundamental economical interest, against the north standing by the
original union, and which having gained control of the federal government
was about to use its powers to extirpate slavery. The continental or
Pan-American nation--the American union, as we most generally think of
it--could not brook dismemberment, nor tolerate a continental rival, and
consequently it warred upon and denationalized the Confederate States. The
last two sentences tell how the brothers' war was caused, what was its
stake on each side, and the true result. This compendious summary is to
serve as a proposition, the proof of which we now purpose to outline.
Our first step is to emphasize how the free-labor system which prevailed
in the north, and the slave-labor system which prevailed in the south,
were utterly incompatible. Free labor is far cheaper and more efficient
than slave labor. It had consequently superseded slavery in the entire
enlightened world. But certain exceptional peculiarities of climate, soil,
and products planted made slavery profitable in the south.
To maintain the market value of the slaves two things were needed: (1) the
competition of free labor and the import of cheap slaves must be
rigorously prevented; (2) a vast reserve of virgin soil, both to replace
the plantations rapidly wearing out and to afford more land for the
multiplying slaves. The fact last mentioned made it vital to the south to
appropriate such parts of the soil of the Territories as suited her cotton
and other staples. Therefore whenever she made such an appropriation she
turned it into a slave State; for thus the competition of free labor would
be effectually excluded therefrom. The much more rapid increase of her
population made appropriation of lands in the Territories likewise vital
to the north. Hers were all free-labor interests, as the south's were all
slave-labor interests; and whenever the former appropriated any of the
Territories, she made a State prohibiting slavery in order to protect her
free-labor interests. The north was not excluded by nature from any part
of the public domain as the other section was. Her free labor could be
made productive everywhere in it, and she really needed the whole.
Thus the brothers of the north and the brothers of the south commenced to
strive with one another over dividing their great inheritance. The former
wanted lands for themselves, their sons, and daughters in all the
Territories possible made into States protecting their free-labor system;
the latter wanted all of the Territories suiting them made into States
protecting their slave-labor system. What ought especially to be
recognized by us now is that this contention was between good, honest,
industrious, plain, free-labor people on one side, and good, honest,
industrious, plain, slave-labor people on the other, those on each side
doing their best, as is the most common thing in the world, to gain and
keep the advantage of those of the other. It was natural, it was right, it
was most laudable that every householder, whether northerner or
southerner, should do his utmost to get free land for himself and family.
This fact--which is really the central, foundation, and cardinal one of
all the facts which brought the brothers' war--must be thoroughly
understood, otherwise the longer one contemplates this exciting theme the
further astray from fact and reasonableness he gets.
The foregoing shows in brief how there came an eager contention for the
public lands between parents, capitalists, workers, employers,
manufacturers, and so forth, bred to free labor and hostile to slavery on
the one side--that is, in the northern States; and the same classes bred
to slavery and hostile to free labor on the other side--that is, in the
southern States. The contention grew to a grapple. As this waxed hotter
the combating brothers became more and more angry, called one another
names more and more opprobrious; and at last each side, in the height of
righteous indignation, denounced their opponents as enemies of country,
morality, and religion. Here the root-and-branch abolitionist and the
fire-eater begin their several careers, and get more and more excited
audience, the former in the north and the other in the south. Both were
emissaries of the fates who had decreed that there must be a brothers'
war, to the end that slavery, the only peril to the American union, be
cast out.
Under the necessity of defending slavery against free labor there came
early an involuntary concretion of the southern States. This was very
plainly discernible when the epoch-making convention was in session. It
was the beginning of a process which has been well-named nation-making.
After a while--say just before Toombs takes the southern lead from
Calhoun--it had developed, as we can now see, from concretion into
nationalization--not nationality, yet--of the south. It was bound, if
slavery was denied expansion over the suitable soil of the Territories and
the restoration of its runaways, to cause in the ripeness of time
secession and the founding of the Confederate States. But there was
another nationalization, older, of much deeper root and wider scope--what
we have already mentioned as the continental or Pan-American. Its origin
was in an involuntary concretion of all the colonies--both the northern
and the southern--antedating the commencement of the southern concretion
mentioned a moment ago. While southern nationalization was the guardian of
the social fabric, the property, the occupations, the means of subsistence
of the southern people, the greater nationalization was not only the
guardian of the same interests of the northern people, but it had a higher
office. This was in due time to give the whole continent everlasting
immunity from war and all its prospective, direct, and consequential
evils, by federating its different States under one democratic
government--this higher office was to perpetuate the American union. This
continental nationalization had probably ripened into at least the
inchoate American nation by 1776. It was this nation, as I am confident
the historical evidence rightly read shows, that made the declaration of
independence and the articles of confederation, carried the Revolutionary
war on to the grandest success ever achieved for real democracy, and then
drafted and adopted the federal constitution. The constitution was not the
creator of this nation, as lawyers and lawyer-bred statesmen hold, but the
union and the constitution are both its creatures. This nation is
constantly evolving, and as it does it modifies and unmakes the
constitution and system of government of the United States, and the same
of each State, as best suits itself. Why do we not trace our history from
the first colonial settlements down to the present, and learn that the
nation develops in both substance and form, in territory, in aims and
purposes, not under the leading hand of conventions, congress, president,
State authority, of even the fully decisive conquest of seceding States by
the armies of the rest, but by the guidance of powers in the unseen, which
we generally think of as the laws of evolution? To illustrate: For some
time after I had got home from Appomattox I was disheartened, as many
others were, at the menace of centralization. A vision of Caleb Cushing's
man on horseback--the coming American Caesar--seared my eyeballs for a few
years. But after the south had been actually reconstructed I was cheered
to note that the evolutionary forces maintaining and developing local
self-government were holding their own with those maintaining and
developing union. To-day, you see the people of different localities all
over the north--in many cities, in a few States--driven forward by a power
which they do not understand, in a struggle which will never end till they
have rescued their liberties from the party machine wielded everywhere by
the public-service corporations.
To resume what we were saying just before this short excursion. Of course
when the drifting of the south toward secession became decided and strong,
Pan-American nationalization set all of its forces in opposing array. As
soon as the southern confederacy was a fact, the brothers' war began. I
emphasize it specially here that this war was mortal rencounter between
two different nations.
The successive stages by which her nationalization impelled the south to
secession are roughly these:
1. The concretion mentioned above probably passes into the beginning of
nationalization when the south was aroused by the resistance of the
free-labor States to the admission of Missouri as a slave State. With a
most rude shock of surprise she was made to contemplate secession.
Although there was much angry discussion and the crisis was grave, you
ought to note that the root-and-branch abolitionist and fire-eater had not
come. That crisis over, which ended the first stage, there was apparently
profound peace between the free-labor communities and the slave-labor
communities for some while.
2. The south rises against the tariff which taxes, as she believes, her
slave-grown staples for the profit of free-labor manufacturers. Here the
next stage begins. Perhaps the advent of nullification, proposed and
advocated by Calhoun as a union weapon with which a State might defend
itself against federal aggression, signalizes this stage more than
anything else.
3. The second gives place to the third stage, when the congressional
debate over anti-slavery petitions opens. It is in this stage that the
root-and-branch abolitionist and the fire-eater begin their really
effective careers. Opposition to the restoration of fugitive slaves was
spreading through the north and steadily strengthening. It ought to be
realized by one who would understand these times that this actual
encouragement of the slaves to escape was a direct attack upon slavery in
the southern States, becoming stronger and more formidable as the
root-and-branch abolitionists became more zealous and influential, and
increased in numbers, and the slaveholder was bound to recognize what it
all portended to him. It was natural that when he had these
root-and-branch abolitionists before himself in mind, he should say of
them:
"The lands of the Territories suiting slave labor are much less in
area than the due of the south therein. She will soon need all these
lands, as the slaves are multiplying rapidly, and the virgin soil of
her older States is going fast. With an excess of slaves and a lack of
fit land soon to come, if we are barred from the Territories our
property must depreciate until it is utterly worthless. But these
abolitionists attempt a further injury. They instigate our slaves to
fly into the north, and then encourage the north not to give them up
when we reclaim them. They deny our property the expansion into what
is really our part of the Territories which it ought to have in order
to maintain its value; and further they try to steal as many of our
slaves from us in the States as they can."
This was the double peril, as it were, which gathered in full view against
the south.
I cannot emphasize it enough that the hot indignation of such as Garrison
against slavery as a hideous wrong was not excited before the competition
between north and south over the public lands had become eager and
all-absorbing. It is nearly always the case that such excitement does not
appear until long after an actual menace by a rival to the personal or
selfish interest of another has shown itself. It is not until the menace
becomes serious that the latter wakes up to discover that the former is
violating some capital article of the decalogue. This was true of the
root-and-branch abolitionist. And his high-flown morality was made still
more Quixotic by his conscientiously assuming that the negro slave was in
all respects just such a human being as his white master.
This third stage extends from about January, 1836, until the country was
alarmed as never before by the controversy of 1849-50 over the admission
of California, in southern latitude, with an anti-slavery constitution. At
its end the southern leadership of Calhoun standing upon nullification, a
remedy that contemplated remaining in the union, is displaced by that of
Toombs, who begins to feel strongly, if not to see clearly, that the south
cannot preserve slavery in the union.
4. The fourth stage begins with the compromise of 1850. Afterwards during
the same year was an occurrence which cannot be overrated in importance by
the student of these times. That was the consideration of the pending
question in Georgia, and action upon it by a convention of delegates
elected for that special purpose. The Georgia Platform, promulgated by
that convention, is as follows:
"To the end that the position of this State may be clearly apprehended
by her confederates of the south and of the north, and that she may be
blameless of all future consequences, _Be it resolved by the people
of Georgia in convention assembled_, _First_, that we hold the
American union secondary in importance only to the rights and
principles it was designed to perpetuate. That past associations,
present fruition, and future prospects, will bind us to it so long as
it continues to be the safeguard of these rights and principles.
_Second._ That if the thirteen original parties to the compact,
bordering the Atlantic in a narrow belt, while their separate
interests were in embryo, their peculiar tendencies scarcely
developed, their Revolutionary trials and triumphs still green in
memory, found union impossible without compromise, the thirty-one of
this day may well yield somewhat in the conflict of opinion and
policy, to preserve that union which has extended the sway of
republican government over a vast wilderness to another ocean, and
proportionally advanced their civilization and national greatness.
_Third._ That in this spirit the State of Georgia has considered the
action of congress, embracing a series of measures for the admission
of California into the union, the organization of territorial
governments for Utah and New Mexico, the establishment of a boundary
between the latter and the State of Texas, the suppression of the
slave-trade in the District of Columbia, and the extradition of
fugitive slaves, and (connected with them) the rejection of
propositions to exclude slavery from the Mexican Territories, and to
abolish it in the District of Columbia; and, whilst she does not
wholly approve, will abide by it as a permanent adjustment of this
sectional controversy.
_Fourth._ That the State of Georgia, in the judgment of this
convention, will and ought to resist, even--as a last resort--to a
disruption of every tie which binds her to the union, any future act
of congress abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, without
the consent and petition of the slaveholders thereof, or any act
abolishing slavery in places within the slaveholding States, purchased
by the United States for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals,
dockyards, and other like purposes; or any act suppressing the
slave-trade between slaveholding States; or any refusal to admit as a
State any Territory applying, because of the existence of slavery
therein; or any act prohibiting the introduction of slaves into the
Territories of Utah and New Mexico; or any act repealing or materially
modifying the laws now in force for the recovery of fugitive slaves.
_Fifth._ That it is the deliberate opinion of this convention, that
upon the faithful execution of the fugitive slave bill by the proper
authorities depends the preservation of our much loved union."
This platform was the work of statesmen who had added to the wisdom of the
fathers, making the declaration of independence, articles of
confederation, and the great constitution, worthy wisdom of their own from
a far more varied experience and better training in government. These
statesmen came indiscriminately from all parties. The people in the State,
from the highest in authority through every intermediate circle down to
the humblest citizen, deliberately, without excitement or passion,
endorsed this platform with practical unanimity. And all parties stood
upon it to the end. This was not an ignorant, debased, corrupt,
unrighteous people; but it was even better in everything that makes a
people great and good than the former generation which had given the
country Washington and Jefferson.
Especially should the student meditate what this solemn declaration shows
was the sentiment of the people of the State at that time towards the
American union. Every one of the five planks contains its own most
convincing proof of deepest devotion. Think of the child who at last
resolves to fly from the home which had been inexpressibly sweet until the
stepmother came; of the father whose conscience commands him to save the
mother's life by killing the assailing son; of what the true Othello felt
when he had to execute the precious Desdemona for what he believed to be
her falseness--think of these examples, if you would realize the agony of
the better classes of the southern people when they at last discovered
that the union had changed from being their best friend into their most
fell enemy.
The Georgia Platform was actually drafted, I believe, by A. H. Stephens,
then a whig. It was probably moulded in its substance--especially in the
fourth and fifth planks--more by Toombs, also a whig, than any other.
Howell Cobb, a democrat, approved, and was elected governor upon it the
next year, receiving the ardent support of Toombs and Stephens. Toombs was
just forty, Stephens a year or two, and Cobb some six or seven years, less
than forty. These three were the leading authors. Note how much younger
they were than Calhoun, who had a few months before died in his
sixty-ninth year. The platform indicates the new sentiment, not only of
Georgia but of the entire south. When its contents are compared with the
doctrine of nullification, it clearly shows as the production of a new era
in the history of southern nationalization; for it marks what we may
somewhat metaphorically distinguish as the close of the pro-union and
opening of the anti-union defence of slavery. The proclivity to secession
uninterruptedly increases from this point on.
I would have it noted that the tactics of this fourth stage are
unaggressive. The Georgia Platform was no more than most grave and serious
warning against being driven to the wall. It did not bully nor hector. The
threat of what must be done in case certain menaced blows to slavery were
struck was so calmly, deprecatingly, and decorously made, that one wonders
it was not heeded. He ceases to wonder only when history reveals to him
that fate had become adverse to the good cause of this noble people.
5. A change of tactics characterizes the fifth stage. The faster growing
population of the north, furnishing settlers in far greater number than
that of the south, was sweeping away all chance of new slave States. The
situation commanded that the defence of the south change to the
aggressive, just as Stoessel was constrained the other day to take the
offensive against 203 Meter Hill. In the first sortie the south got the
Missouri compromise repealed. Then she tried to make a slave State of
Kansas. She failed. When she had lost Kansas--like California in southern
latitude--she could not help recognizing that the outlook for slavery in
the union had become desperate. My northern countrymen, if you were as
free from the surviving influence of the old intersectional quarrel as we
all ought to be, you would applaud the ability and valor with which the
south had fought this losing fight for the welfare and comfort of her
people; and especially would you admire her supreme effort in behalf both
of that people, and also of the union which she loved next to the cause of
her people. Not quailing before odds incalculable, she was as brave and
self-sustained as Miltiades, coming forth with his little ten thousand to
fight the host of Mardonius hand-to-hand. The only thing for her now was
new aggression, to make a demand never seriously urged before. That was
that congress protect the master's property in every Territory until it
became a State. If this were done, she could, perhaps, keep slavery in
some of the Territories long enough for it to strike root permanently. If
it could not be done she must choose between her own cause and the union.
Her persistence in the demand mentioned--and she was obliged to
persist--split the democratic party, which had until this time been her
main upholder in the union. The north refused her demand by electing
Lincoln. This was the end of the fifth stage. Her nationality had become
fully ripe. She seceded into the Confederate States, her only opportunity
of conserving the property and occupation interests of her people. Of
course she expected to get her part of the public domain, and to enforce
extradition of her fugitive slaves.
The foregoing is the barest outline of the rise and conflict between the
two nationalizations. The subject has been neglected too long. There
begins to be some faint understanding of the greater nationalization, but
that understanding is far short of completeness. There is hardly a
suspicion of the other. And yet as to our own special subject it is really
the more important, for in it is the initiative of the brothers' war.
There has been made by nobody any investigation at all of the main parts
of that train of events which I designate as southern nationalization. Not
Wilson's "The Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in the United States," nor
any book by a partisan of either side in the struggle, gives any help
towards this investigation. The historical sources have never been studied
at all; such as the colonial records now publishing, the records and
papers of the probate court in some of the older and more important
counties of the south--especially the returns of administrators,
executors, and guardians, and files of newspapers advertising their
citations. Here can be found the prevailing prices of slaves, their rate
of multiplication, all details of their management, from the very
beginning. The trial and equity courts contain records of litigation about
slaves; of advice of chancellors to trustees seeking to make or change
investment; of wills manumitting slaves; and a thousand other relevant
matters. The course of legislation as to slaves from the first to the end
is also important. From these, from local literature such as "Georgia
Scenes," "Simon Suggs," biography, and various pamphlets, and other
original sources,--far better historical evidence than any which is now
generally invoked,--can be learned the real facts as to the growth of
slavery; and especially how in its economic potency consequent upon the
invention of the gin it supplanted or made dependent upon itself all other
property, and became the solitary foundation of every kind of production
and mode of making a living; so that even by 1820 to abolish slavery would
have been almost to beggar the southern people for two or three
generations. It is to be hoped that Professor Brown, finding the
opportunity which he desires, may yet exhaust not only the sources I have
mentioned, but also important ones that I have not even thought of, and
give the true ante-bellum history of the lower south. Some such work is
necessary to explain the active principle, the _raison d'etre_ of southern
nationalization.
How north and south were sundered by the different nationalizations is yet
to be told in full detail without any censure of the people of either.
Practically every American was born into an occupation or way of life
connected with or founded upon either slave or free labor interests, and
so was born into one or the other of these two nationalizations, and his
conscience coerced him to stay with it. These nationalizations made two
different publics and two different countries in the United States. After
the slavery agitation had become active the masses in either public knew
but little of the other, and cared for it less; and when war broke out
between the two countries every man, woman, and child was ready to die, if
there was need, for his own. When the history of the times has been
impartially and adequately written the world will recognize that the
patriotism and moral worth of neither side excels that of the other, and
it will crown both.
The evolution indicated above produced not only the two hostile peoples,
but also their leaders and representatives of every class. I have taken
pains in a relevant chapter to show how the fire-eaters and the
root-and-branch abolitionists were at last brought upon the stage. Every
fierce controversy in history has had their like on each side. Their
coming is late. The antagonists have become excited. The intelligence
guiding evolution deceives them as to the parts they must play. They
believe that their mission is to arouse the public conscience in order to
right some alleged moral wrong. Their real mission is to excite to angry
action. Cicero condemns the Peripatetics for asserting that proneness to
anger has been usefully given by nature.[2] He overlooked the fact that
the outbreak of the passion is intended to spur us into doing something
important for our own protection; and that it is therefore an
indispensable weapon in our self-defensive armory. These fanatics, as we
often call them, instigated north and south to quarrel more and more
fiercely, and finally to fight. The purpose of the powers in the unseen in
causing the fight has already been stated.
What especially concerns us here is that we avoid adhering to the mistakes
of these partisans which still have injurious effect upon opinion. Thus
the fire-eater could see no good whatever in the yankees, as he called
them, denying them honesty, trustworthiness, and other elementary virtues;
accusing them of robbing us by the tariff and other measures, and hating
us for the prosperity and comfort which the slavery system had blessed us
with. Other of his false charges are still lodged in the memory of some
influential southerners. But the fire-eater's predictions were all
completely falsified by the result of the war; and he has become so much
discredited as an authority, there is no very great need for consuming
much time and effort in correcting his misstatements. On the other hand
the decisive success of their side has kept thousands at the north fully
believing the wildest fabrications of the root-and-branch abolitionists.
The latter believed that the African slave of the south was just such a
human being, ready for liberty and self-government in all particulars, as
civilized and enlightened whites. They believed that the condition of his
immediate ancestors in West Africa was one of high physical, mental,
moral, and social development, and that if there was in him now any
inferiority to his master it was entirely due to the sinister influence of
American slavery. They also believed that the system was fraught with such
cruelties as frequent separation of man and wife and of mother and young
children, under- feeding and clothing, and grinding overwork,--that, in
short, the average slave was daily exposed to something like the torture
of the Inquisition. All this was invention. American slavery found the
negro gabbling inarticulately and gave him English; it found him a
cannibal and fetishist and gave him the Christian religion; it found him a
slave to whom his savage master allowed no rights at all, and it gave him
an enlightened master bound by law to accord him the most precious human
rights; it found him an inveterate idler and gave him the work habit; it
found him promiscuous in the horde and gave him the benign beginning of
the monogamic family,--in short, as now appears very strongly probable,
American slavery gave him his sole opportunity to rise above the barbarism
of West Africa.
These tremendous mistakes of fact, after knitting the north in solid
phalanx against dividing the Territories with the south and restoring
fugitive slaves and thus hasting forward the war, prompted that folly of
follies the fifteenth amendment, and have ever since kept the north from
understanding the race question.
I am sure that it is high time that we of each section should school
ourselves into impartially appreciating the civil leaders of the other
side. The south has made more progress towards this than the north.
Certain causes have operated to help her onward. One of these is that
practically all of us recognize it is far better for the section that the
union side won. Another is that the great mass have learned that slavery
both effeminated and paralyzed the whites and was a smothering incubus
upon our due social and material development. It is natural that although
we give our pro-slavery political leaders and the confederate soldiers
increasing love, we should more and more commend the pro-union and
anti-slavery activity of the northern statesmen. Nothing like this has led
the north to revise the reprobation which in the heat and passion of the
conflict it bestowed upon the public men of the south. If I ever read a
good word from a northern writer as to them, it is for something in their
careers disconnected with the southern cause. Even Mr. Rhodes, the ablest
and most impartial of northern historians of the times, finds in Calhoun
only a closet spinner of utterly impractical theories. Further, I could
hardly believe it when I read it--and it is hard for me to believe it
yet--that, citing some flippant words of Parton in which a slander of
contemporary politics is toothsomely repeated as his voucher, he flatly
charges the lion-hearted knight of the south with playing the coward in
the most heroic episode of his grand career. My faith is strong that this
mode of treating the good and great southern leaders will soon go out of
fashion.
I am greatly in earnest to vindicate these leaders--especially Calhoun,
Toombs, and Davis. Much of the public life of each one was concerned with
matters of national interest. To this I give special attention, for I want
my northern readers to know what true Americans they all were. Without
this they cannot have their full glory. And their justification is that of
their people. Such effective leaders are always representative. It is a
misnomer to call them leaders. They were really followers of their
constituents who were struggling for the subsistence of themselves and
their dear ones. During this time Calhoun, Toombs, and Davis, had they not
labored in every way to protect this great cause--the cause of their own
country--as they did, would have been as recreant as the confederate
soldier, skulking away from the line defending home and fireside. When our
country is in peril the unseen lords of its destiny do not take any one of
us, from the greatest to the humblest, into their confidence as to the
event. Every man of us must support in politics and on the field the cause
of our people. If that must go down it will make defeat glorious to go
down with it, as contentedly and bravely as did Demosthenes, Cicero, and
Davis.
Whoever diligently studies the facts will be convinced that southern
nationalization, with a power superior to human resistance, carried the
southern people into secession, and that their so-called leaders were
carried with them. He will discern that the parts of the latter were
merely to serve as floats to mark the course of the current beneath.
Therefore be just to these leaders for justice' sake. Further, you
brothers and sisters of the north ought to bethink yourselves and keep in
mind how we regard them. The reputation of these our civil champions and
their graves are as dear to us as those of our mothers. If you adopted an
orphan, you would feel it to be unpardonable to speak slightingly to him
of his parents. Cleopatra, her conqueror sending her word to study on what
fair demands she would have, answered:
"That majesty to keep decorum, must
No less beg than a kingdom."
Let those who wore the blue and their descendants think over it long
enough to realize how unspeakably low and treacherous it would be in us to
abet any condemnation whatever of these men for their anti-union
acts--these men whom we or our fathers voted for and supported because of
these acts. If you deny justification to them, how can we keep decorum in
accepting it ourselves?
I would say one more word, where perhaps I am a little over-earnest. These
southern leaders have contributed richly to the treasures of American
history. Their moral worth,--nay, moral grandeur,--their great natural
parts, their statesmanly ability, their eloquence, their heroic fidelity
to their people,--by these each has won indefeasible title to the best of
renown. Whenever the north has made real study of them, she will give them
as generous admiration as she now does to the charge of Pickett. I have
done my utmost to present Calhoun, Toombs, and Davis faithfully, using, as
I believe, all the main facts which are relevant and incontrovertible. I
am sure that every northerner who reads them, after he has laid aside all
prejudice, will admit that I did not claim too much when I was recounting
their merits a moment ago.
I invite close consideration of all that I say of Webster. The purpose of
providence, bestowing birthplace, early environment, training, and career
as preparation for a paramount mission, shows more conspicuously in him
than in any other of America's great, with the solitary exception of
Washington. How the names of detracting agitators and mere politicians
written over his in the temple of fame are now fading off, and how the
invincible and lovable champion of the brother's union looms larger upon
us every year!
I am painfully conscious of how certain omissions, unavoidable in my
limited space, mar the symmetry of my ground-plan. The average reader will
probably think that I ought to have sketched Lincoln, Grant, and Lee. I
was convinced that the public had already become reasonably instructed as
to them.
John Q. Adams is one of the most conspicuous men of his day. Standing
aloof from parties, completely self-reliant, opulently endowed with every
high power of moderation, insight, and effective presentation, his good
genius gave him the championship in congress of the free-labor cause
during the critical years that it was preparing for the decisive meeting
with the slave-labor cause. In this time it seems to me that single-handed
he achieved more for the latter than all its other champions. A pleasant
parallel between him and Lee occurs to me. Each had filled the proudest
place in the chosen avocation of his life. Adams had been the chief
magistrate of the great republic, elected by the votes of a continent. Lee
had been the foremost general of the bravest and most puissant nation that
ever lost its existence by war. Each one of the two passed from power down
into what is usually a condition of inaction and accumulating rust till
the end of life, and to each was most kindly granted the achievement of
new fame and glory. In the national house of representatives, Adams,
during the last twelve years of his life,--1836-48,--did the great deeds
which we have just lauded. In the last years of his life Lee, as the head
of an humble institution of learning, showed not only the youth in his
charge, but all of his stricken people, how to conquer direst adversity
with such grand success in an example of unmurmuring endurance that every
future generation of men will give it more loving appreciation.
John Q. Adams, as I have tried to explain, is almost an American epoch of
himself; but I could not give him the chapter that is his due.
I felt that it would have been well to pair Stephen A. Douglas of the
north with Alexander H. Stephens of the south. They are in nearly exact
antithetical contrast. The former clung to the south, the other to the
union, until the clock struck the dread hour of separation. How they loved
each other and each other's people! They most strikingly exemplify the
adamantine grip which each one of the two nationalizations kept upon its
greatest and best.
Wendell Phillips and William L. Yancey should be contrasted. Each one was
the very prince of sectional agitators, helping with great efficiency to
make the public opinion that carried forward Seward and Lincoln, the
actual leaders of the north, and Toombs, the actual leader of the south.
It is my strong conviction that Phillips and Yancey were the most gifted,
eloquent, and influential stump speakers in America since Patrick Henry.
Chase steadily rises in my estimate. His solid parts, his consistent,
conscientious, and able anti-slavery career, and especially that decisive
speech in the Peace Congress,--these, and other relevancies that can be
mentioned, drew me powerfully. The firm candor with which he avowed in
that memorable speech that the north had decided against the expansion of
slavery, demonstrates the clearness of his vision. The part of it which
recurs to me most frequently is that in which he impressively recounts the
intersectional dissension over the fugitive slave law,--the south
believing slavery right, the north believing it wrong,--and proposes that
in place of the remedy given by that law the master be paid the value of
his slave. "Instead of judgment for rendition," he said, "let there be
judgment for compensation determined by the true value of the services,
and let the same judgment assure freedom to the fugitive. The cost to the
national treasury would be as nothing in comparison with the evils of
discord and strife. All parties would be gainers."
Calhoun devised to restrain the sections from mutual aggression by
endowing each with an absolute veto against the other. Webster fondly
believed that if he could be president he would bring back the wrangling
brothers to love one another again as much as he loved them all. Chase
also had his pet impracticable project. Each one of the three recoiled and
racked all of his invention to save his country from the huge fraternal
slaughter that his divining soul whispered to him was near.
The south will cherish the memory of Chase more and more fondly as she
learns better how he firmly stood for civil law against military rule, and
that he was heart and soul for universal amnesty.
It was all I could do to deny a chapter to William H. Seward. He seems to
me to have been the only northern man whose foresight of the coming
convulsion equalled that of Calhoun. He did not become a Jeremiah as the
other did, for his section was not, after it had just emerged from a gulf
of blood, to be plunged and held for years in a gulf of poverty and
disorder. He was far less serious and much more optimistic in his nature
than Calhoun. Affectionate, sympathetic, rarely agreeable in his
manners--how well Mrs. Davis depicts him in what is to me one of the
pleasantest passages of her book.[3] He was spoils politician, able
popular leader, and great statesman in rare combination. While his heart
was extremely warm, his head was never turned by his feelings. Lincoln
ardently believed in his soul what Choate calls "the glittering
generalities" of the declaration of independence. But to Seward current
illusions were the same as they were to Napoleon Bonaparte--he was to lead
the masses with them just as far as possible, but not to deceive himself.
Read in your closet his two epochal speeches, the "higher law" one of
March 11, 1850, and that proclaiming the irrepressible conflict at
Rochester, October 25, 1858, then read that of Chase at the Peace
Congress, and you cannot avoid feeling that while Chase opposes slavery
mainly because he conceives it to be a gross moral wrong, the other
opposes because it is the belonging of an inferior civilization. In my
opinion no man of that time had such a clear conception as Seward of the
utter economical incompatibility of the free-labor system and the
slave-labor system, and of the doom of the latter in their conflict then
on. While he had this superior insight and wisdom it was the better way
for him to follow the tide of morbid moral sentiment and unreasoning zeal
carrying the country on to his goal. Following thus he proved a leader
unsurpassed. The longer I contemplate Seward the stronger becomes my
conviction that he is the most entertaining subject and the most
delightful in variety of parts and traits of all American statesmen for
the essayist portrait painter. To give a picture true to life demands the
very best and highest art.
In my last two chapters I do all I can to clear up the race question,
which is now densely beclouded with northern misunderstanding and southern
prejudice. The negro has a nature that in some material particulars
differs so widely from that of the Caucasian that it ought to be duly
allowed for; and yet as people are so prone to think all others just like
themselves, this is hardly ever done. Now, forty years after emancipation,
we see that the promptings and consequences of his nature just emphasized
in combination with the social forces operating upon him have caused
changes in the situation, of the gravest import to him. His native
idleness, coming back stronger and stronger the further he gets in time
from the steady work of slavery, his lack of forecast, his vice,
inveterate pauperism, increasing disease and insanity, on one side; the
hostility excited against him by the inexpressibly unwise grant to him of
equal political rights, and the rapid invasion by white labor since the
early nineties of the province which he appropriated during the years when
the whites had not recovered from the paralyzing shock and surprise of
emancipation, on the other side, example these changes. There has evolved
a division of the southern negroes into two classes. One class, which I
most roughly distinguish as the upper, contains all those who are not
compelled by their circumstances to be unskilled laborers in country and
town. It hardly amounts to one-twentieth of the whole. The millions are
all in the other class, which I again most roughly distinguish as the
lower. Ponder what I tell you of them, their helplessness, their
accelerating degradation, their mounting death rate, their gloomy
prospects. I try hard also to have the upper class well understood. To a
southerner it is amazing how many outside people of education,
intelligence, and fair-mindedness assume that the multitude in the lower
class are the same in every material detail of character and ability as
those few who by various favors of fortune have found place in the upper
class. To stress here, in the beginning, a fact as its very great
importance demands, nearly all the negroes who get high station are part
white. Dumas, the father, was at least half white. The son Dumas was
probably three-quarters white. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Anglo-African
composer, is half white. Such as these are the samples by which nearly all
the continent and England, and many northerners, estimate the capacity of
the pure negroes of the south, grovelling in depths out of which one
climbs only now and then by a miracle. The men just mentioned are not real
negroes. It is the same with nearly all the so-called negroes of America,
from Douglass to Dr. Washington, who have become famous. They are but
examples of what whites can do against adversity. The coal-black equalling
these in achievement would be as rare among his fellows as Hans, the
Berlin thinker, is among horses. This palpable distinction between men who
are largely, if not nearly all, Caucasian, and men who are purely West
African in descent, is utterly overlooked by many most conscientious and
earnest ones of the north, like Mr. Louis F. Post, who is always telling
us of the south what the negro is--not, and how we should treat him,
magisterially reading us lessons in A B C democracy.
There will be fewer and fewer part-white negroes in the south by reason of
the steadily increasing hostility of each race to mixed procreation. This
upper class has long shown a drift northward. Under the expulsion of many
of its members from certain occupations by white competition, lately
commenced and fast increasing, this drift now gathers strength. From what
I see every day it seems to me that the destiny of much the greater part
of this upper class is disappearance partly by absorption and partly by
euthanasy.
It is the millions of the lower class that should be our deepest concern.
If they be left where their utopian emancipators and enfranchisers have
placed them, it is almost certain that nearly the whole will go into the
jaws of destruction, now opening wide before them and sucking them in.
Such a result of the three amendments--that is, to have annihilated hosts
upon hosts of pure negroes in order to make just a few part-whites
all-white--would be a fit monument to the statesmanship of the maddest
visionaries in all history. We must come resolutely and lovingly to the
help of these wretched creatures. I tell you at large how it is our duty
to give the black man his own State in our union, and supervise him in it
even better than we are now doing for the Philippine.
I believe that the foregoing, re-enforced by a glance over the
chapter-titles, will give a reader the preconception which he ought to get
from an introduction to a book which he is about to begin. In dealing with
the causes and some of the more important consequences of the brothers'
war my method is rationale rather than narrative. My first purpose is to
indicate how everything happened according to laws that with cosmic force
reared two great economic powers, divided the whole land into a vast host
standing up for one of the two in the south, and a still larger host
standing up for the other in the north, and how these same laws were most
faithfully served by all the actors on each side. I try to set out and
explain what are the principles of evolution and the ways of human action,
and especially the commanding view-points, which must be rightly attended
to in their supreme importance before the greater one of the two critical
American eras can have its fit history. The man who writes it will be
entirely free from the monomania and orgiastic fury of both fire-eater and
root-and-branch abolitionist, from their excessively emotional
assumptions, their explosive and exclamatory argumentation; he will have
the industry, the undisturbed vision, and the perfect fairness of the
foremost sociologists of our time; he will show how each side was right
from first to last in upholding its own separate country,--all belonging
to it, statesmen, agitators, demagogues, fanatical fire-eaters and
abolitionists, generals and soldiers. He will show that such things which
in expedience ought not to have been done were unavoidable, and therefore
to be excused. He will show what erroneous judgments of each section
should now be challenged and kept from working injury. Especially do I
emphasize it, he will convince every average reader that north and south
were equally conscientious, honest, heroic, and lovable from beginning to
end. Such a history will be even greater than that by which Thucydides
realized his soaring ambition to give the world an everlasting possession;
and it will become the bible of America, treasured and loved alike by the
people both north and south.
This bible is coming, as many signs show. I will illustrate by examples
from three northern authors, given not exactly in the order of time, but
in that of their approximation to full attainment. After a circumstantial
description of each one of the three days' fighting at Gettysburg, fair
and impartial in the extreme, Mr. Vanderslice eulogizes both sides,
without invidious distinction, for "their fidelity and gallantry, their
fortitude and valor," and because there was nothing done by either "to
tarnish their record as soldiers," and most becomingly emphasizes the
"martial fame and glory" thereby won "for the American soldier." But just
here he sounds a most unpleasantly discordant note by saying, "One was
right and the other wrong."[4] He forgot that brothers who fight as those
did at Gettysburg are all right, and that whenever one falls on either
side flights of angels sing him to his rest.
In June, 1902, Mr. Charles F. Adams, making an academic address at
Chicago, startled many of his auditors with this outspoken vindication of
the south:
"Legally and technically,--_not morally_,-- ... and wholly
irrespective of humanitarian considerations,--to which side did the
weight of argument incline during the great debate which culminated in
our civil war?... If we accept the judgment of some of the more modern
students and investigators of history,--either wholly unprejudiced or
with a distinct union bias,--it would seem as if the weight of
argument falls into what I will term the confederate scale."[5]
Mr. Adams, having made further inquiry of his own, December 22 of the same
year, announced a still more advanced conclusion. He had said at Chicago
that the confederate scale preponderated; but now his vision having become
more certain he said the scales hung even.[6] Note that in the passage
just quoted from him I have italicized the two words "not morally." I do
not understand that in the Charleston speech he meant to revoke the
italicized words, and to say anything more than that each side was right
in its own view of the nature of the government. Even with this
reservation, the utterances of Mr. Adams evince a grateful improvement
upon the dogmatism which characterizes nearly every other northerner or
southerner who has treated the subject.
Professor Wendell sees clearly that both sides were morally right, and he
is impartially just and equally loving to both. I feel that the quotations
from a late work of his which I now make are the chief merits of this
chapter. Considering the controversy between the sections, he says, with
the truest insight, "The constitution of the United States was presenting
itself more and more in the light of an agreement between two incompatible
sets of economic institutions, assuming to each the right freely to exist
within its own limits."[7]
In this next passage as to the same subject, rising above Mr. Adams to the
high frankness which the facts demand, he says, "The truth is that an
irrepressible social conflict was at hand, and that both sides were as
honorable as were both sides during the American Revolution, or during the
civil wars of England."[8]
How just to north and south each, and how fraternally compassionate
towards the south is this: "Solemn enough to the uninvaded north, the war
meant more than northern imagination has yet realized to those southern
States into whose heart its horrors were slowly, surely carried. Such a
time was too intense for much expression; it was a moment rather for
heroic action; and in south and north alike it found armies of heroes. Of
these there are few more stirring records than a simple ballad made by Dr.
Ticknor, of Georgia, concerning a confederate soldier."[9] And then he
quotes "Little Giffen" in full.
Professor Wendell reaches a still greater height when he decorates the
Tyrtaeus of the Confederate States and the supereminent anti-slavery
lyricist of the north with equal homage and admiration. He says:
"The civil war brought forth no lines more fervent [than the
concluding thirty-six of Timrod's 'The Cotton Boll,' which are set
out], and few whose fervor rises to such lyric height. In the days of
conflict, north regarded south, and south north, as the incarnation of
evil. Time, however, has begun its healing work; at last our country
begins to understand itself better than ever before; and as our new
patriotism strengthens, we cannot prize too highly such verses as
Whittier's, honestly phrasing noble northern sentiment, or as
Timrod's, who with equal honesty phrased the noble sentiment of the
south. A literature which in the same years could produce work so
utterly antagonistic in superficial sentiment, and yet so harmonious
in their common sincerity and loftiness of feeling, is a literature
from which riches may come."[10]
These words are more golden than I can tell. They parallel the elevation
of Webster, showing the same love for South Carolina and Massachusetts, in
the pertinent parts of the reply to Hayne, which since my boyhood I have
cherished as a nonpareil. It is cheering to a faithful southerner to
receive such sure proof that the day must soon come when all obloquy will
be lifted from the fame of Calhoun, Toombs, and Davis. What a grand
triumph of contrast, almost surpassing the best achievement of Shakspeare,
it will be when some honest Griffith, having shown Webster, Lincoln, and
Grant in all the worth which merited their unspeakably happy lot, each
radiant with the victor's glory, places opposite the great civic heroes of
the southern nation, their due renown at last fitly blazoned. That renown
will be that they devoted the very greatest human powers and virtues all
their lives, with never remitted effort and spotless fidelity, to save a
doomed country,--the imperishable renown of grand failure in a cause which
adverse fate cannot keep from being ever dear to all humanity.
My last word as to what I have just quoted from the three northern authors
is that all of us--and especially the fast widening public of
readers--ought to be forever in earnest to applaud such sentiments and
chide every manifestation of excessive sectional bias or prejudice from
either northerner or southerner. This has been my incessantly kept faith
for years. As proof I refer to my article, "The Old and New South," nearly
all of it written in the early part of 1875--thirty years ago--and which I
published the next year. I give an exact copy of it in the Appendix. As
you go through it remember these things of the author: The election of
Lincoln made me believe, as it did thousands of other southerners, that
secession was the only patriotic course. I therefore voted for secession
delegates to the State convention. I served in the confederate army all
the war, taking part in the First Manassas and many other battles; and
when I had been surrendered and paroled at Appomattox I walked back to my
home in Georgia. Ten years after this I had found full solace and comfort
for the direful event to the south of the brothers' war; and I had learned
that the brothers on each side had complete justification in conscience
for their contrary parts as statesmen, public leaders, voters, and at the
end as soldiers. I want my readers of each section to see that I have long
practised what I am now preaching.
I beg attention to the article on another score. It shows that the
opinions expressed in this book have not been formed in haste. Nearly all
of the more important will be found therein, in embryo, at least; and the
present book will show, I hope, that they have prosperously grown. There
are passages in the article, such as those touching the relations of the
races, the future of the negro, the maintenance by the decentralizing
forces of the union of their balance with the counter ones, and also
others, which I might now justly claim to have proved prophetic; and I do
not believe that a serious misprediction can be found in the entire
article. This is, I hope, such corroboration by after occurrences as
indicates that even my early studies of the transcendently important
theme were not unfruitful.
Further, the article serves in some sort to mark a definite stage in
evolution. To give but one illustration: Although my close attention to
planting interests at the time and for the seven or eight preceding years
had kept me closely watching the negro, I had not then discovered even the
beginning of that division of the race into two classes which is now so
plain to me.
Possibly some readers may shy away from my book, deeming that its subject
is hackneyed and worn out. They will exclaim, What can this author say
that has not been said in the vast library of books already written upon
the civil war? This will be asked, I am sure, only by the unobservant and
unreflecting. If one but turn away from the assumptions, dogmas, and
philippics, with which north and south cannonaded each other's morality
with increasing fury from 1831 to 1861, to the _rerum causae_, the play of
resistless social forces, and the other actualities and great things
indicated above, their huge stores of varied novelty, interest, romance,
and wisdom will greatly embarass him--as has been my painful
experience--both in making the best selection and in his felt inability to
give what he does at last select its fit presentation.
As illustration I will say that every thoroughly impartial northern reader
who meditates what I narrate as to Toombs will, I believe, be astonished
to learn that one so prodigally gifted with supreme virtue and supreme
genius, and who was of unexampled success in doing all the common and all
the extraordinary duties of high place, has become worse than forgotten in
almost his own day; and such a reader will suspect, as I do myself, that
there is much more of value in his career that I have overlooked.
Perhaps this chapter is too long already. But I pray my reader to allow me
to say a little more. We are upon the threshold of a new American era.
Evidently because of our western coast we are to dominate the Pacific
ocean commerce and to develop it into proportions so enormous as to be now
almost inconceivable. That coast will soon outstrip the Atlantic in
population and great cities. Our people, safe against wars on the
continent, maintaining armies only of workers, taught better methods every
year by practice and science, will soon be far in advance of their present
enviable prosperity and comfort. Cheering as is the promise of their
material progress, that of their progress in virtue and good government is
still more cheering. Everywhere in the north--which was not impoverished,
deprived of familiar modes of production, and paralyzed with a race
question by the event of the brothers' war--the State electorates are
rebelling successfully against the party machine, cashiering the boss, and
subverting the corporation oligarchy. That in the last election the voters
most intelligently split their tickets assures the early expulsion of
spoilsmen, grafters, and public-service franchise-grabbers from the
control of our politics, legislation, and administration of government,
and the real and permanent elevation of the people to being their own
absolute governors. In several States--one of these a southern--the vote
was for the most democratic and anti-plutocratic president since Lincoln,
while at the same time the anti-plutocratic State candidates, either of
the other party or independent, were elected. Our population will soon
outstrip all the world in average riches, comfort, virtue, and education.
The special note to be made of this new American era now beginning is that
we are to lead the nations into a war-abolishing United States of the
world, which in the end will make and keep them our equals in solid
welfare and happiness. With this prospect in view, the brighter and more
enrapturing as I cannot keep from contrasting it with the black and
hopeless future which settled around me at Appomattox, I would do all that
I can to bring about that better understanding between north and south
which befits the good time near at hand.
CHAPTER II
A BEGINNING MADE WITH SLAVERY
As a distinguished southerner, familiar with the subject, says, slavery in
the United States was "a stupendous anachronism."[11] It is almost
incredible to the average northerner of to-day that the enlightened people
of the south sank backwards in social development a thousand years or
more, and hugged to their bosoms for several generations such a monstrous
evil and peril.
The co-operation of two facts fully explains the wonder just noted. Now
let us try to understand this.
The first fact is the part played by tobacco and cotton before the
anti-slavery sentiment became influential. At a time when there was
practically no industry but agriculture these two staples became the most
lucrative of all common American crops. Tobacco found its true soil in
Virginia, and cotton farther south. It developed in time that both could
be made far more profitably with African slaves than by free white labor,
the only other labor to be had. Of course you are to remember that slave
cultivation of tobacco did not become general in Virginia until near the
end of the seventeenth century, and that it was the invention of the gin
soon after the adoption of the federal constitution in 1789 that started
cotton production on a large scale. What you are especially to grasp here
is the economic conditions which naturally spread slavery from its
beginning at Jamestown, first over Virginia, and then throughout the
entire south, either settled in large measure from Virginia, or looking
thither for example. The Virginian who could not replace his exhausted
fields with virgin soil at home went with his slaves either west or south,
and hacked down enough of the primeval forest to give his working force
its quantum of arable land. We need not stop here to tell of rice and
cane, nor of other crops and industries which for a while engaged slave
labor in northern regions of the south where the soil did not suit
tobacco. The foregoing suggests adequately for this place how slavery
became general in the south.
The second fact is that the prevalent opinion of that time was far
different from that of to-day, for certain reasons, to which I would now
have you attend.
Long before the discovery of America personal slavery had fallen under the
ban of the christian church and become in Europe a thing of the past. The
Divine Comedy catalogues in detail the religious, political, moral, and
social events of its age. It is utterly silent throughout as to slavery.
Dante died in 1321, soon after he had finished the Divine Comedy. That was
nearly three hundred years before the appearance of African slavery in
Virginia.
Now for something of very great importance to us here, which occurred soon
afterwards, and before the introduction of African slavery into America.
It is that by the Renascence the literature of slaveholding Greece and
Rome suddenly acquired and long held commanding influence upon almost
every educator of the public in the enlightened world. It was in the last
quarter of the fourteenth century--some fifty years after Dante had
died--that the classics revived in Italy. Spreading thence over Europe,
they are found dominating the great Elizabethan divines, philosophers,
poets, and other opinion-forming writers at the end of the fifteenth
century. And during all of the time from the landing of the twenty
Africans at Jamestown by the Dutch man-of-war in 1619 until slavery had
become the solitary prop of southern industry and property, the Greek and
Latin ancient writers were in our mother country almost the sole subjects
of school or university education, and the main reading of all those that
read at all. And every page of this literature, studied with enthusiastic
worship and resorted to day in and day out for instruction and
inspiration, disclosed that in Greece and Rome the average family was
dependent for its maintenance upon slaves; and that so far from slavery
being a relic of barbarism, as the American root-and-branch abolitionists
afterwards fulminated in a platform, it was the very foundation of the
state in those two great nations whose philosophy, learning, science,
jurisprudence, poetry, art, and eloquence are still the models in every
enlightened land. Naturally the educated classes, now that it had been
several hundred years since slavery was a burning question, had forgotten
or had never heard of the old disinclination of the church, and could not
see any evil in that which their most admired and dearest ones had all
practised. The classics did not stop with giving slavery the negative
support just mentioned. Although such authors as Quintilian and Seneca,
and the later jurists--all of the discredited silver, and not of the
glorified Ciceronian and Augustan ages--do express, theatrically and
academically, anti-slavery opinions, yet what they say was merely dust in
the balance when weighed against the commendations of the institution to
be found in the writings of Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero, who had now
become the great idols of intellectual society.[12]
The church would not stay out in the cold and dark, whither it had been
suddenly and rudely cast by the Renascence. It woke up to discover that as
the African was a heathen barbarian it was God's mercy to kidnap him for a
christian master, and thus give him his only opportunity of saving his
soul. And although it is not right to enslave other races, the descendants
of Ham are an exception, who by reason of Noah's curse are to be the
servants of servants to the end of time--that is what Holy Church taught
by precept and example.
"Sir John Hawkins has the unenviable distinction of being the first
English captain of a slave-ship, about the year 1552."[13] His venture
proved a great success. Good Queen Bess reproached him for his
mistreatment of human beings. He answered that it was far better for the
African thus to become a slave in a christian community, than to live the
rest of his life in his native home of idolatry; and this was so
convincing that "in the subsequent expeditions of this most heartless
man-stealer, she was a partner and protector."[14] Until the end of the
seventeenth century the masses regarded the negro as being rather wild
beast than man, showing no more scruples in catching and making a drudge
of him than later generations did in lassoing wild horses and working them
under curb-bit, spur, and whip. And the more understanding ones, who
recognized that the negro belonged to humanity, re-enforced Aristotle[15]
and Pliny[16] with much that they found both in the Old and New
Testaments.[17] The many who preached liberty or the true religion posed
as humanitarians, pharisaically comparing themselves with the best
characters of Greece and Rome. The citizens of those great republics, they
said, in spite of their advanced democracy, tore men and women of their
own race and blood away from home and country and forced them with the
scourge to toil in chains, while we do that only with savages and
heathens, who cannot be civilized or christianized in any other way. We
eschew slavery in the abstract. We tolerate it only in the concrete, which
is the slavery of those destined for it by God and nature. Slave-catcher,
slaveholder, and the public seriously and conscientiously held this creed.
You must now add to the list of influences planting and stimulating
slavery in America the protection it got in the constitution under which
the federal government started in 1789. As Mr. Blaine says:
"The compromises on the slavery question, inserted in the
constitution, were among the essential conditions upon which the
federal government was organized. If the African slave-trade had not
been permitted to continue for twenty years, if it had not been
conceded that three-fifths of the slaves should be counted in the
apportionment of representatives in congress, if it had not been
agreed that fugitives from service should be returned to their owners,
the thirteen States would not have been able in 1787 'to form a more
perfect union.'"[18]
Think over it until you can fully take in the prodigious favor to slavery
which this countenance of it by the American bible of bibles naturally
created in the north and south.
The forces rapidly sketched in the foregoing were so powerful in their
co-operation to bring in slavery that its establishment and a long era of
vigorous growth were inevitable. Note the years during which they met no
sensible or only a fitful opposition. The first anti-slavery agitation
that shook the entire country was that over the Missouri question, which
having lasted a little more than two years ended in 1821, thirty-two years
after the adoption of the constitution. This agitation was only against
the extension of slavery. It was not until 1835 that the presentation to
Congress of petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of
Columbia disclosed to the far-seeing Calhoun alone that serious and mighty
aggression upon slavery in the States was commencing. Here we may date the
beginning of the abolition movement. But that movement did not become
respectable with the great mass of northern people until the application
of California in 1850 for admission into the union as a free State widened
the chasm between the sections so that it commenced to show to the dullest
eye, and "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which came out in 1852, stirred the north to
its depths. The growth of slavery was then and had been for a quarter of a
century complete. The soil, climate, and best agricultural interests of
the south, at a time when she was to be wholly agricultural or
economically nothing at all, the practice and precepts of the sages of
Greece and Rome, of the patriarchs of Israel, of Jesus and his disciples
and apostles, of the great and good of modern times,--all these had, with
oracular consensus, led her understanding and conscience into adopting,
nurturing, and on into extending slavery over her territory. Thus when
abolition first emerged into open day, slavery had become the very
economical life of the south. It had so permeated and informed the
combined property, social, and political structure, that abolition would
subvert the community fabric and beggar the population of the southern
States now living in content and comfort.
I trust that the foregoing shows you that it is not so strange after all
that slavery ran the career just described.
But some one says, how could the southerners as Americans, the especial
champions of liberty, stultify themselves by slaveholding? how could they
forget the world-arousing words of the declaration of independence that
all men are created equal, and endowed with unalienable rights to life,
liberty, and pursuit of happiness?
This has already been answered. The slaveholding republics of Greece and
Rome had advanced in democracy so far beyond anything to be found in
Europe at the revival of learning, that from that time on for many years
the political doctrine in the recovered classics was the very greatest of
all the intellectual influences that made for mere democracy. The
celebrated passage in which Burke eulogizes the stubborn maintenance of
their freedom by free slaveholders has been the text of speakers from
Pinkney, addressing the United States senate on the Missouri question, to
Toombs, lecturing in Tremont Temple, Boston, and it has never been
confuted. History shows no instance where such men ever reproached
themselves for slaveholding, and while it was profitable put it aside
because it is undemocratic.
As to the words which you quote from the declaration of independence,
Jefferson, the draftsman, doubtless, meant them to include the African;
but the majority of the congress making it, and the American people
actually ratifying it, almost unanimously held that the African was not
enough of man to come within the words.
A Roman law parallel aptly illustrates. In the Institutes it is said that
slavery is contrary to the law of nature, for under this every one is born
free;[19] and again, that slavery was established by the _jus gentium_
under which a man is made subject to the dominion of another _contra
naturam_, that is, against nature, against _jus naturale_, or the law of
nature.[20] And in the Pandects this is weakly echoed.[21] But the actual
enactment of the _corpus juris civilis_ fortifies slavery as it had been
established all over the world by the _jus gentium_ with these plain
words: "The master has power of life and death over his slave; and
whatever property the slave acquires, he acquires for the master."[22]
Our forefathers making the declaration of independence, and the Romans of
Justinian's time, sentimentalized in the same words over the natural right
to equality and liberty of all human beings, and also resolutely held on
to their slaves. The solemn assertion that all men are created equal and
of inalienable liberty made by American slaveholders was but a repetition
of what Roman slaveholders had already said; and it is curious that the
fact has not attracted due attention.
I fancy that my objector now shoots his last bolt. He exclaims that
southerners were incredibly dull and obtuse not to discern that
resistlessly puissant economical, political, moral, and intellectual
forces, not of America only but of the entire world, were leaguing
together against slavery, and therefore they ought to have fled in time
from the coming wrath and evil day.
A satisfactory reply need not postulate any other than ordinary
intelligence and alertness for the south. Note how people dwell near
overflowing rivers, or a sea of tidal waves, or live volcanoes, or in
earthquake districts, or near a tribe of scalping redskins, where they,
their wives and children, keep merry as the day is long until calamity
comes. The warning of the abolitionists was too late. Suppose we had given
the inhabitants of Herculaneum or Pompeii or St. Pierre timely counsel to
abandon their homes and settle beyond the reach of eruption. How many
would have done it? I knew hundreds of people, and among all of them there
was but one who showed by his actions that he foresaw the early fall of
slavery. That was Mr. Frank L. Upson of Lexington, Georgia, a highly
accomplished and well-informed man. In 1856, I think it was, he sold all
of his slaves, declaring as his reason that he believed if he kept them he
would see them freed without compensation. He was so serious that he
declared this even to his purchasers. They merely laughed, and everybody
else laughed too, to think how green he was to give them the good bargain
that he did. But after the war he enjoyed comfort from the money those
slaves had brought him, when all his neighbors had been plunged into hard
times by emancipation. There may have been others that did like him. There
could not have been many such, for I have never been able to hear of a
single one.
We did like the rest of mankind do or would have done. We stuck to our
homes and business until the tidal wave washed them away. Yet there are
wise ones who are positive that had we not been far more dull and
unforeseeing than the average we would have understood many years before
the final convulsion that the forces arrayed against slavery were
irresistible, and surrendered it in time to get compensated emancipation.
Look at the monopolists now preying upon the public in every corner of the
land. They are confident that their holdings are impregnable against
democracy coming invincibly against them. Look at the great mass of our
population, shutting the fresh air out of their houses in order to be
comfortably warm, and thereby rearing parents--especially mothers--who
unawares are incessantly developing tuberculosis to destroy themselves and
their children. Some years hence when resumption by government of its
functions now granted to private persons has dispossessed all the
monopolists, and when every dwelling-house is kept perfectly ventilated
and free from infected air, there will be other wise ones to believe that
hindsight is just the same as foresight, and to inveigh against the
monopolists and parents just mentioned for their unwonted stupidity and
improvidence.
CHAPTER III
UNAPPEASABLE ANTAGONISM OF FREE LABOR AND SLAVE LABOR, AND THEIR MORTAL
COMBAT OVER THE PUBLIC LANDS
Now a brief explanation of the antagonism between free and slave labor.
The expense of his slaves to the farmer is the same whether they are
resting or at work. Sundays, days and even seasons of unfavorable weather,
in long do-nothing intervals succeeding the making and also the gathering
of the crop, they cost him just as much as when he can work them from sun
to sun. But this is not all of his load. The year round he must subsist
the numerous non-workers in the families of his laborers, whether young,
superannuated, or afflicted. Suppose another farmer to be on adjoining
land who can employ laborers just as he wants them, and discharge them as
soon as he has no further use for them. Do you not perceive that this
free-labor farmer can produce far more cheaply than the slave farmer? And
do you not also perceive that if there is a supply of free labor to be had
in a slave country, and it can be got by every farmer _ad libitum_, slaves
must lose their value as property and be driven to the wall? Free labor
was kept out of the south by the repugnance of the white laborer to the
negro. Note also that when the number of slaves had become considerable
their owners would naturally combine to protect the market value of their
property by preventing the coming in of cheaper labor. This was the real
reason why Virginia and Delaware opposed the extension of the African
slave-trade from 1800 to 1808, and the Confederate States' constitution
refused to reopen it. Slavery made some headway in the north. But not
finding there the stimulus of such products as tobacco and cotton, it
could not become so widespread and deep-seated as to sweep out free labor.
The latter under favorable conditions commenced the competition in which
it could not fail to win; and in due time slavery died out in the north.
We especially desire to emphasize the attitude towards extension of
slavery that free labor was bound to take. That it had already ejected
slavery from every other enlightened community will occur to the reader at
once as weighty proof that the two cannot live together.[23] Think of the
free worker's suffrage, and you cannot believe that he could long be
induced to vote for the protection and further spread of a system taking
the bread out of his own mouth, and degrading him by engendering profound
disrespect for his class; and then think of the vast and rapidly growing
numbers of the free laborers of the north, receiving every day great
accessions of foreign immigrants avoiding the south as they would the
plague; think of all these, and you begin to discern what a mighty power
was rising against slavery.
This has brought us to the place where we can properly treat the
contention for the Territories. Consider their vast area. Remember that
our people have settled thereon in such numbers that thirty-two new States
have been added to the old thirteen, and others still are to be added.
Here for some generations was land for the landless; the full meaning of
which Henry George has made us plainly see. The adventurous and
enterprising of the old States of each section set their faces
thitherward in a constantly swelling stream. Attend to the only material
difference for us between the northerner and the southerner going west.
Each settler wanted a community like his native one. The northerner had
not been trained to manage slave labor and property; he did not like it;
he thought it out of date and vastly inferior to free labor; and he could
not endure to have himself and family live among negroes, repulsive to him
because of unfamiliarity. He had learned from its history in the south
that wherever slavery established itself it superseded all other labor.
Therefore he would none of it in his new home; and he settled in a
non-slave community. Of course the southerner, knowing nothing of free
labor and bred into a love of the slave system, settled among
slaveholders. And so for a generation or two free and slave States were
steadily added to the union in pairs.
But the unsettled lands were diminishing in area. Its population
multiplying so marvellously, the north felt urgent need for the whole of
these lands. The great majority of settlers going thence into the
Territories were farmers. Note some of the more influential classes left
behind them. The parents, relatives, and friends who wanted them suited in
the west--this was the largest class of all, and it was of prodigious
intellectual, political, and moral potency. Then the manufacturers of
agricultural implements, and of many articles, all of which the
southerners either had their mechanic slaves to make by hand, and of
oldtime fashion, or did without; the millers, and many sorts of wholesale
merchants who had found slave owners poor and the employers of free labor
good customers; and these manufacturers and merchants were greedy for the
new markets which they could get only in free States.
These are but the merest hints, but they serve somewhat to suggest the
all-powerful motives which at last united the great majority of northern
people, east and west, in intelligent and inveterate opposition to the
further spread of slavery.
Now look at the southern situation. At the outset, note that his slaves
were the southerner's only laborers, and practically his only property.
And note especially that this property was not only self-supporting, but
it was also the most rapidly self-reproducing that Tom, Dick, and Harry
ever had in all history. A reliable witness tells this: "On my father's
plantation an aged negro woman could call together more than one hundred
of her lineal descendants. I saw this old negro dance at the wedding of
her great-granddaughter."[24]
Let me repeat that slaves were not only money-making laborers, but also
things of valuable property, which of themselves multiplied as dollars do
at compound interest. Let the northern man unfamiliar with slavery try to
understand this one of its phases by supposing that he has orchards
abundantly yielding a fruit which is in good demand, and that the trees
plant and tend themselves, gather and store the fruit, set out other
orchards, and do all things else necessary to care for the property and
keep it steadily growing. Such trees with their yearly produce and
prodigious increase--each by an easy organic or natural, and not by a
difficult artificial, process, relieving the owner from all but the
slightest attention and labor of superintendence--would soon be the only
ones in their entire zone of production; bringing it about that all other
occupations and property therein would be dependent upon this main and
really only industry. Such orchards would be somewhat like the slaves in
their automatic production and accumulation, but they would be much
inferior as marketable property in many particulars.
Although the profits of slave-planting were considerable, the greatest
profit of all was what the master thought of and talked of all the day
long,--the natural increase of his slaves, as he called it. His negroes
were far more to him than his land. His planting was the furthest removed
of all from a proper restorative agriculture. Quickly exhausting his new
cleared fields, he looked elsewhere for other virgin soil to wear out. The
number of the slaves in the south was growing fast, and the new lands in
the older slave States were nearly gone. To keep the hens laying the
golden eggs of natural increase, nests must be found for them on the
cotton, sugar, and rice lands of the Territories. In other words, the area
of slave culture must be extended; for whenever there is no land for a
considerable number of our workers, it is evident that we have a surplus
of slaves; and the effect of that will be at the first to lower the market
value of our only property, and then gradually to destroy it. So the
instincts of the southerners whispered in their ears.
We hope that we now have helped you to an understanding of the active
principles each of free labor and of slave labor; how by reason of them
the interests of north and south in dividing the public domain were in
irreconcilable conflict; and how it was natural that the free States
should band together against, and the slave States band together for,
slavery. Thus the country split into two geographical though not political
sections, the political division which ripened later being as yet only
imminent and inchoate. That these sections had been made by deadly war
between free labor and slave labor is all that we have to say here. The
development went further, as we shall explain in the next chapter--all of
it under the propulsion of the two active principles. They were always the
ultimate and supreme motors. Often they are not to be seen at all. Still
more often what they did was disguised. To read the facts of that time
aright you must always and everywhere look for their work. Do that
patiently, and you will detect every one of the many controversies over
matters affecting an interest of either section as such--whether questions
apparently of national politics, of morals, or religion, in newspapers,
pamphlets, reviews, books, and all the vast contemporary literature, in
the pulpit, on the platform, and in every place and corner of the entire
land where policy and impolicy or right and wrong were mooted--to be but a
part of one or the other of two great complexes of machinery, each geared
to its particular motor and kept going by its mighty push.
CHAPTER IV
GENESIS, COURSE, AND GOAL OF SOUTHERN NATIONALIZATION
Nationalization is the process by which a nation makes itself. The process
may be active for a long while without completion, as we see in the case
of Ireland; it may form a nation, but to be overturned and wiped out, as
the southern confederacy was; or it may find its consummation in such a
powerful one as the United States. The most conspicuous effect of the
process we now have in hand is to make one of many communities. But
sometimes a part breaks off from a nation and sets up and maintains its
independence as a country. Thus a portion of the territory of Mexico was
settled over from our States, and after a while these settlers tore
themselves loose from Mexico and became the nation of Texas. We shall tell
you more fully in another chapter how the separate colonies became
nationalized into the United States, and what we say here of southern
nationalization will illustrate to the reader that important
transformation, to understand which is of especial moment to us in
examining the brothers' war. But we must emphasize the characteristic
feature of the nationalization of the south. I have searched the pages of
history in vain for an example like it. The idiosyncrasy is that the south
was homogeneous in origin, race, language, religion, institutions, and
customs with the north, and yet she developed away from the north into a
separate nation. I have long been accustomed to parallel the case of
Ireland's repulsion from Great Britain, but I always had to admit that
there was dissimilarity in everything except the strong drift towards
independence and the struggle to win it;[25] for the Irish are largely
different from the English in origin, race, language, religion,
institutions, and customs. The more you consider it the more striking
becomes this uniqueness of southern nationalization. Think of it for a
moment. Thirteen adjacent colonies; each a dependency of the same nation;
all settled promiscuously from every part and parcel of one mother
country, and therefore the settlers rapidly becoming in time more like one
another everywhere than the English were who at home were clinging to
their several localities and dialects; governed alike; standing together
against Indians, French, and Spanish, and after a while against the mother
country;--where can you find another instance of so many common ties and
tendencies, all prompting incessantly and mightily to union in a political
whole, which is ever the goal of the nationalizing process. That the
colonies did grow into a political whole is not at all wonderful to the
historical student. The wonder is that after they had done this a number
of them just like the others in the particulars above pointed out, which
fuse adjacent communities into a nation, turn away from the old union and
seek to form one of their own. The southern States all did the same thing
with such practical unanimity that even the foreigner may know that the
same cause was at work in every one of them. Manifestly there was a
nationalizing element in them which was not in the others, and which made
the former homogeneous with one another and heterogeneous to the rest.
And that element which differenced the south from the rest of the union so
greatly that it was, from a time long before either she or the north had
become conscious of it, impelling her irresistibly towards an independent
nationality of her own, all of us natives know was the constructive and
plastic principle of her slave industrial and property system.
It is not the purpose of the foregoing expatiation to prove to you such a
familiar and well-known fact as that slavery parted north and south and
caused the brothers' war. Its purpose is to arouse you to consider
nationalization, and have you see how it acts according to a will of its
own and not of man, and now and then works out most stupendous results
contrary to all that mortals deem probabilities. You ought to recognize
that the forces which produced the Confederate States were just as
all-powerful and opposeless as those which produced the United States;
that in fact they were exactly the same in kind, that is, the forces of
nationalization.
To have you see that even at the time of making the federal constitution
the south had grown into a pro-slavery section and was far on the road
towards independence, it is necessary to correct the prevalent opinion
that there was then below Mason and Dixon's line a very widespread and
influential hostility to slavery. The manumission of his slaves by
Washington, the fearless and outspoken opposition to the institution by
Jefferson and some other prominent persons, and certain facts indicating
unfavorable sentiment, have been too hastily accepted by even historians
as demonstrations that the opinion is true. Here are the facts which prove
it to be utterly untrue. In 1784, three years before our epochal
convention assembled, Jefferson, as chairman of an appropriate committee
consisting besides himself of Chase of Maryland and Howell of Rhode
Island, reported to congress a plan for the temporary government of the
West Territory. This region contained not only all the territory that was
subsequently covered by the famous ordinance of 1787, but such a vast deal
more that it was proposed to make seventeen States out of the whole.
Consider this provision of the report, the suggestion and work of
Jefferson:
"That after the year 1800 of the christian era there shall be neither
slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of said States, otherwise
than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been
convicted to have been personally guilty."
When the report was taken up by congress, Spaight of North Carolina made a
motion to strike out the provision just quoted, and it was seconded by
Reed of South Carolina. On the vote North Carolina was divided; but all
the other southern States represented, to wit, Maryland, Virginia, and
South Carolina, voted for the motion, the colleagues of Jefferson of
Virginia and those of Chase of Maryland out-voting these two southerners
standing by the provision. All the northern States represented, which were
the then four New England States, New York, and Pennsylvania, voted for
the provision. But as it failed to get the necessary seven States it was
not retained.
Thus it appears that at the close of the Revolutionary war the interest of
the south in and her attachment to slavery were so great that by her
representatives in congress she appears to be almost unanimous against the
proposal to keep the institution from extending.
This action of the south shows that both Virginia in ceding that part of
the West Territory which was three years afterwards by the ordinance of
1787 put under Jefferson's provision which had been rejected when it had
been proposed for all the territory, and the south in voting unanimously
for the ordinance, were not actuated by hostility to slavery. The soil of
the territory north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi to which the
ordinance applied probably may have been thought by Virginians unsuited to
tobacco, the then sole crop upon which slave labor could be lucratively
used. Be that as it may, that the southern States in subsequent cessions
made not long afterwards guarded against slavery prohibition must be kept
in mind. When they are, it is proved that always from the time that
Jefferson's provision failed to carry in 1784, as has been told above, the
prevalent sentiment of the southern people overwhelmingly favored slavery.
Let us illustrate from later times. Writers who claim that the south,
meditating secession, purposed to reopen the African slave-trade, adduce
some relevant evidence which at first flush appears to be very weighty, if
not convincing. They show that A. H. Stephens of Georgia, who afterwards
became vice-president of the confederacy, in 1859 used language indicating
that he thought it vital to the south, in her struggle to extend the area
of slavery, to get more Africans; and they further show similar utterances
made at the time by certain papers and other prominent men of the south.
But the constitution of the Confederate States, adopted in 1861, contains
this provision:
"The importation of negroes of the African race from any foreign
country other than the slaveholding States or Territories of the
United States of America is hereby forbidden, and congress is required
to pass such laws as shall effectually prevent the same."
Of course this solemn act unanimously voted for by the members of the
congress, Stephens being one of them, counts incalculably more in weight
to prove that predominant southern sentiment was against reopening the
African slave-trade, than the counter evidence just stated. Likewise all
that Washington, Jefferson, and other of their contemporaries may have
done or said against slavery is outweighed by the contemporary pro-slavery
legislation and measures dictated by the south. It is very probable that
during the time we are now contemplating anti-slavery men were really as
few in the south as union men were after the first blood spilled in the
brothers' war.
Recall the three compromises between north and south, mentioned above, by
which the union was formed, and you will understand that the fathers were
preaching but to stones when they impugned slavery. And at this point
meditate the language of Madison in the historic convention, which shows
that he saw accurately even then the permanence of slavery, and the
unequivocal geographical division it had made. He was discussing the
apprehension of the small States, New Jersey, Delaware, and Rhode Island,
that under the union proposed they would be absorbed by the larger
adjacent States. He affirmed there was no such danger; and that the only
danger arose from the antagonism between the slave and the non-slave
sections. To avert this danger he proposed to arm north and south each
with defensive power against the other by conceding to the former the
superiority it would get in one branch of the federal legislature by
reason of its greater population if the members thereof came in equal
numbers from every State, large or small, and at the same time giving the
south superiority in the other branch by allowing it increased
representation therein for all its slaves counted as free inhabitants.
This prepares you for the language which we now give from the report, and
which we would have you meditate:
"He [Madison] admitted that every peculiar interest, whether in any
class of citizens, or any description of States, ought to be secured
as far as possible. Wherever there is danger of attack, there ought to
be given a constitutional power of defence. But he contended that the
States were divided into different interests, not by their difference
of size, but by other circumstances; the most material of which
resulted partly from climate, but principally from the effects of
their having or not having slaves. These causes concurred in forming
the great division of interests in the United States. It did not lie
between the large and small States. It lay between the northern and
southern; and if any defensive power were necessary, it ought to be
mutually given to these two interests. He was so strongly impressed
with this important truth, that he had been casting about in his mind
for some expedient that would answer the purpose. The one which had
occurred was that, instead of proportioning the votes of the States in
both branches to their respective number of inhabitants, computing the
slaves in the ratio of 5 to 3, they should be represented in one
branch according to the number of free inhabitants only; and in the
other according to their whole number, counting the slaves as free. By
this arrangement the southern scale would have the advantage in one
house and the northern in the other."
Madison meant to say that the great danger of disunion was that--we
emphasize his statement by repeating and italicizing the essential
part--"_the States were divided into different interests ... principally
from the effects of their having or not having slaves. These causes
concurred in forming the great division of interests in the United
States_."
How truly he expresses the economical antagonism of the southern and
northern States, although he hints nothing of the nationalizing tendency
of the former which was bound in time to show itself as one of "the
effects of their having slaves."
It seems to me that Mr. Adams overeulogizes the political instinct and
prophecy evinced by Madison at this tune. I cannot see that the latter
does anything more than merely recognize the fact then plain to all. Note
as proof this other passage quoted by Mr. Adams from Madison in the
convention, in which the material words are given by me in italics: "_It
seems now well understood_ that the real difference of interests lies, not
between the large and small, but between the northern and southern
States."
If the historical expert but duly consider the important facts marshalled
in the foregoing he must find them to be incontrovertible proofs that in
1787, when our fathers were making the federal constitution, and for some
years before, southern nationalization was not simply inchoate, but that
it was growing so rapidly its course could be stopped in but one way; that
is, by the extirpation of slavery, which was both its germ and active
principle. This was before the invention of the gin. After that the lower
south and west quickly added a vast territory to the empire of slavery,
and southern nationalization received throughout its whole domain a new, a
lasting, and a far more powerful impetus. And when the cotton States, as
we call them, had really developed their industry, the southern
confederacy was inevitable.
The fact of this nationalization is indisputable. When the confederates
organized their government at Montgomery, everybody looking on felt and
said that a new nation was born. Why ignore what is so plain and so
important? Thus Mr. Adams most graphically contrasts the two widely
different northern and southern civilizations which were flourishing side
by side,[26] and with a momentary inadvertence he ascribes national
development only to the civilization north of the Potomac and Ohio, and
treats State sovereignty as anti-national. The fact is that a
nationalization, the end of which was southern independence, had been long
active, as we have perhaps too copiously shown, and the doctrine of State
sovereignty was really nothing but its instrument, nurse, and organ. Every
southern State that invoked State sovereignty and seceded was shortly
afterwards found in the new southern nation. Had that nation prospered,
the doctrine would soon have died a natural death even in the confederacy.
Nationalization is the cardinal fact, the _vis major_, on each side. The
free-labor nationalization of the north, purposing to appropriate and hold
the continent, fashioned a self-preserving weapon of the assumption that
the fathers made by the constitution an indissoluble union; the slave
nationalization of the south, purposing to appropriate and hold that part
of the continent suiting its special staples, assumed that the fathers
preserved State sovereignty intact in the federal union.
The closer you look the plainer you will see that the United States held
within itself two nationalities so inveterately hostile to each other that
gemination was long imminent before it actually occurred. The hostility
between the statesmen of Virginia and her daughter States and those of the
north, and especially New England,--Jefferson on one side and Hamilton and
Adams on the other,--the party following the former calling itself
republican and that following the latter calling itself federalist, was
really rooted in the hostility of the two nationalities; and a survival of
this hostility is now unpleasantly vigorous between many northern and
southern writers and lecturers, each class claiming too much of the good
in our past history for its own section and ascribing too much of the bad
to the other. As a lady friend, a native of Michigan who has lived in the
south some years, remarked to me not long since, as soon as one going
north crosses the Ohio he feels that he has entered another country;
behind him is a land of corn-pone, biscuit, three cooked meals a day, and
houses tended untidily by darkey servants; before him is a land of bakers'
bread of wheat, where there is hardly more than one warm meal a day, and
the houses are kept as neat as a pin by the mothers and daughters of the
family. Greater public activity of the county while there is hardly any at
all of its subdivisions, the representative system almost everywhere in
the municipalities, no government by town-meeting and no direct
legislation except occasionally, a most crude and feeble rural common
school system, distinguish and characterize the south; buoyant energy of
the township in public affairs, government by town-meeting instead of by
representatives, a common-school system energetically improving,
distinguish and characterize the north. The manners and customs of
southerners are peculiar. To use an expressive cant word, they "gush" more
than northeners. In cars and public meetings they give their seats to
ladies, while northerners do not. Southerners are quick to return a blow
for insulting words, and in the consequent rencounter they are prone to
use deadly weapons; while northerners are generally as averse to personal
violence as were the Greeks and Romans in their palmiest time. The
battle-cry of the confederates was a wild cheering--a fox-hunt yell, as we
called it; that of the union soldiers was huzza! huzza! huzza! From the
beginning to the end, even at Franklin and Bentonville, and at Farmville,
just two days before I was surrendered at Appomattox, the confederates
always, if possible, took the offensive; the union soldiers were like the
sturdy Englishmen, whose tactics from Hastings to Waterloo have generally
been defensive.
This battle yell, this impetuous charge after charge until the field is
won, marks the fighting of the Americans at King's Mountain--all of them
southerners; and it is another weighty proof of the early coalescence of
the south as a community on its way to independence.
Many other contrasts could be suggested. Think over the foregoing. They
are the respective effects of two different causes,--a free-labor
nationalization above, and a slave-labor nationalization below, Mason and
Dixon's line. The latter--its origin and course--is the especial subject
of this chapter. I believe that the proofs marshalled above demonstrate to
the fair and unprejudiced reader that southern nationalization commenced
before the making of the federal constitution, and afterwards went
directly on, gathering force and power all the while, until it culminated
in
"A storm-cradled nation that fell."
CHAPTER V
AMERICAN NATIONALIZATION, AND HOW IT MADE THE BOND OF UNION STRONGER AND
STRONGER
Greece was going down in her contest with Macedon when she gave the world
to come the Achaean league, the first historical example of full-grown
federation. As Freeman says of such a federal government: "Its perfect
form is a late growth of a very high state of political culture."[27] This
historian thus summarizes its essentials:
"Two requisites seem necessary to constitute federal government in
this its most perfect form. On the one hand, each of the members of
the union must be wholly independent in those matters which concern
each member only. On the other hand, all must be subject to a common
power in those matters which concern the whole body of members
collectively."[28]
No author has yet shown a better-considered and more accurate appreciation
of the benefits to different communities of federal union. But the
islander could not conceive--even at the centre of the British empire
spread over the world--the advanced phase of Anglo-Saxon federation in
America and Australia, which for want of a better name we may call, using
a grand word of our fathers, continental federation.
And Americans of every generation have misunderstood the true nature of
our union, and especially how it was made and how it could be unmade. The
fathers were as much mistaken as to the real authorship of the
declaration of independence, the articles of confederation, and the
federal constitution, as Burke and many people of his time were as to the
true causes of the French revolution, or as the brothers were as to those
of their war. In all that the fathers did they were sure that they acted
as agents solely of their respective colonies or States, which they
believed to be independent and sovereign. Therefore they maintained that
the authorship of the three great documents just mentioned was that of the
separate States, when in truth it was that of the union. When the latter,
which had been long forming its rudiments, came into something like
consciousness, it at once spurred our fathers to make the declaration of
independence. The declaration corresponds to the later ordinances of
secession. And this union, gathering strength, led our fathers to make the
old confederation; and its articles and the belonging government are
closely paralleled by the constitution of the Confederate States and its
belonging government. As southern nationalization brought forth the
southern confederacy, so it was American nationalization that caused
secession from England, the declaration of independence, and the
confederation which won the Revolutionary war. To summarize the foregoing:
Southern nationalization evolved the southern union, and American
nationalization evolved the American union. The fathers, with the usual
undiscernment of contemporaries, by a most natural _hysteron proteron_
conceived the latter union to be the work, product, and result of the
constitution. In the intersectional contention, the south accepted the
mistakes of the fathers and rested her cause upon them, and the north,
instead of correcting them, substituted a huge and glaring mistake of her
own. Advocating the maintenance of the constitution over all the States,
she sought to refute the doctrine of State sovereignty urged by the south
with the arguments of those who had opposed the adoption of the federal
constitution. Patrick Henry and Nathan Dane--we omit the others--argued
that the constitution, if ratified, would really wipe out State lines and
make the central government supreme in authority over the States, and
actually sovereign. Could the people of the thirteen States have been made
to believe this, they would have unanimously rejected the instrument.
Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and many others competent to advise, stood
in solid phalanx on the other side, and the people were convinced by them
that adoption would have no such effect. They decided that the arguments
were not good, and the constitution was ratified. But the discredited
arguments were afterwards, by a very queer psychological process, taken up
by Story, Webster, and a great host, and paraded as unanswerable
refutation of the doctrine of State sovereignty, and demonstration that by
the constitution the United States had acquired absolute supremacy over
the different States.[29] At a later place we will try to show you how
Webster's glory outshines that of every other actor, except Lincoln, in
the great struggle between north and south. But here we must emphasize
how, when supporting the fallacies of Patrick Henry and Nathan Dane, he
met the one real and signal defeat of his life, to which the drubbing he
received from Binney in the Girard College case was a small affair--a
defeat none the less signal because at the time, and long afterwards, it
was and still is crowned as a glorious victory by thousands upon
thousands.
The force-bill had just been introduced into the senate of the United
States. It provided for the collection of the revenue in defiance of the
nullification ordinance of South Carolina. The next day, January 22, 1833,
Calhoun offered in that body his famous resolutions, embodying his
doctrine of nullification, under which he justified the ordinance just
mentioned. The 16th of the next month, Webster discussed the two cardinal
ones of these resolutions at length. As he summarized them, they affirmed:
"1. That the political system under which we live, and under which
congress is now assembled, is a compact, to which the people of the
several States, as separate and sovereign communities, are the
parties.
2. That these sovereign parties have a right to judge, each for
itself, of any alleged violation of the constitution by congress; and
in case of such violation, to choose, each for itself, its own mode
and measure of redress."
He had not long before contemplated making an address to the public in
answer to Calhoun's pro-nullification letter to Governor Hamilton in the
form of a letter from himself to Kent; and it cannot be doubted that he
had got himself ready for this; nor can it be doubted that in the
twenty-five days' interim he had not only worked over and adapted the
unused materials of the address mentioned, but he had most diligently made
special preparation for his speech--in short, it may be assumed that he
had bestowed upon the subject of the resolutions the most searching
examination and profound meditation of which, with his superhuman powers,
he was capable. In spite of all his conscientious labors, as I am now
especially concerned to impress upon you, he injured and set back the
cause of the union by defending it with answerable arguments--nay, rather,
with arguments helping the other side.
At the outset he severely and sternly rebukes two terms of Calhoun's, one
being the use of _constitutional compact_ for _constitution_, and the
other being _the accession of a State to the constitution_. These terms
are utterly impermissible, and are to be scouted. If we accept them, _we
must acquiesce in the monstrous conclusions which the author of the
resolutions draws from them_. That is really what Webster says. Note the
confident positiveness of his pertinent language, some of which we
subjoin:
"It is easy, quite easy, to see why the honorable gentleman has used
it [constitutional compact] in these resolutions. He cannot open the
book, and look upon our written frame of government, without seeing
that it is called a _constitution_. This may well be appalling to him.
It threatens his whole doctrine of compact, and its darling
derivatives, nullification and secession, with instant confutation.
Because, if he admits our instrument of government to be a
_constitution_, then, for that very reason, it is not a compact
between sovereigns; a constitution of government and a compact between
sovereign powers being things essentially unlike in their very
natures, and incapable of ever being the same.
We know no more of a constitutional compact between sovereign powers
than we know of a _constitutional_ indenture of copartnership, a
_constitutional_ bill of exchange. But we know what the _constitution_
is; we know what the bond of our union and the security of our
liberties is; and we mean to maintain and to defend it, in its plain
sense and unsophisticated meaning."
This is enough of the exorcism of that malignant spirit, constitutional
compact. Now as to the other malignant spirit. Webster says:
"The first resolution declares that the people of the several States
'_acceded_' to the constitution, or to the constitutional compact, as
it is called. This word 'accede,' not found either in the constitution
itself, or in the ratification of it by any one of the States, has
been chosen for use here, doubtless, not without a well-considered
purpose.
The natural converse of _accession_ is _secession_; and, therefore,
when it is stated that the people of the States acceded to the union,
it may be more plausibly argued that they may secede from it. _If in
adopting the constitution, nothing was done but acceding to a compact,
nothing would seem necessary to break it up, but to secede from the
same compact._ But the term is wholly out of place.... The people of
the United States have used no such form of expression in establishing
the present government. They do not say that they _accede_ to a
league, but they declare that they _ordain and establish_ a
constitution. Such are the very words of the instrument itself; and in
all the States, without exception, the language used by their
conventions was, that they '_ratified_ the constitution;' some of them
employing the additional words 'assented to' and 'adopted,' but all of
them 'ratifying.'"
Note that I have italicized in the quotation certain admissions of
Webster, which, in case his premises should be disproved, concede the
cause to his adversary. And we will now tell you how Calhoun did disprove
those premises.
He showed that Webster himself had in a senate speech called the
constitution a _constitutional compact_; and that President Washington, in
his official announcement to congress, described North Carolina as
_acceding_ to the union by the ratification she had at last made of the
constitution.
As to these two points Calhoun further sustained himself with
unquestionable authority and also argument inconfutable by one who, like
Webster, did not find the true _ratio decidendi_, that is, the effect of
evolution to bring forth the nation.
The rest of Calhoun's answer will be considered a little later. But what
of it has already been given covers the essentials of the controversy. In
supporting his proposition that the States were sovereign when they made
the constitution, and kept their entire sovereignty intact afterwards, he
was too strong for his antagonist. And yet had his knowledge of the facts
been fuller, how much better he could have done. He could have quoted from
all the great men who made the constitution and secured its ratification
language, in which _accede_ is used again and again in the same sense as
it is in his resolutions.
Likewise, he could have quoted language in which they designated the
constitution as a compact or something synonymous. Madison--to mention
only one of many instances--advocating ratification in the Virginia
convention, called the constitution "a government of _a federal nature_,
consisting of _many coequal sovereignties_." What an effective _argumentum
ad hominem_ could Calhoun have found in the provision of the constitution
of the State of Webster, to wit: that Massachusetts is free, sovereign,
and independent, retaining every power which she has not expressly
delegated to the United States.[30]
Webster also made blunders in construing the context of the constitution,
as well as the clauses specially involved, in contrasting the constitution
with the articles of confederation, and in his reading of our
constitutional history. These blunders were exhaustively, ably,
relentlessly exposed.
We who are trained either in forensic or parliamentary debate well know
the conquering and demolishing reply. Although, as we have just shown,
Calhoun's reply could have been far more effective than it really was,
still its success and triumph were so evident that when he closed, John
Randolph, who had heard it, wanted a hat obstructing his sight removed, so
that, as he said, he might see "Webster die, muscle by muscle."
Master the question at issue, and read the two speeches as impartially as
you strive to read the discussion of AEschines and Demosthenes, and if you
are qualified to judge of debate between intellectual giants you must
admit that Webster was driven from every inch of ground chosen by him as
his very strongest, and which he confidently believed that he could hold
against the world.
Yet the union men, who were hosts in the north and numerous even in the
south at that time, accepted Webster's speech as the bible of their
political faith, and as its reward ennobled him with the pre-eminent title
of Expounder of the Constitution. They ignored, or they never learned of,
the pulverizing refutation. But the State-rights men and the south
generally understood. Webster also understood. He did not make any real
rejoinder. And his subsequent utterances are in harmony with the
State-rights doctrine to which Calhoun seems to have converted him.[31] I
fancy that with that rare humor which was one of his shining gifts, he
dubbed himself in his secret meditations, "Expounder because not
expounding." Later I shall tell you how Webster builded better than he
knew, and that there was, after all, in the speech that which fully
justifies the worship it received from the union men.
But there is something else pertinent to be learned here. That the north
generally found out only what Webster said in the debate for his side, and
never even heard of what was said on the other, and that the south became
at once familiar with both speeches, proves that each section had already
formed its own belonging and independent public, and that the southern
public kept attentive watch upon all affairs of fact or opinion
interesting the other, while the northern public knew hardly anything at
all of the south. A large percentage of the southern leaders had studied
in northern schools and colleges. In this and many other ways they had
been instructed as to the north. Such instruction contributed very greatly
to southern supremacy in the federal government until the election of
Lincoln. We can now see that the powers in charge, as a part of their
work, made the great northern public, which, as Lincoln observed, was to
be the savior of the union, stop its ears to all anti-union sentiments or
arguments. How else can you understand it that the ante-bellum notices of
Webster, the memoir by Everett, the different utterances of Choate, and
many, many other sketches, are so utterly dumb as to Calhoun's great
reply? And is not the same dumbness of Curtis, Von Holst, and McMaster,
writing after the war, due to the survival in the north of the old
constraint? a constraint so powerful that, while Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge, in
1883, did concede just a little to Calhoun, he stopped far short of the
full justice that I believe he would now render were he to traverse the
ground again.
We must now go beyond what we have already hinted, and show you plainly
how both the union men and the State-rights men assumed untenable
premises, and how the south, maintaining a cause foredoomed, vanquished in
the forum of discussion her adversary, maintaining the side which fate had
decreed must win. In no other way can the reader be better made to
understand the incalculable potency of the forces which preserved the
American union after its orators and advocates had all been discomfited;
and in no other way can he better learn what principles are to be invoked
if he would grasp the real essence of the union.
We emphasize the material and cardinal mistake of the union men, thus
phrased by Webster in the speech we have discussed: "Whether the
constitution be a compact between States in their sovereign capacities, is
a question which must be mainly argued from what is contained in the
instrument itself."
This was to abandon inexpugnable ground. That ground was the great body of
pertinent facts, known to all, which begun the making of the union before
the declaration of independence, and which, from that time on to the very
hour that Webster was speaking, had been making the union stronger and
more perfect. He ought to have contended that a nation grows; that it
cannot be made, or be at all modified, even by a constitution. Any
constitution is its creature, not its creator.
How weak he was when he invoked construction of the federal constitution
as the main umpire. That constitution had been always construed against
him. The three departments of the federal government had each uniformly
treated it as a compact between sovereign States; and they kept this up
until the brothers' war broke out. Mr. Stephens, in his great
compilation,[32] demonstrates this unanswerably. But the State-rights men
had a still greater strength than even this, if the question be conceded
to be one of construction. As the author of the Republic of Republics
shows by a mountain of proofs, the illustrious draftsmen of the
constitution and their contemporaries who finally got the constitution
adopted--all the people, high and low, who favored the cause--declared at
the time that the sovereignty of the States would remain unimpaired after
adoption.[33]
To sum up, the generation that drafted and adopted the constitution, and
all the succeeding ones who had lived under it, agreed that the States
were sovereign.
How could even Webster talk these facts out of existence? At every stage
of the intersectional debate the cause of the south supporting State
sovereignty became stronger. And there were great hosts at the north who
understood the record as the south did; and, while they hoped and prayed
that separation would never come, they conscientiously conceded State
sovereignty to the full. It seems to me to be the fact that, although the
federal soldiers cherished deep love for the union, a very great majority
of the more intelligent among them did not long keep at its height the
emotion excited by the attack on Fort Sumter, and soon settled back into
their former creed, holding, because of the reasons summarized above, the
States to be sovereign; and while they thought it supreme folly in the
south to set up the confederacy, they still believed that to do so was
but the exercise of an indubitable right of the States creating it. From
what I saw at the time, and the many proofs that appeared to accumulate
upon me afterwards, this explains the unprecedented panic with which the
federal army abandoned the field at the First Manassas. Consider just a
moment. The federal army, giving the confederates a complete surprise,
turns their position and drives them back in rout. The confederates make
an unexpected stand, fight for some hours, and at last, assuming the
offensive, win the field. The troops on each side practically all raw
volunteers, very much alike in race and character. But the federals had
much more than two to one engaged, as is demonstrated by the fact that the
confederates had only twenty-five regiments of infantry in action, and
they took prisoners from fifty-five. The more one who, like me, observed
much of the war, thinks it over, the more clearly he sees that the flight
from Manassas is not to be explained because of the superior courage and
stamina of the southern soldiers. I believe that the union men, observing
how brave and death-defying their brothers on the other side were in
facing disaster that seemed irretrievable and odds irresistible, at last
became convinced that these brothers, defending home and firesides, were
right, and that they themselves, invading an inviolably sovereign State,
were heinously wrong; and thus awakened conscience made cowards of all
these gallant men. And it is thoroughly established, I believe, that
everywhere in the first engagements of the war, the southern volunteers,
if they were commanded by a fighter, showed far more spirit and stomach
than their adversaries. In the amicable meetings, often occurring upon the
picket line, when we confederates would with good humor ask the union men
how it was that we won so many fights, it was a stereotyped reply of the
latter, "Why, you are fighting for your country and we only for $13 a
month." It was but natural that, by reason of what has been told in the
foregoing, the south unanimously, and a very large number at the north,
should believe any State could under its reserved powers rightfully secede
from the union whenever and for whatever cause it pleased.
We see now what the angry brothers did not see. The absolute sovereignty
of the States, and the right of secession both _de facto_ and _de jure_
could have been conceded, and at the same time the war for the union
justified. The unionists could well have said to the south:
"Your independence is too great a menace to our interests to be
tolerated, and the high duty of self-defence commands that we resist
to the death. The _status quo_ is better for us all. Now that you have
set up for yourself, we must tell you, sadly but firmly, that if you
do not come back voluntarily, we must resort to coercion,--not under
the constitution, for you have thrown that off, but under the law of
nations to which you have just subjected yourself."
The man who of all southerners has given State sovereignty its most
learned and able defence--Sage, the author of "The Republic of
Republics"--says: "To coerce a state is unconstitutional; but it is
equally true that the precedent of coercing states is established, and
that it is defensible under the law of nations."[34]
To have received the confederate commissioners as representing an
independent nation, and made demand that the seceding States return to the
union, would have been a far stronger theory than that on which the war
was avowedly waged; for it would have taken from the south that
superiority in the argument which had given her great prestige in Europe,
and even in the north. And lastly, under the law of nations, the federal
government, after coercing the seceding States back, would have had--even
according to the theory of State rights as maintained in the
south--perfectly legitimate power to abolish slavery. The statement that
emancipation was "sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by
the constitution, upon military necessity," protests so much that one sees
that the highly conscientious man hesitated and doubted. And well may he
have doubted; for what warrant can be found in the constitution for
destroying that property which it solemnly engaged to defend and protect
as a condition precedent of its adoption?--that is, if the southern States
were still in the union and under the constitution, as was claimed by all
who justified the proclamation? But if the southern States had gone out of
the union, they had revoked their ratification and had thrown away all the
protection of slavery given by the constitution; and while the
constitution did not direct how the federal government should act in the
matter, the law of nations gave full and ample directions. Its authority
was not stinted nor hampered by any rights recognized in the constitution
as reserved to the States under it. The subsequent amendment, imposed as a
condition of reconstruction, shows that the people of the north seriously
questioned if slavery had been abolished by the proclamation and its
enforcement by the union armies.
But this, strong as it was, would not have been the true theory. The true
theory--the real fact--is that at the outbreak of the brothers' war, and
long before, the States had become more closely connected than the
Siamese Twins,--indissolubly united as integral parts of the same
organism, like the different trunks of the Banyan tree; and while the
southern nationalization was opposing the union forces with might and
main, it was really but an excrescence, with roots far more shallow than
those of the American union--a parasite like the mistletoe, growing upon
the American body politic, fated to die of itself if not destroyed by its
fell foe. For, as we have explained, the sole motor of this southern
nationalization--slavery--could no more maintain itself permanently
against free labor than the handloom could stand against the steam-loom,
or the draft-horse can much longer compete with artificial traction power.
Now let us rapidly set in array the stronger supports of this true theory.
We should start with the impulse to combine which adjacency always gives
to communities of the same origin; and external compression and joint
interest to those of diverse origin, as we see in the case of the Swiss.
How clearly does our great American sociologist trace the effect of this
impulse in ancient society. First a body of consanguinei grows into a
gens; after a while, neighboring gentes of the same stock-language form a
tribe; then neighboring tribes, as some of the Iroquois and Aztecs, form a
confederacy. At this point the development of the American Indians was
arrested by the coming of the whites. "A coalescence of tribes into a
nation had not occurred in any case in any part of America," says the
great authority.[35] But we can easily understand what would have occurred
had the Indians been left to themselves. They would have passed out of the
nomadic state into settlements of fixed abodes, local and geographical
political divisions evolving from the old gentes and tribes, the
contiguous ones often uniting. History furnishes many examples of
neighboring communities coalescing into nations. One of the most
remarkable of all is the environment which has constrained peoples of four
different languages to coalesce into the little Swiss nation. Turning away
from prehistoric times and also ancient history, let the student
re-enforce the case of the Swiss, just alluded to, with the modern
nation-making in Italy and Germany. These few of the many instances which
can be given show how and what sorts of adjacent communities are prone to
co-operate or combine for a common purpose, and how such combination
develops at last an irresistible proneness to national union. Drops of
liquid in proximity to one another on a plane may long maintain each their
independent forms; but bring them into actual contact, and presto! all the
globules have coalesced into a single mass. After the belonging part of
the evolutionary science of sociology has been fully developed--which time
does not seem very far off--the subject will receive adequate
illustration. Then all of us will understand that, many years before
Alamance and Lexington, the colonies, in their defence of themselves
against the Indians and the French, in their intercommunication over
innumerable matters of joint interest, in the beneficent example of the
Iroquois confederacy and the advice of our fathers by the Iroquois, as
early as 1755, to form one of the colonies similar to their own,[36] and
in many other things that can be suggested, were steadily becoming one
people, and more and more predisposed to political union. We shall also
see, much more clearly than we do yet, that the Revolutionary war, by
keeping them some years under a general government, imparted new and
powerful impetus to the nationalizing forces, which were working none the
less surely because unobserved. Our lesson will be completely learned
when we recognize that about the time the war with the mother country
commenced the globules, that is, the separate colonies, had become
actually a quasi-political whole,--a stage of evolution so near to that of
full nationality that it is hard to distinguish the two. It seems to me
that the nation had come at least into rudimentary existence when the
declaration of independence was made. Surely from that time on something
wondrously like a _de facto_ national union of the old colonies grew
rapidly, and became stronger and stronger; and this to me is the
sufficient and only explanation of the seismic popular upheaval that
displaced the weaker government under the articles of confederation with
one endowed by the federal constitution with ample powers to administer
the affairs of the nation now beginning to stir with consciousness. And
yet so blind was everybody that in 1787 the delegates and their
constituents all believed the convention to be the organ of the States,
when in truth it was the organ of the new American nation. Prompted by a
self-preserving instinct, this nationality deftly kept itself hid. Had it
been disclosed, the federal constitution could not have been adopted; and
had a suspicion of it come a few years later, there would have been
successful secession. And so each State dreamed on its sweet dream of
dominion until the call to the stars and stripes rang through the north.
Then its people began darkly and dimly to discern the nationalization
which had united the States and become a hoop of adamant to hold the union
forever stanch. Of course to the south nothing appeared but the State
sovereignty of the fathers. Her illuded sight was far clearer and more
confident than the true vision of the north, and she magnified State
sovereignty which she thought she saw, and damned the American
nationality preached by the north as anti-State-rights, when at that very
time a nationality of her own had really put all the southern States at
its feet. It mattered not for the thick perception of the north and the
optical illusion of the south, the American nation was now full grown; and
by the result of the brothers' war it made good its claim to sovereignty.
The historian must accurately gauge the effect wrought by the wonderfully
successful career of the United States under the federal constitution in
its first years. War with France imminent, Pinckney's winged word,
"Millions for defence, but not a cent for tribute," the sword buckled on
again by the father of his country--and peace; the extension of our domain
from the Mississippi to the Pacific by the Louisiana purchase; the
victories won against the men who used to say scornfully that our fathers
could not stand the bayonet, and the still more surprising victories won
with an improvised navy against the mistress of the seas, in the war of
1812; the brilliant operations of Decatur against Algiers; the military
power of the Indians decisively and permanently outclassed, until soon our
women and children on the border were practically secure against the
tomahawk and scalping knife; and perhaps above all the world-wide
spaciousness, as it were, and the inexpressibly greater dignity and
splendor of the public arena, as compared with that of any single colony
or State, which was opened at once to every ambitious spirit--these are
some, only, of the feats and achievements which gave the United States
unquestioned authority at home and incomparable prestige around the world.
And on and on the American nation rushed, from one stage of growth into
and through another, until the result was that for some years before
secession State sovereignty, for all of the high airs it gave itself and
the imposing show of respect it extorted, had become merely a survival.
Thus did the American nation form, from a number of different neighboring,
cognate, and very closely-akin communities, under that complex of the
forces of growth and those of combination which imperceptibly and
resistlessly steers the social organism along the entire track of its
evolution. The nationalizing leaven was hidden by the powers in charge of
our national destiny in the colonial meal, and it had in time so
completely leavened the whole lump that Rhode Island, and North Carolina,
trying hard to stay out, and Texas desporting joyfully and proudly under
the lone star in her golden independence, could not break the invisible
leading strings, which pulled all three into the United States. Note how
Oregon and California, though largely settled from the south yet being
without slavery, in their extreme remoteness from the brothers' war
adhered to the union cause. And had the southern confederacy triumphed in
the war, the States in it would have staid out of the federal union only
the few years necessary for slavery to run its course. When there was no
more virgin soil for cotton, the southern nation, which was merely a
growth upon the American nation, would have collapsed of itself, as did
the State of Frankland; and that continental brotherhood which brought in
Rhode Island, North Carolina, and Texas, would have commandingly
reasserted itself. The more you contemplate the facts, the more it is seen
that this continental brotherhood was and is the most vigorous tap-root
and stock of nationality in all history. The providence which at first
gradually and surely mixed the colonies into one people, then into a
feeble and infirm political whole, rapidly hardening in consistency, and
lastly into an indissoluble union, and which was from the beginning more
and more developing us into a nation--this overruling evolution, and not
constitution or lawmaking organs, has been, is, and always will be the
ultimate and supreme authority, the opposeless lawgiver, the resistlessly
self-executing higher law in America, creating, altering, modifying or
abolishing man-made constitutions, laws, ordinances, and statutes, as
suits its own true democratic purpose, often inscrutable to
contemporaries.
The foregoing is the substance of the argument that must now take the
place of that made by Webster and the unionists after him, which was
convincingly confuted by the south. It proves the complete and immaculate
justice of the war for the union.
This view differs from the other, which we admitted above to be very
strong, mainly in refusing to concede that a State is sovereign and can
legitimately secede at will. But under it, it ought to be conceded that
the States in the southern confederacy were for the time actually out of
the American union by revolution. It is not possible to say they were in
rebellion; that is an offence of individuals standing by an authority
hastily improvised and manifestly sham. It was not by the action of
individuals, but it was by the action of States, veritable political
entities and quasi sovereigns, that the confederacy was organized. When
these States were coerced back, they could not invoke the protection to
their slaves given in a constitution which they had solemnly repudiated.
The United States could therefore deal with them as it had with the
Territories from which it excluded slavery. While of course adequate
protection of the freedmen against their former masters ought to have been
provided, it should at the same time have been made clear to the world
that slavery was abolished solely because events had demonstrated it to be
the only root and cause of dismemberment of the union. Such a familiar
example as the often-exercised power of a municipality to blow up a house,
without compensation therefor, to stop the progress of conflagration, and
many other seemingly arbitrary acts done by society in its
self-preservation, would have occurred to conscientious people
contemplating. And it would have been a long flight in morals above the
proclamation, merely to have justified emancipation on the ground that the
existence of slavery was a serious menace to the life of the nation.
One's logic may be often wrong, and yet his proposition has been rightly
given him by an instinct, as we so often see in the case of good women. O
this subliminal self of ours, how it bends us hither and thither, as the
solid hemisphere does the little human figure upon it, posing with a
seeming will of his own! Hence, and not from our argument-making faculty,
come not only our own most important principles of action, but also our
very strongest persuasive influence. And it is the subconscious mental
forces moving great masses of men and women all the same way--that is, the
national instincts--which are the all-conquering powers that the apostle
of a good cause arouses and sets in array. And while it is true that the
mere logic of Webster's anti-nullification speech is puerile, the after
world will more and more couple that speech with the reply to Hayne, and
keep the two at the top--above every effort of all other orators. In the
reply to Hayne, in 1830, he had magnified the union in a passage which
ever since has deservedly led all selections for American speech books.
And now, in 1833, when dismemberment actually makes menace of its ugly
self, the great wizard of speech that takes consciences and hearts
captive,[37] proclaimed to his countrymen that there could be no such
thing as lawful secession or nullification. The earnestness and the
emphasis with which he said this were supreme merits of the speech. And
thenceforth it was enough to the hosts of the north to remember that the
American, towering like a mountain above them all, had in his high place
solemnly declared that secession is necessarily revolution. And, to one
who is familiar with the hypnotizing effect of subconscious national
suggestion it is not strange that they scouted Calhoun's demolishing
reply, and treasured Webster's false logic as supreme and perfect
exposition of the constitution.
CHAPTER VI
ROOT-AND-BRANCH ABOLITIONISTS AND FIRE-EATERS
For a long while opposition to slavery was moderate and not unreasoning.
The first actual quarrel over it between the sections was when Missouri
applied for admission to the union in 1818. That was settled by the famous
compromise of 1820. The most of the anti-slavery men of that day stood
only against the extension of slavery. While many a one of them believed
his conviction was dictated, independently and entirely, by his
conscience, it was in fact given him because of his relation to the
free-labor nationalization claiming the public lands for itself. That was
also true of the great mass of northerners opposed to slavery down to the
very beginning of the war. They wanted the Territories for themselves. The
contest between the United States and England for Oregon is a parallel
case. The American felt, if this territory falls to the United States, I
and my children and children's children can get cheap land somewhere in
it; but if it falls to England, I and they are forever shut out. In the
intersectional contest over the public lands northerners felt that they
would be practically excluded from any part of them into which slavery was
carried; for infinitely preferring, as they did, the free-labor system, to
which they had been bred, to the slavery system, of which they had no
experience, and against which they were prejudiced, they would never
voluntarily settle where it obtained. This, the prevalent view, brought
about the compromise of 1820, by which all the territory north of 36 deg. 30'
was guaranteed to free labor, that is, to the north, not because its
inhabitants were burning with zeal to repress the spread of what they
thought to be an unspeakable moral wrong, but because they purposed
thereby to insure a fair inheritance to their own children.
So much for what we have called the first quarrel between the sections
over slavery. Let us now glance at the stages following until the
root-and-branch abolitionist shows himself.
For some twenty years after the Missouri compromise was made there was
hardly any public agitation at all as to slavery. In 1840 an abolition
ticket for the presidency was nominated, but it received a support much
smaller than had been currently predicted. It is not until January, 1836,
when, upon Calhoun's motion in the senate of the United States to reject
two petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia,
there ensued a prolonged and passionate discussion, that we can say that
the old free-soil practically begins to pass into an abolition movement.
Here moral attack upon slavery seriously begins. If we think but a moment
we will understand it too well to explain it as an arousal of conscience,
which ought to have been aroused many years before if slavery was indeed
the terrible sin the abolitionists now commenced to say it was. The
agitation of 1830, the year that Webster replied to Hayne, and that of
1833, when he and Calhoun crossed swords over nullification, mark a great
advance of intersectional antagonism beyond that of the time of the
Missouri compromise. We can see now as we look back what contemporaries
could not see, that is, that the two were _avant couriers_ of the southern
confederacy. But some of the contemporaries did discern the fact--not
consciously, but instinctively. With these there was, in subliminal
ratiocination, a process somewhat as follows: The southern confederacy, if
it does come, will disrupt the union, which assures, while it lasts,
immunity of our country from frequent wars upon its own soil, and from the
heavy load of great armies kept up even in the intervals of peace. This
disruption will establish in America all the evil conditions of Europe
from which our fathers fled hither. Slavery is the _vis matrix_, the sole
developing force, the life of this menaced confederacy. Let us abolish
slavery, and preserve the union.
How accurately the common instincts--especially those protecting our
private interests--discern both the favorable and unfavorable, becomes
more of a marvel to me every year. To them the favorable is morally right,
the unfavorable morally wrong. If the latter threatens great injury, they
excite against it deep-seated indignation as if it were a crime. How else
can you explain it that all the churches, accepting the same Christ and
worshipping the same God, were at last divided, the northern churches
impugning and the southern churches defending slavery. Dwell upon this
fact until you interpret it aright. On one side the most conscientious and
the best of the north unanimous that slavery is morally wrong; on the
other the most conscientious and best of the south unanimous that it is
morally right. Then think of the northern and southern statesmen, jurists,
and the great public leaders; and at the last consider that the entire
people of one section prayed for, fought and died for, slavery, while that
of the other did the same things against it. When you do this, you must
admit that our community, our country, the society of which we are
members, fashions our consciences and makes our opinions.
The economic interest of the north was against slavery. It was her
interest to get all the territory possible for opportunity to her free
workers. It was also a transcendent economic interest of hers that there
be no great foreign power near her to require of her that she put
thousands of bread-winners and wealth-makers to idle in a standing army.
On the other side the economic interest of the south in slavery was so
great it commanded her to sacrifice all the advantages of union to
preserve slavery, if that should be necessary. Each side feels deeply and
more and more angrily that the other is seeking to rob it of the means of
production and subsistence--the property to which of all it believes its
title most indefeasible. It required some years to bring affairs to this
point; but it was accomplished at last; and the north was ready for the
root-and-branch abolitionist and the south for the fire-eater. Of course
all this effect of oppugnant economical interests is under the guidance of
the directors of evolution, who generally have their human servants to
masquerade as characters widely different from the true. When these
servants put on high airs as if they were doing their own will and not
that of their masters, how the directors must smile. They have guaranteed
animal reproduction from one generation to another by the impulsion of a
supreme momentary pleasure, as Lucretius most philosophically recognizes
in his _dux vitae dia voluptas_. The passion of anger is the converse of
that of love. When consent cannot settle some great controversy that must
be settled, the passion of anger is so greatly excited by the instigation
of the directors that the disputants leave arguments and come to blows. In
the ripeness of time the Ransy Sniffleses[38] come forth. They say and do
everything possible to bring on the impending mortal combat. They never
grasp the essence of the contention, for it is their mission to arouse
feeling, passion, anger. They are resistlessly--most conscientiously and
honestly--impelled to make the other side appear detestable and
insultingly offensive in heinous wrong-doing. The most zealous and the
most influential of the root-and-branch abolitionists were young when they
vaulted into the arena. Garrison was twenty-six when he started the
"Liberator" in 1831, Wendell Phillips was some six years younger than
Garrison, and he was about twenty-six when he made his debut with a
powerful impromptu in Boston, in 1837. Whittier was two years younger than
Garrison, and he was early a co-worker in the "Liberator." It is
demonstrated by everything they said that they were entirely ignorant of
the south and its people, of the average condition of the slave in the
south, and especially of the negro's grade of humanity. They never studied
and investigated facts diligently and impartially, desiring only to
ascertain the truth. They assumed the facts to be as it suited their
purposes, given them by the directors, of exciting hatred of their
opponents,--and it added greatly to their efficiency that they fully
believed their assumptions. Knowing really nothing of the negro except
that he was a man, it was natural for them to believe, as they did, that
the typical, average negro slave of the south was in all the essentials of
good citizenship just such a human being as the typical, average white. If
they did not go quite so far, they surely claimed for him something so
near to it that it is practically the same. We shall, as suggested above,
treat this pernicious error more fully in later chapters.
The root-and-branch abolitionists have claimed ever since the
emancipation proclamation became effective that the overthrow of slavery
was brought about by them; and thousands upon thousands believing it sing
them hosannas. But it is an undeniable fact that the superior power of
free labor in its irreconcilable conflict with slavery was bound to do in
America what it had done everywhere else. And without the abolitionist at
all the days of slavery were numbered, and they were few even if there had
been no secession, and very few if secession had triumphed. For free
labor--its fell and implacable foe--was on the outside steadily and surely
encircling it with a wall that hemmed it from the extension that was a
condition of its life; and within its ring fence necessarily it was
rapidly exhausting all of its resources. It was the mighty counteraction
of free labor that crushed slavery. The root-and-branch abolitionist
thrown up by this movement which had set forward irresistibly, long before
he was ever heard of, and who believed that he started it and was guiding
it, strikingly examples the proverb
"Er denkt zu schieben und ist geschoben."
I believe that future history will give him credit only for having a
little hastened forward the inevitable.
Another abolition misstatement ought to be corrected. Sumner fulminated
against what he called the oligarchs of slavery. And it was common at the
north to speak of southern aristocracy and southern aristocratic
institutions. Of course the slaves had no political privileges, no more
than they had in Athens, which has always been deemed the most genuine
republic ever known. There was in the old south no oligarch, or anything
like him, unless you choose to call such a man as Calhoun an oligarch,
whose influence over his State was entirely from the good opinion and
unexampled confidence of the free citizens of all classes, which he had
won. There was no aristocracy, except such a natural one as can be found
in every one of our States, as is illustrated by the Adamses in
Massachusetts, the Lees in Virginia, and the Cobbs in Georgia. In those
days property was much more equally distributed than now; and it was easy
for the energetic and saving poor young man, of the humblest origin, to
make his way up. In all my day there was universal suffrage, and it was
political death to propose any modification. I explained nearly thirty
years ago how southern conditions prevented the development of anything
like the beneficent New England town-meeting system.[39] But for all of
that the entire spirit of southern society was democratic in the extreme,
far more so than it is now with the nominating machinery everywhere in the
south except South Carolina, controlled by corporation oligarchs. When the
root-and-branch abolitionist inveighed against oligarchy and aristocracy,
and aristocratic institutions in the south, he was just as mistaken as he
was in denouncing what he asserted to be the guilt in morals of
slaveholding.
The more I study the abolitionists whom I distinguish as root-and-branch,
the more completely self-deceived as to facts, the wilder and more
emotional I find them to be. I have just mentioned some of their
misrepresentations; and in later chapters I shall dwell upon their
cardinal mistake as to the place of the negro in the human scale. I have
not sufficient space for more of these things. I will give just one
example of their wildness. They put in circulation that Toombs had said he
expected some day to call the roll of his slaves at the foot of Bunker
Hill monument,--a slander which they persisted in renewing after he had
solemnly and publicly denied it.[40] In their excited imaginations they
were sure that the south was cherishing a scheme by which, under the help
of the court that made the Dred Scott decision, slavery was to be
established and protected by law everywhere in the north. The only
parallel I can think of to this utterly groundless panic is that of some
poor souls in the Confederate ranks in front of Richmond in 1862, who,
when they learned that Jackson had got in the enemy's rear, expressed
lively fears that he was going to drive McClellan's army over them.
And the fire-eaters,--how they got important facts wrong! They habitually
said that the northern masses were too untruthful and dishonest for us of
the south to stay in the partnership without disgrace and loss of
self-respect. I heard of one who was wont gravely to assert that
prostitutes and ice were all that the south was dependent upon the north
for; and these were only luxuries which it was better to do without.
Perhaps the height of falsification by the hotspurs was the assertion,
made everywhere again and again, that northerners were such cowards that,
even if they were spurred into a war in defence of the union, any one
average southerner would prove an overmatch for any five of them.
It is now high time that each section turn resolutely away from these
fanatics, and the literature which they have made or informed, to seek
right instruction as to slavery, the struggle over it, the characters of
the masses on each side and of their leaders, and all other belonging
details, in the real facts. Especially must we understand the internecine
duel between free labor and slavery, and what was the purpose of the
directors of evolution placing the fanatical abolitionist and the
fire-eater upon the stage. When we grasp that purpose clearly, how
pretentious do we understand their claims and self-laudation to be, and
how clearly we see that they are like the fly on the cart-wheel that
became so vain of the great dust it was raising, and also like the little
fice egging on the big dogs to do their fighting. I have still vivid
recollections of hearing in amicable interviews of hostile pickets these
characters denounced for keeping out of the war which, as was then said,
they had caused,--the fanatical abolitionists denounced by the federals,
the fire-eaters, original secessionists, the blue cockade wearers, by the
confederates.
CHAPTER VII
CALHOUN
After John Caldwell Calhoun, who was born March 18, 1782, the birth-year
of Webster, had become large enough to go to the field, the most of his
time until he was eighteen was spent in work on the plantation. His father
had never had but six months' schooling. There were no schools in that
region except a few "old field" ones, where the three R's only were
taught. To one of these John went for a few months. The boy learned to
read, and manifestly he had acquired some habit of reading. In his
thirteenth year he was sent to school to his brother-in-law, Moses
Waddell, who was an unusually good teacher. He found a circulating library
in the house. This was his first access to books. He read old Rollin, and
he probably moused about in Robertson's History of America and Life of
Charles V, and Voltaire's Charles XII. Having laid Rollin aside, he
assailed Locke's famous Essay; but when he got to the chapter on Infinity
his health had become bad, doubtless due to his change from active to
sedentary habits and from physical to mental activity. So he was taken
back to his work at home. His father had died in the meanwhile, and his
mother, who had great business talent, taught him, as we are told, "how to
administer the affairs of a plantation."[41] It will appear in the sequel
that he was superbly trained.[42] When he attained the age of eighteen the
family had become convinced that he ought to be got ready for a
profession. John, knowing himself to be the mainstay of his mother, and
having resolved to be a planter, at first would not hear to this. But the
family persisted. This doubtless influenced him to turn the subject
carefully over in his mind; and the decision which he made showed an
understanding of his own peculiar talents and needs, and also a prescience
of his future which, when his youth, small opportunity of observation, and
want of schooling are remembered, are very wonderful. He gave this family,
who were not well-to-do, to understand he would not accept a limited and
makeshift education. Naturally they asked what sort did he mean, and he
answered, "The best school, college, and legal education to be had in the
United States."[43] Then they asked, How long did he think all this would
take, and he promptly answered seven years. To the average reader it seems
that the time necessary to carry this unschooled lad through the course he
proposed had been egregiously underestimated by him; but to the family, as
they thought of the appertaining annual expenses, it must have looked very
long. They had to give in. That irrefragable influence over his people
which showed itself as soon as he came upon the public stage begins here.
Some one long afterwards said of him, that if he could but talk with every
man he would always have the whole United States on his side. It is more
than probable that in the five years after he had left Waddell's school he
had, in plantation management and other interests of the family,
convinced them that he always acted or advised wisely. Another comment is
in place here. Study of the record of his early life convinces you that
very soon after, if not before, the commencement of his legal studies, he
decided to make law only a stepping-stone by which to enter public life
and also acquire the means to plant. I cannot help inferring that this
was--somewhat vaguely it may be--his intention already formed when he
dictated terms to the family as just told. It is not at all impossible
that to him who afterwards astonished the world by the sureness of his
prophecy there had even then been revealed the career awaiting; and so he
resolved to get ready for college in two years, and pass the rest of the
seven where, besides competent instructors, he would have cultivated
society, libraries, and the best of opportunities to qualify himself for
public life. Be our conjecture true or not, in two years after he had
opened his Latin grammar he entered the junior class at Yale, and two
years later he graduated with credit. After reading law in an office he
took a year's course at the Litchfield law school in Connecticut, and then
he went into an office again for a while. Some time in June, 1807, he hung
out his shingle at Abbeville Court-house, as it was called up to the time
of reconstruction. A few days afterwards in that month occurred the attack
on the Chesapeake, and when the news came it caused a public meeting in
the town. Some good report of him must have been bruited about in the
community in advance of his coming. It is almost certain that his
education had greatly developed those powers of conversation mentioned
above, and that many listeners had greatly approved his views of the
outrage, and the patriotic indignation he uttered over it. It is not
stretching probability too far to assert that, young as he was, he was by
far the ablest man that could be found in the locality to advise upon the
burning question which had arisen so suddenly. He was selected to draft
appropriate resolutions and present them. There is no record of these or
of his speech. But as we know that the resolutions carried, and that
tradition still reports admiringly of the speech, we may be sure that his
performance in both was extraordinarily good. Although there had been a
strong popular prejudice in the county--or district, as it was then
called--against lawyer representatives, October 13, 1807, less than four
months after the meeting just described, he was elected to the legislature
at the head of the ticket.
In that day presidential electors were appointed by the State
legislatures. Shortly after the session of this legislature to which
Calhoun had been elected opened, there was an informal meeting of the
republican members to make nominations for president and vice-president.
The first was unanimously given to Madison. When the other was up, Calhoun
declared his conviction that there was soon to be war with England. At
such a time there should be no dissension in the party. He gave strong
reasons why George Clinton should not be nominated, as had been proposed;
and he suggested John Langdon of New Hampshire as the proper man. The
thorough acquaintance with the grave situation which he manifested, the
due respect he showed Clinton while opposing his nomination, and the
ability with which he discussed the question, advanced him at once to a
place among the most distinguished members of the legislature.
"Several important measures were originated by Mr. Calhoun while in the
legislature which have become a permanent portion of the legislation of
the State, and he soon acquired an extensive practice at the bar."[44] He
kept in the very midst of the political swim. His reputation as an honest,
true, and able adviser had become so great and influential that the
people, in their warm approval of the strong measures he advocated as
preparation for the threatened war, pushed him out as their candidate for
congress and elected him most triumphantly in October, 1810. The first
session of this, the twelfth congress, commenced November 4, 1811. Clay,
then speaker of the house, evidently expecting much of him, gave him the
second place in the committee on foreign relations. There came before the
house a measure contemplating an increase of the army in view of the war
which appeared to many to be nearer than ever. John Randolph was against
it. In March, 1799, a year before Calhoun started to school, Randolph,
then not twenty-six years old, had fearlessly met the great Patrick Henry
in stump discussion, and had, in the opinion of his auditors, got the
better of it. He was elected to congress in this year. Steadily since then
he had developed, until he was now one of the most prominent figures upon
the national stage. While his powers of discussion of a subject were
great, the power that especially characterized him was that of nonplussing
his antagonist with a snub or a sarcasm. Randolph made an earnest speech.
Calhoun replied. It is not enough to say of this speech that it evinces
full mastery of the subject. It presents every important view most
effectively, satisfactorily answering everything which had been said on
the other side. And it is especially happy in the wise use made at each
proper place of the commands of morality and patriotism.
Mr. Pinkney has instructively and entertainingly illustrated this speech
by his excerpts.[45] To them I here add another, which I would have you
consider,--Randolph had strenuously insisted that the cause of this war,
said by the other side to be impending, should first be defined; and until
this plain duty was done there should be no preparation. To this Calhoun
said:
"The single instance alluded to, the endeavor of Mr. Fox to compel Mr.
Pitt to define the object of the war against France, will not support
the gentleman from Virginia in his position. That was an extraordinary
war for an extraordinary purpose. It was not for conquest, or for
redress of injury, but to impose a government on France which she
refused to receive--an object so detestable that an avowal dared not
be made."
This is a thrust which Randolph especially could appreciate.
The more I examine this first speech of a very young member of congress
upon a question of such transcendent importance to the people of the
United States, the more sound, able, complete,--to sum up in one
word,--the more statesmanly it appears. I am confident that whoever will
weigh it carefully will agree with me. He will not be surprised to learn
that it carried the house decisively. Even in Randolph's own State it drew
great praise. But its fame went abroad everywhere, and it was revealed to
America that she had found among her public men another giant.
In the year 1800 Calhoun was a lad of eighteen, without even a complete
common school education. Represent to yourself clearly what he had
accomplished in the interval from the year last mentioned to December 12,
1811, when, not yet thirty, he made the speech we have just considered. If
any public man of America, burdened with such disadvantages, has
surpassed, or even equalled, this meteoric stride, I do not now recall
him. I am not emphasizing especially that he got to congress in such a
short while. What I do especially emphasize is that he so early won place
as an eminent statesman. In these eleven years he lost no time at all in
idleness, or probation, or waiting.
January 8, 1811, some three months after his election to congress, he
married his cousin, Floride Calhoun--not a first cousin, but a daughter of
a first cousin. His letters of courtship, not to her, but, in the old
style, to her mother; his only letter to her, written shortly before the
marriage; and other letters from and to him afterwards, all of which you
can read in the Correspondence,--show him to be such a lover, father,
brother, son-in-law, brother-in-law, grandfather, etc., as everybody
wants. Some South Carolinian, adequately gifted, ought to tell befittingly
the tale of Calhoun's beautiful domestic life.
I must now mention some other facts which will further enlighten you as to
the man.
I was fourteen when Calhoun died. For four or five years before, and
afterwards until I went to the brothers' war, I heard much of Calhoun from
relatives in Abbeville county and the Court House. I still recall most
vividly what a paternal uncle habitually said of the brightness and
unexampled impressiveness of Calhoun's eyes, and the charm and
instructiveness of his conversation. In Georgia there was not a public man
whose course in politics commended itself to all of my acquaintances. I
had become accustomed to hearing much disparagement of Toombs and of
Stephens, with whom I was most familiar. But my South Carolina relatives,
and every man or woman of that State whose talk I listened to; every boy
or girl with whom I talked myself, yea, all of the negroes,--always warmly
maintained the rightfulness of Calhoun's politics, national or State. I
thought it a good hit when a Georgia aunt of mine dubbed the Palmetto
State "The Kingdom of Calhoun," and Abbeville Court House "its capital."
This universal political worship was a great surprise to me. But there was
a still greater one to come. That was, that according to all accounts, and
without any contradiction, in spite of his living away from home the most
of his time, he yet gave his planting interests and all else appertaining
the very best management, and with such unvarying financial success it
would be unkind to compare Webster's money-wasting and amateur farming at
Marshfield. In this community, where he seemed to be known as well as he
was before he removed to Fort Hill, some sixty miles distant, in 1825, he
had become a far greater authority in business than he had even attained
in politics. His acquaintances all sought his advice, which they followed
when they got it; thus making this busiest of public servants their
agricultural oracle.
The reader will find in Starke's memoir and the Correspondence ample
proofs of that diligent attention of Calhoun to his home affairs which
made him the exceptionally successful planter that he was. Starke happily
calls him "the great farmer-statesman of our country."[46]
Now let us see where he made his mark as an able business man in another
place. He was Monroe's secretary of war from 1817 to 1825. When he entered
the office he found something like $50,000,000 of unsettled accounts
outstanding, and jumble in every branch of the service. He soon brought
down the accounts to a few millions. And he reduced the annual expenditure
of four to two and a half millions, "without subtracting a single comfort
from either officer or soldier," as he says with becoming pride. He
established it, that the head of every subordinate department be
responsible for its disbursements. His economy was not parsimonious. He
was especially popular at West Point, for which he did great things, and
with the officers and men of the army.
And if one chose to look through the belonging parts of the Correspondence
and the other accessible pertinent records, he will find ample proofs that
he was ever alert to all the duties of his office, performing each one,
whether important or trivial, with the height of skill and diligence.
Consider, as to his career in the war department, this language of one of
the most inveterate of his disparagers:
"Many of his friends and admirers had with regret seen him abandon his
seat in the legislative hall for a place in the president's council.
They apprehended that he would, to a great extent, lose the renown
which he had gained as a member of congress, for they thought that the
didactic turn of his mind rendered him unfit to become a successful
administrator. He undeceived them in a manner which astonished even
those who had not shared these apprehensions. The department of war
was in a state of really astounding confusion when he assumed charge
of it. Into this chaos he soon brought order, and the whole service of
the department received an organization so simple and at the same time
so efficient that it has, in the main, been adhered to by all his
successors, and proved itself capable of standing even the test of the
civil war."[47]
Now let us glance at his magnificent success in winning for the United
States the vast territory of Texas and Oregon. The latter had long been in
dispute between us and England. Ever since 1818 it had been jointly
occupied under agreement. We wanted all of it; and of course as our
settlements in the west approached nearer and nearer, our desire for it
mounted. And England wanted all of it too. Soon after Texas achieved her
independence she applied for admission into our union, but as the settlers
had carried slavery with them free-soil opposition kept her out. Texas got
in debt, and the only thing for her to do was to tie to some great power
willing to receive her. England, seeing her opportunity, was trying to
propitiate Mexico in order, with the favor of the latter, to get Texas for
herself. Of course the south wanted Texas to come in, but the free-soilers
did not. And the north wanted Oregon; and although its soil and climate
did not admit of slavery, the south was against its acquisition unless the
concession be made that it be permitted to slavery to occupy all the
suitable soil of the Territories. As early as 1843 Calhoun, with his
piercing vision, saw the situation clearly. If the dispute as to Oregon
provoked war, England could throw troops thither from China by a much
shorter route than ours, the latter going as it did from the States on the
Atlantic coast around Cape Horn. That would be bad enough for us. But
suppose England gets Texas. A hostile power, with a vast empire of land,
will spring up under the very nose of the States, where our adversary will
acquire a base of operations in the highest degree unfavorable to us. Then
England will rise in her demands as to Oregon, and perhaps win all of it
from us. In an affair of inter-dependent contingencies it is of the first
importance to do the right thing instead of the wrong thing first. Texas
was ripe, Oregon was not. Calhoun saw the first thing to do was to annex
Texas. For when England cannot secure that base of operations in Texas she
will shrink from making Oregon a cause of war, and while she is
hesitating, Oregon--which is near to us and far from her--is steadily
filling with population in which settlers from the United States more and
more preponderate; and at the same time the populous States are fast
approaching. After a while the inhabitants will all practically be on our
side, and they will have hosts of allies to the eastward in supporting
distance, which would give us an invincible advantage in case war for
Oregon does come. This is what Calhoun styled "masterly inactivity" on our
part, and which, had it been fully carried out as he advised, Oregon would
now extend much further north than it does. To sum up in a line, he saw
that activity as to Texas and inactivity as to Oregon was each masterly.
But the hotheads of the south and the fanatical wing of the anti-slavery
men at the north rose up, obstructing his way like mountains. At the same
time there was lack of vision in even the leaders of each section who
could rise to patriotism above prejudice. Polk blundered in not continuing
Calhoun as secretary of State, in which place he had made so good a
beginning that it soon accomplished the annexation of Texas. In his
inaugural Polk asserted that our title to Oregon was good, and to be
maintained by arms if need be; and he went further away from "masterly
inactivity" in his first annual message. He evoked great popular
excitement, and "Fifty-four forty or fight!" and "All of Oregon or none!"
came forth in passionate ejaculations in every corner of the land. Calhoun
had been called from retirement to take Texas and Oregon in hand, and when
Polk made a new secretary he went back into the retirement for which he
greatly longed. The record shows that the best men of all parties, north
and south, felt that as Tyler's secretary he was the man of all to manage
the two matters so vitally important to the United States, and they deeply
regretted that the place was not continued to him by Polk. And now
instead of the happy settlement they had been sure the master would
effect, the country was face to face with a war that portended direful
disaster to each section. The eyes of patriots turned to Calhoun again;
and as he cannot be secretary, he must be in the senate. And a way being
made, he was seated in due time. It needs not to go into much detail. The
situation had changed greatly. The especial thing to do now was to avoid
war. And as a resolution to terminate the joint occupation had been passed
by congress, and as the ire of Great Britain had been greatly aroused,
there must at once be a settlement of the Oregon controversy. And so the
controversy was compromised and averted, this good result being mainly due
to the efforts of Calhoun. Even Von Holst calls his speech of March 16,
1846, great. It will live forever. It is paying it gross disrespect to
treat it as mere oratory, even if one concede to it the highest eloquence.
It voices the ripest wisdom of the ablest practical statesman dealing with
a most momentous public affair, in a crisis delicate and perilous in the
extreme. The vindication of the true course of action is majestic. But to
my mind the gr
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