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Title: The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V
Political Essays
Author: James Russell Lowell
Release Date: September 15, 2007 [eBook #22609]
Language: English
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Riverside Edition
THE WRITINGS OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL IN PROSE AND POETRY
VOLUME V
Political Essays
by
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
[Illustration: _Mr. Lowell in 1881_]
London
MacMillan and Co.
1898
CONTENTS
THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY 1
THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER 17
E PLURIBUS UNUM 45
THE PICKENS-AND-STEALIN'S REBELLION 75
GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT 92
THE REBELLION: ITS CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES 118
McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN 153
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 177
RECONSTRUCTION 210
SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT? 239
THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP 264
THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 283
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL AT THE AGE OF 62.
ENGRAVED ON STEEL, BY J. A. J. WILCOX _Frontispiece_
MAJOR ROBERT ANDERSON 56
GENERAL GEORGE B. McCLELLAN 92
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 178
ANDREW JOHNSON 264
WILLIAM H. SEWARD 302
POLITICAL ESSAYS
THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY
1858
There was no apologue more popular in the Middle Ages than that of the
hermit, who, musing on the wickedness and tyranny of those whom the
inscrutable wisdom of Providence had intrusted with the government of
the world, fell asleep, and awoke to find himself the very monarch
whose abject life and capricious violence had furnished the subject of
his moralizing. Endowed with irresponsible power, tempted by passions
whose existence in himself he had never suspected, and betrayed by the
political necessities of his position, he became gradually guilty of
all the crimes and the luxury which had seemed so hideous to him in his
hermitage over a dish of water-cresses.
The American Tract Society from small beginnings has risen to be the
dispenser of a yearly revenue of nearly half a million. It has become a
great establishment, with a traditional policy, with the distrust of
change and the dislike of disturbing questions (especially of such as
would lessen its revenues) natural to great establishments. It had been
poor and weak; it has become rich and powerful. The hermit has become
king.
If the pious men who founded the American Tract Society had been told
that within forty years they would be watchful of their publications,
lest, by inadvertence, anything disrespectful might be spoken of the
African Slave-trade,--that they would consider it an ample equivalent
for compulsory dumbness on the vices of Slavery, that their colporteurs
could awaken the minds of Southern brethren to the horrors of St.
Bartholomew,--that they would hold their peace about the body of Cuffee
dancing to the music of the cart-whip, provided only they could save
the soul of Sambo alive by presenting him a pamphlet, which he could
not read, on the depravity of the double shuffle,--that they would
consent to be fellow members in the Tract Society with him who sold
their fellow members in Christ on the auction block, if he agreed with
them in condemning Transubstantiation (and it would not be difficult
for a gentleman who ignored the real presence of God in his brother man
to deny it in the sacramental wafer),--if those excellent men had been
told this, they would have shrunk in horror, and exclaimed, "Are thy
servants dogs, that they should do these things?"
Yet this is precisely the present position of the Society.
There are two ways of evading the responsibility of such inconsistency.
The first is by an appeal to the Society's Constitution, and by
claiming to interpret it strictly in accordance with the rules of law
as applied to contracts, whether between individuals or States. The
second is by denying that Slavery is opposed to the genius of
Christianity, and that any moral wrongs are the necessary results of
it. We will not be so unjust to the Society as to suppose that any of
its members would rely on this latter plea, and shall therefore confine
ourselves to a brief consideration of the other.
In order that the same rules of interpretation should be considered
applicable to the Constitution of the Society and to that of the United
States, we must attribute to the former a solemnity and importance
which involve a palpable absurdity. To claim for it the verbal accuracy
and the legal wariness of a mere contract is equally at war with common
sense and the facts of the case; and even were it not so, the party to
a bond who should attempt to escape its ethical obligation by a legal
quibble of construction would be put in coventry by all honest men. In
point of fact, the Constitution was simply the minutes of an agreement
among certain gentlemen, to define the limits within which they would
accept trust funds, and the objects for which they should expend them.
But if we accept the alternative offered by the advocates of strict
construction, we shall not find that their case is strengthened.
Claiming that where the meaning of an instrument is doubtful, it should
be interpreted according to the contemporary understanding of its
framers, they argue that it would be absurd to suppose that gentlemen
from the Southern States would have united to form a society that
included in its objects any discussion of the moral duties arising from
the institution of Slavery. Admitting the first part of their
proposition, we deny the conclusion they seek to draw from it. They are
guilty of a glaring anachronism in assuming the same opinions and
prejudices to have existed in 1825 which are undoubtedly influential in
1858. The Anti-slavery agitation did not begin until 1831, and the
debates in the Virginia Convention prove conclusively that six years
after the foundation of the Tract Society, the leading men in that
State, men whose minds had been trained and whose characters had been
tempered in that school of action and experience which was open to all
during the heroic period of our history, had not yet suffered such
distortion of the intellect through passion and such deadening of the
conscience through interest, as would have prevented their discussing
either the moral or the political aspects of Slavery, and precluded
them from uniting in any effort to make the relation between master and
slave less demoralizing to the one and less imbruting to the other.
Again, it is claimed that the words of the Constitution are conclusive,
and that the declaration that the publications of the Society shall be
such as are "satisfactory to all Evangelical Christians" forbids by
implication the issuing of any tract which could possibly offend the
brethren in Slave States. The Society, it is argued, can publish only
on topics about which all Evangelical Christians are agreed, and must,
therefore, avoid everything in which the question of politics is
involved. But what are the facts about matters other than Slavery?
Tracts have been issued and circulated in which Dancing is condemned as
sinful; are all Evangelical Christians agreed about this? On the
Temperance question, against Catholicism,--have these topics never
entered into our politics? The simple truth is that Slavery is the only
subject about which the Publishing Committee have felt Constitutional
scruples. Till this question arose, they were like men in perfect
health, never suspecting that they had any constitution at all; but
now, like hypochondriacs, they feel it in every pore, at the least
breath from the eastward.
If a strict construction of the words "all Evangelical Christians" be
insisted on, we are at a loss to see where the committee could draw the
dividing line between what might be offensive and what allowable. The
Society publish tracts in which the study of the Scriptures is enforced
and their denial to the laity by Romanists assailed. But throughout the
South it is criminal to teach a slave to read; throughout the South no
book could be distributed among the servile population more incendiary
than the Bible, if they could only read it. Will not our Southern
brethren take alarm? The Society is reduced to the dilemma of either
denying that the African has a soul to be saved, or of consenting to
the terrible mockery of assuring him that the way of life is to be
found only by searching a book which he is forbidden to open.
If we carry out this doctrine of strict construction to its legitimate
results, we shall find that it involves a logical absurdity. What is
the number of men whose outraged sensibilities may claim the
suppression of a tract? Is the _taboo_ of a thousand valid? Of a
hundred? Of ten? Or are tracts to be distributed only to those who will
find their doctrine agreeable, and are the Society's colporteurs to be
instructed that a Temperance essay is the proper thing for a
total-abstinent infidel, and a sermon on the Atonement for a distilling
deacon? If the aim of the Society be only to convert men from sins they
have no mind to, and to convince them of errors to which they have no
temptation, they might as well be spending their money to persuade
schoolmasters that two and two make four, or geometricians that there
cannot be two obtuse angles in a triangle. If this be their notion of
the way in which the gospel is to be preached, we do not wonder that
they have found it necessary to print a tract upon the impropriety of
sleeping in church.
But the Society are concluded by their own action; for in 1857 they
unanimously adopted the following resolution: "That those moral duties
which grow out of the existence of Slavery, as well as those moral
evils and vices which it is known to promote and which are condemned in
Scripture, and so much deplored by Evangelical Christians, undoubtedly
do fall within the province of this Society, and can and ought to be
discussed in a fraternal and Christian spirit." The Society saw clearly
that it was impossible to draw a Mason and Dixon's line in the world of
ethics, to divide Duty by a parallel of latitude. The only line which
Christ drew is that which parts the sheep from the goats, that great
horizon-line of the moral nature of man, which is the boundary between
light and darkness. The Society, by yielding (as they have done in
1858) to what are pleasantly called the "objections" of the South
(objections of so forcible a nature that we are told the colporteurs
were "forced to flee") virtually exclude the black man, if born to the
southward of a certain arbitrary line, from the operation of God's
providence, and thereby do as great a wrong to the Creator as the
Episcopal Church did to the artist when without public protest they
allowed Ary Scheffer's _Christus Consolator_, with the figure of the
slave left out, to be published in a Prayer-Book.
The Society is not asked to disseminate Anti-slavery doctrines, but
simply to be even-handed between master and slave, and, since they have
recommended Sambo and Toney to be obedient to Mr. Legree, to remind him
in turn that he also has duties toward the bodies and souls of his
bondmen. But we are told that the time has not yet arrived, that at
present the ears of our Southern brethren are closed against all
appeals, that God in his good time will turn their hearts, and that
then, and not till then, will be the fitting occasion to do something
in the premises. But if the Society is to await this golden opportunity
with such exemplary patience in one case, why not in all? If it is to
decline any attempt at converting the sinner till after God has
converted him, will there be any special necessity for a tract society
at all? Will it not be a little presumptuous, as well as superfluous,
to undertake the doing over again of what He has already done? We fear
that the studies of Blackstone, upon which the gentlemen who argue thus
have entered in order to fit themselves for the legal and
constitutional argument of the question, have confused their minds, and
that they are misled by some fancied analogy between a tract and an
action of trover, and conceive that the one, like the other, cannot be
employed till after an actual conversion has taken place.
The resolutions reported by the Special Committee at the annual meeting
of 1857, drawn up with great caution and with a sincere desire to make
whole the breach in the Society, have had the usual fate of all
attempts to reconcile incompatibilities by compromise. They express
confidence in the Publishing Committee, and at the same time impliedly
condemn them by recommending them to do precisely what they had all
along scrupulously avoided doing. The result was just what might have
been expected. Both parties among the Northern members of the Society,
those who approved the former action of the Publishing Committee and
those who approved the new policy recommended in the resolutions, those
who favored silence and those who favored speech on the subject of
Slavery, claimed the victory, while the Southern brethren, as usual,
refused to be satisfied with anything short of unconditional
submission. The word Compromise, as far as Slavery is concerned, has
always been of fatal augury. The concessions of the South have been
like the "With all my worldly goods I thee endow" of a bankrupt
bridegroom, who thereby generously bestows all his debts upon his wife,
and as a small return for his magnanimity consents to accept all her
personal and a life estate in all her real property. The South is
willing that the Tract Society should expend its money to convince the
slave that he has a soul to be saved so far as he is obedient to his
master, but not to persuade the master that he has a soul to undergo a
very different process so far as he is unmerciful to his slave.
We Americans are very fond of this glue of compromise. Like so many
quack cements, it is advertised to make the mended parts of the vessel
stronger than those which have never been broken, but, like them, it
will not stand hot water,--and as the question of slavery is sure to
plunge all who approach it, even with the best intentions, into that
fatal element, the patched-up brotherhood, which but yesterday was
warranted to be better than new, falls once more into a heap of
incoherent fragments. The last trial of the virtues of the Patent
Redintegrator by the Special Committee of the Tract Society has ended
like all the rest, and as all attempts to buy peace at too dear a rate
must end. Peace is an excellent thing, but principle and pluck are
better; and the man who sacrifices them to gain it finds at last that
he has crouched under the Caudine yoke to purchase only a contemptuous
toleration, that leaves him at war with his own self-respect and the
invincible forces of his higher nature.
But the peace which Christ promised to his followers was not of this
world; the good gift he brought them was not peace, but a sword. It was
no sword of territorial conquest, but that flaming blade of conscience
and self-conviction which lightened between our first parents and their
lost Eden,--that sword of the Spirit that searcheth all things,--which
severs one by one the ties of passion, of interest, of self-pride, that
bind the soul to earth,--whose implacable edge may divide a man from
family, from friends, from whatever is nearest and dearest,--and which
hovers before him like the air-drawn dagger of Macbeth, beckoning him,
not to crime, but to the legitimate royalties of self-denial and
self-sacrifice, to the freedom which is won only by surrender of the
will. Christianity has never been concession, never peace; it is
continual aggression; one province of wrong conquered, its pioneers are
already in the heart of another. The mile-stones of its onward march
down the ages have not been monuments of material power, but the
blackened stakes of martyrs, trophies of individual fidelity to
conviction. For it is the only religion which is superior to all
endowment, to all authority,--which has a bishopric and a cathedral
wherever a single human soul has surrendered itself to God. That very
spirit of doubt, inquiry, and fanaticism for private judgment, with
which Romanists reproach Protestantism, is its stamp and token of
authenticity,--the seal of Christ, and not of the Fisherman.
We do not wonder at the division which has taken place in the Tract
Society, nor do we regret it. The ideal life of a Christian is possible
to very few, but we naturally look for a nearer approach to it in those
who associate together to disseminate the doctrines which they believe
to be its formative essentials, and there is nothing which the enemies
of religion seize on so gladly as any inconsistency between the conduct
and the professions of such persons. Though utterly indifferent to the
wrongs of the slave, the scoffer would not fail to remark upon the
hollowness of a Christianity which was horror-stricken at a dance or a
Sunday drive, while it was blandly silent about the separation of
families, the putting asunder whom God had joined, the selling
Christian girls for Christian harems, and the thousand horrors of a
system which can lessen the agonies it inflicts only by debasing the
minds and souls of the race on which it inflicts them. Is your
Christianity, then, he would say, a respecter of persons, and does it
condone the sin because the sinner can contribute to your coffers? Was
there ever a simony like this,--that does not sell, but withholds, the
gift of God for a price?
The world naturally holds the Society to a stricter accountability than
it would insist upon in ordinary cases. Were they only a club of
gentlemen associated for their own amusement, it would be very natural
and proper that they should exclude all questions which would introduce
controversy, and that, however individually interested in certain
reforms, they should not force them upon others who would consider them
a bore. But a society of professing Christians, united for the express
purpose of carrying both the theory and the practice of the New
Testament into every household in the land, has voluntarily subjected
itself to a graver responsibility, and renounced all title to fall back
upon any reserved right of personal comfort or convenience.
We say, then, that we are glad to see this division in the Tract
Society; not glad because of the division, but because it has sprung
from an earnest effort to relieve the Society of a reproach which was
not only impairing its usefulness, but doing an injury to the cause of
truth and sincerity everywhere. We have no desire to impugn the motives
of those who consider themselves conservative members of the Society;
we believe them to be honest in their convictions, or their want of
them; but we think they have mistaken notions as to what conservatism
is, and that they are wrong in supposing it to consist in refusing to
wipe away the film on their spectacle-glasses which prevents their
seeing the handwriting on the wall, or in conserving reverently the
barnacles on their ship's bottom and the dry-rot in its knees. We yield
to none of them in reverence for the Past; it is there only that the
imagination can find repose and seclusion; there dwells that silent
majority whose experience guides our action and whose wisdom shapes our
thought in spite of ourselves;--but it is not length of days that can
make evil reverend, nor persistence in inconsistency that can give it
the power or the claim of orderly precedent. Wrong, though its
title-deeds go back to the days of Sodom, is by nature a thing of
yesterday,--while the right, of which we became conscious but an hour
ago, is more ancient than the stars, and of the essence of Heaven. If
it were proposed to establish Slavery to-morrow, should we have more
patience with its patriarchal argument than with the parallel claim of
Mormonism? That Slavery is old is but its greater condemnation; that we
have tolerated it so long, the strongest plea for our doing so no
longer. There is one institution to which we owe our first allegiance,
one that is more sacred and venerable than any other,--the soul and
conscience of Man.
What claim has Slavery to immunity from discussion? We are told that
discussion is dangerous. Dangerous to what? Truth invites it, courts
the point of the Ithuriel-spear, whose touch can but reveal more
clearly the grace and grandeur of her angelic proportions. The
advocates of Slavery have taken refuge in the last covert of desperate
sophism, and affirm that their institution is of Divine ordination,
that its bases are laid in the nature of man. Is anything, then, of
God's contriving endangered by inquiry? Was it the system of the
universe, or the monks, that trembled at the telescope of Galileo? Did
the circulation of the firmament stop in terror because Newton laid his
daring finger on its pulse? But it is idle to discuss a proposition so
monstrous. There is no right of sanctuary for a crime against humanity,
and they who drag an unclean thing to the horns of the altar bring it
to vengeance, and not to safety.
Even granting that Slavery were all that its apologists assume it to
be, and that the relation of master and slave were of God's appointing,
would not its abuses be just the thing which it was the duty of
Christian men to protest against, and, as far as might be, to root out?
Would our courts feel themselves debarred from interfering to rescue a
daughter from a parent who wished to make merchandise of her purity, or
a wife from a husband who was brutal to her, by the plea that parental
authority and marriage were of Divine ordinance? Would a police-justice
discharge a drunkard who pleaded the patriarchal precedent of Noah? or
would he not rather give him another month in the House of Correction
for his impudence?
The Anti-slavery question is not one which the Tract Society can
exclude by triumphant majorities, nor put to shame by a comparison of
respectabilities. Mixed though it has been with politics, it is in no
sense political, and springing naturally from the principles of that
religion which traces its human pedigree to a manger, and whose first
apostles were twelve poor men against the whole world, it can dispense
with numbers and earthly respect. The clergyman may ignore it in the
pulpit, but it confronts him in his study; the church-member, who has
suppressed it in parish-meeting, opens it with the pages of his
Testament; the merchant, who has shut it out of his house and his
heart, finds it lying in wait for him, a gaunt fugitive, in the hold of
his ship; the lawyer, who has declared that it is no concern of his,
finds it thrust upon him in the brief of the slave-hunter; the
historian, who had cautiously evaded it, stumbles over it at Bunker
Hill. And why? Because it is not political, but moral,--because it is
not local, but national,--because it is not a test of party, but of
individual honesty and honor. The wrong which we allow our nation to
perpetrate we cannot localize, if we would; we cannot hem it within the
limits of Washington or Kansas; sooner or later, it will force itself
into the conscience and sit by the hearthstone of every citizen.
It is not partisanship, it is not fanaticism, that has forced this
matter of Anti-slavery upon the American people; it is the spirit of
Christianity, which appeals from prejudices and predilections to the
moral consciousness of the individual man; that spirit elastic as air,
penetrative as heat, invulnerable as sunshine, against which creed
after creed and institution after institution have measured their
strength and been confounded; that restless spirit which refuses to
crystallize in any sect or form, but persists, a Divinely commissioned
radical and reconstructor, in trying every generation with a new
dilemma between ease and interest on the one hand, and duty on the
other. Shall it be said that its kingdom is not of this world? In one
sense, and that the highest, it certainly is not; but just as certainly
Christ never intended those words to be used as a subterfuge by which
to escape our responsibilities in the life of business and politics.
Let the cross, the sword, and the arena answer, whether the world, that
then was, so understood its first preachers and apostles. Cæsar and
Flamen both instinctively dreaded it, not because it aimed at riches or
power, but because it strove to conquer that other world in the moral
nature of mankind, where it could establish a throne against which
wealth and force would be weak and contemptible. No human device has
ever prevailed against it, no array of majorities or respectabilities;
but neither Cæsar nor Flamen ever conceived a scheme so cunningly
adapted to neutralize its power as that graceful compromise which
accepts it with the lip and denies it in the life, which marries it at
the altar and divorces it at the church-door.
THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER
1860
While all of us have been watching, with that admiring sympathy which
never fails to wait on courage and magnanimity, the career of the new
Timoleon in Sicily; while we have been reckoning, with an interest
scarcely less than in some affair of personal concern, the chances and
changes that bear with furtherance or hindrance upon the fortune of
united Italy, we are approaching, with a quietness and composure which
more than anything else mark the essential difference between our own
form of democracy and any other yet known in history, a crisis in our
domestic policy more momentous than any that has arisen since we became
a nation. Indeed, considering the vital consequences for good or evil
that will follow from the popular decision in November, we might be
tempted to regard the remarkable moderation which has thus far
characterized the Presidential canvass as a guilty indifference to the
duty implied in the privilege of suffrage, or a stolid unconsciousness
of the result which may depend upon its exercise in this particular
election, did we not believe that it arose chiefly from the general
persuasion that the success of the Republican party was a foregone
conclusion.
In a society like ours, where every man may transmute his private
thought into history and destiny by dropping it into the ballot-box, a
peculiar responsibility rests upon the individual. Nothing can absolve
us from doing our best to look at all public questions as citizens, and
therefore in some sort as administrators and rulers. For though during
its term of office the government be practically as independent of the
popular will as that of Russia, yet every fourth year the people are
called upon to pronounce upon the conduct of their affairs.
Theoretically, at least, to give democracy any standing-ground for an
argument with despotism or oligarchy, a majority of the men composing
it should be statesmen and thinkers. It is a proverb, that to turn a
radical into a conservative there needs only to put him into office,
because then the license of speculation or sentiment is limited by a
sense of responsibility; then for the first time he becomes capable of
that comparative view which sees principles and measures, not in the
narrow abstract, but in the full breadth of their relations to each
other and to political consequences. The theory of democracy
presupposes something of these results of official position in the
individual voter, since in exercising his right he becomes for the
moment an integral part of the governing power.
How very far practice is from any likeness to theory, a week's
experience of our politics suffices to convince us. The very government
itself seems an organized scramble, and Congress a boy's debating-club,
with the disadvantage of being reported. As our party-creeds are
commonly represented less by ideas than by persons (who are assumed,
without too close a scrutiny, to be the exponents of certain ideas) our
politics become personal and narrow to a degree never paralleled,
unless in ancient Athens or mediæval Florence. Our Congress debates and
our newspapers discuss, sometimes for day after day, not questions of
national interest, not what is wise and right, but what the Honorable
Lafayette Skreemer said on the stump, or bad whiskey said for him, half
a dozen years ago. If that personage, outraged in all the finer
sensibilities of our common nature, by failing to get the contract for
supplying the District Court-House at Skreemeropolisville City with
revolvers, was led to disparage the union of these States, it is seized
on as proof conclusive that the party to which he belongs are so many
Cat_a_lines,--for Congress is unanimous only in misspelling the name of
that oft-invoked conspirator. The next Presidential Election looms
always in advance, so that we seem never to have an actual Chief
Magistrate, but a prospective one, looking to the chances of reelection,
and mingling in all the dirty intrigues of provincial politics with an
unhappy talent for making them dirtier. The cheating mirage of the
White House lures our public men away from present duties and
obligations; and if matters go on as they have gone, we shall need a
Committee of Congress to count the spoons in the public plate-closet,
whenever a President goes out of office,--with a policeman to watch
every member of the Committee. We are kept normally in that most
unprofitable of predicaments, a state of transition, and politicians
measure their words and deeds by a standard of immediate and temporary
expediency,--an expediency not as concerning the nation, but which, if
more than merely personal, is no wider than the interests of party.
Is all this a result of the failure of democratic institutions? Rather
of the fact that those institutions have never yet had a fair trial,
and that for the last thirty years an abnormal element has been acting
adversely with continually increasing strength. Whatever be the effect
of slavery upon the States where it exists, there can be no doubt that
its moral influence upon the North has been most disastrous. It has
compelled our politicians into that first fatal compromise with their
moral instincts and hereditary principles which makes all consequent
ones easy; it has accustomed us to makeshifts instead of statesmanship,
to subterfuge instead of policy, to party-platforms for opinions, and
to a defiance of the public sentiment of the civilized world for
patriotism. We have been asked to admit, first, that it was a necessary
evil; then that it was a good both to master and slave; then that it
was the corner-stone of free institutions; then that it was a system
divinely instituted under the Old Law and sanctioned under the New.
With a representation, three fifths of it based on the assumption that
negroes are men, the South turns upon us and insists on our
acknowledging that they are things. After compelling her Northern
allies to pronounce the "free and equal" clause of the preamble to the
Declaration of Independence (because it stood in the way of enslaving
men) a manifest absurdity, she has declared, through the Supreme Court
of the United States, that negroes are not men in the ordinary meaning
of the word. To eat dirt is bad enough, but to find that we have eaten
more than was necessary may chance to give us an indigestion. The
slaveholding interest has gone on step by step, forcing concession
after concession, till it needs but little to secure it forever in the
political supremacy of the country. Yield to its latest demand,--let it
mould the evil destiny of the Territories,--and the thing is done past
recall. The next Presidential Election is to say _Yes_ or _No_.
But we should not regard the mere question of political preponderancy
as of vital consequence, did it not involve a continually increasing
moral degradation on the part of the Non-slaveholding States,--for Free
States they could not be called much longer. Sordid and materialistic
views of the true value and objects of society and government are
professed more and more openly by the leaders of popular outcry,--for
it cannot be called public opinion. That side of human nature which it
has been the object of all lawgivers and moralists to repress and
subjugate is flattered and caressed; whatever is profitable is right;
and already the slave-trade, as yielding a greater return on the
capital invested than any other traffic, is lauded as the highest
achievement of human reason and justice. Mr. Hammond has proclaimed the
accession of King Cotton, but he seems to have forgotten that history
is not without examples of kings who have lost their crowns through the
folly and false security of their ministers. It is quite true that
there is a large class of reasoners who would weigh all questions of
right and wrong in the balance of trade; but we cannot bring ourselves
to believe that it is a wise political economy which makes cotton by
unmaking men, or a far-seeing statesmanship which looks on an immediate
money-profit as a safe equivalent for a beggared public sentiment. We
think Mr. Hammond even a little premature in proclaiming the new
Pretender. The election of November may prove a Culloden. Whatever its
result, it is to settle, for many years to come, the question whether
the American idea is to govern this continent, whether the Occidental
or the Oriental theory of society is to mould our future, whether we
are to recede from principles which eighteen Christian centuries have
been slowly establishing at the cost of so many saintly lives at the
stake and so many heroic ones on the scaffold and the battle-field, in
favor of some fancied assimilation to the household arrangements of
Abraham, of which all that can be said with certainty is that they did
not add to his domestic happiness.
We believe that this election is a turning-point in our history; for,
although there are four candidates, there are really, as everybody
knows, but two parties, and a single question that divides them. The
supporters of Messrs. Bell and Everett have adopted as their platform
the Constitution, the Union, and the enforcement of the Laws. This may
be very convenient, but it is surely not very explicit. The cardinal
question on which the whole policy of the country is to turn--a
question, too, which this very election must decide in one way or the
other--is the interpretation to be put upon certain clauses of the
Constitution. All the other parties equally assert their loyalty to
that instrument. Indeed, it is quite the fashion. The removers of all
the ancient landmarks of our policy, the violators of thrice-pledged
faith, the planners of new treachery to established compromise, all
take refuge in the Constitution,--
"Like thieves that in a hemp-plot lie,
Secure against the hue and cry."
In the same way the first Bonaparte renewed his profession of faith in
the Revolution at every convenient opportunity; and the second follows
the precedent of his uncle, though the uninitiated fail to see any
logical sequence from 1789 to 1815 or 1860. If Mr. Bell loves the
Constitution, Mr. Breckinridge is equally fond; that Egeria of our
statesmen could be "happy with either, were t' other dear charmer
away." Mr. Douglas confides the secret of his passion to the
unloquacious clams of Rhode Island, and the chief complaint made
against Mr. Lincoln by his opponents is that he is _too_ Constitutional.
Meanwhile, the only point in which voters are interested is, What do
they mean by the Constitution? Mr. Breckinridge means the superiority
of a certain exceptional species of property over all others; nay, over
man himself. Mr. Douglas, with a different formula for expressing it,
means practically the same thing. Both of them mean that Labor has no
rights which Capital is bound to respect,--that there is no higher law
than human interest and cupidity. Both of them represent not merely the
narrow principles of a section, but the still narrower and more selfish
ones of a caste. Both of them, to be sure, have convenient phrases to
be juggled with before election, and which mean one thing or another,
or neither one thing nor another, as a particular exigency may seem to
require; but since both claim the regular Democratic nomination, we
have little difficulty in divining what their course would be after the
fourth of March, if they should chance to be elected. We know too well
what regular Democracy is, to like either of the two faces which each
shows by turns under the same hood. Everybody remembers Baron Grimm's
story of the Parisian showman, who in 1789 exhibited the _royal_ Bengal
tiger under the new character of _national_, as more in harmony with
the changed order of things. Could the animal have lived till 1848,
he would probably have found himself offered to the discriminating
public as the _democratic_ and _social_ ornament of the jungle. The
Pro-slavery party of this country seeks the popular favor under even
more frequent and incongruous _aliases_: it is now _national_, now
_conservative_, now _constitutional_; here it represents
Squatter-Sovereignty, and there the power of Congress over the
Territories; but, under whatever name, its nature remains unchanged,
and its instincts are none the less predatory and destructive.
Mr. Lincoln's position is set forth with sufficient precision in the
platform adopted by the Chicago Convention; but what are we to make of
Messrs. Bell and Everett? Heirs of the stock in trade of two defunct
parties, the Whig and Know-Nothing, do they hope to resuscitate them?
or are they only like the inconsolable widows of Père la Chaise, who,
with an eye to former customers, make use of the late Andsoforth's
gravestone to advertise that they still carry on business at the old
stand? Mr. Everett, in his letter accepting the nomination, gave us
only a string of reasons why he should not have accepted it at all; and
Mr. Bell preserves a silence singularly at variance with his
patronymic. The only public demonstration of principle that we have
seen is an emblematic bell drawn upon a wagon by a single horse, with a
man to lead him, and a boy to make a nuisance of the tinkling symbol as
it moves along. Are all the figures in this melancholy procession
equally emblematic? If so, which of the two candidates is typified in
the unfortunate who leads the horse?--for we believe the only hope of
the party is to get one of them elected by some hocus-pocus in the
House of Representatives. The little boy, we suppose, is intended to
represent the party, which promises to be so conveniently small that
there will be an office for every member of it, if its candidate should
win. Did not the bell convey a plain allusion to the leading name on
the ticket, we should conceive it an excellent type of the hollowness
of those fears for the safety of the Union, in case of Mr. Lincoln's
election, whose changes are so loudly rung,--its noise having once or
twice given rise to false alarms of fire, till people found out what it
really was. Whatever profound moral it be intended to convey, we find
in it a similitude that is not without significance as regards the
professed creed of the party. The industrious youth who operates upon
it has evidently some notion of the measured and regular motion that
befits the tongues of well-disciplined and conservative bells. He does
his best to make theory and practice coincide; but with every jolt on
the road an involuntary variation is produced, and the sonorous
pulsation becomes rapid or slow accordingly. We have observed that the
Constitution was liable to similar derangements, and we very much doubt
whether Mr. Bell himself (since, after all, the Constitution would
practically be nothing else than his interpretation of it) would keep
the same measured tones that are so easy on the smooth path of
candidacy, when it came to conducting the car of State over some of the
rough places in the highway of Manifest Destiny, and some of those
passages in our politics which, after the fashion of new countries, are
rather _corduroy_ in character.
But, fortunately, we are not left wholly in the dark as to the aims of
the self-styled Constitutional party. One of its most distinguished
members, Governor Hunt of New York, has given us to understand that its
prime object is the defeat at all hazards of the Republican candidate.
To achieve so desirable an end, its leaders are ready to coalesce, here
with the Douglas, and there with the Breckinridge faction of that very
Democratic party of whose violations of the Constitution, corruption,
and dangerous limberness of principle they have been the lifelong
denouncers. In point of fact, then, it is perfectly plain that we have
only two parties in the field: those who favor the extension of
slavery, and those who oppose it,--in other words, a Destructive and a
Conservative party.
We know very well that the partisans of Mr. Bell, Mr. Douglas, and Mr.
Breckinridge all equally claim the title of conservative: and the fact
is a very curious one, well worthy the consideration of those foreign
critics who argue that the inevitable tendency of democracy is to
compel larger and larger concessions to a certain assumed communistic
propensity and hostility to the rights of property on the part of the
working classes. But the truth is, that revolutionary ideas are
promoted, not by any unthinking hostility to the _rights_ of property,
but by a well-founded jealousy of its usurpations; and it is Privilege,
and not Property, that is perplexed with fear of change. The
conservative effect of ownership operates with as much force on the man
with a hundred dollars in an old stocking as on his neighbor with a
million in the funds. During the Roman Revolution of '48, the beggars
who had funded their gains were among the stanchest reactionaries, and
left Rome with the nobility. No question of the abstract right of
property has ever entered directly into our politics, or ever
will,--the point at issue being, whether a certain exceptional kind of
property, already privileged beyond all others, shall be entitled to
still further privileges at the expense of every other kind. The
extension of slavery over new territory means just this,--that this one
kind of property, not recognized as such by the Constitution, or it
would never have been allowed to enter into the basis of
representation, shall control the foreign and domestic policy of the
Republic.
A great deal is said, to be sure, about the rights of the South; but
has any such right been infringed? When a man invests money in any
species of property, he assumes the risks to which it is liable. If he
buy a house, it may be burned; if a ship, it may be wrecked; if a horse
or an ox, it may die. Now the disadvantage of the Southern kind of
property is--how shall we say it so as not to violate our Constitutional
obligations?--that it is exceptional. When it leaves Virginia, it is a
thing; when it arrives in Boston, it becomes a man, speaks human
language, appeals to the justice of the same God whom we all
acknowledge, weeps at the memory of wife and children left behind,--in
short, hath the same organs and dimensions that a Christian hath, and
is not distinguishable from ordinary Christians, except, perhaps, by a
simpler and more earnest faith. There are people at the North who
believe that, beside _meum_ and _tuum_, there is also such a thing as
_suum_,--who are old-fashioned enough, or weak enough, to have their
feelings touched by these things, to think that human nature is older
and more sacred than any claim of property whatever, and that it has
rights at least as much to be respected as any hypothetical one of our
Southern brethren. This, no doubt, makes it harder to recover a
fugitive chattel; but the existence of human nature in a man here and
there is surely one of those accidents to be counted on at least as
often as fire, shipwreck, or the cattle-disease; and the man who
chooses to put his money into these images of his Maker cut in ebony
should be content to take the incident risks along with the advantages.
We should be very sorry to deem this risk capable of diminution; for we
think that the claims of a common manhood upon us should be at least as
strong as those of Freemasonry, and that those whom the law of man
turns away should find in the larger charity of the law of God and
Nature a readier welcome and surer sanctuary. We shall continue to
think the negro a man, and on Southern evidence, too, so long as he is
counted in the population represented on the floor of Congress,--for
three fifths of perfect manhood would be a high average even among
white men; so long as he is hanged or worse, as an example and terror
to others,--for we do not punish one animal for the moral improvement
of the rest; so long as he is considered capable of religious
instruction,--for we fancy the gorillas would make short work with a
missionary; so long as there are fears of insurrection,--for we never
heard of a combined effort at revolt in a menagerie. Accordingly, we do
not see how the particular right of whose infringement we hear so much
is to be made safer by the election of Mr. Bell, Mr. Breckinridge, or
Mr. Douglas,--there being quite as little chance that any of them would
abolish human nature as that Mr. Lincoln would abolish slavery. The
same generous instinct that leads some among us to sympathize with the
sorrows of the bereaved master will always, we fear, influence others
to take part with the rescued man.
But if our Constitutional Obligations, as we like to call our
constitutional timidity or indifference, teach us that a particular
divinity hedges the Domestic Institution, they do not require us to
forget that we have institutions of our own, worth maintaining and
extending, and not without a certain sacredness, whether we regard the
traditions of the fathers or the faith of the children. It is high time
that we should hear something of the rights of the Free States, and of
the duties consequent upon them. We also have our prejudices to be
respected, our theory of civilization, of what constitutes the safety
of a state and insures its prosperity, to be applied wherever there is
soil enough for a human being to stand on and thank God for making him
a man. Is conservatism applicable only to property, and not to justice,
freedom, and public honor? Does it mean merely drifting with the
current of evil times and pernicious counsels, and carefully nursing
the ills we have, that they may, as their nature it is, grow worse?
To be told that we ought not to agitate the question of Slavery, when
it is that which is forever agitating us, is like telling a man with
the fever and ague on him to stop shaking, and he will be cured. The
discussion of Slavery is said to be dangerous, but dangerous to what?
The manufacturers of the Free States constitute a more numerous class
than the slaveholders of the South: suppose they should claim an equal
sanctity for the Protective System. Discussion is the very life of free
institutions, the fruitful mother of all political and moral
enlightenment, and yet the question of all questions must be tabooed.
The Swiss guide enjoins silence in the region of avalanches, lest the
mere vibration of the voice should dislodge the ruin clinging by frail
roots of snow. But where is our avalanche to fall? It is to overwhelm
the Union, we are told. The real danger to the Union will come when the
encroachments of the Slave-Power and the concessions of the Trade-Power
shall have made it a burden instead of a blessing. The real avalanche
to be dreaded,--are we to expect it from the ever-gathering mass of
ignorant brute force, with the irresponsibility of animals and the
passions of men, which is one of the fatal necessities of slavery, or
from the gradually increasing consciousness of the non-slaveholding
population of the Slave States of the true cause of their material
impoverishment and political inferiority? From one or the other source
its ruinous forces will be fed, but in either event it is not the Union
that will be imperilled, but the privileged Order who on every occasion
of a thwarted whim have menaced its disruption, and who will then find
in it their only safety.
We believe that the "irrepressible conflict"--for we accept Mr.
Seward's much-denounced phrase in all the breadth of meaning he ever
meant to give it--is to take place in the South itself; because the
Slave System is one of those fearful blunders in political economy
which are sure, sooner or later, to work their own retribution. The
inevitable tendency of slavery is to concentrate in a few hands the
soil, the capital, and the power of the countries where it exists, to
reduce the non-slaveholding class to a continually lower and lower
level of property, intelligence, and enterprise,--their increase in
numbers adding much to the economical hardship of their position and
nothing to their political weight in the community. There is no
home-encouragement of varied agriculture,--for the wants of a slave
population are few in number and limited in kind; none of inland trade,
for that is developed only by communities where education induces
refinement, where facility of communication stimulates invention and
variety of enterprise, where newspapers make every man's improvement in
tools, machinery, or culture of the soil an incitement to all, and
bring all the thinkers of the world to teach in the cheap university of
the people. We do not, of course, mean to say that slaveholding States
may not and do not produce fine men; but they fail, by the inherent
vice of their constitution and its attendant consequences, to create
enlightened, powerful, and advancing communities of men, which is the
true object of all political organizations, and is essential to the
prolonged existence of all those whose life and spirit are derived
directly from the people. Every man who has dispassionately endeavored
to enlighten himself in the matter cannot but see, that, for the many,
the course of things in slaveholding States is substantially what we
have described, a downward one, more or less rapid, in civilization and
in all those results of material prosperity which in a free country
show themselves in the general advancement for the good of all, and
give a real meaning to the word Commonwealth. No matter how enormous
the wealth centred in the hands of a few, it has no longer the
conservative force or the beneficent influence which it exerts when
equably distributed,--even loses more of both where a system of
absenteeism prevails so largely as in the South. In such communities
the seeds of an "irrepressible conflict" are surely if slowly ripening,
and signs are daily multiplying that the true peril to their social
organization is looked for, less in a revolt of the owned labor than in
an insurrection of intelligence in the labor that owns itself and finds
itself none the richer for it. To multiply such communities is to
multiply weakness.
The election in November turns on the single and simple question,
Whether we shall consent to the indefinite multiplication of them; and
the only party which stands plainly and unequivocally pledged against
such a policy, nay, which is not either openly or impliedly in favor of
it,--is the Republican party. We are of those who at first regretted
that another candidate was not nominated at Chicago; but we confess
that we have ceased to regret it, for the magnanimity of Mr. Seward
since the result of the Convention was known has been a greater
ornament to him and a greater honor to his party than his election to
the Presidency would have been. We should have been pleased with Mr.
Seward's nomination, for the very reason we have seen assigned for
passing him by,--that he represented the most advanced doctrines of his
party. He, more than any other man, combined in himself the moralist's
oppugnancy to Slavery as a fact, the thinker's resentment of it as a
theory, and the statist's distrust of it as a policy,--thus summing up
the three efficient causes that have chiefly aroused and concentrated
the antagonism of the Free States. Not a brilliant man, he has that
best gift of Nature, which brilliant men commonly lack, of being always
able to do his best; and the very misrepresentation of his opinions
which was resorted to in order to neutralize the effect of his speeches
in the Senate and elsewhere was the best testimony to their power. Safe
from the prevailing epidemic of Congressional eloquence as if he had
been inoculated for it early in his career, he addresses himself to the
reason, and what he says sticks. It was assumed that his nomination
would have embittered the contest and tainted the Republican creed with
radicalism; but we doubt it. We cannot think that a party gains by not
hitting its hardest, or by sugaring its opinions. Republicanism is not
a conspiracy to obtain office under false pretences. It has a definite
aim, an earnest purpose, and the unflinching tenacity of profound
conviction. It was not called into being by a desire to reform the
pecuniary corruptions of the party now in power. Mr. Bell or Mr.
Breckinridge would do that, for no one doubts their honor or their
honesty. It is not unanimous about the Tariff, about State-Rights,
about many other questions of policy. What unites the Republicans is a
common faith in the early principles and practice of the Republic, a
common persuasion that slavery, as it cannot but be the natural foe of
the one, has been the chief debaser of the other, and a common resolve
to resist its encroachments everywhen and everywhere. They see no
reason to fear that the Constitution, which has shown such pliant
tenacity under the warps and twistings of a forty-years' pro-slavery
pressure, should be in danger of breaking, if bent backward again
gently to its original rectitude of fibre. "All forms of human
government," says Machiavelli, "have, like men, their natural term, and
those only are long-lived which possess in themselves the power of
returning to the principles on which they were originally founded."
It is in a moral aversion to slavery as a great wrong that the chief
strength of the Republican party lies. They believe as everybody
believed sixty years ago; and we are sorry to see what appears to be an
inclination in some quarters to blink this aspect of the case, lest the
party be charged with want of conservatism, or, what is worse, with
abolitionism. It is and will be charged with all kinds of dreadful
things, whatever it does, and it has nothing to fear from an upright
and downright declaration of its faith. One part of the grateful work
it has to do is to deliver us from the curse of perpetual concession
for the sake of a peace that never comes, and which, if it came, would
not be peace, but submission,--from that torpor and imbecility of faith
in God and man which have stolen the respectable name of Conservatism.
A question which cuts so deep as that which now divides the country
cannot be debated, much less settled, without excitement. Such
excitement is healthy, and is a sign that the ill humors of the body
politic are coming to the surface, where they are comparatively
harmless. It is the tendency of all creeds, opinions, and political
dogmas that have once defined themselves in institutions to become
inoperative. The vital and formative principle, which was active during
the process of crystallization into sects, or schools of thought, or
governments, ceases to act; and what was once a living emanation of the
Eternal Mind, organically operative in history, becomes the dead
formula on men's lips and the dry topic of the annalist. It has been
our good fortune that a question has been thrust upon us which has
forced us to reconsider the primal principles of government, which has
appealed to conscience as well as reason, and, by bringing the theories
of the Declaration of Independence to the test of experience in our
thought and life and action, has realized a tradition of the memory
into a conviction of the understanding and the soul. It will not do for
the Republicans to confine themselves to the mere political argument,
for the matter then becomes one of expediency, with two defensible
sides to it; they must go deeper, to the radical question of right and
wrong, or they surrender the chief advantage of their position. What
Spinoza says of laws is equally true of party platforms,--that those
are strong which appeal to reason, but those are impregnable which
compel the assent both of reason and the common affections of mankind.
No man pretends that under the Constitution there is any possibility of
interference with the domestic relations of the individual States; no
party has ever remotely hinted at any such interference; but what the
Republicans affirm is, that in every contingency where the Constitution
can be construed in favor of freedom, it ought to be and shall be so
construed. It is idle to talk of sectionalism, abolitionism, and
hostility to the laws. The principles of liberty and humanity cannot,
by virtue of their very nature, be sectional, any more than light and
heat. Prevention is not abolition, and unjust laws are the only serious
enemies that Law ever had. With history before us, it is no treason to
question the infallibility of a court; for courts are never wiser or
more venerable than the men composing them, and a decision that
reverses precedent cannot arrogate to itself any immunity from
reversal. Truth is the only unrepealable thing.
We are gravely requested to have no opinion, or, having one, to
suppress it, on the one topic that has occupied caucuses, newspapers,
Presidents' messages, and Congress for the last dozen years, lest we
endanger the safety of the Union. The true danger to popular forms of
government begins when public opinion ceases because the people are
incompetent or unwilling to think. In a democracy it is the duty of
every citizen to think; but unless the thinking result in a definite
opinion, and the opinion lead to considerate action, they are nothing.
If the people are assumed to be incapable of forming a judgment for
themselves, the men whose position enables them to guide the public
mind ought certainly to make good their want of intelligence. But on
this great question, the wise solution of which, we are every day
assured, is essential to the permanence of the Union, Mr. Bell has no
opinion at all, Mr. Douglas says it is of no consequence which opinion
prevails, and Mr. Breckinridge tells us vaguely that "all sections have
an equal right in the common Territories." The parties which support
these candidates, however, all agree in affirming that the election of
its special favorite is the one thing that can give back peace to the
distracted country. The distracted country will continue to take care
of itself, as it has done hitherto, and the only question that needs an
answer is, What policy will secure the most prosperous future to the
helpless Territories, which our decision is to make or mar for all
coming time? What will save the country from a Senate and Supreme Court
where freedom shall be forever at a disadvantage?
There is always a fallacy in the argument of the opponents of the
Republican party. They affirm that all the States and all the citizens
of the States ought to have equal rights in the Territories.
Undoubtedly. But the difficulty is that they cannot. The slaveholder
moves into a new Territory with his _institution_, and from that moment
the free white settler is virtually excluded. _His_ institutions he
cannot take with him; they refuse to root themselves in soil that is
cultivated by slave-labor. Speech is no longer free; the post-office is
Austrianized; the mere fact of Northern birth may be enough to hang
him. Even now in Texas, settlers from the Free States are being driven
out and murdered for pretended complicity in a plot the evidence for
the existence of which has been obtained by means without a parallel
since the trial of the Salem witches, and the stories about which are
as absurd and contradictory as the confessions of Goodwife Corey.
Kansas was saved, it is true; but it was the experience of Kansas that
disgusted the South with Mr. Douglas's panacea of "Squatter
Sovereignty."
The claim of _equal_ rights in the Territories is a specious fallacy.
Concede the demand of the slavery-extensionists, and you give up every
inch of territory to slavery, to the absolute exclusion of freedom. For
what they ask (however they may disguise it) is simply this,--that
their _local law_ be made the law of the land, and coextensive with the
limits of the General Government. The Constitution acknowledges no
unqualified or interminable right of property in the labor of another;
and the plausible assertion, that "that is property which the law makes
property" (confounding _a_ law existing anywhere with _the_ law which
is binding everywhere), can deceive only those who have either never
read the Constitution, or are ignorant of the opinions and intentions
of those who framed it. It is true only of the States where slavery
already exists; and it is because the propagandists of slavery are well
aware of this, that they are so anxious to establish by positive
enactment the seemingly moderate title to a right of existence for
their institution in the Territories,--a title which they do not
possess, and the possession of which would give them the oyster and
the Free States the shells. Laws accordingly are asked for to protect
Southern property in the Territories,--that is, to protect the
inhabitants from deciding for themselves what their frame of government
shall be. Such laws will be passed, and the fairest portion of our
national domain irrevocably closed to free labor, if the on-slaveholding
States fail to do their duty in the present crisis.
But will the election of Mr. Lincoln endanger the Union? It is not a
little remarkable that, as the prospect of his success increases, the
menaces of secession grow fainter and less frequent. Mr. W. L. Yancey,
to be sure, threatens to secede; but the country can get along without
him, and we wish him a prosperous career in foreign parts. But Governor
Wise no longer proposes to seize the Treasury at Washington,--perhaps
because Mr. Buchanan has left so little in it. The old Mumbo-Jumbo is
occasionally paraded at the North, but, however many old women may be
frightened, the pulse of the stock-market remains provokingly calm.
General Cushing, infringing the patent-right of the late Mr. James, the
novelist, has seen a solitary horseman on the edge of the horizon. The
exegesis of the vision has been various, some thinking that it means a
Military Despot,--though in that case the force of cavalry would seem
to be inadequate,--and others the Pony Express. If it had been one
rider on two horses, the application would have been more general and
less obscure. In fact, the old cry of Disunion has lost its terrors, if
it ever had any, at the North. The South itself seems to have become
alarmed at its own scarecrow, and speakers there are beginning to
assure their hearers that the election of Mr. Lincoln will do them no
harm. We entirely agree with them, for it will save them from
themselves.
To believe any organized attempt by the Republican party to disturb the
existing internal policy of the Southern States possible presupposes a
manifest absurdity. Before anything of the kind could take place, the
country must be in a state of forcible revolution. But there is no
premonitory symptom of any such convulsion, unless we except Mr.
Yancey, and that gentleman's throwing a solitary somerset will hardly
turn the continent head over heels. The administration of Mr. Lincoln
will be conservative, because no government is ever intentionally
otherwise, and because power never knowingly undermines the foundation
on which it rests. All that the Free States demand is that influence in
the councils of the nation to which they are justly entitled by their
population, wealth, and intelligence. That these elements of prosperity
have increased more rapidly among them than in communities otherwise
organized, with greater advantages of soil, climate, and mineral
productions, is certainly no argument that they are incapable of the
duties of efficient and prudent administration, however strong a one it
may be for their endeavoring to secure for the Territories the single
superiority that has made themselves what they are. The object of the
Republican party is not the abolition of African slavery, but the utter
extirpation of dogmas which are the logical sequence of attempts to
establish its righteousness and wisdom, and which would serve equally
well to justify the enslavement of every white man unable to protect
himself. They believe that slavery is a wrong morally, a mistake
politically, and a misfortune practically, wherever it exists; that it
has nullified our influence abroad and forced us to compromise with our
better instincts at home; that it has perverted our government from its
legitimate objects, weakened the respect for the laws by making them
the tools of its purposes, and sapped the faith of men in any higher
political morality than interest or any better statesmanship than
chicane. They mean in every lawful way to hem it within its present
limits.
We are persuaded that the election of Mr. Lincoln will do more than
anything else to appease the excitement of the country. He has proved
both his ability and his integrity; he has had experience enough in
public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a
politician. That he has not had more will be no objection to him in the
eyes of those who have seen the administration of the experienced
public functionary whose term of office is just drawing to a close. He
represents a party who know that true policy is gradual in its
advances, that it is conditional and not absolute, that it must deal
with facts and not with sentiments, but who know also that it is wiser
to stamp out evil in the spark than to wait till there is no help but
in fighting fire with fire. They are the only conservative party,
because they are the only one based on an enduring principle, the only
one that is not willing to pawn to-morrow for the means to gamble with
to-day. They have no hostility to the South, but a determined one to
doctrines of whose ruinous tendency every day more and more convinces
them.
The encroachments of Slavery upon our national policy have been like
those of a glacier in a Swiss valley. Inch by inch, the huge dragon
with its glittering scales and crests of ice coils itself onward, an
anachronism of summer, the relic of a by-gone world where such monsters
swarmed. But it has its limit, the kindlier forces of Nature work
against it, and the silent arrows of the sun are still, as of old,
fatal to the frosty Python. Geology tells us that such enormous
devastators once covered the face of the earth, but the benignant
sunlight of heaven touched them, and they faded silently, leaving no
trace, but here and there the scratches of their talons, and the gnawed
boulders scattered where they made their lair. We have entire faith in
the benignant influence of Truth, the sunlight of the moral world, and
believe that slavery, like other worn-out systems, will melt gradually
before it. "All the earth cries out upon Truth, and the heaven blesseth
it; ill works shake and tremble at it, and with it is no unrighteous
thing."
E PLURIBUS UNUM
1861
We do not believe that any government--no, not the Rump Parliament on
its last legs--ever showed such pitiful inadequacy as our own during
the past two months. Helpless beyond measure in all the duties of
practical statesmanship, its members or their dependants have given
proof of remarkable energy in the single department of peculation; and
there, not content with the slow methods of the old-fashioned
defaulter, who helped himself only to what there was, they have
contrived to steal what there was going to be, and have peculated in
advance by a kind of official post-obit. So thoroughly has the credit
of the most solvent nation in the world been shaken, that an
administration which still talks of paying a hundred millions for Cuba
is unable to raise a loan of five millions for the current expenses of
government. Nor is this the worst: the moral bankruptcy at Washington
is more complete and disastrous than the financial, and for the first
time in our history the Executive is suspected of complicity in a
treasonable plot against the very life of the nation.
Our material prosperity for nearly half a century has been so
unparalleled that the minds of men have become gradually more and more
absorbed in matters of personal concern; and our institutions have
practically worked so well and so easily that we have learned to trust
in our luck, and to take the permanence of our government for granted.
The country has been divided on questions of temporary policy, and the
people have been drilled to a wonderful discipline in the manoeuvres
of party tactics; but no crisis has arisen to force upon them a
consideration of the fundamental principles of our system, or to arouse
in them a sense of national unity, and make them feel that patriotism
was anything more than a pleasant sentiment,--half Fourth of July and
half Eighth of January,--a feeble reminiscence, rather than a living
fact with a direct bearing on the national well-being. We have had long
experience of that unmemorable felicity which consists in having no
history, so far as history is made up of battles, revolutions, and
changes of dynasty; but the present generation has never been called
upon to learn that deepest lesson of polities which is taught by a
common danger, throwing the people back on their national instincts,
and superseding party-leaders, the peddlers of chicane, with men
adequate to great occasions and dealers in destiny. Such a crisis is
now upon us; and if the virtue of the people make up for the imbecility
of the Executive, as we have little doubt that it will, if the public
spirit of the whole country be awakened in time by the common peril,
the present trial will leave the nation stronger than ever, and more
alive to its privileges and the duties they imply. We shall have
learned what is meant by a government of laws, and that allegiance to
the sober will of the majority, concentrated in established forms and
distributed by legitimate channels, is all that renders democracy
possible, is its only conservative principle, the only thing that has
made and can keep us a powerful nation instead of a brawling mob.
The theory that the best government is that which governs least seems
to have been accepted literally by Mr. Buchanan, without considering
the qualifications to which all general propositions are subject. His
course of conduct has shown up its absurdity, in cases where prompt
action is required, as effectually as Buckingham turned into ridicule
the famous verse,--
"My wound is great, because it is so small,"
by instantly adding,--
"Then it were greater, were it none at all."
Mr. Buchanan seems to have thought, that, if to govern little was to
govern well, then to do nothing was the perfection of policy. But there
is a vast difference between letting well alone and allowing bad to
become worse by a want of firmness at the outset. If Mr. Buchanan,
instead of admitting the right of secession, had declared it to be, as
it plainly is, rebellion, he would not only have received the unanimous
support of the Free States, but would have given confidence to the
loyal, reclaimed the wavering, and disconcerted the plotters of treason
in the South.
Either we have no government at all, or else the very word implies the
right, and therefore the duty, in the governing power, of protecting
itself from destruction and its property from pillage. But for Mr.
Buchanan's acquiescence, the doctrine of the right of secession would
never for a moment have bewildered the popular mind. It is simply
mob-law under a plausible name. Such a claim might have been fairly
enough urged under the old Confederation; though even then it would
have been summarily dealt with, in the case of a Tory colony, if the
necessity had arisen. But the very fact that we have a National
Constitution, and legal methods for testing, preventing, or punishing
any infringement of its provisions, demonstrates the absurdity of any
such assumption of right now. When the States surrendered their power
to make war, did they make the single exception of the United States,
and reserve the privilege of declaring war against them at any moment?
If we are a congeries of mediæval Italian republics, why should the
General Government have expended immense sums in fortifying points
whose strategic position is of continental rather than local
consequence? Florida, after having cost us nobody knows how many
millions of dollars and thousands of lives to render the holding of
slaves possible to her, coolly proposes to withdraw herself from the
Union and take with her one of the keys of the Mexican Gulf, on the
plea that her slave-property is rendered insecure by the Union.
Louisiana, which we bought and paid for to secure the mouth of the
Mississippi, claims the right to make her soil French or Spanish, and
to cork up the river again, whenever the whim may take her. The United
States are not a German Confederation, but a unitary and indivisible
nation, with a national life to protect, a national power to maintain,
and national rights to defend against any and every assailant, at all
hazards. Our national existence is all that gives value to American
citizenship. Without the respect which nothing but our consolidated
character could inspire, we might as well be citizens of the
toy-republic of San Marino, for all the protection it would afford us.
If our claim to a national existence was worth a seven years' war to
establish, it is worth maintaining at any cost; and it is daily
becoming more apparent that the people, so soon as they find that
secession means anything serious, will not allow themselves to be
juggled out of their rights, as members of one of the great powers of
the earth, by a mere quibble of Constitutional interpretation.
We have been so much accustomed to the Buncombe style of oratory, to
hearing men offer the pledge of their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor
on the most trivial occasions, that we are apt to allow a great
latitude in such matters, and only smile to think how small an advance
any intelligent pawnbroker would be likely to make on securities of
this description. The sporadic eloquence that breaks out over the
country on the eve of election, and becomes a chronic disease in the
two houses of Congress, has so accustomed us to dissociate words and
things, and to look upon strong language as an evidence of weak
purpose, that we attach no meaning whatever to declamation. Our
Southern brethren have been especially given to these orgies of
loquacity, and have so often solemnly assured us of their own courage,
and of the warlike propensities, power, wealth, and general superiority
of that part of the universe which is so happy as to be represented by
them, that, whatever other useful impression they have made, they
insure our never forgetting the proverb about the woman who talks of
her virtue. South Carolina, in particular, if she has hitherto failed
in the application of her enterprise to manufacturing purposes of a
more practical kind, has always been able to match every yard of
printed cotton from the North with a yard of printed fustian, the
product of her own domestic industry. We have thought no harm of this,
so long as no Act of Congress required the reading of the
"Congressional Globe." We submitted to the general dispensation of
long-windedness and short-meaningness as to any other providental
visitation, endeavoring only to hold fast our faith in the divine
government of the world in the midst of so much that was past
understanding. But we lost sight of the metaphysical truth, that,
though men may fail to convince others by a never so incessant
repetition of sonorous nonsense, they nevertheless gradually persuade
themselves, and impregnate their own minds and characters with a belief
in fallacies that have been uncontradicted only because not worth
contradiction. Thus our Southern politicians, by dint of continued
reiteration, have persuaded themselves to accept their own flimsy
assumptions for valid statistics, and at last actually believe
themselves to be the enlightened gentlemen, and the people of the Free
States the peddlers and sneaks they have so long been in the habit of
fancying. They have argued themselves into a kind of vague faith that
the wealth and power of the Republic are south of Mason and Dixon's
line; and the Northern people have been slow in arriving at the
conclusion that treasonable talk would lead to treasonable action,
because they could not conceive that anybody should be so foolish as to
think of rearing an independent frame of government on so visionary a
basis. Moreover, the so often recurring necessity, incident to our
system, of obtaining a favorable verdict from the people has fostered
in our public men the talents and habits of jury-lawyers at the expense
of statesmanlike qualities; and the people have been so long wonted to
look upon the utterances of popular leaders as intended for immediate
effect and having no reference to principles, that there is scarcely a
prominent man in the country so independent in position and so clear of
any suspicion of personal or party motives that they can put entire
faith in what he says, and accept him either as the leader or the
exponent of their thoughts and wishes. They have hardly been able to
judge with certainty from the debates in Congress whether secession
were a real danger, or only one of those political feints of which they
have had such frequent experience.
Events have been gradually convincing them that the peril was actual
and near. They begin to see how unwise, if nothing worse, has been the
weak policy of the Executive in allowing men to play at Revolution till
they learn to think the coarse reality as easy and pretty as the
vaudeville they have been acting. They are fast coming to the
conclusion that the list of grievances put forward by the secessionists
is a sham and a pretence, the veil of a long-matured plot against
republican institutions. And it is time the traitors of the South
should know that the Free States are becoming every day more united in
sentiment and more earnest in resolve, and that, so soon as they are
thoroughly satisfied that secession is something more than empty
bluster, a public spirit will be aroused that will be content with no
half-measures, and which no Executive, however unwilling, can resist.
The country is weary of being cheated with plays upon words. The United
States are a nation, and not a mass-meeting; theirs is a government,
and not a caucus,--a government that was meant to be capable, and is
capable, of something more than the helpless _please don't_ of a
village constable; they have executive and administrative officers that
are not mere puppet-figures to go through the motions of an objectless
activity, but arms and hands that become supple to do the will of the
people so soon as that will becomes conscious and defines its purpose.
It is time that we turned up our definitions in some more trustworthy
dictionary than that of avowed disunionists and their more dangerous
because more timid and cunning accomplices. Rebellion smells no sweeter
because it is called Secession, nor does Order lose its divine
precedence in human affairs because a knave may nickname it Coercion.
Secession means chaos, and Coercion the exercise of legitimate
authority. You cannot dignify the one nor degrade the other by any
verbal charlatanism. The best testimony to the virtue of coercion is
the fact that no wrongdoer ever thought well of it. The thief in jail,
the mob-leader in the hands of the police, and the murderer on the drop
will be unanimous in favor of this new heresy of the unconstitutionality
of constitutions, with its Newgate Calendar of confessors, martyrs, and
saints. Falstaff's famous regiment would have volunteered to a man for
its propagation or its defence. Henceforth let every unsuccessful
litigant have the right to pronounce the verdict of a jury sectional,
and to quash all proceedings and retain the property in controversy by
seceding from the court-room. Let the planting of hemp be made penal,
because it squints toward coercion. Why, the first great secessionist
would doubtless have preferred to divide heaven peaceably, would have
been willing to send commissioners, must have thought Michael's
proceedings injudicious, and could probably even now demonstrate the
illegality of hell-fire to any five-year-old imp of average education
and intelligence. What a fine world we should have, if we could only
come quietly together in convention, and declare by unanimous
resolution, or even by a two-thirds vote, that edge-tools should
hereafter cut everybody's fingers but his that played with them; that,
when two men ride on one horse, the hindmost shall always sit in front;
and that, when a man tries to thrust his partner out of bed and gets
kicked out himself, he shall be deemed to have established his title to
an equitable division, and the bed shall be thenceforth his as of
right, without detriment to the other's privilege in the floor!
If secession be a right, then the moment of its exercise is wholly
optional with those possessing it. Suppose, on the eve of a war with
England, Michigan should vote herself out of the Union and declare
herself annexed to Canada, what kind of a reception would her
commissioners be likely to meet in Washington, and what scruples should
we feel about coercion? Or, to take a case precisely parallel to that
of South Carolina, suppose that Utah, after getting herself admitted to
the Union, should resume her sovereignty, as it is pleasantly called,
and block our path to the Pacific, under the pretence that she did not
consider her institutions safe while the other States entertained such
unscriptural prejudices against her special weakness in the patriarchal
line. Is the only result of our admitting a Territory on Monday to be
the giving it a right to steal itself and go out again on Tuesday? Or
do only the original thirteen States possess this precious privilege of
suicide? We shall need something like a Fugitive Slave Law for runaway
republics, and must get a provision inserted in our treaties with
foreign powers, that they shall help us catch any delinquent who may
take refuge with them, as South Carolina has been trying to do with
England and France. It does not matter to the argument, except so far
as the good taste of the proceeding is concerned, at what particular
time a State may make her territory foreign, thus opening one gate of
our national defences and offering a bridge to invasion. The danger of
the thing is in her making her territory foreign under any
circumstances; and it is a danger which the government must prevent, if
only for self-preservation. Within the limits of the constitution two
sovereignties cannot exist; and yet what practical odds does it make,
if a State may become sovereign by simply declaring herself so? The
legitimate consequence of secession is, not that a State becomes
sovereign, but that, so far as the general government is concerned, she
has outlawed herself, nullified her own existence as a State, and
become an aggregate of riotous men who resist the execution of the
laws.
We are told that coercion will be civil war; and so is a mob civil war,
till it is put down. In the present case, the only coercion called for
is the protection of the public property, and the collection of the
federal revenues. If it be necessary to send troops to do this, they
will not be sectional, as it is the fashion nowadays to call people who
insist on their own rights and the maintenance of the laws, but federal
troops, representing the will and power of the whole Confederacy. A
danger is always great so long as we are afraid of it; and mischief
like that now gathering head in South Carolina may soon become a
danger, if not swiftly dealt with. Mr. Buchanan seems altogether too
wholesale a disciple of the _laissez-faire_ doctrine, and has allowed
activity in mischief the same immunity from interference which is true
policy only in regard to enterprise wisely and profitably directed. He
has been naturally reluctant to employ force, but has overlooked the
difference between indecision and moderation, forgetting the lesson of
all experience, that firmness in the beginning saves the need of force
in the end, and that forcible measures applied too late may be made to
seem violent ones, and thus excite a mistaken sympathy with the
sufferers by their own misdoing. The feeling of the country has been
unmistakably expressed in regard to Major Anderson, and that not merely
because he showed prudence and courage, but because he was the first
man holding a position of trust who did his duty to the nation. Public
sentiment unmistakably demands that, in the case of Anarchy _vs._
America, the cause of the defendant shall not be suffered to go by
default. The proceedings in South Carolina, parodying the sublime
initiative of our own Revolution with a Declaration of Independence
that hangs the franchise of human nature on the kink of a hair, and
substitutes for the visionary right of all men to the pursuit of
happiness the more practical privilege of some men to pursue their own
negro,--these proceedings would be merely ludicrous, were it not for
the danger that the men engaged in them may so far commit themselves as
to find the inconsistency of a return to prudence too galling, and to
prefer the safety of their pride to that of their country.
[Illustration: _Major Anderson_]
It cannot be too distinctly stated or too often repeated that the
discontent of South Carolina is not one to be allayed by any
concessions which the Free States can make with dignity or even safety.
It is something more radical and of longer standing than distrust of
the motives or probable policy of the Republican party. It is neither
more nor less than a disbelief in the very principles on which our
government is founded. So long as they practically retained the
government of the country, and could use its power and patronage to
their own advantage, the plotters were willing to wait; but the moment
they lost that control, by the breaking up of the Democratic party, and
saw that their chance of ever regaining it was hopeless, they declared
openly the principles on which they have all along been secretly
acting. Denying the constitutionality of special protection to any
other species of property or branch of industry, and in 1832
threatening to break up the Union unless their theory of the
Constitution in this respect were admitted, they went into the late
Presidential contest with a claim for extraordinary protection to a
certain kind of property already the only one endowed with special
privileges and immunities. Defeated overwhelmingly before the people,
they now question the right of the majority to govern, except on their
terms, and threaten violence in the hope of extorting from the fears of
the Free States what they failed to obtain from their conscience and
settled convictions of duty. Their quarrel is not with the Republican
party, but with the theory of Democracy.
The South Carolina politicians have hitherto shown themselves adroit
managers, shrewd in detecting and profiting by the weaknesses of men;
but their experience has not been of a kind to give them practical
wisdom in that vastly more important part of government which depends
for success on common sense and business habits. The members of the
South Carolina Convention have probably less knowledge of political
economy than any single average Northern merchant whose success depends
on an intimate knowledge of the laws of trade and the world-wide
contingencies of profit and loss. Such a man would tell them, as the
result of invariable experience, that the prosperity of no community
was so precarious as that of one whose very existence was dependent on
a single agricultural product. What divinity hedges cotton, that
competition may not touch it,--that some disease, like that of the
potato and the vine, may not bring it to beggary in a single year, and
cure the overweening conceit of prosperity with the sharp medicine of
Ireland and Madeira? But these South Carolina economists are better at
vaporing than at calculation. They will find to their cost that the
figures of statistics have little mercy for the figures of speech,
which are so powerful in raising enthusiasm and so helpless in raising
money. The eating of one's own words, as they must do, sooner or later,
is neither agreeable nor nutritious; but it is better to do it before
there is nothing else left to eat. The secessionists are strong in
declamation, but they are weak in the multiplication-table and the
ledger. They have no notion of any sort of logical connection between
treason and taxes. It is all very fine signing Declarations of
Independence, and one may thus become a kind of panic-price hero for a
week or two, even rising to the effigial martyrdom of the illustrated
press; but these gentlemen seem to have forgotten that, if their
precious document should lead to anything serious, they have been
signing promises to pay for the State of South Carolina to an enormous
amount. It is probably far short of the truth to say that the taxes of
an autonomous palmetto republic would be three times what they are now.
To speak of nothing else, there must be a military force kept
constantly on foot; and the ministers of King Cotton will find that the
charge made by a standing army on the finances of the new empire is
likely to be far more serious and damaging than can be compensated by
the glory of a great many such "spirited charges" as that by which
Colonel Pettigrew and his gallant rifles took Fort Pinckney, with its
garrison of one engineer officer and its armament of no guns. Soldiers
are the most costly of all toys or tools. The outgo for the army of the
Pope, never amounting to ten thousand effective men, in the cheapest
country in the world, has been half a million of dollars a month. Under
the present system, it needs no argument to show that the
non-slaveholding States, with a free population considerably more than
double that of the slaveholding States, and with much more generally
distributed wealth and opportunities of spending, pay far more than the
proportion predicable on mere preponderance in numbers of the expenses
of a government supported mainly by a tariff on importations. And it is
not the burden of this difference merely that the new Cotton Republic
must assume. They will need as large, probably a larger, army and navy
than that of the present Union; as numerous a diplomatic establishment;
a postal system whose large yearly deficit they must bear themselves;
and they must assume the main charges of the Indian Bureau. If they
adopt free trade, they will alienate the Border Slave States, and even
Louisiana; if a system of customs, they have cut themselves off from
the chief consumers of foreign goods. One of the calculations of the
Southern conspirators is to render the Free States tributary to their
new republic by adopting free trade and smuggling their imported goods
across the border. But this is all moonshine; for, even if smuggling
could not be prevented as easily as it now is from the British
Provinces, how long would it be before the North would adapt its tariff
to the new order of things? And thus thrown back upon direct taxation,
how many years would it take to open the eyes of the poorer classes of
Secessia to the hardship of their position and its causes? Their
ignorance has been trifled with by men who cover treasonable designs
with a pretence of local patriotism. Neither they nor their misleaders
have any true conception of the people of the Free States, of those
"white slaves" who in Massachusetts alone have a deposit in the Savings
Banks whose yearly interest would pay seven times over the four hundred
thousand dollars which South Carolina cannot raise.
But even if we leave other practical difficulties out of sight, what
chance of stability is there for a confederacy whose very foundation is
the principle that any member of it may withdraw at the first
discontent? If they could contrive to establish a free trade treaty
with their chief customer, England, would she consent to gratify
Louisiana with an exception in favor of sugar? Some of the leaders of
the secession movement have already become aware of this difficulty,
and accordingly propose the abolition of all State lines,--the first
step toward a military despotism; for, if our present system have one
advantage greater than another, it is the neutralization of numberless
individual ambitions by adequate opportunities of provincial
distinction. Even now the merits of the Napoleonic system are put
forward by some of the theorists of Alabama and Mississippi, who
doubtless have as good a stomach to be emperors as ever Bottom had to a
bottle of hay, when his head was temporarily transformed to the
likeness of theirs,--and who, were they subjects of the government that
looks so nice across the Atlantic, would, ere this, have been on their
way to Cayenne, a spot where such red-peppery temperaments would find
themselves at home.
The absurdities with which the telegraphic column of the newspapers has
been daily crowded, since the vagaries of South Carolina finally
settled down into unmistakable insanity, would give us but a poor
opinion of the general intelligence of the country, did we not know
that they were due to the necessities of "Our Own Correspondent." At
one time, it is Fort Sumter that is to be bombarded with floating
batteries mounted on rafts behind a rampart of cotton-bales; at
another, it is Mr. Barrett, Mayor of Washington, announcing his
intention that the President-elect shall be inaugurated, or Mr.
Buchanan declaring that he shall cheerfully assent to it. Indeed! and
who gave them any choice in the matter? Yesterday, it was General Scott
who would not abandon the flag which he had illustrated with the
devotion of a lifetime; to-day, it is General Harney or Commodore
Kearney who has concluded to be true to the country whose livery he has
worn and whose bread he has eaten for half a century; to-morrow, it
will be Ensign Stebbins who has been magnanimous enough not to throw up
his commission. What are we to make of the extraordinary confusion of
ideas which such things indicate? In what other country would it be
considered creditable to an officer that he merely did not turn traitor
at the first opportunity? There can be no doubt of the honor both of
the army and navy, and of their loyalty to their country. They will do
their duty, if we do ours in saving them a country to which they can be
loyal.
We have been so long habituated to a kind of local independence in the
management of our affairs, and the central government has fortunately
had so little occasion for making itself felt at home and in the
domestic concerns of the States, that the idea of its relation to us as
a power, except for protection from without, has gradually become vague
and alien to our ordinary habits of thought. We have so long heard the
principle admitted, and seen it acted on with advantage to the general
weal, that the people are sovereign in their own affairs, that we must
recover our presence of mind before we see the fallacy of the
assumption, that the people, or a bare majority of them, in a single
State, can exercise their right of sovereignty as against the will of
the nation legitimately expressed. When such a contingency arises, it
is for a moment difficult to get rid of our habitual associations, and
to feel that we are not a mere partnership, dissolvable whether by
mutual consent or on the demand of one or more of its members, but a
nation, which can never abdicate its right, and can never surrender it
while virtue enough is left in the people to make it worth retaining.
It would seem to be the will of God that from time to time the manhood
of nations, like that of individuals, should be tried by great dangers
or by great opportunities. If the manhood be there, it makes the great
opportunity out of the great danger; if it be not there, then the great
danger out of the great opportunity. The occasion is offered us now of
trying whether a conscious nationality and a timely concentration of
the popular will for its maintenance be possible in a democracy, or
whether it is only despotisms that are capable of the sudden and
selfish energy of protecting themselves from destruction.
The Republican party has thus far borne itself with firmness and
moderation, and the great body of the Democratic party in the Free
States is gradually being forced into an alliance with it. Let us not
be misled by any sophisms about conciliation and compromise.
Discontented citizens may be conciliated and compromised with, but
never open rebels with arms in their hands. If there be any concessions
which justice may demand on the one hand and honor make on the other,
let us try if we can adjust them with the Border Slave States; but a
government has already signed its own death-warrant, when it consents
to make terms with law-breakers. First re-establish the supremacy of
order, and then it will be time to discuss terms; but do not call it a
compromise, when you give up your purse with a pistol at your head.
This is no time for sentimentalisms about the empty chair at the
national hearth; all the chairs would be empty soon enough, if one of
the children is to amuse itself with setting the house on fire,
whenever it can find a match. Since the election of Mr. Lincoln, not
one of the arguments has lost its force, not a cipher of the statistics
has been proved mistaken, on which the judgment of the people was made
up. Nobody proposes, or has proposed, to interfere with any existing
rights of property; the majority have not assumed to decide upon any
question of the righteousness or policy of certain social arrangements
existing in any part of the Confederacy; they have not undertaken to
constitute themselves the conscience of their neighbors; they have
simply endeavored to do their duty to their own posterity, and to
protect them from a system which, as ample experience has shown, and
that of our present difficulty were enough to show, fosters a sense of
irresponsibleness to all obligation in the governing class, and in the
governed an ignorance and a prejudice which may be misled at any moment
to the peril of the whole country.
But the present question is one altogether transcending all limits of
party and all theories of party policy. It is a question of national
existence; it is a question whether Americans shall govern America, or
whether a disappointed clique shall nullify all government now, and
render a stable government difficult hereafter; it is a question, not
whether we shall have civil war under certain contingencies, but
whether we shall prevent it under any. It is idle, and worse than idle,
to talk about Central Republics that can never be formed. We want
neither Central Republics nor Northern Republics, but our own Republic
and that of our fathers, destined one day to gather the whole continent
under a flag that shall be the most august in the world. Having once
known what it was to be members of a grand and peaceful constellation,
we shall not believe, without further proof, that the laws of our
gravitation are to be abolished, and we flung forth into chaos, a
hurlyburly of jostling and splintering stars, whenever Robert Toombs or
Robert Rhett, or any other Bob of the secession kite, may give a flirt
of self-importance. The first and greatest benefit of government is
that it keeps the peace, that it insures every man his right, and not
only that, but the permanence of it. In order to this, its first
requisite is stability; and this once firmly settled, the greater the
extent of conterminous territory that can be subjected to one system
and one language and inspired by one patriotism, the better. That there
should be some diversity of interests is perhaps an advantage, since
the necessity of legislating equitably for all gives legislation its
needful safeguards of caution and largeness of view. A single empire
embracing the whole world, and controlling, without extinguishing,
local organizations and nationalities, has been not only the dream of
conquerors, but the ideal of speculative philanthropists. Our own
dominion is of such extent and power, that it may, so far as this
continent is concerned, be looked upon as something like an approach to
the realization of such an ideal. But for slavery, it might have
succeeded in realizing it; and in spite of slavery, it may. One
language, one law, one citizenship over thousands of miles, and a
government on the whole so good that we seem to have forgotten what
government means,--these are things not to be spoken of with levity,
privileges not to be surrendered without a struggle. And yet while
Germany and Italy, taught by the bloody and bitter and servile
experience of centuries, are striving toward unity as the blessing
above all others desirable, we are to allow a Union, that for almost
eighty years has been the source and the safeguard of incalculable
advantages, to be shattered by the caprice of a rabble that has out-run
the intention of its leaders, while we are making up our minds what
coercion means! Ask the first constable, and he will tell you that it
is the force necessary for executing the laws. To avoid the danger of
what men who have seized upon forts, arsenals, and other property of
the United States, and continue to hold them by military force, may
choose to call civil war, we are allowing a state of things to gather
head which will make real civil war the occupation of the whole country
for years to come, and establish it as a permanent institution. There
is no such antipathy between the North and the South as men ambitious
of a consideration in the new republic, which their talents and
character have failed to secure them in the old, would fain call into
existence by asserting that it exists. The misunderstanding and dislike
between them is not so great as they were within living memory between
England and Scotland, as they are now between England and Ireland.
There is no difference of race, language, or religion. Yet, after a
dissatisfaction of near a century and two rebellions, there is no part
of the British dominion more loyal than Scotland, no British subjects
who would be more loath to part with the substantial advantages of
their imperial connection than the Scotch; and even in Ireland, after a
longer and more deadly feud, there is no sane man who would consent to
see his country irrevocably cut off from power and consideration to
obtain an independence which would be nothing but Donnybrook Fair
multiplied by every city, town, and village in the island. The same
considerations of policy and advantage which render the union of
Scotland and Ireland with England a necessity apply with even more
force to the several States of our Union. To let one, or two, or half a
dozen of them break away in a freak of anger or unjust suspicion, or,
still worse, from mistaken notions of sectional advantage, would be to
fail in our duty to ourselves and our country, would be a fatal
blindness to the lessons which immemorial history has been tracing on
the earth's surface, either with the beneficent furrow of the plough,
or, when that was unheeded, the fruitless gash of the cannon ball.
When we speak of coercion, we do not mean violence, but only the
assertion of constituted and acknowledged authority. Even if seceding
States could be conquered back again, they would not be worth the
conquest. We ask only for the assertion of a principle which shall give
the friends of order in the discontented quarters a hope to rally
round, and the assurance of the support they have a right to expect.
There is probably a majority, and certainly a powerful minority, in the
seceding States, who are loyal to the Union; and these should have that
support which the prestige of the General Government can alone give
them. It is not to the North nor to the Republican party that the
malcontents are called on to submit, but to the laws and to the benign
intentions of the Constitution, as they were understood by its framers.
What the country wants is a permanent settlement; and it has learned,
by repeated trial, that compromise is not a cement, but a wedge. The
Government did not hesitate to protect the doubtful right of property
of a Virginian in Anthony Burns by the exercise of coercion, and the
loyalty of Massachusetts was such that her own militia could be used to
enforce an obligation abhorrent, and, as there is reason to believe,
made purposely abhorrent, to her dearest convictions and most venerable
traditions; and yet the same Government tampers with armed treason, and
lets _I dare not_ wait upon _I would_, when it is a question of
protecting the acknowledged property of the Union, and of sustaining,
nay, preserving even, a gallant officer whose only fault is that he has
been too true to his flag. While we write, the newspapers bring us the
correspondence between Mr. Buchanan and the South Carolina "Commissioners;"
and surely never did a government stoop so low as ours has done, not
only in consenting to receive these ambassadors from Nowhere, but in
suggesting that a soldier deserves court-martial who has done all he
could to maintain himself in a forlorn hope, with rebellion in his
front and treachery in his rear. Our Revolutionary heroes had
old-fashioned notions about rebels, suitable to the straightforward
times in which they lived,--times when blood was as freely shed to
secure our national existence as milk-and-water is now to destroy it.
Mr. Buchanan might have profited by the example of men who knew nothing
of the modern arts of Constitutional interpretation, but saw clearly
the distinction between right and wrong. When a party of the Shays
rebels came to the house of General Pomeroy, in Northampton, and asked
if he could accommodate them,--the old soldier, seeing the green sprigs
in their hats, the badges of their treason, shouted to his son, "Fetch
me my hanger, and I'll _accommodate_ the scoundrels!" General Jackson,
we suspect, would have accommodated rebel commissioners in the same
peremptory style.
While our Government, like Giles in the old rhyme, is wondering whether
it is a government or not, emissaries of treason are cunningly working
upon the fears and passions of the Border States, whose true interests
are infinitely more on the side of the Union than of slavery. They are
luring the ambitious with visionary promises of Southern grandeur and
prosperity, and deceiving the ignorant into the belief that the
principles and practice of the Free States were truly represented by
John Brown. All this might have been prevented, had Mr. Buchanan in his
Message thought of the interests of his country instead of those of his
party. It is not too late to check and neutralize it now. A decisively
national and patriotic policy is all that can prevent excited men from
involving themselves so deeply that they will find "returning as
tedious as go o'er," and be more afraid of cowardice than of
consequences.
Slavery is no longer the matter in debate, and we must beware of being
led off upon that side-issue. The matter now in hand is the
reëstablishment of order, the reaffirmation of national unity, and the
settling once for all whether there can be such a thing as a government
without the right to use its power in self-defence. The Republican
party has done all it could lawfully do in limiting slavery once more
to the States in which it exists, and in relieving the Free States from
forced complicity with an odious system. They can be patient, as
Providence is often patient, till natural causes work that conviction
which conscience has been unable to effect. They believe that the
violent abolition of slavery, which would be sure to follow sooner or
later the disruption of our Confederacy, would not compensate for the
evil that would be entailed upon both races by the abolition of our
nationality and the bloody confusion that would follow it. More than
this, they believe that there can be no permanent settlement except in
the definite establishment of the principle, that this Government, like
all others, rests upon the everlasting foundations of just
Authority,--that that authority, once delegated by the people, becomes
a common stock of Power to be wielded for the common protection, and
from which no minority or majority of partners can withdraw its
contribution under any conditions,--that this power is what makes us a
nation, and implies a corresponding duty of submission, or, if that be
refused, then a necessary right of self-vindication. We are citizens,
when we make laws; we become subjects, when we attempt to break them
after they are made. Lynch-law maybe better than no law in new and
half-organized communities, but we cannot tolerate its application in
the affairs of government. The necessity of suppressing rebellion by
force may be a terrible one, but its consequences, whatever they may
be, do not weigh a feather in comparison with those that would follow
from admitting the principle that there is no social compact binding on
any body of men too numerous to be arrested by a United States marshal.
As we are writing these sentences, the news comes to us that South
Carolina has taken the initiative, and chosen the arbitrament of war.
She has done it because her position was desperate, and because she
hoped thereby to unite the Cotton States by a complicity in blood, as
they are already committed by a unanimity in bravado. Major Anderson
deserves more than ever the thanks of his country for his wise
forbearance. The foxes in Charleston, who have already lost their tails
in the trap of Secession, wished to throw upon him the responsibility
of that second blow which begins a quarrel, and the silence of his guns
has balked them. Nothing would have pleased them so much as to have one
of his thirty-two-pound shot give a taste of real war to the boys who
are playing soldier at Morris's Island. But he has shown the discretion
of a brave man. South Carolina will soon learn how much she has
undervalued the people of the Free States. Because they prefer law to
bowie-knives and revolvers, she has too lightly reckoned on their
caution and timidity. She will find that, though slow to kindle, they
are as slow to yield, and that they are willing to risk their lives for
the defence of law, though not for the breach of it. They are beginning
to question the value of a peace that is forced on them at the point of
the bayonet, and is to be obtained only by an abandonment of rights and
duties.
When we speak of the courage and power of the Free States, we do not
wish to be understood as descending to the vulgar level of meeting brag
with brag. We speak of them only as among the elements to be gravely
considered by the fanatics who may render it necessary for those who
value the continued existence of this Confederacy as it deserves to be
valued to kindle a back-fire, and to use the desperate means which God
has put into their hands to be employed in the last extremity of free
institutions. And when we use the term coercion, nothing is farther
from our thoughts than the carrying of blood and fire among those whom
we still consider our brethren of South Carolina. These civilized
communities of ours have interests too serious to be risked on a
childish wager of courage,--a quality that can always be bought cheaper
than day-labor on a railway-embankment. We wish to see the Government
strong enough for the maintenance of law, and for the protection, if
need be, of the unfortunate Governor Pickens from the anarchy he has
allowed himself to be made a tool of by evoking. Let the power of the
Union be used for any other purpose than that of shutting and barring
the door against the return of misguided men to their allegiance. At
the same time we think legitimate and responsible force prudently
exerted safer than the submission, without a struggle, to unlawful and
irresponsible violence.
Peace is the greatest of blessings, when it is won and kept by manhood
and wisdom; but it is a blessing that will not long be the housemate of
cowardice. It is God alone who is powerful enough to let His authority
slumber; it is only His laws that are strong enough to protect and
avenge themselves. Every human government is bound to make its laws so
far resemble His that they shall be uniform, certain, and
unquestionable in their operation; and this it can do only by a timely
show of power, and by an appeal to that authority which is of divine
right, inasmuch as its office is to maintain that order which is the
single attribute of the Infinite Reason that we can clearly apprehend
and of which we have hourly example.
THE PICKENS-AND-STEALIN'S REBELLION
1861
Had any one ventured to prophesy on the Fourth of March that the
immediate prospect of Civil War would be hailed by the people of the
Free States with a unanimous shout of enthusiasm, he would have been
thought a madman. Yet the prophecy would have been verified by what we
now see and hear in every city, town, and hamlet from Maine to Kansas.
With the advantage of three months' active connivance in the cabinet of
Mr. Buchanan, with an empty treasury at Washington, and that reluctance
to assume responsibility and to inaugurate a decided policy, the common
vice of our politicians, who endeavor to divine and to follow popular
sentiment rather than to lead it, it seemed as if Disunion were
inevitable, and the only open question were the line of separation. So
assured seemed the event that English journalists moralized gravely on
the inherent weakness of Democracy. While the leaders of the Southern
Rebellion did not dare to expose their treason to the risk of a popular
vote in any one of the seceding States, _The Saturday Review_, one
of the ablest of British journals, solemnly warned its countrymen to
learn by our example the dangers of an extended suffrage.
Meanwhile, the conduct of the people of the Free States, during all
these trying and perilous months, had proved, if it proved anything,
the essential conservatism of a population in which every grown man
has a direct interest in the stability of the national government.
So abstinent are they by habit and principle from any abnormal
intervention with the machine of administration, so almost
superstitious in adherence to constitutional forms, as to be for a
moment staggered by the claim to a _right_ of secession set up by all
the Cotton States, admitted by the Border Slave States, which had the
effrontery to deliberate between their plain allegiance and their
supposed interest, and but feebly denied by the Administration then in
power. The usual panacea of palaver was tried; Congress did its best to
add to the general confusion of thought; and, as if that were not
enough, a Convention of Notables was called simultaneously to thresh
the straw of debate anew, and to convince thoughtful persons that men
do not grow wiser as they grow older. So in the two Congresses the
notables talked,--in the one those who ought to be shelved, in the
other those who were shelved already,--while those who were too
thoroughly shelved for a seat in either addressed Great Union Meetings
at home. Not a man of them but had a compromise in his pocket, adhesive
as Spalding's glue, warranted to stick the shattered Confederacy
together so firmly that, if it ever broke again, it must be in a new
place, which was a great consolation. If these gentlemen gave nothing
very valuable to the people of the Free States, they were giving the
Secessionists what was of inestimable value to them,--Time. The latter
went on seizing forts, navy-yards, and deposits of Federal money,
erecting batteries, and raising and arming men at their leisure; above
all, they acquired a prestige, and accustomed men's minds to the
thought of disunion, not only as possible, but actual. They began to
grow insolent, and, while compelling absolute submission to their
rebellious usurpation at home, decried any exercise of legitimate
authority on the part of the General Government as _Coercion_,--a new
term, by which it was sought to be established as a principle of
constitutional law, that it is always the Northern bull that has gored
the Southern ox.
During all this time, the Border Slave States, and especially Virginia,
were playing a part at once cowardly and selfish. They assumed the
right to stand neutral between the government and rebellion, to
contract a kind of morganatic marriage with Treason, by which they
could enjoy the pleasant sin without the tedious responsibility, and to
be traitors in everything but the vulgar contingency of hemp. Doubtless
the aim of the political managers in these States was to keep the North
amused with schemes of arbitration, reconstruction, and whatever other
fine words would serve the purpose of hiding the real issue, till the
new government of Secessia should have so far consolidated itself as to
be able to demand with some show of reason a recognition from foreign
powers, and to render it politic for the United States to consent to
peaceable separation. They counted on the self-interest of England and
the supineness of the North. As to the former, they were not wholly
without justification,--for nearly all the English discussions of the
"American Crisis" which we have seen have shown far more of the
shop-keeping spirit than of interest in the maintenance of free
institutions; but in regard to the latter they made the fatal mistake
of believing our Buchanans, Cushings, and Touceys to be representative
men. They were not aware how utterly the Democratic party had divorced
itself from the moral sense of the Free States, nor had they any
conception of the tremendous recoil of which the long-repressed
convictions, traditions, and instincts of a people are capable.
Never was a nation so in want of a leader; never was it more plain
that, without a head, the people "bluster abroad as beasts," with
plenty of the iron of purpose, but purpose without coherence, and with
no cunning smith of circumstance to edge it with plan and helve it with
direction. What the country was waiting for showed itself in the
universal thrill of satisfaction when Major Anderson took the
extraordinary responsibility of doing his duty. But such was the
general uncertainty, so doubtful seemed the loyalty of the Democratic
party as represented by its spokesmen at the North, so irresolute was
the tone of many Republican leaders and journals, that a powerful and
wealthy community of twenty millions of people gave a sigh of relief
when they had been permitted to install the Chief Magistrate of their
choice in their own National Capital. Even after the inauguration of
Mr. Lincoln, it was confidently announced that Jefferson Davis, the
Burr of the Southern conspiracy, would be in Washington before the
month was out; and so great was the Northern despondency that the
chances of such an event were seriously discussed. While the nation was
falling to pieces, there were newspapers and "distinguished statesmen"
of the party so lately and so long in power base enough to be willing
to make political capital out of the common danger, and to lose their
country, if they could only find their profit. There was even one man
found in Massachusetts, who, measuring the moral standard of his party
by his own, had the unhappy audacity to declare publicly that there
were friends enough of the South in his native State to prevent the
march of any troops thence to sustain that Constitution to which he had
sworn fealty in Heaven knows how many offices, the rewards of almost as
many turnings of his political coat. There was one journal in New York
which had the insolence to speak of _President_ Davis and _Mister_
Lincoln in the same paragraph. No wonder the "dirt-eaters" of the
Carolinas could be taught to despise a race among whom creatures might
be found to do that by choice which they themselves were driven to do
by misery.
Thus far the Secessionists had the game all their own way, for their
dice were loaded with Northern lead. They framed their sham
constitution, appointed themselves to their sham offices, issued their
sham commissions, endeavored to bribe England with a sham offer of low
duties and Virginia with a sham prohibition of the slave-trade,
advertised their proposals for a sham loan which was to be taken up
under intimidation, and levied real taxes on the people in the name of
the people whom they had never allowed to vote directly on their
enormous swindle. With money stolen from the Government, they raised
troops whom they equipped with stolen arms, and beleaguered national
fortresses with cannon stolen from national arsenals. They sent out
secret agents to Europe, they had their secret allies in the Free
States, their conventions transacted all important business in secret
session;--there was but one exception to the shrinking delicacy
becoming a maiden government, and that was the openness of the
stealing. We had always thought a high sense of personal honor an
essential element of chivalry; but among the _Romanic_ races, by which,
as the wonderful ethnologist of _De Bow's Review_ tells us, the
Southern States where settled, and from which they derive a close
entail of chivalric characteristics, to the exclusion of the vulgar
Saxons of the North, such is by no means the case. For the first time
in history the deliberate treachery of a general is deemed worthy of a
civic ovation, and Virginia has the honor of being the first State
claiming to be civilized that has decreed the honors of a triumph to a
cabinet officer who had contrived to gild a treason that did not
endanger his life with a peculation that could not further damage his
reputation. Rebellion, even in a bad cause, may have its romantic side;
treason, which had not been such but for being on the losing side, may
challenge admiration; but nothing can sweeten larceny or disinfect
perjury. A rebellion inaugurated with theft, and which has effected its
entry into national fortresses, not over broken walls, but by breaches
of trust, should take Jonathan Wild for its patron saint, with the run
of Mr. Buchanan's cabinet for a choice of sponsors,--godfathers we
should not dare to call them.
Mr. Lincoln's Inaugural Speech was of the kind usually called "firm,
but conciliatory,"--a policy doubtful in troublous times, since it
commonly argues weakness, and more than doubtful in a crisis like ours,
since it left the course which the Administration meant to take
ambiguous, and, while it weakened the Government by exciting the
distrust of all who wished for vigorous measures, really strengthened
the enemy by encouraging the conspirators in the Border States. There
might be a question as to whether this or that attitude were expedient
for the Republican party; there could be none as to the only safe and
dignified one for the Government of the Nation. Treason was as much
treason in the beginning of March as in the middle of April; and it
seems certain now, as it seemed probable to many then, that the country
would have sooner rallied to the support of the Government, if the
Government had shown an earlier confidence in the loyalty of the
people. Though the President talked of "repossessing" the stolen forts,
arsenals, and custom-houses, yet close upon this declaration followed
the disheartening intelligence that the cabinet were discussing the
propriety of evacuating not only Fort Sumter, which was of no strategic
importance, but Fort Pickens, which was the key to the Gulf of Mexico,
and to abandon which was almost to acknowledge the independence of the
Rebel States. Thus far the Free States had waited with commendable
patience for some symptom of vitality in the new Administration,
something that should distinguish it from the piteous helplessness of
its predecessor. But now their pride was too deeply outraged for
endurance; indignant remonstrances were heard from all quarters, and
the Government seemed for the first time fairly to comprehend that it
had twenty millions of freemen at its back, and that forts might be
taken and held by honest men as well as by knaves and traitors. The
nettle had been stroked long enough; it was time to try a firm grip.
Still the Administration seemed inclined to temporize, so thoroughly
was it possessed by the notion of conciliating the Border States. In
point of fact, the side which those States might take in the struggle
between Law and Anarchy was of vastly more import to them than to us.
They could bring no considerable reinforcement of money, credit, or
arms to the rebels; they could at best but add so many mouths to an
army whose commissariat was already dangerously embarrassed. They could
not even, except temporarily, keep the war away from the territory of
the seceding States, every one of which had a sea-door open to the
invasion of an enemy who controlled the entire navy and shipping of the
country. The position assumed by Eastern Virginia and Maryland was of
consequence only so far as it might facilitate a sudden raid on
Washington, and the policy of both these States was to amuse the
Government by imaginary negotiations till the plans of the conspirators
were ripe. In both States men were actively recruited and enrolled to
assist in attacking the capital. With them, as with the more openly
rebellious States, the new theory of "Coercion" was ingeniously
arranged like a valve, yielding at the slightest impulse to the passage
of forces for the subversion of legitimate authority, closing
imperviously, so that no drop of power could ooze through in the
opposite direction. Lord De Roos, long suspected of cheating at cards,
would never have been convicted but for the resolution of an adversary,
who, pinning his hand to the table with a fork, said to him blandly,
"My Lord, if the ace of spades is not under your Lordship's hand, why,
then, I beg your pardon!" It seems to us that a timely treatment of
Governor Letcher in the same energetic way would have saved the
disasters of Harper's Ferry and Norfolk,--for disasters they were,
though six months of temporizing had so lowered the public sense of
what was due to the national dignity that people were glad to see the
Government active at length, even if only in setting fire to its own
house.
We are by no means inclined to criticise the Administration, even if
this were the proper time for it; but we cannot help thinking that
there was great wisdom in Napoleon's recipe for saving life in dealing
with a mob,--"First fire grape-shot _into_ them; after that, over their
heads as much as you like." The position of Mr. Lincoln was already
embarrassed when he entered upon office, by what we believe to have
been a political blunder in the leaders of the Republican party.
Instead of keeping closely to the real point, and the only point, at
issue, namely, the claim of a minority to a right of rebellion when
displeased with the result of an election, the bare question of
Secession, pure and simple, they allowed their party to become divided,
and to waste themselves in discussing terms of compromise and
guaranties of slavery which had nothing to do with the business in
hand. Unless they were ready to admit that popular government was at an
end, those were matters already settled by the Constitution and the
last election. Compromise was out of the question with men who had gone
through the motions, at least, of establishing a government and
electing an anti-president. The way to insure the loyalty of the Border
States, as the event has shown, was to convince them that disloyalty
was dangerous. That revolutions never go backward is one of those
compact generalizations which the world is so ready to accept because
they save the trouble of thinking; but, however it may be with
revolutions, it is certain that rebellions most commonly go backward
with disastrous rapidity, and it was of the gravest moment, as
respected its moral influence, that Secession should not have time
allowed it to assume the proportions and the dignity of revolution; in
other words, of a rebellion too powerful to be crushed. The secret
friends of the secession treason in the Free States have done their
best to bewilder the public mind and to give factitious prestige to a
conspiracy against free government and civilization by talking about
the _right_ of revolution, as if it were some acknowledged principle of
the Law of Nations. There is a right and sometimes a duty of rebellion,
as there is also a right and sometimes a duty of hanging men for it;
but rebellion continues to be rebellion until it has accomplished its
object and secured the acknowledgment of it from the other party to the
quarrel, and from the world at large. The Republican Party in the
November elections had really effected a peaceful revolution, had
emancipated the country from the tyranny of an oligarchy which had
abused the functions of the Government almost from the time of its
establishment, to the advancement of their own selfish aims and
interests; and it was this legitimate change of rulers and of national
policy by constitutional means which the Secessionists intended to
prevent. To put the matter in plain English, they resolved to treat the
people of the United States, in the exercise of their undoubted and
lawful authority, as rebels, and resorted to their usual policy of
intimidation in order to subdue them. Either this magnificent empire
should be their plantation, or it should perish. This was the view even
of what were called the moderate slaveholders of the Border States; and
all the so-called compromises and plans of reconstruction that were
thrown into the caldron where the hell-broth of anarchy was brewing had
this extent, no more,--What terms of _submission_ would the people make
with their natural masters? Whatever other result may have come of the
long debates in Congress and elsewhere, they have at least convinced
the people of the Free States that there can be no such thing as a
moderate slaveholder,--that moderation and slavery can no more coexist
than Floyd and honesty, or Anderson and treason.
We believe, then, that conciliation was from the first impossible,--that
to attempt it was unwise, because it put the party of law and loyalty
in the wrong,--and that, if it was done as a mere matter of policy in
order to gain time, it was a still greater mistake, because it was the
rebels only who could profit by it in consolidating their organization,
while the seeming gain of a few days or weeks was a loss to the
Government, whose great advantage was in an administrative system
thoroughly established, and, above all, in the vast power of the
national idea, a power weakened by every day's delay. This is so true
that already men began to talk of the rival governments at Montgomery
and Washington, and Canadian journals to recommend a strict neutrality,
as if the independence and legitimacy of the mushroom despotism of New
Ashantee were an acknowledged fact, and the name of the United States
of America had no more authority than that of Jefferson Davis and
Company, dealers in all kinds of repudiation and anarchy. For more than
a month after the inauguration of President Lincoln there seemed to be
a kind of interregnum, during which the confusion of ideas in the
Border States as to their rights and duties as members of the "old"
Union, as it began to be called, became positively chaotic. Virginia,
still professing neutrality, prepared to seize the arsenal at Harper's
Ferry and the navy-yard at Norfolk; she would prevent the passage of
the United States' forces "with a serried phalanx of her gallant sons,"
two regiments of whom stood looking on while a file of marines took
seven wounded men in an engine-house for them; she would do everything
but her duty,--the gallant Ancient Pistol of a commonwealth. She
"resumed her sovereignty," whatever that meant; her Convention passed
an ordinance of secession, concluded a league offensive and defensive
with the rebel Confederacy, appointed Jefferson Davis commander-in-chief
of her land-forces and somebody else of the fleet she meant to steal at
Norfolk, and then coolly referred the whole matter back to the people
to vote three weeks afterwards whether they _would_ secede three weeks
before. Wherever the doctrine of Secession has penetrated, it seems to
have obliterated every notion of law and precedent.
The country had come to the conclusion that Mr. Lincoln and his cabinet
were mainly employed in packing their trunks to leave Washington, when
the "venerable Edward Ruffin of Virginia" fired that first gun at Fort
Sumter which brought all the Free States to their feet as one man. That
shot is destined to be the most memorable one ever fired on this
continent since the Concord fowling-pieces said, "That bridge is ours,
and we mean to go across it," eighty-seven Aprils ago. As these began a
conflict which gave us independence, so that began another which is to
give us nationality. It was certainly a great piece of good-luck for
the Government that they had a fort which it was so profitable to lose.
The people were weary of a masterly inactivity which seemed to consist
mainly in submitting to be kicked. We know very well the difficulties
that surrounded the new Administration; we appreciate their reluctance
to begin a war the responsibility of which was as great as its
consequences seemed doubtful; but we cannot understand how it was hoped
to evade war, except by concessions vastly more disastrous than war
itself. War has no evil comparable in its effect on national character
to that of a craven submission to manifest wrong, the postponement of
moral to material interests. There is no prosperity so great as
courage. We do not believe that any amount of forbearance would have
conciliated the South so long as they thought us pusillanimous. The
only way to retain the Border States was by showing that we had the
will and the power to do without them. The little Bopeep policy of
"Let them alone, and they'll all come home
Wagging their tails behind them"
was certainly tried long enough with conspirators who had shown
unmistakably that they desired nothing so much as the continuance of
peace, especially when it was all on one side, and who would never have
given the Government the great advantage of being attacked in Fort
Sumter, had they not supposed they were dealing with men who could not
be cuffed into resistance. The lesson we have to teach them now is,
that we are thoroughly and terribly in earnest. Mr. Stephens's theories
are to be put to a speedier and sterner test than he expected, and we
are to prove which is stronger,--an oligarchy built _on_ men, or a
commonwealth built _of_ them. Our structure is alive in every part with
defensive and recuperative energies; woe to theirs, if that vaunted
corner-stone which they believe patient and enduring as marble should
begin to writhe with intelligent life!
We have no doubt of the issue. We believe that the strongest battalions
are always on the side of God. The Southern army will be fighting for
Jefferson Davis, or at most for the liberty of self-misgovernment,
while we go forth for the defence of principles which alone make
government august and civil society possible. It is the very life of
the nation that is at stake. There is no question here of dynasties,
races, religions, but simply whether we will consent to include in our
Bill of Rights--not merely as of equal validity with all other rights,
whether natural or acquired, but by its very nature transcending and
abrogating them all--the Right of Anarchy. We must convince men that
treason against the ballot-box is as dangerous as treason against a
throne, and that, if they play so desperate a game, they must stake
their lives on the hazard. The one lesson that remained for us to teach
the political theorists of the Old World was, that we are as strong to
suppress intestine disorder as foreign aggression, and we must teach it
decisively and thoroughly. The economy of war is to be tested by the
value of the object to be gained by it. A ten years' war would be cheap
that gave us a country to be proud of, and a flag that should command
the respect of the world because it was the symbol of the enthusiastic
unity of a great nation.
The Government, however slow it may have been to accept the war which
Mr. Buchanan's supineness left them, is acting now with all energy and
determination. What they have a right to claim is the confidence of the
people, and that depends in good measure on the discretion of the
press. Only let us have no more weakness under the plausible name of
Conciliation. We need not discuss the probabilities of an
acknowledgment of the Confederated States by England and France; we
have only to say, "Acknowledge them at your peril." But there is no
chance of the recognition of the Confederacy by any foreign
governments, so long as it is without the confidence of the brokers.
There is no question on which side the strength lies. The whole tone of
the Southern journals, so far as we are able to judge, shows the
inherent folly and weakness of the secession movement. Men who feel
strong in the justice of their cause, or confident in their powers, do
not waste breath in childish boasts of their own superiority and
querulous depreciation of their antagonists. They are weak, and they
know it. And not only are they weak in comparison with the Free States,
but we believe they are without the moral support of whatever deserves
the name of public opinion at home. If not, why does their Congress, as
they call it, hold council always with closed doors, like a knot of
conspirators? The first tap of the Northern drum dispelled many
illusions, and we need no better proof of which ship is sinking than
that Mr. Caleb Cushing should have made such haste to come over to the
old Constitution, with the stars and stripes at her mast-head.
We cannot think that the war we are entering on can end without some
radical change in the system of African slavery. Whether it be doomed
to a sudden extinction, or to a gradual abolition through economical
causes, this war will not leave it where it was before. As a power in
the state, its reign is already over. The fiery tongues of the
batteries in Charleston harbor accomplished in one day a conversion
which the constancy of Garrison and the eloquence of Phillips had
failed to bring about in thirty years. And whatever other result this
war is destined to produce, it has already won for us a blessing worth
everything to us as a nation in emancipating the public opinion of the
North.
GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT
1864
We can conceive of no object capable of rousing deeper sympathy than a
defeated commander. Though the first movement of popular feeling may be
one of wrathful injustice, yet, when the ebb of depression has once
fairly run out, and confidence begins to set back, hiding again that
muddy bed of human nature which such neap-tides are apt to lay bare,
there is a kindly instinct which leads all generous minds to seek every
possible ground of extenuation, to look for excuses in misfortune
rather than incapacity, and to allow personal gallantry to make up, as
far as may be, for want of military genius. There is no other kind of
failure which comes so directly home to us, none which appeals to so
many of the most deeply rooted sentiments at once. Want of success in
any other shape is comparatively a personal misfortune to the man
himself who fails; but how many hopes, prides, sacrifices, and heroisms
are centred in him who wields the embattled manhood of his country! An
army is too multitudinous to call forth that personal enthusiasm which
is a necessity of the heart. The imagination needs a single figure
which it can invest with all those attributes of admiration that become
vague and pointless when divided among a host. Accordingly, we
impersonate in the general, not only the army he leads, but whatever
qualities we are proud of in the nation itself. He becomes for the
moment the ideal of all masculine virtues, and the people are eager to
lavish their admiration on him. His position gives him at a bound what
other men must spend their lives in winning or vainly striving to win.
If he gain a battle, he flatters that pride of prowess which, though it
may be a fault of character in the individual man, is the noblest of
passions in a people. If he lose one, we are all beaten with him, we
all fall down with our Cæsar, and the grief glistens in every eye, the
shame burns on every cheek. Moralize as we may about the victories of
peace and the superiority of the goose-quill over the sword, there is
no achievement of human genius on which a country so prides itself as
on success in war, no disgrace over which it broods so inconsolably as
military disaster.
[Illustration: _General McClellan_]
There is nothing more touching than the sight of a nation in search of
its great man, nothing more beautiful than its readiness to accept a
hero on trust. Nor is this a feeble sentimentality. It is much rather a
noble yearning of what is best in us, for it is only in these splendid
figures which now and then sum up all the higher attributes of
character that the multitude of men can ever hope to find their blind
instinct of excellence realized and satisfied. Not without reason are
nations always symbolized as women, for there is something truly
feminine in the devotion with which they are willing to give all for
and to their ideal man, and the zeal with which they drape some
improvised Agamemnon with all the outward shows of royalty from the
property-room of imagination. This eagerness of loyalty toward
first-rate character is one of the conditions of mastery in every
sphere of human activity, for it is the stuff that genius works in.
Heroes, to be sure, cannot be made to order, yet with a man of the
right fibre, who has the stuff for greatness in him, the popular
enthusiasm would go far toward making him in fact what he is in fancy.
No commander ever had more of this paid-up capital of fortune, this
fame in advance, this success before succeeding, than General
McClellan. That dear old domestic bird, the Public, which lays the
golden eggs out of which greenbacks are hatched, was sure she had
brooded out an eagle-chick at last. How we all waited to see him stoop
on the dove-cote of Richmond! Never did nation give such an example of
faith and patience as while the Army of the Potomac lay during all
those weary months before Washington. Every excuse was invented, every
palliation suggested, except the true one, that our chicken was no
eagle, after all. He was hardening his seres, he was waiting for his
wings to grow, he was whetting his beak; we should see him soar at last
and shake the thunder from his wings. But do what we could, hope what
we might, it became daily clearer that, whatever other excellent
qualities he might have, this of being aquiline was wanting.
Disguise and soften it as we may, the campaign of the Peninsula was a
disastrous failure,--a failure months long, like a bad novel in weekly
instalments, with "To be continued" grimly ominous at the end of every
part. So far was it from ending in the capture of Richmond that nothing
but the gallantry of General Pope and his little army hindered the
Rebels from taking Washington. And now comes Major-General George B.
McClellan, and makes affidavit in one volume[1] octavo that he is a
great military genius, after all. It should seem that this genius is of
two varieties. The first finds the enemy, and beats him; the second
finds him, and succeeds in getting away. General McClellan is now
attempting a change of base in the face of public opinion, and is
endeavoring to escape the consequences of having escaped from the
Peninsula. For a year his reputation flared upward like a rocket,
culminated, burst, and now, after as long an interval, the burnt-out
case comes down to us in this Report.
[1] _Letter of the Secretary of War, transmitting Report on the
Organization of the Army of the Potomac, and of the Campaigns in
Virginia and Maryland under the Command of Major-General George
B. McClellan, from July 26, 1861, to November 7, 1862._
Washington: Government Printing-Office. 1864. 8vo, pp. 242.
There is something ludicrously tragic, as our politics are managed, in
seeing an Administration compelled to print a campaign document (for
such is General McClellan's Report in a double sense) directed against
itself. Yet in the present case, had it been possible to escape the
penance, it had been unwise, for we think that no unprejudiced person
can read the volume without a melancholy feeling that General McClellan
has foiled himself even more completely than the Rebels were able to
do. He should have been more careful of his communications, for a line
two hundred and forty-two pages long is likely to have its weak points.
The volume before us is rather the plea of an advocate retained to
defend the General's professional character and expound his political
opinions than the curt, colorless, unimpassioned statement of facts
which is usually so refreshing in the official papers of military men,
and has much more the air of being addressed to a jury than to the War
Department at Washington. It is, in short, a letter to the people of
the United States, under cover to the Secretary of War. General
McClellan puts himself upon the country, and, after taking as much time
to make up his mind as when he wearied and imperilled the nation in his
camp on the Potomac, endeavors to win back from public opinion the
victory which nothing but his own over-caution enabled the Rebels to
snatch from him before Richmond. He cannot give us back our lost time
or our squandered legions; but how nice it would be if we would give
him back his reputation, which has never been of any great use to us,
and yet would be so convenient for him! It was made for him, and
accordingly fits him better than it would any one else. But it is
altogether too late. There is no argument for the soldier but success,
no wisdom for the man but to acknowledge defeat and be silent under it.
The Great Captain on his sofa at Longwood may demonstrate how the
Russian expedition might, could, would, and should have ended
otherwise; but meanwhile its results are not to be reasoned with,--the
Bourbons are at the Tuileries, and he at St. Helena. There is hardly
anything that may not be made out of history by a skilful manipulator.
Characters may be white-washed, bigotry made over into zeal, timidity
into prudence, want of conviction into toleration, obstinacy into
firmness; but the one thing that cannot be theorized out of existence,
or made to look like anything else, is a lost campaign.
We have had other unsuccessful generals, but not one of them has ever
been tempted into the indecorum of endeavoring to turn a defeat in the
field to political advantage. Not one has thought of defending himself
by imputations on his superiors. Early in the war General McDowell set
an example of silence under slanderous reproach that won for him the
sympathy and respect of whoever could be touched by self-reliant
manliness. It is because General McClellan has seen fit to overstep the
bounds of a proper official reserve, because, after more than a year
for reflection, he has repeated charges of the grossest kind against
those under whose orders he was acting, and all this from a political
motive, that we think his Report deserving of more than usual
attention. It will be no fault of his if he be not put in nomination
for the Presidency, and accordingly it becomes worth our while to
consider such evidences of character and capacity as his words and
deeds afford us.
We believe that General McClellan has been ruined, like another general
whose name began with Mac, by the "All hail hereafter" of certain
political witches, who took his fortunes into their keeping after his
campaign in Western Virginia. He had shown both ability and decision in
handling a small force, and he might with experience have shown similar
qualities in directing the operations of a great army, had not the
promise of the Presidency made him responsible to other masters than
military duty and unselfish patriotism. Thenceforward the soldier was
lost in the politician. He thought more of the effect to be produced by
his strategy on the voters behind him than on the enemy in his front.
What should have been his single object--the suppression of the
rebellion for the sake of the country--was now divided with the desire
of merely ending it by some plan that should be wholly of his own
contrivance, and should redound solely to his own credit and
advancement. He became giddy and presumptuous, and lost that sense of
present realities, so essential to a commander, in contemplating the
mirage that floated the White House before his eyes. At an age
considerably beyond that of General Bonaparte when he had triumphantly
closed his first Italian campaign, he was nick-named "the _young_
Napoleon," and from that time forth seems honestly to have endeavored,
like Toepffer's Albert, to resemble the ideal portrait which had been
drawn for him by those who put him forward as their stalking-horse. And
it must be admitted that these last managed matters cleverly, if a
little coarsely. They went to work deliberately to Barnumize their
prospective candidate. No _prima donna_ was ever more thoroughly
exploited by her Hebrew _impresario_. The papers swarmed with
anecdotes, incidents, sayings. Nothing was too unimportant, and the new
commander-in-chief pulled on his boots by telegram from Maine to
California, and picked his teeth by special despatch to the Associated
Press. We had him warm for supper in _the very latest_ with three
exclamation marks, and cold for breakfast in _last evening's
telegraphic news_ with none. Nothing but a patent pill was ever so
suddenly famous.
We are far from blaming General McClellan for all this. He probably
looked upon it as one of the inevitable discomforts of distinction in
America. But we think that it insensibly affected his judgment, led him
to regard himself as the representative of certain opinions, rather
than as a general whose whole duty was limited to the army under his
command, and brought him at last to a temper of mind most unfortunate
for the public interests, in which he could believe the administration
personally hostile to himself because opposed to the political
principles of those who wished to profit by his "availability." It was
only natural, too, that he should gradually come to think himself what
his partisans constantly affirmed that he was,--the sole depositary of
the country's destiny. We form our judgment of General McClellan solely
from his own Report; we believe him to be honest in his opinions, and
patriotic so far as those opinions will allow him to be; we know him to
be capable of attaching those about him in a warm personal friendship,
and we reject with the contempt they deserve the imputations on his
courage and his military honor; but at the same time we consider him a
man like other men, with a head liable to be turned by a fame too
easily won. His great misfortune was that he began his first important
campaign with a reputation to save instead of to earn, so that he was
hampered by the crowning disadvantage of age in a general without the
experience which might neutralize it. Nay, what was still worse, he had
two reputations to keep from damage, the one as soldier, the other as
politician.
He seems very early to have misapprehended the true relation in which
he stood to the government. By the operation of natural causes, as
politicians would call them, he had become heir presumptive to the
chair of state, and felt called on to exert an influence on the policy
of the war, or at least to express an opinion that might go upon record
for future convenience. He plunged into that Dismal Swamp of
constitutional hermeneutics, in which the wheels of government were
stalled at the outbreak of our rebellion, and from which every
untrained explorer rises with a mouth too full of mud to be
intelligible to Christian men. He appears to have thought it within the
sphere of his duty to take charge of the statesmanship of the President
no less than of the movements of the army, nor was it long before there
were unmistakable symptoms that he began to consider himself quite as
much the chief of an opposition who could dictate terms as the military
subordinate who was to obey orders. Whatever might have been his
capacity as a soldier, this divided allegiance could not fail of
disastrous consequences to the public service, for no mistress exacts
so jealously the entire devotion of her servants as war. A mind
distracted with calculations of future political contingencies was not
to be relied on in the conduct of movements which above all others
demand the constant presence, the undivided energy, of all the
faculties, and the concentration of every personal interest on the one
object of immediate success. A general who is conscious that he has an
army of one hundred and fifty thousand voters at his back will be
always weakened by those personal considerations which are the worst
consequence of the elective system. General McClellan's motions were
encumbered in every direction by a huge train of political baggage.
This misconception of his own position, or rather his confounding the
two characters of possible candidate and actual general, forced the
growth of whatever egotism was latent in his nature. He began erelong
to look at everything from a personal point of view, to judge men and
measures by their presumed relation to his own interests, and at length
fairly persuaded himself that the inevitable results of his own want of
initiative were due to the hostile combination against him of Mr.
Lincoln, Mr. Stanton, and General Halleck. Regarding himself too much
in considering the advantages of success, he regards others too little
in awarding the responsibility of failure.
The intense self-consciousness of General McClellan and a certain aim
at effect for ulterior and unmilitary purposes show themselves early.
In October, 1861, addressing a memorial to Mr. Cameron, then Secretary
of War, he does not forget the important constituency of Buncombe. "The
unity of this nation," he says, "the preservation of our institutions,
are so dear to me that I have willingly sacrificed my private happiness
with the single object of doing my duty to my country. When the task is
accomplished, I shall be glad to retire to the obscurity from which
events have drawn me. Whatever the determination of the government may
be, I will do the best I can with the Army of the Potomac, and will
share its fate, whatever may be the task imposed upon me." Not to speak
of taste, the utter blindness to the true relations of things shown in
such language is startling. What sacrifice had General McClellan made
which had not been equally made by every one of the hundred and fifty
thousand men of his army? Educated at the expense of the country, his
services were a debt due on demand. And what was the sacrifice of which
a soldier speaks so pathetically? To be raised from the management of a
railway to one of the most conspicuous and inspiring positions of
modern times, to an opportunity such as comes rarely to any man, and
then only as the reward of transcendent ability transcendently
displayed! To step from a captaincy of engineers to the command in
chief of a great nation on fire with angry enthusiasm, spendthrift of
men, money, devotion, to be the chosen champion of order, freedom, and
civilization,--this is indeed a sacrifice such as few men have been
called upon to make by their native land! And of what is General
McClellan thinking when he talks of returning to obscurity? Of what are
men commonly thinking when they talk thus? The newspapers would soon
grow rich, if everybody should take to advertising what he did not
want. And, moreover, to what kind of obscurity can a successful general
return? An obscurity made up of the gratitude and admiration of his
countrymen, a strange obscurity of glory! Nor is this the only occasion
on which the General speaks of his willingness to share the fate of his
army. What corporal could do less? No man thoroughly in earnest, and
with the fate of his country in his hands and no thought but of that,
could have any place in his mind for such footlight phrases as these.
General McClellan's theory from the first seems to have been that a
large army would make a great general, though all history shows that
the genius, decision, and confidence of a leader are the most powerful
reinforcement of the troops under his command, and that an able captain
makes a small army powerful by recruiting it with his own vigor and
enthusiasm. From the time of his taking the command till his removal,
he was constantly asking for more men, constantly receiving them, and
constantly unable to begin anything with them after he got them. He
could not move without one hundred and fifty thousand pairs of legs,
and when his force had long reached that number, the President was
obliged by the overtaxed impatience of the country to pry him up from
his encampment on the Potomac with a special order. What the army
really needed was an addition of one man, and that at the head of it;
for a general, like an orator, must be moved himself before he can move
others. The larger his army, the more helpless was General McClellan.
Like the magician's _famulus_, who rashly undertook to play the
part of master, and who could evoke powers that he could not control,
he was swamped in his own supplies. With every reinforcement sent him
on the Peninsula, his estimate of the numbers opposed to him increased.
His own imagination faced him in superior numbers at every turn. Since
Don Quixote's enumeration of the armies of the Emperor Alifanfaron and
King Pentapolin of the Naked Arm, there has been nothing like our
General's vision of the Rebel forces, with their ever-lengthening list
of leaders, gathered for the defence of Richmond. His anxiety swells
their muster-roll at last to two hundred thousand. We say his anxiety,
for no man of ordinary judgment can believe that with that number of
men the Rebel leaders would not have divided their forces, with one
army occupying General McClellan, while they attempted the capital he
had left uncovered with the other.
The first plan proposed by General McClellan covered operations
extending from Virginia to Texas. With a main army of two hundred and
seventy-three thousand he proposes "not only to drive the enemy out of
Virginia and occupy Richmond, but to occupy Charleston, Savannah,
Montgomery, Pensacola, Mobile, and New Orleans; in other words, to move
into the heart of the enemy's country and crush the rebellion in its
very heart." We do not say that General McClellan's ambition to be the
one man who should crush the rebellion was an unworthy one, but that
his theory that this was possible, and in the way he proposed, shows
him better fitted to state the abstract problems than to apprehend the
complex details of their solution when they lie before him as practical
difficulties. For when we consider the necessary detachments from this
force to guard his communications through an enemy's country, as he
wishes the President to do, in order to justify the largeness of the
force required, we cannot help asking how soon the army for active
operations would be reduced to a hundred and fifty thousand. And how
long would a general be in reaching New Orleans, if he is six months in
making up his mind to advance with an army of that strength on the
insignificant fortifications of Manassas, manned, according to the best
information, with forty thousand troops? At the same time General
McClellan assigns twenty thousand as a force adequate for opening the
Mississippi. This plan, to be sure, was soon abandoned, but it is an
illustration of the want of precision and forethought which
characterizes the mind of its author. A man so vague in his conceptions
is apt to be timid in action, for the same haziness of mind may,
according to circumstances, either soften and obscure the objects of
thought, or make them loom with purely fantastic exaggeration. There is
a vast difference between clearness of head on demand and the power of
framing abstract schemes of action, beautiful in their correctness of
outline and apparent simplicity. It is a perception of this truth, we
believe, which leads practical men always to suspect plans supported by
statistics too exquisitely conclusive.
It was on precisely such a specious basis of definite misinformation
that General McClellan's next proposal for the campaign by way of the
Peninsula rested,--precise facts before he sets out turning to
something like precise no-facts when he gets there,--beautiful
completeness of conception ending in hesitation, confusion, and
failure. Before starting, "the roads are passable at all seasons of the
year, the country much more favorable for offensive operations than
that in front of Washington, much more level, the woods less dense, the
soil more sandy" (p. 47). After arriving, we find "the roads
impassable," "very dense and extensive forests, the clearings being
small and few;" and "the comparative flatness of the country and the
alertness of the enemy, everywhere in force, rendered thorough
reconnoissances slow, dangerous, and difficult" (p. 79). General
McClellan's mental constitution would seem to be one of those, easily
elated and easily depressed, that exaggerate distant advantages and
dangers near at hand,--minds stronger in conception than perception,
and accordingly, as such always are, wanting that faculty of swift
decision which, catching inspiration from danger, makes opportunity
success. Add to this a kind of adhesiveness (we can hardly call it
obstinacy or pertinacity) of temper, which can make no allowance for
change of circumstances, and we think we have a tolerably clear notion
of the causes of General McClellan's disasters. He can compose a good
campaign beforehand, but he cannot improvise one out of the events of
the moment, as is the wont of great generals. Occasion seldom offers
her forelock twice to the grasp of the same man, and yet General
McClellan, by the admission of the Rebels themselves, had Richmond at
his mercy more than once.
He seems to attribute his misfortunes mainly to the withdrawal of
General McDowell's division, and its consequent failure to coöperate
with his own forces. But the fact is patent that the campaign was lost
by his sitting down in front of Yorktown, and wasting a whole month in
a series of approaches whose scientific propriety would have delighted
Uncle Toby, to reduce a garrison of eight thousand men. Without that
delay, which gave the Rebels time to send Jackson into the Shenandoah
valley, General McDowell's army would have been enabled to come to his
assistance. General McClellan, it is true, complains that it was not
sent round by water, as he wished; but even if it had been, it could
only have been an addition of helplessness to an army already too
unwieldy for its commander; for he really made the Rebel force double
his own (as he always fancied it) by never bringing more than a quarter
of his army into action at once. Yet during the whole campaign he was
calling for more men, and getting them, till his force reached the
highest limit he himself had ever set. When every available man, and
more, had been sent him, he writes from Harrison's Bar to Mr. Stanton,
"To accomplish the great task of capturing Richmond and putting an end
to this rebellion, reinforcements should be sent to me _rather much
over than less than one hundred thousand men_." This letter General
McClellan has not seen fit to include in his Report. Was the government
to be blamed for pouring no more water into a sieve like this?
It certainly was a great mistake on Mr. Lincoln's part to order General
McDowell off on a wild-goose chase after Jackson. The coöperation of
this force might have enabled General McClellan even then to retrieve
his campaign, and we do not in the least blame him for feeling bitterly
the disappointment of wanting it. But it seems to us that it was mainly
his own fault that there was anything to retrieve, and the true
occasion to recover his lost ground was offered him after his bloody
repulse of the enemy at Malvern Hill, though he did not turn it to
account. For his retreat we think he would deserve all credit, had he
not been under the necessity of making it. It was conducted with great
judgment and ability, and we do not love that partisan narrowness of
mind that would grudge him the praise so fairly earned. But at the same
time it is not ungenerous to say that the obstinate valor shown by his
army under all the depression of a backward movement, while it proves
how much General McClellan had done to make it an effective force,
makes us regret all the more that he should have wanted the decision to
try its quality under the inspiration of attack. It is impossible that
the spirit of the army should not have been affected by the doubt and
indecision of their general. They fought nobly, but they were always on
the defensive. Had General McClellan put them at once on the
aggressive, we believe his campaign would have been a triumphant one.
With truly great generals resolve is instinctive, a deduction from
premises supplied by the eye, not the memory, and men find out the
science of their achievements afterwards, like the mathematical law in
the Greek column. The stiffness rather than firmness of mind, the
surrender of all spontaneous action in the strait-waistcoat of a
preconceived plan, to which we have before alluded, unfitted him for
that rapid change of combinations on the great chess-board of battle
which enabled General Rosecrans at Murfreesboro to turn defeat into
victory, an achievement without parallel in the history of the war.
General McClellan seems to have considered the President too careful of
the safety of the capital; but he should measure the value of
Washington by what he himself thought of the importance of taking
Richmond. That, no doubt, would be a great advantage, but the loss of a
recognized seat of government, with its diplomatic and other
traditions, would have been of vastly more fatal consequence to us than
the capture of their provisional perch in Virginia would have been to
the Rebel authorities. It would have brought foreign recognition to the
Rebels, and thrown Maryland certainly, and probably Kentucky, into the
scale against us. So long as we held Washington, we had on our side the
two powerful sentiments of permanence and tradition, some insensible
portions of which the Rebels were winning from us with every day of
repose allowed them by General McClellan. It was a clear sense of this
that both excited and justified the impatience of the people, who saw
that the insurrection was gaining the coherence and prestige of an
established power,--an element of much strength at home and abroad.
That this popular instinct was not at fault, we have the witness of
General Kirby Smith, who told Colonel Fremantle "that McClellan might
probably have destroyed the Southern army with the greatest ease during
the first winter, and without much risk to himself, as the Southerners
were so much over-elated by their easy triumph at Manassas, and their
army had dwindled away."
We have said that General McClellan's volume is rather a plea in
abatement of judgment than a report. It was perfectly proper that he
should endeavor to put everything in its true light, and he would be
sure of the sympathy of all right-minded men in so doing; but an _ex
parte_ statement at once rouses and justifies adverse criticism. He
has omitted many documents essential to the formation of a just
opinion; and it is only when we have read these also, in the Report of
the Committee on the Conduct of the War, that we feel the full weight
of the cumulative evidence going to show the hearty support in men and
confidence that he received from the Administration, and, when there
were no more men to be sent, and confidence began to yield before
irresistible facts, the prolonged forbearance with which he was still
favored. Nothing can be kinder or more cordial than the despatches and
letters both of the President and Mr. Stanton, down to the time when
General McClellan wrote the following sentences at the end of an
official communication addressed to the latter: "If I save this army
now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you, or to any other
persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this
army." (28th June, 1862.) We shall seek no epithet to characterize
language like this. All but the most bigoted partisans will qualify it
as it deserves. We have here a glaring example of that warping of good
sense and good feeling which the consciousness of having a political
stake at risk will produce in a gallant soldier and a courteous
gentleman. Can General McClellan, after a year to grow cool in, either
himself believe, or expect any one else to believe, that the President
and the Secretary of War would "do their best to sacrifice" an army of
a hundred and fifty thousand brave men, in order to lessen his possible
chances as a candidate for the Presidency? It was of vastly more
importance to them than to him that he should succeed. The dignified
good temper of Mr. Lincoln's answer to this wanton insult does him
honor: "I have not said you were ungenerous for saying you needed
reinforcements; I thought you were ungenerous in assuming that I did
not send them as fast as I could. I feel any misfortune to you and your
army quite as keenly as you feel it yourself." Mr. Stanton could only
be silent; and whatever criticisms may be made on some traits of his
character, he is quite safe in leaving the rebuke of such an imputation
to whoever feels that earnestness, devotion, and unflagging purpose are
high qualities in a public officer.
If General McClellan had been as prompt in attacking the enemy as he
showed himself in this assault on his superiors, we think his campaign
in the Peninsula would have ended more satisfactorily. We have no doubt
that he would conduct a siege or a defence with all the science and all
the proprieties of warfare, but we think he has proved himself
singularly wanting in the qualities which distinguish the natural
leaders of men. He had every theoretic qualification, but no ardor, no
leap, no inspiration. A defensive general is an earthen redoubt, not an
ensign to rally enthusiasm and inspire devotion. Caution will never
make an army, though it may sometimes save one. We think General
McClellan reduced the efficiency and lowered the tone of his soldiers
by his six months' dose of prudence. With every day he gave the enemy,
he lessened his chances of success, and added months to the duration of
the war. He never knew how to find opportunity, much less to make it.
He was an accomplished soldier, but lacked that downright common sense
which is only another name for genius with its coat off for actual work
in hand.
Were General McClellan's Report nothing more than a report, were the
General himself nothing more than an officer endeavoring to palliate a
failure, we should not have felt called on to notice his plea, unless
to add publicity to any new facts he might be able to bring forward.
But the Report is a political manifesto, and not only that, but an
attack on the administration which appointed him to the command,
supported him with all its resources, and whose only fault it was not
sooner to discover his incapacity to conduct aggressive movements.
General McClellan is a candidate for the Presidency, and as he has had
no opportunity to show his capacity in any civil function, his claim
must rest on one of two grounds,--either the ability he has shown as a
general, or the specific principles of policy he is supposed to
represent. Whatever may be the success of our operations in the field,
our Chief Magistracy for the next four years will demand a person of
great experience and ability. Questions cannot fail to arise taxing
prudence of the longest forecast and decision of the firmest quality.
How far is General McClellan likely to fulfill these conditions? What
are the qualities of mind of which both his career and his Report give
the most irrefragable evidence?
General McClellan's mind seems to be equally incapable of appreciating
the value of time as the material of action, and its power in changing
the relations of facts, and thus modifying the basis of opinion. He is
a good maker of almanacs, but no good judge of the weather. Judging by
the political counsel which he more than once felt called upon to offer
the President, and which, as he has included it in his Report, we must
presume to represent his present opinions, he does not seem even yet to
appreciate the fact that this is not a war between two nations, but an
attempt at revolution within ourselves, which can be adequately met
only by revolutionary measures. And yet, if he were at this moment
elevated to the conduct of our affairs, he would find himself
controlled by the same necessities which have guided Mr. Lincoln, and
must either adopt his measures, or submit to a peace dictated by the
South. No side issue as to how the war shall be conducted is any longer
possible. The naked question is one of war or submission, for
compromise means surrender; and if the choice be war, we cannot afford
to give the enemy fifty in the game, by standing upon scruples which he
would be the last to appreciate or to act upon. It is one of the most
terrible features of war that it must be inexorable by its very nature.
Great statesmanship and great generalship have been more than once
shown by the same man, and, naturally enough, because they both result
from the same qualities of mind, an instant apprehension of the demand
of the moment, and a self-confidence that can as instantly meet it, so
that every energy of the man is gathered to one intense focus. It is
the faculty of being a present man, instead of a prospective one; of
being ready, instead of getting ready. Though we think great injustice
has been done by the public to General McClellan's really high merits
as an officer, yet it seems to us that those very merits show precisely
the character of intellect to unfit him for the task just now demanded
of a statesman. His capacity for organization may be conspicuous; but,
be it what it may, it is one thing to bring order out of the confusion
of mere inexperience, and quite another to retrieve it from a chaos of
elements mutually hostile, which is the problem sure to present itself
to the next administration. This will constantly require precisely that
judgment on the nail, and not to be drawn for at three days' sight, of
which General McClellan has shown least.
Is our path to be so smooth for the next four years that a man whose
leading characteristic is an exaggeration of difficulties is likely to
be our surest guide? If the war is still to be carried on,--and surely
the nation has shown no symptoms of slackening in its purpose,--what
modifications of it would General McClellan introduce? The only
information that is vouchsafed us is, that he is to be the
"conservative" candidate, a phrase that may mean too little or too
much. As well as we can understand it, it is the convenient formula by
which to express the average want of opinions of all who are out of
place, out of humor, or dislike the dust which blinds and chokes
whoever is behind the times. Sometimes it is used as the rallying-cry
of an amiable class of men, who still believe, in a vague sort of way,
that the rebels can be conciliated by offering them a ruler more
_comme il faut_ than Mr. Lincoln, a country where a flatboat-man
may rise to the top, by virtue of mere manhood, being hardly the place
for people of truly refined sensibilities. Or does it really mean
nothing more nor less than that we are to try to put slavery back again
where it was before (only that it is not quite convenient just now to
say so), on the theory that teleologically the pot of ointment was made
to conserve the dead fly?
In the providence of God the first thoughtless enthusiasm of the nation
has settled to deep purpose, their anger has been purified by trial
into a conviction of duty, and they are face to face with one of those
rare occasions where duty and advantage are identical. The man who is
fit for the office of President in these times should be one who knows
how to advance, an art which General McClellan has never learned. He
must be one who comprehends that three years of war have made vast
changes in the relative values of things. He must be one who feels to
the very marrow of his bones that this is a war, not to conserve the
forms, but the essence, of free institutions. He must be willing to
sacrifice everything to the single consideration of success, because
success means truth and honor; to use every means, though they may
alarm the fears of men who are loyal with a reservation, or shock the
prejudices of would-be traitors. No middle course is safe in troubled
times, and the only way to escape the dangers of revolution is by
directing its forces and giving it useful work to do.
THE REBELLION: ITS CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES
1864
In spite of the popular theory that nothing is so fallacious as
circumstantial evidence, there is no man of observation who would not
deem it more trustworthy than any human testimony, however honest,
which was made up from personal recollection. The actors in great
affairs are seldom to be depended on as witnesses, either to the order
of events or their bearing upon results; for even where selfish
interest is not to be taken into account, the mythic instinct erelong
begins to shape things as they ought to have been, rather than as they
were. This is true even of subjects in which we have no personal
interest, and not only do no two men describe the same street-scene in
the same way, but the same man, unless prosaic to a degree below the
freezing-point of Tupper, will never do it twice in the same way. Few
men, looking into their old diaries, but are astonished at the
contrast, sometimes even the absolute unlikeness, between the matters
of fact recorded there and their own recollection of them. Shortly
after the battle of Lexington it was the interest of the Colonies to
make the British troops not only wanton, but unresisted, aggressors;
and if primitive Christians could be manufactured by affidavit, so
large a body of them ready to turn the other cheek also was never
gathered as in the minute-men before the meeting-house on the 19th of
April, 1775. The Anglo-Saxon could not fight comfortably without the
law on his side. But later, when the battle became a matter of local
pride, the muskets that had been fired at the Redcoats under Pitcairn
almost rivalled in number the pieces of furniture that came over in the
Mayflower. Indeed, whoever has talked much with Revolutionary
pensioners knows that those honored veterans were no less remarkable
for imagination than for patriotism. It should seem that there is,
perhaps, nothing on which so little reliance is to be placed as facts,
especially when related by one who saw them. It is no slight help to
our charity to recollect that, in disputable matters, every man sees
according to his prejudices, and is stone-blind to whatever he did not
expect or did not mean to see. Even where no personal bias can be
suspected, contemporary and popular evidence is to be taken with great
caution, so exceedingly careless are men as to exact truth, and such
poor observers, for the most part, of what goes on under their eyes.
The ballad which was hawked about the streets at the execution of
Captain Kidd, and which was still to be bought at street-stalls within
a few years, affirms three times in a single stanza that the pirate's
name was Robert. Yet he was commissioned, indicted, convicted, and
hanged as William Kidd. Nor was he, as is generally supposed, convicted
of piracy, but of murder. The marvels of Spiritualism are supernatural
to the average observer, who is willing to pay for that dulness from
another world which he might have for nothing in this, while they seem
mere legerdemain, and not of the highest quality, to the trained organs
of scientific men.
History, we are told, is philosophy teaching by example. But how if the
example does not apply? Le Verrier discovers Neptune when, according to
his own calculations, the planet should not have been in the place
where his telescope found it. Does the example redound to the credit of
luck or of mathematics? The historian may give a thoroughly false view
of an event by simply assuming that _after_ means _in consequence of_,
or even by the felicitous turn of a sentence. Style will find readers
and shape convictions, while mere truth only gathers dust on the shelf.
The memory first, and by degrees the judgment, is enslaved by the
epigrams of Tacitus or Michelet. Our conception of scenes and men is
outlined and colored for us by the pictorial imagination of Carlyle.
Indeed, after reading history, one can only turn round, with Montaigne,
and say, _What know I?_ There was a time when the reputation of Judas
might have been thought past mending, but a German has whitewashed him
as thoroughly as Malone did Shakespeare's bust, and an English poet
made him the hero of a tragedy, as the one among the disciples who
believed too much. Call no one happy till he is dead? Rather call no
one safe, whether in good repute or evil, after he has been dead long
enough to have his effigy done in historical wax-work. Only get the
real clothes, that is, only be careful to envelop him in a sufficiently
probable dressing of facts, and the public will be entirely satisfied.
What's Hecuba to us, or we to Hecuba? Or is Thackeray's way any nearer
the truth, who strips Louis the Great of all his stage-properties, and
shows him to us the miserable forked radish of decrepitude?
There are many ways of writing what is called history. The earliest and
simplest was to record in the form of annals, without investigating,
whatever the writer could lay hold of, the only thread of connection
being the order of time, so that events have no more relation to each
other than so many beads on a string. Higher then this, because more
picturesque, and because living men take the place of mere names, are
the better class of chronicles, like Froissart's, in which the scenes
sometimes have the minute vividness of illumination, and the page seems
to take life and motion as we read. The annalist still survives, a kind
of literary dodo, in the "standard" historian, respectable,
immitigable,--with his philosophy of history, and his stereotyped
phrase, his one Amurath succeeding another, so very dead, so unlike
anything but historical characters, that we can scarce believe they
ever lived,--and only differing from his ancient congener of the
monastery by his skill in making ten words do the duty of one. His are
the fatal books without which no gentleman's library can be complete;
his the storied pages which ingenuous youth is invited to turn, and is
apt to turn four or five together. With him something is still always
sure to transpire in the course of these negotiations, still the
traditional door is opened to the inroad of democratic innovation,
still it is impossible to interpret the motives which inspired the
conduct of so-and-so in this particular emergency. So little does he
himself conceive of any possible past or future life in his characters
that he periphrases death into a disappearance from the page of
history, as if they were bodiless and soulless creatures of pen and
ink; mere names, not things. Picturesqueness he sternly avoids as the
Delilah of the philosophic mind, liveliness as a snare of the careless
investigator; and so, stopping both ears, he slips safely by those
Sirens, keeping safe that sobriety of style which his fellow-men call
by another name. Unhappy books, which we know by heart before we read
them, and which a mysterious superstition yet compels many unoffending
persons to read! What has not the benevolent reader had to suffer at
the hands of the so-called impartial historian, who, wholly
disinterested and disinteresting, writes with as mechanic an industry
and as little emotion as he would have brought to the weaving of calico
or the digging of potatoes, under other circumstances! Far truer, at
least to nature and to some conceivable theory of an immortal soul in
man, is the method of the poet, who makes his personages luminous from
within by an instinctive sympathy with human motives of action, and a
conception of the essential unity of character through every change of
fate.
Of late years men have begun to question the prescriptive right of this
"great gyant Asdryasdust, who has choked many men," to choke them also
because he had worked his wicked will on their fathers. It occurred to
an inquiring mind here and there that if the representation of men's
action and passion on the theatre could be made interesting, there was
no good reason why the great drama of history should be dull as a
miracle-play. Need philosophy teaching by example be so tiresome that
the pupils would rather burst in ignorance than go within earshot of
the pedagogue? Hence the historical romance, sometimes honestly called
so, and limited by custom in number of volumes; sometimes not called
so, and without any such limitation. This latter variety admits several
styles of treatment. Sometimes a special epoch is chosen, where one
heroic figure may serve as a centre round which events and subordinate
characters group themselves, with no more sacrifice of truth than is
absolutely demanded by artistic keeping. This may be called the epic
style, of which Carlyle is the acknowledged master. Sometimes a period
is selected, where the facts, by coloring and arrangement, may be made
to support the views of a party, and history becomes a political
pamphlet indefinitely prolonged. Here point is the one thing
needful,--to be attained at all hazards, whether by the turn of a
sentence or the twisting of a motive. Macaulay is preëminent in this
kind, and woe to the party or the man that comes between him and his
epigrammatic necessity! Again, there is the new light, or perhaps, more
properly, the forlorn-hope method, where the author accepts a brief
against the _advocatus diaboli_, and strives to win a reverse of
judgment, as Mr. Froude has done in the case of Henry VIII. The latest
fashion of all is the _a priori_, in which a certain dominant principle
is taken for granted, and everything is deduced from _x_, instead of
serving to prove what _x_ may really be. The weakness of this heroic
treatment, it seems to us, is in allowing too little to human nature as
an element in the problem. This would be a fine world, if facts would
only be as subservient to theory in real life as in the author's
inkstand. Mr. Buckle stands at the head of this school, and has just
found a worthy disciple in M. Taine, who, in his _Histoire de la
Littérature Anglaise_, having first assumed certain ethnological
postulates, seems rather to shape the character of the literature to
the race than to illustrate that of the race by the literature.
In short, whether we consider the incompetence of men in general as
observers, their carelessness about things at the moment indifferent,
but which may become of consequence hereafter (as, for example, in the
dating of letters), their want of impartiality, both in seeing and
stating occurrences and in tracing or attributing motives, it is plain
that history is not to be depended on in any absolute sense. That
smooth and indifferent quality of mind, without a flaw of prejudice or
a blur of theory, which can reflect passing events as they truly are,
is as rare, if not so precious, as that artistic sense which can hold
the mirror up to nature. The fact that there is so little historical or
political prescience, that no man of experience ventures to prophesy,
is enough to prove, either that it is impossible to know all the terms
of our problem, or that history does not repeat itself with anything
like the exactness of coincidence which is so pleasing to the
imagination. Six months _after_ the _coup d'état_ of December, 1851,
Mr. Savage Landor, who knew him well, said to us that Louis Napoleon
had ten times the political sagacity of his uncle; but who foresaw or
foretold an Augustus in the dull-eyed frequenter of Lady Blessington's,
the melodramatic hero of Strasburg and Bologne, with his cocked hat and
his eagle from Astley's? What insurance company would have taken the
risk of his hare-brained adventure? Coleridge used to take credit to
himself for certain lucky vaticinations, but his memory was always
inexact, his confounding of what he did and what he thought he meant to
do always to be suspected, and his prophecies, when examined, are
hardly more precise than an ancient oracle or a couplet of Nostradamus.
The almanac-makers took the wisest course, stretching through a whole
month their "about this time expect a change of weather."
That history repeats itself has become a kind of truism, but of as
little practical value in helping us to form our opinions as other
similar labor-saving expedients to escape thought. Sceptical minds see
in human affairs a regular oscillation, hopeful ones a continual
progress, and both can support their creeds with abundance of pertinent
example. Both seem to admit a law of recurrence, but the former make it
act in a circle, the latter in a spiral. There is, no doubt, one
constant element in the reckoning, namely, human nature, and perhaps
another in human nature itself,--the tendency to reaction from all
extremes; but the way in which these shall operate, and the force they
shall exert, are dependent on a multitude of new and impredicable
circumstances. Coincidences there certainly are, but our records are
hardly yet long enough to furnish the basis for secure induction. Such
parallelisms are merely curious, and entertain the fancy rather than
supply precedent for the judgment. When Tacitus tells us that
gladiators have not so much stomach for fighting as soldiers, we
remember our own roughs and shoulder-hitters at the beginning of the
war, and are inclined to think that Macer and Billy Wilson illustrated
a general truth. But, unfortunately, Octavius found prize-fighters of
another metal, not to speak of Spartacus. Perhaps the objections to our
making use of colored soldiers (_hic niger est, hunc tu, Romane,
caveto_) will seem as absurd one of these days as the outcry that Cæsar
was degrading the service by enlisting Gauls; but we will not hazard a
prophecy. In the alarm of the Pannonian revolt, his nephew recruited
the army of Italy by a conscription of slaves, who thereby became free,
and this measure seems to have been acquiesced in by the unwarlike
citizens, who preferred that the experiment of death should be made _in
corpore vili_ rather than in their own persons.
If the analogies between past and present were as precise as they are
sometimes represented to be, if Time really dotes and repeats his old
stories, then ought students of history to be the best statesmen. Yet,
with Guizot for an adviser, Louis Philippe, himself the eyewitness of
two revolutions, became the easy victim of a third. Reasoning from what
has been to what will be is apt to be paralogistic at the best. Much
influence must still be left to chance, much accounted for by what
pagans called Fate, and we Providence. We can only say, _Victrix
causa diis placuit_, and Cato must make the best of it. What is
called poetical justice, that is, an exact subservience of human
fortunes to moral laws, so that the actual becomes the liege vassal of
the ideal, is so seldom seen in the events of real life that even the
gentile world felt the need of a future state of rewards and
punishments to make the scale of Divine justice even, and satisfy the
cravings of the soul. Our sense of right, or of what we believe to be
right, is so pleased with an example of retribution that a single
instance is allowed to outweigh the many in which wrong escapes
unwhipped. It was remarked that sudden death overtook the purchasers of
certain property bequeathed for pious uses in England, and sequestered
at the Reformation. Fuller tells of a Sir Miles Pateridge, who threw
dice with the king for Jesus' bells, and how "the ropes after catched
about his neck," he being hanged in the reign of Edward VI. But at
least a fifth of the land in England was held by suppressed
monasteries, and the metal for the victorious cannon of revolutionary
France once called to the service of the Prince of Peace from
consecrated spires. We err in looking for a visible and material
penalty, as if God imposed a fine of mishap for the breach of his
statutes. Seldom, says Horace, has penalty lost the scent of crime,
yet, on second thought, he makes the sleuth-hound lame. Slow seems the
sword of Divine justice, adds Dante, to him who longs to see it smite.
The cry of all generations has been, "How long, O Lord?" Where crime
has its root in weakness of character, that same weakness is likely to
play the avenger; but where it springs from that indifference as to
means and that contempt of consequences which are likely to be felt by
a strong nature, intent upon its end, it would be hardy to reckon on
the same dramatic result. And if we find this difficulty in the cases
of individual men, it is even more rash to personify nations, and deal
out to them our little vials of Divine retribution, as if we were the
general dispensaries of doom. Shall we lay to a nation the sins of a
line of despots whom it cannot shake off? If we accept too blindly the
theory of national responsibility, we ought, by parity of reason, to
admit success as a valid proof of right. The moralists of fifty years
ago, who saw the democratic orgies of France punished with Napoleon,
whose own crimes brought him in turn to the rock of Prometheus, how
would they explain the phenomenon of Napoleon III.? The readiness to
trace a too close and consequent relation between public delinquencies
and temporal judgments seems to us a superstition holding over from the
time when each race, each family even, had its private and tutelary
divinity,--a mere refinement of fetichism. The world has too often seen
"captive good attending captain ill" to believe in a providence that
sets man-traps and spring-guns for the trespassers on its domain, and
Christianity, perhaps, elevated man in no way so much as in making
every one personally, not gregariously, answerable for his doings or
not-doings, and thus inventing conscience, as we understand its
meaning. But just in proportion as the private citizen is enlightened
does he become capable of an influence on that manifold result of
thought, sentiment, reason, impulse, magnanimity, and meanness which,
as Public Opinion, has now so great a share in shaping the destiny of
nations. And in this sense does he become responsible, and out of the
aggregate of such individual responsibilities we can assume a common
complicity in the guilt of common wrongdoing.
But surely the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth; and though we do not
believe in his so immediate interference in events as would satisfy our
impatience of injustice, yet he achieves his ends and brings about his
compensations by having made Good infinitely and eternally lovely to
the soul of man, while the beauty of Evil is but a brief cheat, which
their own lusts put upon the senses of her victims. And it is surely
fixed as the foundations of the earth that faithfulness to right and
duty, self-sacrifice, loyalty to that service whose visible reward is
often but suffering and baffled hope, draw strength and succor from
exhaustless springs far up in those Delectable Mountains of trial which
the All-knowing has set between us and the achievement of every noble
purpose. History teaches, at least, that wrong can reckon on no
alliance with the diviner part of man, while every high example of
virtue, though it led to the stake or the scaffold, becomes a part of
the reserved force of humanity, and from generation to generation
summons kindred natures to the standard of righteousness as with the
sound of a trumpet. There is no such reinforcement as faith in God, and
that faith is impossible till we have squared our policy and conduct
with our highest instincts. In the loom of time, though the woof be
divinely foreordained, yet man supplies the weft, and the figures of
the endless web are shaped and colored by our own wisdom or folly. Let
no nation think itself safe in being merely right, unless its captains
are inspired and sustained by a sense thereof.
We do not believe that history supplies any trustworthy data for
casting the horoscope of our war. America is something without
precedent Moreover, such changes have been going on in the social and
moral condition of nations as to make the lessons of even comparatively
recent times of little import in forming conclusions on contemporary
affairs. Formerly a fact, not yet forgetful of its etymology, was a
thing done, a deed, and in a certain sense implied, truly enough, the
predominance of individual actors and prevailing characters. But
powerful personalities are becoming of less and less account, when
facility of communication has given both force and the means of
exerting it to the sentiment of civilized mankind, and when commerce
has made the banker's strong-box a true temple of Janus, the shutting
or opening of which means peace or war. Battles are decisive now not so
much by the destruction of armies as by the defeat of public spirit,
and a something that has actually happened may be a less important
fact, either in conjecturing probabilities or determining policy, than
the indefinable progress of change, not marked on any dial, but
instinctively divined, that is taking place in the general thought.
The history of no civil war can be written without bias, scarcely
without passionate prejudice. It is always hard for men to conceive the
honesty or intelligence of those who hold other opinions, or indeed to
allow them the _right_ to think for themselves; but in troubled
times the blood mounts to the head, and colors the judgment, giving to
suspicions and fancies the force of realities, and intensifying
personal predilections, till they seem the pith and substance of
national duties. Even where the office of historian is assumed in the
fairest temper, it is impossible that the narrative of events whose
bearing is so momentous should not insensibly take somewhat the form of
an argument,--that the political sympathies of the author should not
affect his judgment of men and measures. And in such conflicts, far
more than in ordinary times, as the stake at issue is more absorbing
and appeals more directly to every private interest and patriotic
sentiment, so men, as they become prominent, and more or less
identified with this or that policy, at last take the place of
principles with the majority of minds. To agree with us is to be a
great commander, a prudent administrator, a politician without private
ends.
The contrast between the works of Mr. Pollard[2] and Mr. Greeley[3] is
very striking. Though coincident in design, they are the antipodes of
each other in treatment. Mr. Greeley, finding a country beyond measure
prosperous suddenly assailed by rebellion, is naturally led to seek an
adequate cause for so abnormal an effect. Mr. Pollard, formerly an
office-holder under the United States, and now the editor of a Richmond
newspaper, is struck by the same reflection, and, unwilling to state
the true cause, or unable to find a plausible reason, is driven to hunt
up an excuse for what strikes ordinary people as one of the greatest
crimes in history. The difference is instructive.
[2] _The Southern History of the War. The First Year of the
War._ By Edward A. Pollard.
[3] _The American Conflict._ By Horace Greeley. Vol. I.
Mr. Pollard's book, however, is well worth reading by those who wish to
learn something of the motives which originally led the Southern States
into rebellion, and still actuate them in their obstinate resistance.
To any one familiar with the history of the last thirty years, it would
almost seem that Mr. Pollard's object had been to expose the futility
of the pretences set up by the originators of Secession, so utterly
does he fail in showing any adequate grounds for that desperate
measure. As a history, the book is of little value, except as giving us
here and there a hint by which we can guess something of the state of
mind prevailing at the South. In point of style it is a curious jumble
of American sense and Southern _highfaluting_. One might fancy it
written by a schoolmaster, whose boys had got hold of the manuscript,
and inserted here and there passages taken at random from the _Gems
of Irish Oratory_. Mr. Pollard's notions of the "Yankees," and the
condition of things among them, would be creditable to a Chinaman from
pretty well up in the back country. No society could hold together for
a moment in the condition of moral decay which he attributes to the
Northern States. Before writing his next volume he should read Charles
Lamb's advice "to those who have the framing of advertisements for the
apprehension of offenders." We must do him the justice to say, however,
that he writes no nonsense about difference of races, and that, of all
"Yankees," he most thoroughly despises the Northern snob who professes
a sympathy for "Southern institutions" because he believes that a
slaveholder is a better man than himself.
In narrating the causes which brought about the present state of
things, Mr. Pollard arranges matters to suit his own convenience,
constantly reversing the relations of cause and effect, and forgetting
that the order of events is of every importance in estimating their
moral bearing. The only theoretic reason he gives for Secession is the
desire to escape from the tyranny of a "numerical majority." Yet it was
by precisely such a majority, and that attained by force or fraud, that
the seceding States were taken out of the Union. We entirely agree with
Mr. Pollard that a show of hands is no test of truth; but he seems to
forget that, except under a despotism, a numerical majority of some
sort or other is sure to govern. No man capable of thought, as Mr.
Pollard certainly is, would admit that a majority was any more likely
to be right under a system of limited than under one of universal
suffrage, always provided the said majority did not express his own
opinions. The majority always governs in the long run, because it comes
gradually round to the side of what is just and for the common
interest, and the only dangerous majority is that of a mob unchecked by
the delay for reflection which all constitutional government
interposes. The constitutions of most of the Slave States, so far as
white men are concerned, are of the most intensely democratic type.
Would Mr. Pollard consolidate them all under one strong government, or
does he believe that to be good for a single State which is bad for
many united? It is curious to see, in his own intense antipathy to a
slaveholding aristocracy, how purely American he is in spite of his
theories; and, bitterly hostile as he is to the Davis administration,
he may chance on the reflection that a majority is pretty much the same
thing in one parallel of latitude as another. Of one thing he may be
assured,--that we of the North do not understand by republic a
government of the better and more intelligent class by the worse and
more ignorant, and accordingly are doing our best by education to
abolish the distinction between the two.
The fact that no adequate reasons for Secession have ever been brought
forward, either by the seceding States at the time, or by their
apologists since, can only be explained on the theory that nothing more
than a _coup d'état_ was intended, which should put the South in
possession of the government. Owing to the wretched policy (if
supineness deserve the name) largely prevalent in the North, of sending
to the lower house of Congress the men who needed rather than those who
ought to go there,--men without the responsibility or the independence
which only established reputation, social position, long converse with
great questions, or native strength of character can give,--and to the
habit of looking on a seat in the national legislature more as the
reward for partisan activity than as imposing a service of the highest
nature, so that representatives were changed as often as there were new
political debts to pay or cliques to be conciliated,--owing to these
things, the South maintained an easy superiority at Washington, and
learned to measure the Free States by men who represented their
weakest, and sometimes their least honorable, characteristics. We doubt
if the Slave States have sent many men to the Capitol who could be
bought, while it is notorious that from the north of Mason and Dixon's
line many an M.C. has cleared, like a ship, for Washington and a
market. Southern politicians judge the North by men without courage and
without principle, who would consent to any measure if it could be
becomingly draped in generalities, or if they could evade the pillory
of the yeas and nays. The increasing drain of forensic ability toward
the large cities, with the mistaken theory that residence in the
district was a necessary qualification in candidates, tended still more
to bring down the average of Northern representation. The "claims" of a
section of the State, or even part of a district, have been allowed to
have weight, as if square miles or acres were to be weighed against
capacity and experience. We attached too little importance to the
social prestige which the South acquired and maintained at the seat of
government, forgetting the necessary influence it would exert upon the
independence of many of our own members. These in turn brought home the
new impressions they had acquired, till the fallacy gradually became
conviction of a general superiority in the South, though it had only so
much truth in it as this, that the people of that section sent their
men of character and position to Washington, and kept them there till
every year of experience added an efficiency which more than made up
for their numerical inferiority. Meanwhile, our thinking men allowed,
whether from timidity or contempt, certain demagogic fallacies to
become axioms by dint of repetition, chief among which was the notion
that a man was the better representative of the democratic principle
who had contrived to push himself forward to popularity by whatever
means, and who represented the average instead of the highest culture
of the community, thus establishing an aristocracy of mediocrity, nay,
even of vulgarity, in some less intelligent constituencies. The one
great strength of democracy is, that it opens all the highways of power
and station to the better man, that it gives every man the chance of
rising to his natural level; and its great weakness is in its tendency
to urge this principle to a vicious excess, by pushing men forward into
positions for which they are unfit, not so much because they deserve to
rise, or because they have risen by great qualities, as because they
began low. Our quadrennial change of offices, which turns public
service into a matter of bargain and sale instead of the reward of
merit and capacity, which sends men to Congress to represent private
interests in the sharing of plunder, without regard to any claims of
statesmanship or questions of national policy, as if the ship of state
were periodically captured by privateers, has hastened our downward
progress in the evil way. By making the administration prominent at the
cost of the government, and by its constant lesson of scramble and
vicissitude, almost obliterating the idea of orderly permanence, it has
tended in no small measure to make disruption possible, for Mr.
Lincoln's election threw the weight of every office-holder in the South
into the scale of Secession. The war, however, has proved that the core
of Democracy was sound; that the people, if they had been neglectful of
their duties, or had misapprehended them, had not become corrupt.
Mr. Greeley's volume is a valuable contribution to our political
history. Though for many years well known as an ardent politician, and
associated by popular prejudice with that class of untried social
theories which are known by the name of _isms_, his tone is
singularly calm and dispassionate. Disfigured here and there by a
vulgarism which adds nothing to its point, while it detracts from its
purity, his style is clear, straightforward, and masculine,--a good
business style, at once bare of ornament and undiluted with eloquence.
Mr. Greeley's intimate knowledge of our politics and instinctive
sympathy with the far-reaching scope of our institutions (for, as
Béranger said of himself, he is _tout peuple_) admirably fitted
him for his task. He is clear, concise, and accurate, honestly striving
after the truth, while his judicious Preface shows that he appreciates
fully the difficulties that beset whoever seeks to find it. If none of
his readers will be surprised to find his work that of an able man,
there are many who would not expect it to be, as it is, that of a
fair-minded one. He writes without passion, making due allowance for
human nature in the South as well as the North, and does not waste his
strength, as is the manner of fanatics, in fighting imaginary giants
while a real enemy is in the field. Tracing Secession to its twin
sources in slavery and the doctrine of State Rights, and amply
sustaining his statements of fact by citations from contemporary
documents and speeches, he has made the plainest, and for that very
reason, we think, the strongest, argument that has been put forth on
the national side of the question at issue in our civil war. Above all,
he is ready to allow those virtues in the character of the Southern
people whose existence alone makes reunion desirable or possible. We
should not forget that the Negro is at least no more our brother than
they, for if he have fallen among thieves who have robbed him of his
manhood, they have been equally enslaved by prejudice, ignorance, and
social inferiority.
It is not a little singular that, while slavery has been for nearly
eighty years the one root of bitterness in our politics, the general
knowledge of its history should be so superficial. Abolitionism has
been so persistently represented as the disturbing element which
threatened the permanence of our Union, that mere repetition has at
last become conviction with that large class of minds with which a
conclusion is valuable exactly in proportion as it saves mental labor.
Mr. Greeley's chronological narrative is an excellent corrective of
this delusion, and his tough little facts, driven firmly home, will
serve to spike this parrot battery, and render it harmless for the
future. A consecutive statement of such of the events in our history as
bear directly on the question of slavery, separated from all secondary
circumstances, shows two things clearly: first, that the doctrine that
there was any national obligation to consider slaves as merely
property, or to hold our tongues about slavery, is of comparatively
recent origin; and, second, that there was a pretty uniform ebb of
anti-slavery sentiment for nearly sixty years after the adoption of the
Constitution, the young flood beginning to set strongly in again after
the full meaning of the annexation of Texas began to be understood at
the North, but not fairly filling up again even its own deserted
channels till the Southern party succeeded in cutting the embankment of
the Missouri Compromise. Then at last it became evident that the real
danger to be guarded against was the abolition of Freedom, and the
reaction was as violent as it was sudden.
In the early days of the Republic, slavery was admitted to be a social
and moral evil, only to be justified by necessity; and we think it more
than doubtful if South Carolina and Georgia could have procured an
extension of the slave-trade, had there not been a general persuasion
that the whole system could not long maintain itself against the growth
of intelligence and humanity. As early as 1786 a resident of South
Carolina wrote: "In countries where slavery is encouraged, the ideas of
the people are of a peculiar cast; the soul becomes dark and narrow,
and assumes a tone of savage brutality.... The most elevated and
liberal Carolinians abhor slavery; they will not debase themselves by
attempting to vindicate it." In 1789 William Pinckney said, in the
Maryland Assembly: "Sir, by the eternal principles of natural justice,
no master in the State has a right to hold his slave in bondage for a
single hour." And he went on to speak of slavery in a way which, fifty
years later, would have earned him a coat of tar and feathers, if not a
halter, in any of the Slave States, and in some of the Free. In 1787
Delaware passed an act forbidding the importation of "negro or mulatto
slaves into the State for sale or otherwise;" and three years later her
courts declared a slave, hired in Maryland and brought over the border,
free under this statute. In 1790 there were Abolition societies in
Maryland and Virginia. In 1787 the Synod of the Presbyterian Church
(since called the General Assembly), in their pastoral letter,
"strongly recommended the abolition of slavery, with the instruction of
the negroes in literature and religion." We cite these instances to
show that the sacredness of slavery from discussion was a discovery of
much later date. So also was the theory of its divine origin,--a
theological slough in which, we are sorry to say, Northern men have
shown themselves readiest to bemire themselves. It was when slave labor
and slave breeding began to bring large and rapid profits, by the
extension of cotton-culture consequent on the invention of Whitney's
gin, and the purchase of Louisiana, that slavery was found to be
identical with religion, and, like Duty, a "daughter of the voice of
God." Till it became rich, it had been content with claiming the
municipal law for its parent, but now it was easy to find heralds who
could blazon for it a nobler pedigree. Men who looked upon dancing as
sinful could see the very beauty of holiness in a system like this! It
is consoling to think that, even in England, it is little more than a
century since the divine right of kings ceased to be defended in the
same way, by making the narrative portions of Scripture doctrinal. Such
strange things have been found in the Bible that we are not without
hope of the discovery of Christianity there, one of these days.
The influence of the Southern States in the national politics was due
mainly to the fact of their having a single interest on which they were
all united, and, though fond of contrasting their more chivalric
character with the commercial spirit of the North, it will be found
that profit has been the motive to all the encroachments of slavery.
These encroachments first assumed the offensive with the annexation of
Texas. In the admission of Missouri, though the Free States might
justly claim a right to fix the political destiny of half the
territory, bought with the common money of the nation, and though
events have since proved that the compromise of 1820 was a fatal
mistake, yet, as slavery was already established there, the South
might, with some show of reason, claim to be on the defensive. In one
sense, it is true, every enlargement of the boundaries of slavery has
been an aggression. For it cannot with any fairness be assumed that the
framers of the Constitution intended to foreordain a perpetual balance
of power between the Free and the Slave States. If they had, it is
morally certain that they would not so have arranged the basis of
representation as to secure to the South an unfair preponderance, to be
increased with every addition of territory. It is much more probable
that they expected the Southern States to fall more and more into a
minority of population and wealth, and were willing to strengthen this
minority by yielding it somewhat more than its just share of power in
Congress. Indeed, it was mainly on the ground of the undue advantage
which the South would gain, politically, that the admission of Missouri
was distasteful to the North.
It was not till after the Southern politicians had firmly established
their system of governing the country by an alliance with the
Democratic party of the Free States, on the basis of a division of
offices, that they dreamed of making their "institution" the chief
concern of the nation. As we follow Mr. Greeley's narrative, we see
them first pleading for the existence of slavery, then for its
equality, and at last claiming for it an absolute dominion. Such had
been the result of uniform concession on the part of the North for the
sake of Union, such the decline of public spirit, that within sixty
years of the time when slaveholders like George Mason of Virginia could
denounce slavery for its inconsistency with the principles on which our
Revolution had triumphed, the leaders of a party at the North claiming
a kind of patent in the rights of man as an expedient for catching
votes were decrying the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence as
visionary and impracticable. Was it the Slave or the Free States that
had just cause to be alarmed for their peculiar institutions? And,
meanwhile, it had been discovered that slavery was conservative! It
would protect a country in which almost every voter was a landholder
from any sudden frenzy of agrarianism! In the South it certainly
conserved a privileged class, and prevented a general debauch of
education; but in the North it preserved nothing but political
corruption, subserviency, cant, and all those baser qualities which
unenviably distinguish man from the brutes.
The nation had paid ten millions for Texas, an extension of the area of
freedom, as it was shamelessly called, which was to raise the value of
slaves in Virginia, according to Mr. Upshur, and did raise it, fifty
per cent. It was next proposed to purchase Cuba for one hundred
millions, or to take it by force if Spain refused to sell. And all this
for fear of abolition. This was paying rather dearly for our
conservative element, it should seem, especially when it stood in need
of such continual and costly conservation. But it continued to be plain
to a majority of voters that democratic institutions absolutely
demanded a safeguard against democracy, and that the only insurance was
something that must be itself constantly insured at more and more
ruinous rates. It continued to be plain also that slavery was purely a
matter of local concern, though it could help itself to the national
money, force the nation into an unjust war, and stain its reputation in
Europe with the buccaneering principles proclaimed in the Ostend
Manifesto. All these were plainly the results of the ever-increasing
and unprovoked aggressions of Northern fanaticism. To be the victims of
such injustice seemed not unpleasing to the South. Let us sum up the
items of their little bill against us. They demanded Missouri,--we
yielded; they could not get along without Texas,--we _re_-annexed it;
they must have a more stringent fugitive-slave law,--we gulped it; they
must no longer be insulted with the Missouri Compromise,--we repealed
it. Thus far the North had surely been faithful to the terms of the
bond. We had paid our pound of flesh whenever it was asked for, and
with fewer wry faces, inasmuch as Brother Ham underwent the incision.
Not at all. We had only surrendered the principles of the Revolution;
we must give up the theory also, if we would be loyal to the
Constitution.
We entirely agree with Mr. Greeley that the quibble which would make
the Constitution an anti-slavery document, because the word _slave_ is
not mentioned in it, cannot stand a moment if we consider the speeches
made in Convention, or the ideas by which the action of its members was
guided. But the question of slavery in the Territories stands on wholly
different ground. We know what the opinions of the men were who drafted
the Constitution, by their own procedure in passing the Ordinance of
1787. That the North should yield all claim to the common lands was
certainly a new interpretation of constitutional law. And yet this was
practically insisted on by the South, and its denial was the more
immediate occasion of rupture between the two sections. But, in our
opinion, the real cause which brought the question to the decision of
war was the habit of concession on the part of the North, and the
inability of its representatives to say _No_, when policy as well as
conscience made it imperative. Without that confidence in Northern
pusillanimity into which the South had been educated by their long
experience of this weakness, whatever might have been the secret wish
of the leading plotters, they would never have dared to rush their
fellow-citizens into a position where further compromise became
impossible.
Inextricably confused with the question of Slavery, and essential to an
understanding of the motives and character of the Southern people as
distinguished from their politicians, is the doctrine of State Rights.
On this topic also Mr. Greeley furnishes all the data requisite to a
full understanding of the matter. The dispute resolves itself
substantially into this: whether the adoption of the Constitution
established a union or a confederacy, a government or a league, a
nation or a committee. This also is a question which can only be
determined by a knowledge of what the Convention of 1787 intended and
accomplished, and the States severally acceded to,--it being of course
understood that no State had a right, or at the time pretended any
right, to accept the Constitution with mental reservations. On this
subject we have ample and unimpeachable testimony in the discussions
which led to the calling of the Convention, and the debates which
followed in the different conventions of the States called together to
decide whether the new frame of government should be accepted or
rejected. The conviction that it was absolutely necessary to remodel
the Articles of Confederation was wrought wholly by an experience of
the inadequacy of the existing plan (under which a single State could
oppose its veto to a law of Congress), from, the looseness of its
cohesion and its want of power to compel obedience. The principle of
coercive authority, which was represented as so oppressively
unconstitutional by the friends of Secession in the North as well as
the South four years ago, was precisely that which, as its absence had
brought the old plan to a dead-lock, was deemed essential to the new.
The formal proposal for a convention, originated by Hamilton, was
seconded by one State after another. Here is a sample of Virginian
public sentiment at that time, from the "instructions to their
representatives," by several constituencies: "Government without
coercion is a proposition at once so absurd and self-contradictory that
the idea creates a confusion of the understanding; it is form without
substance, at best a body without a soul." Oliver Ellsworth, advocating
the adoption of the Constitution in the Convention of Connecticut,
says: "A more energetic system is necessary. The present is merely
advisory. It has no coercive power. Without this, government is
ineffectual, or rather is no government at all." Earlier than this
Madison had claimed "an implied right of coercion" even for the
Confederate Congress, and Jefferson had gone so far as to say that they
possessed it "by the law of nature." The leading objections to the new
Constitution were such as to show the general belief that the State
sovereignties were to be absorbed into the general government in all
matters of national concern. But the unhappy ingenuity of Mr. Jefferson
afterwards devised that theory of strict construction which would
enable any State to profit by the powers of the Constitution so long as
it was for her interest or convenience, and then, by pleading its want
of powers, to resolve the helpless organization once more into the
incoherence of confederacy. By this dexterous legerdemain, the Union
became a string of juggler's rings, which seems a chain while it
pleases the operator, but which, by bringing the strain on the weak
point contrived for the purpose, is made to fall easily asunder and
become separate rings again. An adroit use of this theory enabled the
South to gain one advantage after another by threatening disunion, and
led naturally, on the first effective show of resistance, to secession.
But in order that the threat might serve its purpose without the costly
necessity of putting it in execution, the doctrine of State Rights was
carefully inculcated at the South by the same political party which
made belief in the value of the Union a fanaticism at the North. On one
side of Mason and Dixon's line it was lawful, and even praiseworthy, to
steal the horse; on the other, it was a hanging matter to look over the
fence.
But in seeking for the cause of the rebellion, with any fairness toward
the Southern people, and any wish to understand their motives and
character, it would be unwise to leave out of view the fact that they
have been carefully educated in the faith that secession is not only
their right, but the only safeguard of their freedom. While it is
perfectly true that the great struggle now going on is intrinsically
between right and privilege, between law and license, and while on the
part of its leaders the Southern revolt was a conspiracy against
popular government, and an attempt to make a great Republic into a mere
convenient drudge for Slavery, yet we should despair of our kind did we
believe that the rank and file of the Confederate armies were
consciously spending so much courage and endurance on behalf of
barbarism. It is more consoling, as it is nearer the truth, to think
that they are fighting for what they have been taught to believe their
rights, and their inheritance as a free people. The high qualities they
have undoubtedly shown in the course of the war, their tenacity,
patience, and discipline, show that, under better influences, they may
become worthy to take their part in advancing the true destinies of
America.
It is yet too early to speculate with much confidence on the remote
consequences of the war. One of its more immediate results has already
been to disabuse the Southern mind of some of its most fatal
misconceptions as to Northern character. They thought us a trading
people, incapable of lofty sentiment, ready to sacrifice everything for
commercial advantage,--a heterogeneous rabble, fit only to be ruled by
a superior race. They are not likely to make that mistake again, and
must have learned by this time that the best blood is that which has in
it most of the iron of purpose and constancy. War, the sternest and
dearest of teachers, has already made us a soberer and older people on
both sides. It has brought questions of government and policy home to
us as never before, and has made us feel that citizenship is a duty to
whose level we must rise, and not a privilege to which we are born. The
great principles of humanity and politics, which had faded into the
distance of abstraction and history, have been for four years the theme
of earnest thought and discussion at every fireside and wherever two
men met together. They have again become living and operative in the
heart and mind of the nation. What was before a mighty population is
grown a great country, united in one hope, inspired by one thought, and
welded into one power. But have not the same influences produced the
same result in the South, and created there also a nation hopelessly
alien and hostile? To a certain extent this is true, but not in the
unlimited way in which it is stated by enemies in England, or
politicians at home, who would gladly put the people out of heart,
because they themselves are out of office. With the destruction of
slavery, the one object of the war will have been lost by the Rebels,
and its one great advantage gained by the government. Slavery is by no
means dead as yet, whether socially in its relation of man to man, or
morally in its hold on public opinion and its strength as a political
superstition. But there is no party at the North, considerable in
numbers or influence, which could come into power on the platform of
making peace with the Rebels on their own terms. No party can get
possession of the government which is not in sympathy with the temper
of the people, and the people, forced into war against their will by
the unprovoked attack of pro-slavery bigotry, are resolved on pushing
it to its legitimate conclusion. War means now, consciously with many,
unconsciously with most, but inevitably, abolition. Nothing can save
slavery but peace. Let its doom be once accomplished, or its
reconstruction (for reconstruction means nothing more) clearly seen to
be an impossibility, and the bond between the men at the South who were
willing to destroy the Union, and those at the North who only wish to
save it, for the sake of slavery, will be broken. The ambitious in both
sections will prefer their chances as members of a mighty empire to
what would always be secondary places in two rival and hostile nations,
powerless to command respect abroad or secure prosperity at home. The
masses of the Southern people will not feel too keenly the loss of a
kind of property in which they had no share, while it made them
underlings, nor will they find it hard to reconcile themselves with a
government from which they had no real cause of estrangement. If the
war be waged manfully, as becomes a thoughtful people, without insult
or childish triumph in success, if we meet opinion with wiser opinion,
waste no time in badgering prejudice till it become hostility, and
attack slavery as a crime against the nation, and not as individual
sin, it will end, we believe, in making us the most powerful and
prosperous community the world ever saw. Our example and our ideas will
react more powerfully than ever on the Old World, and the consequence
of a rebellion, aimed at the natural equality of all men, will be to
hasten incalculably the progress of equalization over the whole earth.
Above all, Freedom will become the one absorbing interest of the whole
people, making us a nation alive from sea to sea with the consciousness
of a great purpose and a noble destiny, and uniting us as slavery has
hitherto combined and made powerful the most hateful aristocracy known
to man.
McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN?
1864
The spectacle of an opposition waiting patiently during several months
for its principles to turn up would be amusing in times less critical
than these. Nor was this the worst. If there might be persons malicious
enough to think that the Democratic party could get along very well
without principles, all would admit that a candidate was among the
necessaries of life. Now, where not only immediate policy, but the very
creed which that policy is to embody, is dependent on circumstances,
and on circumstances so shifting and doubtful as those of a campaign,
it is hard to find a representative man whose name may, in some
possible contingency, mean enough, without, in some other equally
possible contingency, meaning too much. The problem was to hunt up
somebody who, without being anything in particular, might be anything
in general, as occasion demanded. Of course, the professed object of
the party was to save their country, but which _was_ their country, and
which it would be most profitable to save, whether America or Secessia,
was a question that Grant or Sherman might answer one way or the other
in a single battle. If only somebody or something would tell them
whether they were for war or peace! The oracles were dumb, and all
summer long they looked anxiously out, like Sister Anne from her tower,
for the hero who should rescue unhappy Columbia from the Republican
Bluebeard. Did they see a cloud of dust in the direction of Richmond or
Atlanta? Perhaps Grant might be the man, after all, or even Sherman
would answer at a pinch. When at last no great man would come along, it
was debated whether it might not be better to nominate some one without
a record, as it is called, since a nobody was clearly the best exponent
of a party that was under the unhappy necessity of being still
uncertain whether it had any recognizable soul or not. Meanwhile, the
time was getting short and the public impatience peremptory.
"Under which king, bezonian? Speak, or die!"
The party found it alike inconvenient to do the one or the other, and
ended by a compromise which might serve to keep them alive till after
election, but which was as far from any distinct utterance as if their
mouths were already full of that official pudding which they hope for
as the reward of their amphibological patriotism. Since it was not safe
to be either for peace or war, they resolved to satisfy every
reasonable expectation by being at the same time both and neither. If
you are warlike, there is General McClellan; if pacific, surely you
must be suited with Mr. Pendleton; if neither, the combination of the
two makes a _tertium quid_ that is neither one thing nor another. As
the politic Frenchman, kissing the foot of St. Peter's statue (recast
out of a Jupiter), while he thus did homage to existing prejudices,
hoped that the Thunderer would remember him if he ever came into power
again, so the Chicago Convention compliments the prevailing warlike
sentiment of the country with a soldier, but holds the civilian quietly
in reserve for the future contingencies of submission. The nomination
is a kind of political _What-is-it?_ and voters are expected, without
asking impertinent questions, to pay their money and make their own
choice as to the natural history of the animal. Looked at from the
Northern side, it is a raven, the bird of carnage, to be sure, but
whitewashed and looking as decorously dove-like as it can; from the
Southern, it is a dove, blackened over for the nonce, but letting the
olive-branch peep from under its wing.
A more delicate matter for a convention, however, even than the
selection of candidates, is the framing of a platform for them to stand
upon. It was especially delicate for a gathering which represented so
many heterogeneous and almost hostile elements. So incongruous an
assemblage has not been seen since the host of Peter the Hermit,
unanimous in nothing but the hope of plunder and of reconquering the
Holy Land of office. There were War Democrats ready to unite in peace
resolutions, and Peace Democrats eager to move the unanimous nomination
of a war candidate. To make the confusion complete, Mr. Franklin
Pierce, the dragooner of Kansas, writes a letter in favor of free
elections, and the maligners of New England propose a Connecticut
Yankee as their favorite nominee. The Convention was a rag-bag of
dissent, made up of bits so various in hue and texture that the
managers must have been as much puzzled to arrange them in any kind of
harmonious pattern as the thrifty housewife in planning her coverlet
out of the parings of twenty years' dressmaking. All the odds and ends
of personal discontent, every shred of private grudge, every resentful
rag snipped off by official shears, scraps of Rebel gray and leavings
of Union blue,--all had been gathered, as if for the tailoring of
Joseph's coat; and as a Chatham Street broker first carefully removes
all marks of previous ownership from the handkerchiefs which find their
way to his counter, so the temporary chairman advised his hearers, by
way of a preliminary caution, to surrender their convictions. This,
perhaps, was superfluous, for it may be doubted whether anybody
present, except Mr. Fernando Wood, ever legally had one, though Captain
Rynders must have brought many in his following who richly deserved it.
Mr. Belmont, being chosen to represent the Democracy of Mammon, did
little more than paraphrase in prose the speech of that fallen
financier in another rebellious conclave, as reported by Milton:--
"How in safety best we may
Compose our present evils, with regard
Of what we are and were, dismissing quite
All thoughts of war."
But we turn from the momentary elevation of the banker, to follow the
arduous labors of the Committee on Resolutions.[4] The single end to
be served by the platform they were to construct was that of a bridge
over which their candidate might make his way into the White House.
But it must be so built as to satisfy the somewhat exacting theory
of construction held by the Rebel emissaries at Niagara, while at the
same time no apprehensions as to its soundness must be awakened in the
loyal voters of the party. The war plank would offend the one, the
State Rights plank excite the suspicion of the other. The poor fellow
in Æsop, with his two wives, one pulling out the black hairs and the
other the white, was not in a more desperate situation than the
Committee,--MacHeath, between his two doxies, not more embarrassed. The
result of their labors was, accordingly, as narrow as the pathway of
the faithful into the Mahometan paradise,--so slender, indeed, that
Blondin should have been selected as the only candidate who could hope
to keep his balance on it, with the torrent of events rushing ever
swifter and louder below. It might sustain the somewhat light Unionism
of Mr. Pendleton, but would General McClellan dare to trust its fragile
footing, with his Report and his West Point oration, with his record,
in short, under his arm? Without these documents General McClellan is a
nobody; with them, before he can step on a peace platform, he must eat
an amount of leek that would have turned the stomach of Ancient Pistol
himself. It remained to be seen whether he was more in favor of being
President than of his own honor and that of the country.
[4] The _Platform of the Chicago Convention_ was published
in the public journals 30th August.
The Resolutions of the Chicago Convention, though they denounce various
wrongs and evils, some of them merely imaginary, and all the necessary
results of civil war, propose only one thing,--surrender. Disguise it
as you will, flavor it as you will, call it what you will, umble-pie is
umble-pie, and nothing else. The people instinctively so understood it.
They rejected with disgust a plan whose mere proposal took their
pusillanimity for granted, and whose acceptance assured their
self-contempt. At a moment when the Rebels would be checkmated in
another move, we are advised to give them a knight and begin the game
over again. If they are not desperate, what chance of their accepting
offers which they rejected with scorn before the war began? If they are
not desperate, why is their interest more intense in the result of our
next Presidential election than even in the campaign at their very
door? If they were not desperate, would two respectable men like
Messrs. Clay and Holcomb endure the society of George Saunders? General
McClellan himself admitted the righteousness of the war by volunteering
in it, and, the war once begun, the only real question has been whether
the principle of legitimate authority or that of wanton insurrection
against it should prevail,--whether we should have for the future a
government of opinion or of brute force. When the rebellion began, its
leaders had no intention to dissolve the Union, but to reconstruct it,
to make the Montgomery Constitution and Jefferson Davis supreme over
the whole country, and not over a feeble fragment of it. They knew, as
we knew, the weakness of a divided country, and our experience of
foreign governments during the last four years has not been such as to
lessen the apprehension on that score, or to make the consciousness of
it less pungent in either of the contending sections. Even now,
Jefferson Davis is said to be in favor of a confederation between the
Free and the Slave States. But what confederation could give us back
the power and prestige of the old Union? The experience of Germany
surely does not tempt to imitation. And in making overtures for peace,
with whom are we to treat? Talking vaguely about "the South," "the
Confederate States," or "the Southern people," does not help the
matter; for the cat under all this meal is always the _government_
at Richmond, men with everything to expect from independence, with much
to hope from reconstruction, and sure of nothing but ruin from reunion.
And these men, who were arrogant as equals and partners, are to be
moderate in dictating terms as conquerors! If the people understood
less clearly the vital principle which is at hazard in this contest, if
they were not fully persuaded that Slavery and State Eights are merely
the counters, and that free institutions are the real stake, they might
be deluded with the hope of compromise. But there are things that are
not subjects of compromise. The honor, the conscience, the very soul of
a nation, cannot be compromised without ceasing to exist. When you
propose to yield a part of them, there is already nothing left to
yield.
And yet this is all that the party calling itself Democratic, after
months of deliberation, after four years in which to study the popular
mind, have to offer in the way of policy. It is neither more nor less
than to confess that they have no real faith in popular
self-government, for it is to assume that the people have neither
common nor moral sense. General McClellan is to be put in command of
the national citadel, on condition that he immediately offers to
capitulate. To accept the nomination on these terms was to lose, not
only his election, but his self-respect. Accordingly, no sooner was the
damaging effect of the platform evident than it was rumored that he
would consent to the candidacy, but reject the conditions on which
alone it was offered. The singular uniform, half Union-blue and half
Confederate--gray, in which it was proposed by the managers at Chicago
to array the Democratic party, while it might be no novelty to some
camp-followers of the New York delegation familiar with the rules of
certain of our public institutions, could hardly be agreeable to one
who had worn the livery of his country with distinction. It was the
scene of Petruchio and the tailor over again:--
_Gen. McC._ "Why, what, i' th' Devil's name, tailor, call'st
thou this?"
_Committee._ "You bid me make it orderly and well,
According to the fashion and the time."
_Gen. McC._ "Marry, I did; but, if you be remembered,
_I did not bid you mar it to the time._"
Between the nomination and acceptance came the taking of Atlanta,
marring the coat to the time with a vengeance, and suggesting the
necessity of turning it,--a sudden cure which should rank among the
first in future testimonials to the efficacy of Sherman's lozenges. Had
General McClellan thrust the resolutions away from him with an honest
scorn, we should have nothing to say save in commendation. But to
accept them with his own interpretation, to put upon them a meaning
utterly averse from their plain intention, and from that understanding
of them which the journals of his own faction clearly indicated by
their exultation or their silence, according as they favored
Confederacy or Union, is to prepare a deception for one of the parties
to the bargain. In such cases, which is commonly cheated, the
candidate, or the people who vote for him? If the solemn and deliberate
language of resolutions is to be interpreted by contraries, what rule
of hermeneutics shall we apply to the letter of a candidate? If the
Convention meant precisely what they did not say, have we any assurance
that the aspirant has not said precisely what he did not mean? Two
negatives may constitute an affirmative, but surely the affirmation of
two contradictory propositions by parties to the same bargain assures
nothing but misunderstanding.
The resolutions were adopted with but four dissenting votes; their
meaning was obvious, and the whole country understood it to be peace on
any conditions that would be condescended to at Richmond. If a nation
were only a contrivance to protect men in gathering gear, if territory
meant only so many acres for the raising of crops, if power were of
worth only as a police to prevent or punish crimes against person and
property, then peace for the mere sake of peace were the one desirable
thing for a people whose only history would be written in its
cash-book. But if a nation be a living unity, leaning on the past by
tradition, and reaching toward the future by continued aspiration and
achievement,--if territory be of value for the raising of men formed to
high aims and inspired to noble deeds by that common impulse which,
springing from a national ideal, gradually takes authentic shape in a
national character,--if power be but a gross and earthy bulk till it be
ensouled with thought and purpose, and of worth only as the guardian
and promoter of truth and justice among men,--then there are
misfortunes worse than war and blessings greater than peace. At this
moment, not the Democratic party only, but the whole country, longs for
peace, and the difference is merely as to the price that shall be paid
for it. Shall we pay in degradation, and sue for a cessation of
hostilities which would make chaos the rule and order the exception,
which would not be peace, but toleration, not the repose of manly
security, but the helpless quiet of political death? Or shall we pay,
in a little more present suffering, self-sacrifice, and earnestness of
purpose, for a peace that shall be as lasting as honorable, won as it
will be by the victory of right over wrong, and resting on the promise
of God and the hope of man? We believe the country has already made up
its mind as to the answer, and will prove that a democracy may have as
clear a conception of its interests and duties, as fixed a purpose in
defending the one and fulfilling the other, a will as united and
prompt, as have hitherto been supposed to characterize forms of
government where the interests were more personal and the power less
diffused.
Fortunately, though some of General McClellan's indiscreet friends
would make the coming election to turn upon his personal quarrel with
the administration, the question at issue between the two parties which
seek to shape the policy of the country is one which manifestly
transcends all lesser considerations, and must be discussed in the
higher atmosphere of principle, by appeals to the reason, and not the
passions, of the people. However incongruous with each other in opinion
the candidates of the Democratic party may be, in point of
respectability they are unexceptionable. It is true, as one of the
candidates represents war and the other peace, and "when two men ride
on one horse, one must ride behind," that it is of some consequence to
know which is to be in the saddle and which on the croup; but we will
take it for granted that General McClellan will have no more delicacy
about the opinions of Mr. Pendleton than he has shown for those of the
Convention. Still, we should remember that the General may be imprudent
enough to die, as General Harrison and General Taylor did before him,
and that Providence may again make "of our pleasant vices whips to
scourge us." We shall say nothing of the sectional aspect of the
nomination, for we do not believe that what we deemed a pitiful
electioneering clamor, when raised against our own candidates four
years ago, becomes reasonable argument in opposing those of our
adversaries now. The point of interest, then, is simply this: What can
General McClellan accomplish for the country which Mr. Lincoln has
failed to accomplish? In what respect would their policies differ? And,
supposing them to differ, which would be most consistent with the honor
and permanent well-being of the nation?
General McClellan, in his letter of acceptance,[5] assumes that, in
nominating him, "the record of his public life was kept in view" by the
Convention. This will enable us to define with some certainty the
points on which his policy would be likely to differ from that of Mr.
Lincoln. He agrees with him that the war was a matter of necessity, not
of choice. He agrees with him in assuming a right to emancipate slaves
as a matter of military expediency, differing only as to the method and
extent of its application,--a mere question of judgment. He agrees
with, him as to the propriety of drafting men for the public service,
having, indeed, been the first to recommend a draft of men whom he was
to command himself. He agrees with him that it is not only lawful, but
politic, to make arrests without the ordinary forms of law where the
public safety requires it, and himself both advised and accomplished
the seizure of an entire Legislature. So far there is no essential
difference, and beyond this we find very little, except that Mr.
Lincoln was in a position where he was called on to act with a view to
the public welfare, and General McClellan in one where he could express
abstract opinions, without the responsibility of trial, to be used
hereafter for partisan purposes as a part of his "record." For example,
just after his failure to coerce the State of Virginia, he took
occasion to instruct his superiors in their duty, and, among other
things, stated his opinion that the war "should not be a war looking to
the subjugation of the people of any State," but "should be against
armed forces and political organizations." The whole question of the
right to "coerce a sovereign State" appears to have arisen from a
confusion of the relations of a State to its own internal policy and to
the general government. But a State is certainly a "political
organization," and, if we understand General McClellan rightly, he
would coerce a State, but not the people of it,--a distinction which we
hope he appreciates better than its victims would be likely to do. We
find here also no diversity in principle between the two men, only that
Mr. Lincoln has been compelled to do, while General McClellan has had
the easier task of telling us what he would do. After the Peninsular
campaign, we cannot but think that even the latter would have been
inclined to say, with the wisest man that ever spoke in our tongue, "If
to do were as easy as to know what 'twere good to do, chapels had been
churches, and poor men's cottages princes' palaces."
[5] This letter was published in the public journals 9 September.
The single question of policy on which General McClellan differs from
Mr. Lincoln, stripped of the conventional phrases in which he drapes
it, is Slavery. He can mean nothing else when he talks of "conciliation
and compromise," of receiving back any State that may choose to return
"with a full guaranty of all its constitutional rights." If it be true
that a rose by any other name will smell as sweet, it is equally true
that there is a certain species of toadstool that would be none the
less disgusting under whatever _alias_. Compromise and conciliation
are both excellent things in their own way, and in the fitting time and
place, but right cannot be compromised without surrendering it, and to
attempt conciliation by showing the white feather ends, not in
reconcilement, but subjection. The combined ignorance of the Seven
Sleepers of Ephesus as to what had been going on while they were in
their cavern would hardly equal that of General McClellan alone as to
the political history of the country. In the few months between Mr.
Lincoln's election and the attack on Fort Sumter we tried conciliation
in every form, carrying it almost to the verge of ignominy. The
Southern leaders would have none of it. They saw in it only a
confession of weakness, and were but the more arrogant in their demand
of all or nothing. Compromise we tried for three quarters of a century,
and it brought us to where we are, for it was only a fine name for
cowardice, and invited aggression. And now that the patient is dying of
this drench of lukewarm water, Doctor Sangrado McClellan gravely
prescribes another gallon. If that fail to finish him, why, give him a
gallon more.
We wish it were as easy to restore General McClellan's army to what it
was before the Peninsular campaign as he seems to think it is to put
the country back where it was at the beginning of the war. The war, it
is true, was undertaken to assert the sovereignty of the Constitution,
but the true cause of quarrel was, not that the South denied the
supremacy of that instrument, but that they claimed the sole right to
interpret it, and to interpret it in a sense hostile to the true ideal
of the country, and the clear interests of the people. But
circumstances have changed, and what was at first a struggle to
maintain the outward form of our government has become a contest to
preserve the life and assert the supreme will of the nation. Even in
April, 1861, underneath that desire for legal sanction common to our
race, which expressed itself in loyalty to the Constitution, there was
an instinctive feeling that the very germinating principle of our
nationality was at stake, and that unity of territory was but another
name for unity of idea; nay, was impossible without it, and undesirable
if it were possible. It was not against the Constitution that the
Rebels declared war, but against free institutions; and if they are
beaten, they must submit to the triumph of those institutions. Their
only chance of constitutional victory was at the polls. They rejected
it, though it was in their grasp, and now it is for us, and not them,
to dictate terms. After all the priceless blood they have shed, General
McClellan would say to them, "Come back and rule us." Mr. Lincoln says,
"Come back as equals, with every avenue of power open to you that is
open to us; but the advantage which the slaveholding interest wrung
from the weakness of the fathers your own madness has forfeited to the
sons."
General McClellan tells us that if the war had been conducted "in
accordance with those principles which he took occasion to declare when
in active service, reconciliation would have been easy." We suppose he
refers to his despatch of July 7th, 1862, when, having just
demonstrated his incapacity in the profession for which he had been
educated, he kindly offered to take the civil policy of the country
under his direction, expecting, perhaps, to be more successful in a
task for which he was fitted neither by training nor experience. It is
true he had already been spoken of as a possible candidate for the
Presidency, and that despatch was probably written to be referred to
afterwards as part of the "record" to which he alludes in his recent
letter. Indeed, he could have had no other conceivable object in so
impertinent a proceeding, for, up to that time, the war had been
conducted on the very principles he recommended; nay, was so conducted
for six months longer, till it was demonstrated that reconciliation was
not to be had on those terms, and that victory was incompatible with
them. Mr. Lincoln was forced into what General McClellan calls a
radical policy by the necessity of the case. The Rebels themselves
insisted on convincing him that his choice was between that and
failure. They boasted that slavery was their bulwark and arsenal; that,
while every Northern soldier withdrew so much from the productive
industry of the Union, every fighting-man at the South could be brought
into the field, so long as the negroes were left to do the work that
was to feed and clothe him. Were these negroes property? The laws of
war justified us in appropriating them to our own use. Were they
population? The laws of war equally justified us in appealing to them
for aid in a cause which was their own more than it was ours. It was so
much the worse for the South that its property was of a kind that could
be converted from chattels into men, and from men into soldiers, by the
scratch of a pen. The dragon's teeth were not of our sowing, but, so
far from our being under any obligation not to take into our service
the army that sprang from them, it would have been the extreme of
weakness and folly not to do it. If there be no provision in the
Constitution for emancipating the negroes, neither is there any for
taking Richmond; and we give General McClellan too much credit for
intelligence and patriotism to suppose that if, when he asked for a
hundred thousand more men at Harrison's Bar, he had been told that he
could have black ones, he would have refused them.
But supposing the very improbable chance of General McClellan's
election to the Presidency, how would he set about his policy of
conciliation? Would he disarm the colored troops? In favor of
prosecuting the war, as he declares himself to be, this would only
necessitate the draft of just so many white ones in their stead. Would
he recall the proclamation of freedom? This would only be to incite a
servile insurrection. The people have already suffered too much by
General McClellan's genius for retreat, to follow him in another even
more disastrous. But it is idle to suppose that the Rebels are to be
appeased by any exhibition of weakness. Like other men, they would take
fresh courage from it. Force is the only argument to which they are in
a condition to listen, and, like other men, they will yield to it at
last, if it prove irresistible. We cannot think that General McClellan
would wish to go down to posterity as the President who tried to
restore the Union by the reënslaving of men who had fought in its
defence, and had failed in the attempt. We doubt if he had any very
clear conception of what he meant by conciliation and compromise,
except as a gloss to make the unconditional surrender doctrine of the
Chicago Convention a little less odious. If he meant more, if he hoped
to gain political strength by an appeal to the old pro-slavery
prejudices of the country, he merely shows the same unfortunate
unconsciousness of the passage of time, and the changes it brings with
it, that kept him in the trenches at Yorktown till his own defeat
became inevitable. Perhaps he believes that the Rebels would accept
from him what they rejected with contempt when offered by Mr.
Lincoln,--that they would do in compliment to him what they refused to
do from the interest of self-preservation. If they did, it would simply
prove that they were in a condition to submit to terms, and not to
dictate them. If they listened to his advances, their cause must be so
hopeless that it would be a betrayal of his trust to make them. If they
were obstinate, he would be left with the same war on his hands which
has forced Mr. Lincoln into all his measures, and which would not be
less exacting on himself. As a peace candidate he might solicit votes
with some show of reason, but on a war platform we see no good reason
for displacing Mr. Lincoln in his favor except on personal grounds; and
we fear that our campaigns would hardly be conducted with vigor under a
President whom the people should have invested with the office by way
of poultice for his bruised sensibilities as a defeated commander. Once
in the Presidential chair, with a country behind him insisting on a
re-establishment of the Union, and a rebellion before him deaf to all
offers from a government that faltered in its purposes, we do not see
what form of conciliation he would hit upon by which to persuade a
refractory "political organization," except that practised by Hood's
butcher when he was advised to try it on a drove of sheep.
"He seized upon the foremost wether,
And hugged and lugged and tugged him neck and crop,
Just _nolens volens_ through the open shop
(If tails came off he did not care a feather);
Then, walking to the door and smiling grim,
He rubbed his forehead and his sleeve together,--
There! I've _con_ciliated him!'"
It is idle, however, to think of allaying angry feeling or appeasing
resentment while the war lasts, and idler to hope for any permanent
settlement, except in the complete subjugation of the rebellion. There
are persons who profess to be so much shocked at the _word_ subjugation
as to be willing that we should have immediate experience of the
_thing_, by receiving back the Rebels on their own conditions. Mr.
Lincoln has already proclaimed an amnesty wide enough to satisfy the
demands of the most exacting humanity, and they must reckon on a
singular stupidity in their hearers who impute ferocious designs to a
man who cannot nerve his mind to the shooting of a deserter or the
hanging of a spy. Mr. Lincoln, in our judgment, has shown from the
first the considerate wisdom of a practical statesman. If he has been
sometimes slow in making up his mind, it has saved him the necessity of
being hasty to change it when once made up, and he has waited till the
gradual movement of the popular sentiment should help him to his
conclusions and sustain him in them. To be moderate and unimpassioned
in revolutionary times that kindle natures of more flimsy texture to a
blaze may not be a romantic quality, but it is a rare one, and goes
with those massive understandings on which a solid structure of
achievement may be reared. Mr. Lincoln is a long-headed and
long-purposed man, who knows when he is ready,--a secret General
McClellan never learned. That he should be accused of playing Cromwell
by the Opposition, and reproached with not being Cromwellian enough by
the more ardent of his own supporters, is proof enough that his action
has been of that firm but deliberate temper best suited to troublous
times and to constitutional precedents. One of these accusations is the
unworthy fetch of a party at a loss for argument, and the other springs
from that exaggerated notion of the power of some exceptional
characters upon events which Carlyle has made fashionable, but which
was never even approximately true except in times when there was no
such thing as public opinion, and of which there is no record personal
enough to assure us what we are to believe. A more sincere man than
Cromwell never lived, yet they know little of his history who do not
know that his policy was forced to trim between Independents and
Presbyterians, and that he so far healed the wounds of civil war as to
make England dreaded without satisfying either. We have seen no reason
to change our opinion of Mr. Lincoln since his wary scrupulousness won
him the applause of one party, or his decided action, when he was at
last convinced of its necessity, made him the momentary idol of the
other. We will not call him a great man, for over-hasty praise is too
apt to sour at last into satire, and greatness may be trusted safely to
history and the future; but an honest one we believe him to be, and
with no aim save to repair the glory and greatness of his country.
But fortunately it is no trial of the personal merits of opposing
candidates on which the next election is to pronounce a verdict. The
men set up by the two parties represent principles utterly
antagonistic, and so far-reaching in their consequences that all
personal considerations and contemporary squabbles become as
contemptible in appearance as they always are in reality. However
General McClellan may equivocate and strive to hide himself in a cloud
of ink, the man who represents the party that deliberately and
unanimously adopted the Chicago Platform is the practical embodiment of
the principles contained in it. By ignoring the platform, he seems, it
is true, to nominate himself; but this, though it may be good evidence
of his own presumption, affords no tittle of proof that he could have
been successful at Chicago without some distinct previous pledges of
what his policy would be. If no such pledges were given, then the
Convention nominated him with a clear persuasion that he was the sort
of timber out of which tools are made. If they were not given, does not
the acceptance of the nomination under false pretences imply a certain
sacrifice of personal honor? And will the honor of the country be safe
in the hands of a man who is careless of his own? General McClellan's
election will be understood by the South and by the whole country as an
acknowledgment of the right of secession,--an acknowledgment which will
resolve the United States into an association for insurance against any
risk of national strength and greatness by land or sea. Mr. Lincoln, on
the other hand, is the exponent of principles vital to our peace,
dignity, and renown,--of all that can save America from becoming
Mexico, and insure popular freedom for centuries to come.
It is the merest electioneering trick to say that the war has been
turned from its original intention, as if this implied that a cheat had
thereby been put upon the country. The truth is, that the popular
understanding has been gradually enlightened as to the real causes of
the war, and, in consequence of that enlightenment, a purpose has grown
up, defining itself slowly into clearer consciousness, to finish the
war in the only way that will keep it finished, by rooting out the evil
principle from which it sprang. The country has been convinced that a
settlement which should stop short of this would be nothing more than a
truce favorable only to the weaker party in the struggle, to the very
criminals who forced it upon us. The single question is, Shall we have
peace by submission or by victory? General McClellan's election insures
the one, Mr. Lincoln's gives us our only chance of the other. It is
Slavery, and not the Southern people, that is our enemy; we must
conquer this to be at peace with them. With the relations of the
several States of the Rebel Confederacy to the Richmond government we
have nothing to do; but to say that, after being beaten as foreign
enemies, they are to resume their previous relations to our own
government as if nothing had happened, seems to us a manifest
absurdity. From whom would General McClellan, if elected under his plan
of conciliation, exact the penalties of rebellion? The States cannot be
punished, and the only merciful way in which we can reach the real
criminals is by that very policy of emancipation whose efficacy is
proved by the bitter opposition of all the allies of the Rebellion in
the North. This is a punishment which will not affect the independence
of individual States, which will improve the condition of the mass of
the Southern population, and which alone will remove the rock of
offence from the pathway of democratic institutions. So long as slavery
is left, there is antipathy between the two halves of the country, and
the recurrence of actual war will be only a question of time. It is the
nature of evil to be aggressive. Without moral force in itself, it is
driven, by the necessity of things, to seek material props. It cannot
make peace with truth, if it would. Good, on the other hand, is by its
very nature peaceful. Strong in itself, strong in the will of God and
the sympathy of man, its conquests are silent and beneficent as those
of summer, warming into life, and bringing to blossom and fruitage,
whatever is wholesome in men and the institutions of men.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
1864-1865.
There have been many painful crises since the impatient vanity of South
Carolina hurried ten prosperous Commonwealths into a crime whose
assured retribution was to leave them either at the mercy of the nation
they had wronged, or of the anarchy they had summoned but could not
control, when no thoughtful American opened his morning paper without
dreading to find that he had no longer a country to love and honor.
Whatever the result of the convulsion whose first shocks were beginning
to be felt, there would still be enough square miles of earth for
elbow-room; but that ineffable sentiment made up of memory and hope, of
instinct and tradition, which swells every man's heart and shapes his
thought, though perhaps never present to his consciousness, would be
gone from it, leaving it common earth and nothing more. Men might
gather rich crops from it, but that ideal harvest of priceless
associations would be reaped no longer; that fine virtue which sent up
messages of courage and security from every sod of it would have
evaporated beyond recall. We should be irrevocably cut off from our
past, and be forced to splice the ragged ends of our lives upon
whatever new conditions chance might leave dangling for us.
We confess that we had our doubts at first whether the patriotism of
our people were not too narrowly provincial to embrace the proportions
of national peril. We felt an only too natural distrust of immense
public meetings and enthusiastic cheers.
That a reaction should follow the holiday enthusiasm with which the war
was entered on, that it should follow soon, and that the slackening of
public spirit should be proportionate to the previous over-tension,
might well be foreseen by all who had studied human nature or history.
Men acting gregariously are always in extremes. As they are one moment
capable of higher courage, so they are liable, the next, to baser
depression, and it is often a matter of chance whether numbers shall
multiply confidence or discouragement. Nor does deception lead more
surely to distrust of men than self-deception to suspicion of
principles. The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all
weathers is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp
mordant of experience. Enthusiasm is good material for the orator, but
the statesman needs something more durable to work in,--must be able to
rely on the deliberate reason and consequent firmness of the people,
without which that presence of mind, no less essential in times of
moral than of material peril, will be wanting at the critical moment.
Would this fervor of the Free States hold out? Was it kindled by a just
feeling of the value of constitutional liberty? Had it body enough to
withstand the inevitable dampening of checks, reverses, delays? Had our
population intelligence enough to comprehend that the choice was
between order and anarchy, between the equilibrium of a government by
law and the tussle of misrule by _pronunciamiento_? Could a war be
maintained without the ordinary stimulus of hatred and plunder, and
with the impersonal loyalty of principle? These were serious questions,
and with no precedent to aid in answering them.
[Illustration: _Abraham Lincoln_]
At the beginning of the war there was, indeed, occasion for the most
anxious apprehension. A President known to be infected with the
political heresies, and suspected of sympathy with the treason, of the
Southern conspirators, had just surrendered the reins, we will not say
of power, but of chaos, to a successor known only as the representative
of a party whose leaders, with long training in opposition, had none in
the conduct of affairs; an empty treasury was called on to supply
resources beyond precedent in the history of finance; the trees were
yet growing and the iron unmined with, which a navy was to be built and
armored; officers without discipline were to make a mob into an army;
and, above all, the public opinion of Europe, echoed and reinforced
with every vague hint and every specious argument of despondency by a
powerful faction at home, was either contemptuously sceptical or
actively hostile. It would be hard to over-estimate the force of this
latter element of disintegration and discouragement among a people
where every citizen at home, and every soldier in the field, is a
reader of newspapers. The pedlers of rumor in the North were the most
effective allies of the rebellion. A nation can be liable to no more
insidious treachery than that of the telegraph, sending hourly its
electric thrill of panic along the remotest nerves of the community,
till the excited imagination makes every real danger loom heightened
with its unreal double.
And even if we look only at more palpable difficulties, the problem to
be solved by our civil war was so vast, both in its immediate relations
and its future consequences; the conditions of its solution were so
intricate and so greatly dependent on incalculable and uncontrollable
contingencies; so many of the data, whether for hope or fear, were,
from their novelty, incapable of arrangement under any of the
categories of historical precedent, that there were moments of crisis
when the firmest believer in the strength and sufficiency of the
democratic theory of government might well hold his breath in vague
apprehension of disaster. Our teachers of political philosophy,
solemnly arguing from the precedent of some petty Grecian, Italian, or
Flemish city, whose long periods of aristocracy were broken now and
then by awkward parentheses of mob, had always taught us that
democracies were incapable of the sentiment of loyalty, of concentrated
and prolonged effort, of far-reaching conceptions; were absorbed in
material interests; impatient of regular, and much more of exceptional
restraint; had no natural nucleus of gravitation, nor any forces but
centrifugal; were always on the verge of civil war, and slunk at last
into the natural almshouse of bankrupt popular government, a military
despotism. Here was indeed a dreary outlook for persons who knew
democracy, not by rubbing shoulders with it lifelong, but merely from
books, and America only by the report of some fellow-Briton, who,
having eaten a bad dinner or lost a carpet-bag here, had written to the
"Times" demanding redress, and drawing a mournful inference of
democratic instability. Nor were men wanting among ourselves who had so
steeped their brains in London literature as to mistake Cockneyism for
European culture, and contempt of their country for cosmopolitan
breadth of view, and who, owing all they had and all they were to
democracy, thought it had an air of high-breeding to join in the
shallow epicedium that our bubble had burst.
But beside any disheartening influences which might affect the timid or
the despondent, there were reasons enough of settled gravity against
any over-confidence of hope. A war--which, whether we consider the
expanse of the territory at stake, the hosts brought into the field, or
the reach of the principles involved, may fairly be reckoned the most
momentous of modern times--was to be waged by a people divided at home,
unnerved by fifty years of peace, under a chief magistrate without
experience and without reputation, whose every measure was sure to be
cunningly hampered by a jealous and unscrupulous minority, and who,
while dealing with unheard-of complications at home, must soothe a
hostile neutrality abroad, waiting only a pretext to become war. All
this was to be done without warning and without preparation, while at
the same time a social revolution was to be accomplished in the
political condition of four millions of people, by softening the
prejudices, allaying the fears, and gradually obtaining the
coöperation, of their unwilling liberators. Surely, if ever there were
an occasion when the heightened imagination of the historian might see
Destiny visibly intervening in human affairs, here was a knot worthy of
her shears. Never, perhaps, was any system of government tried by so
continuous and searching a strain as ours during the last three years;
never has any shown itself stronger; and never could that strength be
so directly traced to the virtue and intelligence of the people,--to
that general enlightenment and prompt efficiency of public opinion
possible only under the influence of a political framework like our
own. We find it hard to understand how even a foreigner should be blind
to the grandeur of the combat of ideas that has been going on here,--to
the heroic energy, persistency, and self-reliance of a nation proving
that it knows how much dearer greatness is than mere power; and we own
that it is impossible for us to conceive the mental and moral condition
of the American who does not feel his spirit braced and heightened by
being even a spectator of such qualities and achievements. That a
steady purpose and a definite aim have been given to the jarring forces
which, at the beginning of the war, spent themselves in the discussion
of schemes which could only become operative, if at all, after the war
was over; that a popular excitement has been slowly intensified into an
earnest national will; that a somewhat impracticable moral sentiment
has been made the unconscious instrument of a practical moral end; that
the treason of covert enemies, the jealousy of rivals, the unwise zeal
of friends, have been made not only useless for mischief, but even
useful for good; that the conscientious sensitiveness of England to the
horrors of civil conflict has been prevented from complicating a
domestic with a foreign war;--all these results, any one of which might
suffice to prove greatness in a ruler, have been mainly due to the good
sense, the good-humor, the sagacity, the large--mindedness, and the
unselfish honesty of the unknown man whom a blind fortune, as it
seemed, had lifted from the crowd to the most dangerous and difficult
eminence of modern times. It is by presence of mind in untried
emergencies that the native metal of a man is tested; it is by the
sagacity to see, and the fearless honesty to admit, whatever of truth
there may be in an adverse opinion, in order more convincingly to
expose the fallacy that lurks behind it, that a reasoner at length
gains for his mere statement of a fact the force of argument; it is by
a wise forecast which allows hostile combinations to go so far as by
the inevitable reaction to become elements of his own power, that a
politician proves his genius for state-craft; and especially it is by
so gently guiding public sentiment that he seems to follow it, by so
yielding doubtful points that he can be firm without seeming obstinate
in essential ones, and thus gain the advantages of compromise without
the weakness of concession; by so instinctively comprehending the
temper and prejudices of a people as to make them gradually conscious
of the superior wisdom of his freedom from temper and prejudice,--it is
by qualities such as these that a magistrate shows himself worthy to be
chief in a commonwealth of freemen. And it is for qualities such as
these that we firmly believe History will rank Mr. Lincoln among the
most prudent of statesmen and the most successful of rulers. If we wish
to appreciate him, we have only to conceive the inevitable chaos in
which we should now be weltering, had a weak man or an unwise one been
chosen in his stead.
"Bare is back," says the Norse proverb, "without brother behind it";
and this is, by analogy, true of an elective magistracy. The hereditary
ruler in any critical emergency may reckon on the inexhaustible
resources of _prestige_, of sentiment, of superstition, of dependent
interest, while the new man must slowly and painfully create all these
out of the unwilling material around him, by superiority of character,
by patient singleness of purpose, by sagacious presentiment of popular
tendencies and instinctive sympathy with the national character. Mr.
Lincoln's task was one of peculiar and exceptional difficulty. Long
habit had accustomed the American people to the notion of a party in
power, and of a President as its creature and organ, while the more
vital fact, that the executive for the time being represents the
abstract idea of government as a permanent principle superior to all
party and all private interest, had gradually become unfamiliar. They
had so long seen the public policy more or less directed by views of
party, and often even of personal advantage, as to be ready to suspect
the motives of a chief magistrate compelled, for the first time in our
history, to feel himself the head and hand of a great nation, and to
act upon the fundamental maxim, laid down by all publicists, that the
first duty of a government is to defend and maintain its own existence.
Accordingly, a powerful weapon seemed to be put into the hands of the
opposition by the necessity under which the administration found itself
of applying this old truth to new relations. Nor were the opposition
his only nor his most dangerous opponents.
The Republicans had carried the country upon an issue in which ethics
were more directly and visibly mingled with politics than usual. Their
leaders were trained to a method of oratory which relied for its effect
rather on the moral sense than the understanding. Their arguments were
drawn, not so much from experience as from general principles of right
and wrong. When the war came, their system continued to be applicable
and effective, for here again the reason of the people was to be
reached and kindled through their sentiments. It was one of those
periods of excitement, gathering, contagious, universal, which, while
they last, exalt and clarify the minds of men, giving to the mere words
_country_, _human rights_, _democracy_, a meaning and a force beyond
that of sober and logical argument. They were convictions, maintained
and defended by the supreme logic of passion. That penetrating fire ran
in and roused those primary instincts that make their lair in the dens
and caverns of the mind. What is called the great popular heart was
awakened, that indefinable something which may be, according to
circumstances, the highest reason or the most brutish unreason. But
enthusiasm, once cold, can never be warmed over into anything better
than cant,--and phrases, when once the inspiration that filled them
with beneficent power has ebbed away, retain only that semblance of
meaning which enables them to supplant reason in hasty minds. Among the
lessons taught by the French Revolution there is none sadder or more
striking than this, that you may make everything else out of the
passions of men except a political system that will work, and that
there is nothing so pitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sincerity
formulated into dogma. It is always demoralizing to extend the domain
of sentiment over questions where it has no legitimate jurisdiction;
and perhaps the severest strain upon Mr. Lincoln was in resisting a
tendency of his own supporters which chimed with his own private
desires, while wholly opposed to his convictions of what would be wise
policy.
The change which three years have brought about is too remarkable to be
passed over without comment, too weighty in its lesson not to be laid
to heart. Never did a President enter upon office with less means at
his command, outside his own strength of heart and steadiness of
understanding, for inspiring confidence in the people, and so winning
it for himself, than Mr. Lincoln. All that was known of him was that he
was a good stump-speaker, nominated for his _availability_,--that is,
because he had no history,--and chosen by a party with whose more
extreme opinions he was not in sympathy. It might well be feared that a
man past fifty, against whom the ingenuity of hostile partisans could
rake up no accusation, must be lacking in manliness of character, in
decision of principle, in strength of will; that a man who was at best
only the representative of a party, and who yet did not fairly
represent even that, would fail of political, much more of popular,
support. And certainly no one ever entered upon office with so few
resources of power in the past, and so many materials of weakness in
the present, as Mr. Lincoln. Even in that half of the Union which
acknowledged him as President, there was a large and at that time
dangerous minority, that hardly admitted his claim to the office, and
even in the party that elected him there was also a large minority that
suspected him of being secretly a communicant with the church of
Laodicea. All that he did was sure to be virulently attacked as ultra
by one side; all that he left undone, to be stigmatized as proof of
lukewarmness and backsliding by the other. Meanwhile, he was to carry
on a truly colossal war by means of both; he was to disengage the
country from diplomatic entanglements of unprecedented peril
undisturbed by the help or the hindrance of either, and to win from the
crowning dangers of his administration, in the confidence of the
people, the means of his safety and their own. He has contrived to do
it, and perhaps none of our Presidents since Washington has stood so
firm in the confidence of the people as he does after three years of
stormy administration.
Mr. Lincoln's policy was a tentative one, and rightly so. He laid down
no programme which must compel him to be either inconsistent or unwise,
no cast-iron theorem to which circumstances must be fitted as they
rose, or else be useless to his ends. He seemed to have chosen
Mazarin's motto, _Le temps et moi_. The _moi_ to be sure, was not very
prominent at first; but it has grown more and more so, till the world
is beginning to be persuaded that it stands for a character of marked
individuality and capacity for affairs. Time was his prime-minister,
and, we began to think, at one period, his general-in-chief also. At
first he was so slow that he tired out all those who see no evidence of
progress but in blowing up the engine; then he was so fast, that he
took the breath away from those who think there is no getting on safely
while there is a spark of fire under the boilers. God is the only being
who has time enough; but a prudent man, who knows how to seize
occasion, can commonly make a shift to find as much as he needs. Mr.
Lincoln, as it seems to us in reviewing his career, though we have
sometimes in our impatience thought otherwise, has always waited, as a
wise man should, till the right moment brought up all his reserves.
_Semper nocuit differre paratis_ is a sound axiom, but the really
efficacious man will also be sure to know when he is _not_ ready, and
be firm against all persuasion and reproach till he is.
One would be apt to think, from some of the criticisms made on Mr.
Lincoln's course by those who mainly agree with him in principle, that
the chief object of a statesman should be rather to proclaim his
adhesion to certain doctrines, than to achieve their triumph by quietly
accomplishing his ends. In our opinion, there is no more unsafe
politician than a conscientiously rigid _doctrinaire_, nothing more
sure to end in disaster than a theoretic scheme of policy that admits
of no pliability for contingencies. True, there is a popular image of
an impossible He, in whose plastic hands the submissive destinies of
mankind become as wax, and to whose commanding necessity the toughest
facts yield with the graceful pliancy of fiction; but in real life we
commonly find that the men who control circumstances, as it is called,
are those who have learned to allow for the influence of their eddies,
and have the nerve to turn them to account at the happy instant. Mr.
Lincoln's perilous task has been to carry a rather shaky raft through
the rapids, making fast the unrulier logs as he could snatch
opportunity, and the country is to be congratulated that he did not
think it his duty to run straight at all hazards, but cautiously to
assure himself with his setting-pole where the main current was, and
keep steadily to that. He is still in wild water, but we have faith
that his skill and sureness of eye will bring him out right at last.
A curious, and, as we think, not inapt parallel might be drawn between
Mr. Lincoln and one of the most striking figures in modern
history,--Henry IV. of France. The career of the latter may be more
picturesque, as that of a daring captain always is; but in all its
vicissitudes there is nothing more romantic than that sudden change, as
by a rub of Aladdin's lamp, from the attorney's office in a country
town of Illinois to the helm of a great nation in times like these. The
analogy between the characters and circumstances of the two men is in
many respects singularly close. Succeeding to a rebellion rather than a
crown, Henry's chief material dependence was the Huguenot party, whose
doctrines sat upon him with a looseness distasteful certainly, if not
suspicious, to the more fanatical among them. King only in name over
the greater part of France, and with his capital barred against him, it
yet gradually became clear to the more far-seeing even of the Catholic
party that he was the only centre of order and legitimate authority
round which France could reorganize itself. While preachers who held
the divine right of kings made the churches of Paris ring with
declamations in favor of democracy rather than submit to the heretic
dog of a Béarnois,--much as our _soi-disant_ Democrats have lately been
preaching the divine right of slavery, and denouncing the heresies of
the Declaration of Independence,--Henry bore both parties in hand till
he was convinced that only one course of action could possibly combine
his own interests and those of France. Meanwhile the Protestants
believed somewhat doubtfully that he was theirs, the Catholics hoped
somewhat doubtfully that he would be theirs, and Henry himself turned
aside remonstrance, advice, and curiosity alike with a jest or a
proverb (if a little _high_, he liked them none the worse), joking
continually as his manner was. We have seen Mr. Lincoln contemptuously
compared to Sancho Panza by persons incapable of appreciating one of
the deepest pieces of wisdom in the profoundest romance ever written;
namely, that, while Don Quixote was incomparable in theoretic and ideal
statesmanship, Sancho, with his stock of proverbs, the ready money of
human experience, made the best possible practical governor. Henry IV.
was as full of wise saws and modern instances as Mr. Lincoln, but
beneath all this was the thoughtful, practical, humane, and thoroughly
earnest man, around whom the fragments of France were to gather
themselves till she took her place again as a planet of the first
magnitude in the European system. In one respect Mr. Lincoln was more
fortunate than Henry. However some may think him wanting in zeal, the
most fanatical can find no taint of apostasy in any measure of his, nor
can the most bitter charge him with being influenced by motives of
personal interest. The leading distinction between the policies of the
two is one of circumstances. Henry went over to the nation; Mr. Lincoln
has steadily drawn the nation over to him. One left a united France;
the other, we hope and believe, will leave a reunited America. We leave
our readers to trace the further points of difference and resemblance
for themselves, merely suggesting a general similarity which has often
occurred to us. One only point of melancholy interest we will allow
ourselves to touch upon. That Mr. Lincoln is not handsome nor elegant,
we learn from certain English tourists who would consider similar
revelations in regard to Queen Victoria as thoroughly American in their
want of _bienséance_. It is no concern of ours, nor does it affect his
fitness for the high place he so worthily occupies; but he is certainly
as fortunate as Henry in the matter of good looks, if we may trust
contemporary evidence. Mr. Lincoln has also been reproached with
Americanism by some not unfriendly British critics; but, with all
deference, we cannot say that we like him any the worse for it, or see
in it any reason why he should govern Americans the less wisely.
People of more sensitive organizations may be shocked, but we are glad
that in this our true war of independence, which is to free us forever
from the Old World, we have had at the head of our affairs a man whom
America made, as God made Adam, out of the very earth, unancestried,
unprivileged, unknown, to show us how much truth, how much magnanimity,
and how much state-craft await the call of opportunity in simple
manhood when it believes in the justice of God and the worth of man.
Conventionalities are all very well in their proper place, but they
shrivel at the touch of nature like stubble in the fire. The genius
that sways a nation by its arbitrary will seems less august to us than
that which multiplies and reinforces itself in the instincts and
convictions of an entire people. Autocracy may have something in it
more melodramatic than this, but falls far short of it in human value
and interest.
Experience would have bred in us a rooted distrust of improvised
statesmanship, even if we did not believe politics to be a science,
which, if it cannot always command men of special aptitude and great
powers, at least demands the long and steady application of the best
powers of such men as it can command to master even its first
principles. It is curious, that, in a country which boasts of its
intelligence, the theory should be so generally held that the most
complicated of human contrivances, and one which every day becomes more
complicated, can be worked at sight by any man able to talk for an hour
or two without stopping to think.
Mr. Lincoln is sometimes claimed as an example of a ready-made ruler.
But no case could well be less in point; for, besides that he was a man
of such fair-mindedness as is always the raw material of wisdom, he had
in his profession a training precisely the opposite of that to which a
partisan is subjected. His experience as a lawyer compelled him not
only to see that there is a principle underlying every phenomenon in
human affairs, but that there are always two sides to every question,
both of which must be fully understood in order to understand either,
and that it is of greater advantage to an advocate to appreciate the
strength than the weakness of his antagonist's position. Nothing is
more remarkable than the unerring tact with which, in his debate with
Mr. Douglas, he went straight to the reason of the question; nor have
we ever had a more striking lesson in political tactics than the fact,
that, opposed to a man exceptionally adroit in using popular prejudice
and bigotry to his purpose, exceptionally unscrupulous in appealing to
those baser motives that turn a meeting of citizens into a mob of
barbarians, he should yet have won his case before a jury of the
people. Mr. Lincoln was as far as possible from an impromptu
politician. His wisdom was made up of a knowledge of things as well as
of men; his sagacity resulted from a clear perception and honest
acknowledgment of difficulties, which enabled him to see that the only
durable triumph of political opinion is based, not on any abstract
right, but upon so much of justice, the highest attainable at any given
moment in human affairs, as may be had in the balance of mutual
concession. Doubtless he had an ideal, but it was the ideal of a
practical statesman,--to aim at the best, and to take the next best, if
he is lucky enough to get even that. His slow, but singularly
masculine, intelligence taught him that precedent is only another name
for embodied experience, and that it counts for even more in the
guidance of communities of men than in that of the individual life. He
was not a man who held it good public economy to pull down on the mere
chance of rebuilding better. Mr. Lincoln's faith in God was qualified
by a very well-founded distrust of the wisdom of man. Perhaps it was
his want of self-confidence that more than anything else won him the
unlimited confidence of the people, for they felt that there would be
no need of retreat from any position he had deliberately taken. The
cautious, but steady, advance of his policy during the war was like
that of a Roman army. He left behind him a firm road on which public
confidence could follow; he took America with him where he went; what
he gained he occupied, and his advanced posts became colonies. The very
homeliness of his genius was its distinction. His kingship was
conspicuous by its workday homespun. Never was ruler so absolute as he,
nor so little conscious of it; for he was the incarnate common-sense of
the people. With all that tenderness of nature whose sweet sadness
touched whoever saw him with something of its own pathos, there was no
trace of sentimentalism in his speech or action. He seems to have had
but one rule of conduct, always that of practical and successful
politics, to let himself be guided by events, when they were sure to
bring him out where he wished to go, though by what seemed to
unpractical minds, which let go the possible to grasp at the desirable,
a longer road.
Undoubtedly the highest function of statesmanship is by degrees to
accommodate the conduct of communities to ethical laws, and to
subordinate the conflicting self-interests of the day to higher and
more permanent concerns. But it is on the understanding, and not on the
sentiment, of a nation that all safe legislation must be based.
Voltaire's saying, that "a consideration of petty circumstances is the
tomb of great things," may be true of individual men, but it certainly
is not true of governments. It is by a multitude of such
considerations, each in itself trifling, but all together weighty, that
the framers of policy can alone divine what is practicable and
therefore wise. The imputation of inconsistency is one to which every
sound politician and every honest thinker must sooner or later subject
himself. The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion. The
course of a great statesman resembles that of navigable rivers,
avoiding immovable obstacles with noble bends of concession, seeking
the broad levels of opinion on which men soonest settle and longest
dwell, following and marking the almost imperceptible slopes of
national tendency, yet always aiming at direct advances, always
recruited from sources nearer heaven, and sometimes bursting open paths
of progress and fruitful human commerce through what seem the eternal
barriers of both. It is loyalty to great ends, even though forced to
combine the small and opposing motives of selfish men to accomplish
them; it is the anchored cling to solid principles of duty and action,
which knows how to swing with the tide, but is never carried away by
it,--that we demand in public men, and not obstinacy in prejudice,
sameness of policy, or a conscientious persistency in what is
impracticable. For the impracticable, however theoretically enticing,
is always politically unwise, sound statesmanship being the application
of that prudence to the public business which is the safest guide in
that of private men.
No doubt slavery was the most delicate and embarrassing question with
which Mr. Lincoln was called on to deal, and it was one which no man in
his position, whatever his opinions, could evade; for, though he might
withstand the clamor of partisans, he must sooner or later yield to the
persistent importunacy of circumstances, which thrust the problem upon
him at every turn and in every shape.
It has been brought against us as an accusation abroad, and repeated
here by people who measure their country rather by what is thought of
it than by what it is, that our war has not been distinctly and
avowedly for the extinction of slavery, but a war rather for the
preservation of our national power and greatness, in which the
emancipation of the negro has been forced upon us by circumstances and
accepted as a necessity. We are very far from denying this; nay, we
admit that it is so far true that we were slow to renounce our
constitutional obligations even toward those who had absolved us by
their own act from the letter of our duty. We are speaking of the
government which, legally installed for the whole country, was bound,
so long as it was possible, not to overstep the limits of orderly
prescription, and could not, without abnegating its own very nature,
take the lead in making rebellion an excuse for resolution. There were,
no doubt, many ardent and sincere persons who seemed to think this as
simple a thing to do as to lead off a Virginia reel. They forgot what
should be forgotten least of all in a system like ours, that the
administration for the time being represents not only the majority
which elects it, but the minority as well,--a minority in this case
powerful, and so little ready for emancipation that it was opposed even
to war. Mr. Lincoln had not been chosen as general agent of an
antislavery society, but President of the United States, to perform
certain functions exactly defined by law. Whatever were his wishes, it
was no less duty than policy to mark out for himself a line of action
that would not further distract the country, by raising before their
time questions which plainly would soon enough compel attention, and
for which every day was making the answer more easy.
Meanwhile he must solve the riddle of this new Sphinx, or be devoured.
Though Mr. Lincoln's policy in this critical affair has not been such
as to satisfy those who demand an heroic treatment for even the most
trifling occasion, and who will not cut their coat according to their
cloth, unless they can borrow the scissors of Atropos, it has been at
least not unworthy of the long-headed king of Ithaca. Mr. Lincoln had
the choice of Bassanio offered him. Which of the three caskets held the
prize that was to redeem the fortunes of the country? There was the
golden one whose showy speciousness might have tempted a vain man; the
silver of compromise, which might have decided the choice of a merely
acute one; and the leaden,--dull and homely looking, as prudence always
is,--yet with something about it sure to attract the eye of practical
wisdom. Mr. Lincoln dallied with his decision perhaps longer than
seemed needful to those on whom its awful responsibility was not to
rest, but when he made it, it was worthy of his cautious but
sure-footed understanding. The moral of the Sphinx-riddle, and it is a
deep one, lies in the childish simplicity of the solution. Those who
fail in guessing it, fail because they are over ingenious, and cast
about for an answer that shall suit their own notion of the gravity of
the occasion and of their own dignity, rather than the occasion itself.
In a matter which must be finally settled by public opinion, and in
regard to which the ferment of prejudice and passion on both sides has
not yet subsided to that equilibrium of compromise from which alone a
sound public opinion can result, it is proper enough for the private
citizen to press his own convictions with all possible force of
argument and persuasion; but the popular magistrate, whose judgment
must become action, and whose action involves the whole country, is
bound to wait till the sentiment of the people is so far advanced
toward his own point of view, that what he does shall find support in
it, instead of merely confusing it with new elements of division. It
was not unnatural that men earnestly devoted to the saving of their
country, and profoundly convinced that slavery was its only real enemy,
should demand a decided policy round which all patriots might
rally,--and this might have been the wisest course for an absolute
ruler. But in the then unsettled state of the public mind, with a large
party decrying even resistance to the slaveholders' rebellion as not
only unwise, but even unlawful; with a majority, perhaps, even of the
would-be loyal so long accustomed to regard the Constitution as a deed
of gift conveying to the South their own judgment as to policy and
instinct as to right, that they were in doubt at first whether their
loyalty were due to the country or to slavery; and with a respectable
body of honest and influential men who still believed in the
possibility of conciliation,--Mr. Lincoln judged wisely, that, in
laying down a policy in deference to one party, he should be giving to
the other the very fulcrum for which their disloyalty had been waiting.
It behooved a clear-headed man in his position not to yield so far to
an honest indignation against the brokers of treason in the North as to
lose sight of the materials for misleading which were their stock in
trade, and to forget that it is not the falsehood of sophistry which is
to be feared, but the grain of truth mingled with it to make it
specious,--that it is not the knavery of the leaders so much as the
honesty of the followers they may seduce, that gives them power for
evil. It was especially his duty to do nothing which might help the
people to forget the true cause of the war in fruitless disputes about
its inevitable consequences.
The doctrine of state rights can be so handled by an adroit demagogue
as easily to confound the distinction between liberty and lawlessness
in the minds of ignorant persons, accustomed always to be influenced by
the sound of certain words, rather than to reflect upon the principles
which give them meaning. For, though Secession involves the manifest
absurdity of denying to a State the right of making war against any
foreign power while permitting it against the United States; though it
supposes a compact of mutual concessions and guaranties among States
without any arbiter in case of dissension; though it contradicts
common-sense in assuming that the men who framed our government did not
know what they meant when they substituted Union for Confederation;
though it falsifies history, which shows that the main opposition to
the adoption of the Constitution was based on the argument that it did
not allow that independence in the several States which alone would
justify them in seceding;--yet, as slavery was universally admitted to
be a reserved right, an inference could be drawn from any direct attack
upon it (though only in self-defence) to a natural right of resistance,
logical enough to satisfy minds untrained to detect fallacy, as the
majority of men always are, and now too much disturbed by the disorder
of the times to consider that the order of events had any legitimate
bearing on the argument. Though Mr. Lincoln was too sagacious to give
the Northern allies of the Rebels the occasion they desired and even
strove to provoke, yet from the beginning of the war the most
persistent efforts have been made to confuse the public mind as to its
origin and motives, and to drag the people of the loyal States down
from the national position they had instinctively taken to the old
level of party squabbles and antipathies. The wholly unprovoked
rebellion of an oligarchy proclaiming negro slavery the corner-stone of
free institutions, and in the first flush of over-hasty confidence
venturing to parade the logical sequence of their leading dogma, "that
slavery is right in principle, and has nothing to do with difference of
complexion," has been represented as a legitimate and gallant attempt
to maintain the true principles of democracy. The rightful endeavor of
an established government, the least onerous that ever existed, to
defend itself against a treacherous attack on its very existence, has
been cunningly made to seem the wicked effort of a fanatical clique to
force its doctrines on an oppressed population.
Even so long ago as when Mr. Lincoln, not yet convinced of the danger
and magnitude of the crisis, was endeavoring to persuade himself of
Union majorities at the South, and to carry on a war that was half
peace in the hope of a peace that would have been all war,--while he
was still enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law, under some theory that
Secession, however it might absolve States from their obligations,
could not escheat them of their claims under the Constitution, and that
slaveholders in rebellion had alone among mortals the privilege of
having their cake and eating it at the same time,--the enemies of free
government were striving to persuade the people that the war was an
Abolition crusade. To rebel without reason was proclaimed as one of the
rights of man, while it was carefully kept out of sight that to
suppress rebellion is the first duty of government. All the evils that
have come upon the country have been attributed to the Abolitionists,
though it is hard to see how any party can become permanently powerful
except in one of two ways,--either by the greater truth of its
principles, or the extravagance of the party opposed to it. To fancy
the ship of state, riding safe at her constitutional moorings, suddenly
engulfed by a huge kraken of Abolitionism, rising from unknown depths
and grasping it with slimy tentacles, is to look at the natural history
of the matter with the eyes of Pontoppidan. To believe that the leaders
in the Southern treason feared any danger from Abolitionism would be to
deny them ordinary intelligence, though there can be little doubt that
they made use of it to stir the passions and excite the fears of their
deluded accomplices. They rebelled, not because they thought slavery
weak, but because they believed it strong enough, not to overthrow the
government, but to get possession of it; for it becomes daily clearer
that they used rebellion only as a means of revolution, and if they got
revolution, though not in the shape they looked for, is the American
people to save them from its consequences at the cost of its own
existence? The election of Mr. Lincoln, which it was clearly in their
power to prevent had they wished, was the occasion merely, and not the
cause, of their revolt. Abolitionism, till within a year or two, was
the despised heresy of a few earnest persons, without political weight
enough to carry the election of a parish constable; and their cardinal
principle was disunion, because they were convinced that within the
Union the position of slavery was impregnable. In spite of the proverb,
great effects do not follow from small causes,--that is,
disproportionately small,--but from adequate causes acting under
certain required conditions. To contrast the size of the oak with that
of the parent acorn, as if the poor seed had paid all costs from its
slender strong-box, may serve for a child's wonder; but the real
miracle lies in that divine league which bound all the forces of nature
to the service of the tiny germ in fulfilling its destiny. Everything
has been at work for the past ten years in the cause of anti-slavery,
but Garrison and Phillips have been far less successful propagandists
than the slaveholders themselves, with the constantly growing arrogance
of their pretensions and encroachments. They have forced the question
upon the attention of every voter in the Free States, by defiantly
putting freedom and democracy on the defensive. But, even after the
Kansas outrages, there was no wide-spread desire on the part of the
North to commit aggressions, though there was a growing determination
to resist them. The popular unanimity in favor of the war three years
ago was but in small measure the result of anti-slavery sentiment, far
less of any zeal for abolition. But every month of the war, every
movement of the allies of slavery in the Free States, has been making
Abolitionists by the thousand. The masses of any people, however
intelligent, are very little moved by abstract principles of humanity
and justice, until those principles are interpreted for them by the
stinging commentary of some infringement upon their own rights, and
then their instincts and passions, once aroused, do indeed derive an
incalculable reinforcement of impulse and intensity from those higher
ideas, those sublime traditions, which have no motive political force
till they are allied with a sense of immediate personal wrong or
imminent peril. Then at last the stars in their courses begin to fight
against Sisera. Had any one doubted before that the rights of human
nature are unitary, that oppression is of one hue the world over, no
matter what the color of the oppressed,--had any one failed to see what
the real essence of the contest was,--the efforts of the advocates of
slavery among ourselves to throw discredit upon the fundamental axioms
of the Declaration of Independence and the radical doctrines of
Christianity could not fail to sharpen his eyes.
While every day was bringing the people nearer to the conclusion which
all thinking men saw to be inevitable from the beginning, it was wise
in Mr. Lincoln to leave the shaping of his policy to events. In this
country, where the rough and ready understanding of the people is sure
at last to be the controlling power, a profound common-sense is the
best genius for statesmanship. Hitherto the wisdom of the President's
measures has been justified by the fact that they have always resulted
in more firmly uniting public opinion. One of the things particularly
admirable in the public utterances of President Lincoln is a certain
tone of familiar dignity, which, while it is perhaps the most difficult
attainment of mere style, is also no doubtful indication of personal
character. There must be something essentially noble in an elective
ruler who can descend to the level of confidential ease without
forfeiting respect, something very manly in one who can break through
the etiquette of his conventional rank and trust himself to the reason
and intelligence of those who have elected him. No higher compliment
was ever paid to a nation than the simple confidence, the fireside
plainness, with which Mr. Lincoln always addresses himself to the
reason of the American people. This was, indeed, a true democrat, who
grounded himself on the assumption that a democracy can think. "Come,
let us reason together about this matter," has been the tone of all his
addresses to the people; and accordingly we have never had a chief
magistrate who so won to himself the love and at the same time the
judgment of his countrymen. To us, that simple confidence of his in the
right-mindedness of his fellow-men is very touching, and its success is
as strong an argument as we have ever seen in favor of the theory that
men can govern themselves. He never appeals to any vulgar sentiment, he
never alludes to the humbleness of his origin; it probably never
occurred to him, indeed, that there was anything higher to start from
than manhood; and he put himself on a level with those he addressed,
not by going down to them, but only by taking it for granted that they
had brains and would come up to a common ground of reason. In an
article lately printed in "The Nation," Mr. Bayard Taylor mentions the
striking fact, that in the foulest dens of the Five Points he found the
portrait of Lincoln. The wretched population that makes its hive there
threw all its votes and more against him, and yet paid this instinctive
tribute to the sweet humanity of his nature. Their ignorance sold its
vote and took its money, but all that was left of manhood in them
recognized its saint and martyr.
Mr. Lincoln is not in the habit of saying, "This is _my_ opinion, or
_my_ theory," but, "This is the conclusion to which, in my judgment,
the time has come, and to which, accordingly, the sooner we come the
better for us." His policy has been the policy of public opinion based
on adequate discussion and on a timely recognition of the influence of
passing events in shaping the features of events to come.
One secret of Mr. Lincoln's remarkable success in captivating the
popular mind is undoubtedly an unconsciousness of self which enables
him, though under the necessity of constantly using the capital _I_, to
do it without any suggestion of egotism. There is no single vowel which
men's mouths can pronounce with such difference of effect. That which
one shall hide away, as it were, behind the substance of his discourse,
or, if he bring it to the front, shall use merely to give an agreeable
accent of individuality to what he says, another shall make an
offensive challenge to the self-satisfaction of all his hearers, and an
unwarranted intrusion upon each man's sense of personal importance,
irritating every pore of his vanity, like a dry northeast wind, to a
goose-flesh of opposition and hostility. Mr. Lincoln has never studied
Quinctilian; but he has, in the earnest simplicity and unaffected
Americanism of his own character, one art of oratory worth all the
rest. He forgets himself so entirely in his object as to give his _I_
the sympathetic and persuasive effect of _We_ with the great body of
his countrymen. Homely, dispassionate, showing all the rough-edged
process of his thought as it goes along, yet arriving at his
conclusions with an honest kind of every-day logic, he is so eminently
our representative man, that, when he speaks, it seems as if the people
were listening to their own thinking aloud. The dignity of his thought
owes nothing to any ceremonial garb of words, but to the manly movement
that comes of settled purpose and an energy of reason that knows not
what rhetoric means. There has been nothing of Cleon, still less of
Strepsiades striving to underbid him in demagogism, to be found in the
public utterances of Mr. Lincoln. He has always addressed the
intelligence of men, never their prejudice, their passion, or their
ignorance.
* * * * * * *
On the day of his death, this simple Western attorney, who according to
one party was a vulgar joker, and whom the _doctrinaires_ among
his own supporters accused of wanting every element of statesmanship,
was the most absolute ruler in Christendom, and this solely by the hold
his good-humored sagacity had laid on the hearts and understandings of
his countrymen. Nor was this all, for it appeared that he had drawn the
great majority, not only of his fellow-citizens, but of mankind also,
to his side. So strong and so persuasive is honest manliness without a
single quality of romance or unreal sentiment to help it! A civilian
during times of the most captivating military achievement, awkward,
with no skill in the lower technicalities of manners, he left behind
him a fame beyond that of any conqueror, the memory of a grace higher
than that of outward person, and of a gentlemanliness deeper than mere
breeding. Never before that startled April morning did such multitudes
of men shed tears for the death of one they had never seen, as if with
him a friendly presence had been taken away from their lives, leaving
them colder and darker. Never was funeral panegyric so eloquent as the
silent look of sympathy which strangers exchanged when they met on that
day. Their common manhood had lost a kinsman.
RECONSTRUCTION
1865
In the glare of our civil war, certain truths, hitherto unobserved or
guessed at merely, have been brought out with extraordinary sharpness
of relief; and two of them have been specially impressive, the one for
European observers, the other for ourselves. The first, and perhaps the
most startling to the Old World watcher of the political skies, upon
whose field of vision the flaming sword of our western heavens grew
from a misty speck to its full comet-like proportions, perplexing them
with fear of change, has been the amazing strength and no less amazing
steadiness of democratic institutions. An army twice larger than
England, with the help of bounties, drafts, and the purchase of foreign
vagabonds, ever set in the field during the direst stress of her
struggle with Napoleon has been raised in a single year by voluntary
enlistment. A people untrained to bear the burden of heavy taxes not
only devotes to the public service sums gathered by private
subscription that in any other country would be deemed fabulous, but by
sheer force of public opinion compels its legislators to the utmost
ingenuity and searchingness of taxation. What was uttered as a sarcasm
on the want of public spirit in Florence is here only literally true:--
"Many refuse to bear the common burden;
But thy solicitous people answereth
Unasked, and cries, 'I bend my back to it.'"
And that the contrast may be felt in its fullest completeness, we must
consider that no private soldier is tempted into the ranks by hopes of
plunder, or driven into them by want of fair wages for fair work,--that
no officer can look forward to the splendid prizes of hereditary wealth
and title. Love of their country was the only incentive, its gratitude
their only reward. And in the matter of taxation also, a willingness to
help bear the common burden has more of generosity in it where the
wealth of the people is in great part the daily result of their daily
toil, and not a hoard inherited without merit, as without industry.
Nor have the qualities which lead to such striking results been
exhibited only by the North. The same public spirit, though misled by
wicked men for selfish ends, has shown itself in almost equal strength
at the South. And in both cases it has been unmistakably owing to that
living and active devotion of the people to institutions in whose
excellence they share, and their habit of obedience to laws of their
own making. If we have not hitherto had that conscious feeling of
nationality, the ideal abstract of history and tradition, which belongs
to older countries, compacted, by frequent war and united by memories
of common danger and common triumph, it has been simply because our
national existence has never been in such peril as to force upon us the
conviction that it was both the title-deed of our greatness and its
only safeguard. But what splendid possibilities has not our trial
revealed even to ourselves! What costly stuff whereof to make a nation!
Here at last is a state whose life is not narrowly concentred in a
despot or a class, but feels itself in every limb; a government which
is not a mere application of force from without, but dwells as a vital
principle in the will of every citizen. Our enemies--and wherever a man
is to be found bribed by an abuse, or who profits by a political
superstition, we have a natural enemy--have striven to laugh and sneer
and lie this apparition of royal manhood out of existence. They
conspired our murder; but in this vision is the prophecy of a dominion
which is to push them from their stools, and whose crown doth sear
their eyeballs. America lay asleep, like the princess of the fairy
tale, enchanted by prosperity; but at the first fiery kiss of war the
spell is broken, the blood tingles along her veins again, and she
awakes conscious of her beauty and her sovereignty.
It is true that, by the side of the self-devotion and public spirit,
the vices and meannesses of troubled times have shown themselves, as
they will and must. We have had shoddy, we have had contracts, we have
had substitute-brokerage, we have had speculators in patriotism, and,
still worse, in military notoriety. Men have striven to make the blood
of our martyrs the seed of wealth or office. But in times of public and
universal extremity, when habitual standards of action no longer serve,
and ordinary currents of thought are swamped in the flood of enthusiasm
or excitement, it always happens that the evil passions of some men are
stimulated by what serves only to exalt the nobler qualities of others.
In such epochs, evil as well as good is exaggerated. A great social
convulsion shakes up the lees which underlie society, forgotten because
quiescent, and the stimulus of calamity brings out the extremes of
human nature, whether for good or evil.
What is especially instructive in the events we have been witnessing
for the past four years is the fact that the people have been the chief
actors in the drama. They have not been the led, but the leaders. They
have not been involved in war by the passions or interests of their
rulers, but deliberately accepted the ordeal of battle in defence of
institutions which were the work of their own hands, and of whose
beneficence experience had satisfied them. Loyalty has hitherto been a
sentiment rather than a virtue; it has been more often a superstition
or a prejudice than a conviction of the conscience or of the
understanding. Now for the first time it is identical with patriotism,
and has its seat in the brain, and not the blood. It has before been
picturesque, devoted, beautiful, as forgetfulness of self always is,
but now it is something more than all these,--it is logical. Here we
have testimony that cannot be gainsaid to the universal vitality and
intelligence which our system diffuses with healthy pulse through all
its members. Every man feels himself a part, and not a subject, of the
government, and can say in a truer and higher sense than Louis XIV., "I
am the state." But we have produced no Cromwell, no Napoleon. Let us be
thankful that we have passed beyond that period of political
development when such productions are necessary, or even possible. It
is but another evidence of the excellence of the democratic principle.
Where power is the privilege of a class or of a single person, it may
be usurped; but where it is the expression of the common will, it can
no more be monopolized than air or light. The ignorant and unreasoning
force of a populace, sure of losing nothing and with a chance of
gaining something by any change, that restless material out of which
violent revolutions are made, if it exist here at all, is to be found
only in our great cities, among a class who have learned in other
countries to look upon all law as their natural enemy. Nor is it by any
fault of American training, but by the want of it, that these people
are what they are. When Lord Derby says that the government of this
country is at the mercy of an excited mob, he proves either that the
demagogue is no exclusive product of a democracy, or that England would
be in less danger of war if her governing class knew something less of
ancient Greece and a little more of modern America.
Whether or no there be any truth in the assertion that democracy tends
to bring men down to a common level (as it surely brings them up to
one), we shall not stop to inquire, for the world has not yet had a
long enough experience of it to warrant any safe conclusion. During our
revolutionary struggle, it seems to us that both our civil and military
leaders compare very well in point of ability with the British product
of the same period, and the same thing may very well be true at the
present time. But while it may be the glory, it can hardly be called
the duty of a country to produce great men; and if forms of polity have
anything to do in the matter, we should incline to prefer that which
could make a great nation felt to be such and loved as such by every
human fibre in it, to one which stunted the many that a few favored
specimens might grow the taller and fairer.
While the attitude of the government was by the necessity of the case
expectant so far as slavery was concerned, it is also true that the
people ran before it, and were moved by a deeper impulse than the mere
instinct of self-preservation. The public conscience gave energy and
intention to the public will, and the bounty which drew our best
soldiers to the ranks was an idea. The game was the ordinary game of
war, and they but the unreasoning pieces on the board; but they felt
that a higher reason was moving them in a game where the stake was the
life not merely of their country, but of a principle whose rescue was
to make America in very deed a New World, the cradle of a fairer
manhood. Weakness was to be no longer the tyrant's opportunity, but the
victim's claim; labor should never henceforth be degraded as a curse,
but honored as that salt of the earth which keeps life sweet, and gives
its savor to duty. To be of good family should mean being a child of
the one Father of us all; and good birth, the being born into God's
world, and not into a fool's paradise of man's invention. But even had
this moral leaven been wanting, had the popular impulse been merely one
of patriotism, we should have been well content to claim as the result
of democracy that for the first time in the history of the world it had
mustered an army that knew for what it was fighting. Nationality is no
dead abstraction, no unreal sentiment, but a living and operative
virtue in the heart and moral nature of men. It enlivens the dullest
soul with an ideal out of and beyond itself, lifting every faculty to a
higher level of vision and action. It enlarges the narrowest intellect
with a fealty to something better than self. It emancipates men from
petty and personal interests, to make them conscious of sympathies
whose society ennobles. Life has a deeper meaning when its throb beats
time to a common impulse and catches its motion from the general heart.
But while the experience of the last four years has been such, with all
its sorrows, as to make us proud of our strength and grateful for the
sources of it, we cannot but feel that peace will put to the test those
higher qualities which war leaves in reserve. What are we to do with
the country our arms have regained? It is by our conduct in this
stewardship, and not by our rights under the original compact of the
States, that our policy is to be justified. The glory of conquest is
trifling and barren, unless victory clear the way to a higher
civilization, a more solid prosperity, and a Union based upon
reciprocal benefits. In what precise manner the seceding States shall
return, whether by inherent right, or with some preliminary penance and
ceremony of readoption, is of less consequence than what they shall be
after their return. Dependent provinces, sullenly submitting to a
destiny which they loathe, would be a burden to us, rather than an
increase of strength or an element of prosperity. War would have won us
a peace stripped of all the advantages that make peace a blessing. We
should have so much more territory, and so much less substantial
greatness. We did not enter upon war to open a new market, or fresh
fields for speculators, or an outlet for redundant population, but to
save the experiment of democracy from destruction, and put it in a
fairer way of success by removing the single disturbing element. Our
business now is not to allow ourselves to be turned aside from a
purpose which our experience thus far has demonstrated to have been as
wise as it was necessary, and to see to it that, whatever be the other
conditions of reconstruction, democracy, which is our real strength,
receive no detriment.
We would not be understood to mean that Congress should lay down in
advance a fixed rule not to be departed from to suit the circumstances
of special cases as they arise. What may do very well for Tennessee may
not be as good for South Carolina. Wise statesmanship does not so much
consist in the agreement of its forms with any abstract ideal, however
perfect, as in its adaptation to the wants of the governed and its
capacity of shaping itself to the demands of the time. It is not to be
judged by its intention, but by its results, and those will be
proportioned to its practical, and not its theoretic, excellence. The
Anglo-Saxon soundness of understanding has shown itself in nothing more
clearly than in allowing institutions to be formulated gradually by
custom, convenience, or necessity, and in preferring the practical
comfort of a system that works, to the French method of a scientific
machinery of perpetual motion, demonstrably perfect in all its parts,
and yet refusing to go. We do not wish to see scientific treatment,
however admirable, applied to the details of reconstruction, if that is
to be, as now seems probable, the next problem that is to try our
intelligence and firmness. But there are certain points, it seems to
us, on which it is important that public opinion should come to some
sort of understanding in advance.
The peace negotiations have been of service in demonstrating that it is
not any ill blood engendered by war, any diversity of interests
properly national, any supposed antagonism of race, but simply the
slaveholding class, that now stands between us and peace, as four years
ago it forced us into war. Precisely as the principle of Divine right
could make no lasting truce with the French Revolution, the Satanic
right of the stronger to enslave the weaker can come to no
understanding with democracy. The conflict is in the things, not in the
men, and one or the other must abdicate. Of course the leaders, to whom
submission would be ruin, and a few sincere believers in the doctrine
of State rights, are willing to sacrifice even slavery for
independence, a word which has a double meaning for some of them; but
there can be no doubt that an offer to receive the seceding States back
to their old position under the Constitution would have put the war
party in a hopeless minority at the South. We think there are manifest
symptoms that the chinks made by the four years' struggle have let in
new light to the Southern people, however it may be with their ruling
faction, and that they begin to suspect a diversity of interest between
themselves, who chiefly suffer by the war, and the small class who
bullied them into it for selfish purposes of their own. However that
may be, the late proposal of Davis and Lee for the arming of slaves,
though they certainly did not so intend it, has removed a very serious
obstacle from our path. It is true that the emancipating clause was
struck out of the act as finally passed by the shadowy Congress at
Richmond. But this was only for the sake of appearances. Once arm and
drill the negroes, and they can never be slaves again. This is admitted
on all hands, and accordingly, whatever the words of the act may be, it
practically at once promotes the negro to manhood by brevet, as it
were, but at any rate to manhood. For the offer of emancipation as a
bounty implies reason in him to whom it is offered; nay, more, implies
a capacity for progress and a wish, for it, which are in themselves
valid titles to freedom. This at a step puts the South back to the
position held by her greatest men in regard to slavery. All the
Scriptural arguments, all the fitness of things, all the physiological
demonstrations, all Mr. Stephens's corner-stones, Ham, Onesimus, heels,
hair, and facial angle,--all are swept out, by one flirt of the besom
of Fate, into the inexorable limbo of things that were and never should
have been. How is Truth wounded to death in the house of her friends!
The highest authority of the South has deliberately renounced its
vested interest in the curse of Noah, and its right to make beasts of
black men because St. Paul sent back a white one to his master. Never
was there a more exact verification of the Spanish proverb, that he who
went out for wool may come back shorn. Alas for Nott and Gliddon!
Thrice alas for Bishop Hopkins! With slavery they lose their hold on
the last clue by which human reason could find its way to a direct
proof of the benevolence of God and the plenary inspiration of
Scripture.
All that we have learned of the blacks during the war makes the plan of
arming a part of them to help maintain the master's tyranny over the
rest seem so futile, and the arguments urged against it by Mr. Gholson
and Mr. Hunter are so convincing, that we can hardly persuade ourselves
that the authors of it did not intend it to make the way easier, not to
independence, but to reunion. It is said to argue desperation on the
part of the chief conspirators at Richmond, and it undoubtedly does;
but we see in what we believe to be the causes of their despair
something more hopeful than the mere exhaustion it indicates. It is
simply incredible that the losses of a four years' war should have
drained the fighting men of a population of five millions, or anything
like it; and the impossibility of any longer filling the Rebel armies
even by the most elaborate system of press-gangs proves to our mind
that the poorer class of whites have for some reason or other deserted
the cause of the wealthy planters. The men are certainly there, but
they have lost all stomach for fighting. Here again we see something
which is likely to make a final settlement more easy than it would have
been even a year ago. Though the fact that so large a proportion of the
Southern people cannot read makes it harder to reach them, yet our
soldiers have circulated among them like so many Northern newspapers,
and it is impossible that this intercourse, which has been constant,
should not have suggested to them many ideas of a kind which their
treacherous guides would gladly keep from them. The frantic rage of
Southern members of Congress against such books as Helper's can be
explained only by their fear lest their poorer constituents should be
set a-thinking, for the notion of corrupting a field-hand by an
Abolition document is too absurd even for a Wigfall or a Charleston
editor.
Here, then, are two elements of a favorable horoscope for our future;
an acknowledgment of the human nature of the negro by the very
Sanhedrim of the South, thus removing his case from the court of ethics
to that of political economy; and a suspicion on the part of the
Southern majority that something has been wrong, which makes them
readier to see and accept what is right. We do not mean to say that
there is any very large amount of even latent Unionism at the South,
but we believe there is plenty of material in solution there which
waits only to be precipitated into whatever form of crystal we desire.
We must not forget that the main elements of Southern regeneration are
to be sought in the South itself, and that such elements are abundant.
A people that has shown so much courage and constancy in a bad cause,
because they believed it a good one, is worth winning even by the
sacrifice of our natural feeling of resentment. If we forgive the negro
for his degradation and his ignorance, in consideration of the system
of which he has been the sacrifice, we ought also to make every
allowance for the evil influence of that system upon the poor whites.
It is the fatal necessity of all wrong to revenge itself upon those who
are guilty of it, or even accessory to it. The oppressor is dragged
down by the victim of his tyranny. The eternal justice makes the
balance even; and as the sufferer by unjust laws is lifted above his
physical abasement by spiritual compensations and that nearness to God
which only suffering is capable of, in like measure are the material
advantages of the wrong-doer counterpoised by a moral impoverishment.
Our duty is not to punish, but to repair; and the cure must work both
ways, emancipating the master from the slave, as well as the slave from
the master. Once rid of slavery, which was the real criminal, let us
have no more reproaches, justifiable only while the Southern sin made
us its forced accomplices; and while we bind up the wounds of our black
brother who had fallen among thieves that robbed him of his rights as a
man, let us not harden our hearts against our white brethren, from whom
interest and custom, those slyer knaves, whose fingers we have felt
about our own pockets, had stolen away their conscience and their sense
of human brotherhood.
The first question that arises in the mind of everybody in thinking of
reconstruction is, What is to be done about the negro? After the war is
over, there will be our Old Man of the Sea, as ready to ride us as
ever. If we only emancipate him, he will not let us go free. We must do
something more than merely this. While the suffering from them is still
sharp, we should fix it in our minds as a principle, that the evils
which have come upon us are the direct and logical consequence of our
forefathers having dealt with a question of man as they would with one
of trade or territory,--as if the rights of others were something
susceptible of compromise,--as if the laws that govern the moral, and,
through it, the material world, would stay their operation for our
convenience. It is well to keep this present in the mind, because in
the general joy and hurry of peace we shall be likely to forget it
again, and to make concessions, or to leave things at loose ends for
time to settle,--as time has settled the blunders of our ancestors. Let
us concede everything except what does not belong to us, but is only a
trust-property, namely, the principle of democracy and the prosperity
of the future involved in the normal development of that principle.
We take it for granted at the outset, that the mind of the country is
made up as to making no terms with slavery in any way, large or
limited, open or covert. Not a single good quality traceable to this
system has been brought to light in the white race at the South by the
searching test of war. In the black it may have engendered that
touching piety of which we have had so many proofs, and it has
certainly given them the unity of interest and the sympathy of
intelligence which make them everywhere our friends, and which have
saved them from compromising their advantage, and still further
complicating the difficulties of civil war by insurrection. But what
have been its effects upon the ruling class, which is, after all, the
supreme test of institutions? It has made them boastful, selfish,
cruel, and false, to a degree unparalleled in history. So far from
having given them any special fitness for rule, it has made them
incapable of any but violent methods of government, and unable to deal
with the simplest problems of political economy. An utter ignorance of
their own countrymen at the North led them to begin the war, and an
equal misconception of Europe encouraged them to continue it. That
they have shown courage is true, but that is no exclusive property of
theirs, and the military advantage they seemed to possess is due less
to any superiority of their own than to the extent of their territory
and the roadless wildernesses which are at once the reproach and the
fortification of their wasteful system of agriculture. Their advantages
in war have been in proportion to their disadvantages in peace, and it
is peace which most convincingly tries both the vigor of a nation and
the wisdom of its polity. It is with this class that we shall have to
deal in arranging the conditions of settlement; and we must do it with
a broad view of the interests of the whole country and of the great
mass of the Southern people, whose ignorance and the prejudices
consequent from it made it so easy to use them as the instruments of
their own ruin. No immediate advantage must blind us to the real
objects of the war,--the securing our external power and our internal
tranquillity, and the making them inherent and indestructible by
founding them upon the common welfare.
The first condition of permanent peace is to render those who were the
great slaveholders when the war began, and who will be the great
landholders after it is over, powerless for mischief. What punishment
should be inflicted on the chief criminals is a matter of little
moment. The South has received a lesson of suffering which satisfies
all the legitimate ends of punishment, and as for vengeance, it is
contrary to our national temper and the spirit of our government. Our
great object should be, not to weaken, but to strengthen the South,--to
make it richer, and not poorer. We must not repeat the stupid and fatal
blunder of slaveholding publicists, that the wealth and power of one
portion of the country are a drain upon the resources of the rest,
instead of being their natural feeders and invigorators. Any general
confiscation of Rebel property, therefore, seems to us unthrifty
housekeeping, for it is really a levying on our own estate, and a
lessening of our own resources. The people of the Southern States will
be called upon to bear their part of the grievous burden of taxation
which the war will leave upon our shoulders, and that is the fairest as
well as the most prudent way of making them contribute to our national
solvency. All irregular modes of levying contributions, however
just,--and exactly just they can seldom be,--leave discontent behind
them, while a uniform system, where every man knows what he is to pay
and why he is to pay it, tends to restore stability by the very
evenness of its operation, by its making national interests familiar to
all, and by removing any sense of injustice. Any sweeping confiscation,
such as has sometimes been proposed in Congress with more heat than
judgment, would render the South less available for revenue, would
retard the return of industry to its legitimate channels, by lessening
its means, and would not destroy the influence of the misgoverning
aristocracy. On the contrary, it would give them that prestige of
misfortune whose power over the sentiments of mankind is the moral of
the story of Stuarts and Bourbons and Bonapartes. Retribution they
should have, but let them have it in the only way worthy of a great
people to inflict. Let it come in a sense of their own folly and sin,
brought about by the magnanimity of their conquerors, by the return of
a more substantial prosperity born of the new order of things, so as to
convince, instead of alienating. We should remember that it is our
country which we have regained, and not merely a rebellious faction
which we have subdued.
Whether it would not be good policy for the general government to
assume all the wild lands in the rebellious States, and to devote the
proceeds of their sale to actual settlers to the payment of the
national debt, is worth consideration. Texas alone, on whose public
lands our assumption of her indebtedness gives us an equitable claim,
would suffice to secure our liabilities and to lighten our taxation,
and in all cases of land granted to freedmen no title should vest till
a fair price had been paid,--a principle no less essential to their
true interests than our own. That these people, who are to be the
peasantry of the future Southern States, should be made landholders, is
the main condition of a healthy regeneration of that part of the
country, and the one warranty of our rightful repossession of it. The
wealth that makes a nation really strong, and not merely rich, is the
opportunity for industry, intelligence, and well-being of its laboring
population. This is the real country of poor men, as the great majority
must always be. No glories of war or art, no luxurious refinement of
the few, can give them a sense of nationality where this is wanting. If
we free the slave without giving him a right in the soil, and the
inducement to industry which this offers, we reproduce only a more
specious form of all the old abuses. We leave all political power in
the hands of the wealthy landholders, where it was before. We leave the
poorer whites unemancipated, for we leave labor still at the mercy of
capital, and with its old stigma of degradation. Blind to the lessons
of all experience, we deliberately make the South what Ireland was when
Arthur Young travelled there, the country richest in the world by
nature, reduced to irredeemable poverty and hopeless weakness by an
upper class who would not, and a lower class who could not, improve. We
have no right to purchase dominion, no right to purchase even
abolition, at such a price as that. No _uti possidetis_ conveys any
legitimate title, except on the condition of wise administration and
mutual benefit.
But will it be enough to make the freedmen landholders merely? Must we
not make them voters also, that they may have that power of
self-protection which no interference of government can so safely,
cheaply, and surely exercise in their behalf? We answer this question
in the affirmative, for reasons both of expediency and justice. At
best, the difficulty, if not settled now, will come up again for
settlement hereafter, when it may not be so easy of solution. As a
matter of expediency, it is always wisest to shape a system of policy
with a view to permanence, much more than to immediate convenience.
When things are put upon a right footing at first,--and the only right
footing is one which will meet the inevitable demands of the future as
well as the more noisy ones of the present,--all subsidiary relations
will of necessity arrange themselves by mutual adaptation, without
constantly calling for the clumsy interference of authority. We must
leave behind us no expectation and no fear of change, to unsettle men's
minds and dishearten their industry. Both the late master and the late
slave should begin on the new order of things with a sense of its
permanence on the one hand and its rightfulness on the other. They will
soon learn that neither intelligence can do without labor, nor labor
without intelligence, and that wealth will result only from a clearly
understood and reciprocally beneficial dependence of each upon the
other. Unless we make the black a citizen, we take away from the white
the strongest inducement to educate and enlighten him. As a mere
proletary, his ignorance is a temptation to the stronger race; as a
voter, it is a danger to them which it becomes their interest to
remove. It is easy to manage the mob of New York for the time with
grape-shot, but it is the power for evil which their suffrage gives
them that will at last interest all classes, by reform and education,
to make it a power for good.
Under the head of expediency comes also this other
consideration,--that, unless made citizens, the emancipated blacks,
reckoned as they must be in the basis of representation, and yet
without power to modify the character of the representatives chosen,
will throw so much more power into the hands of men certain to turn it
to their disadvantage, and only too probably to our own. This mass, if
we leave it inert, may, in any near balance of parties, be enough to
crush us; while, if we endow it with life and volition, if we put it in
the way of rising in intelligence and profiting by self-exertion, it
will be the best garrison for maintaining the supremacy of our ideas,
till they have had time to justify themselves by experience. Have we
endured and prosecuted this war for the sake of bringing back our old
enemies to legislate for us, stronger than ever, with all the
resentment and none of the instruction of defeat?
But as a measure of justice also, which is always the highest
expediency, we are in favor of giving the ballot to the freedmen. Our
answer to the question, What are we to do with the negro? is short and
simple. Give him a fair chance. We must get rid of the delusion that
right is in any way dependent on the skin, and not on an inward virtue.
Our war has been carried on for the principles of democracy, and a
cardinal point of those principles is, that the only way in which to
fit men for freedom is to make them free, the only way to teach them
how to use political power is to give it them. Both South and North
have at last conceded the manhood of the negro, and the question now is
how we shall make that manhood available and profitable to him and to
us. Democracy does not mean, to any intelligent person, an attempt at
the impossibility of making one man as good as another. But it
certainly does mean the making of one man's manhood as good as
another's and the giving to every human being the right of unlimited
free trade in all his faculties and acquirements. We believe the white
race, by their intellectual and traditional superiority, will retain
sufficient ascendency to prevent any serious mischief from the new
order of things. We admit that the whole subject bristles with
difficulties, and we would by no means discuss or decide it on
sentimental grounds. But our choice would seem to be between
unqualified citizenship, to depend on the ability to read and write, if
you will, and setting the blacks apart in some territory by themselves.
There are, we think, insuperable objections to this last plan. It would
put them beyond the reach of all good influence from the higher
civilization of the whites, without which they might relapse into
barbarism like the Maroons of Surinam, and it would deprive the whole
Southern country of the very labor it needs. As to any prejudices which
should prevent the two races from living together, it would soon yield
to interest and necessity. The mere antipathy of color is not so strong
there as here, and the blacks would form so very large a majority of
the laboring class as not to excite the jealousy of rivalry. We can
remember when the prejudice against the Celt was as strong in many of
the Free States as that against the African could ever be at the South.
It is not very long since this prejudice nearly gave a new direction to
the politics of the country. Yet, like all prejudices, it had not
coherence enough to keep any considerable party long together.
The objections to the plan are, of course, the same which lie against
any theory of universal suffrage. These are many and strong, if
considered abstractly; but we assume that theory to be admitted now as
the rule of our political practice, and its evils as a working system
have not been found so great, taking the country at large, as nearly to
outweigh, its advantages. Moreover, as we have said before, it compels
the redress of its own abuses, and the remedy is one which is a benefit
to the whole community, for it is simply to raise the general standard
of intelligence. It is superior, certainly, to the English system, in
which the body of the nation is alienated from its highest intellect
and culture. We think the objections are quite as strong to any
elective plan of government, for a select majority is as liable to be
governed by its interests and passions as any popular one. Witness the
elections at Oxford. Is the average wisdom or unselfishness of mankind
so high that there should be no narrow minds and no selfish hearts in
any body of electors, however carefully selected? The only infallible
sovereign on earth is chosen by the majority of a body in which passion
and intrigue and the influence (sometimes none of the purest) of
conflicting courts are certainly not inoperative. Man is perhaps not
the wisest of animals, but he has at least as keen a sense of his own
advantage in a hovel as in a palace, and what is for the interest of
the masses of the people is not very far from being for that of the
country. It is said, to be sure, that we are inadequately represented
in Congress; but a representative is apt to be a tolerably exact
exponent of the merits of his constituency, and we must look for relief
to the general improvement of our people in morals, manners, and
culture. We doubt if the freedmen would send worse members to Congress
than some in whose election merchants and bankers and even doctors of
divinity have been accomplices.
With the end of the war the real trial of our statesmanship, our
patriotism, and our patience will begin. The passions excited by it
will, no doubt, subside in due time, but meanwhile it behooves the
party in possession of the government to conciliate patriotic men of
all shades of opinion by a liberal, manly and unpartisan policy.
Republicans must learn to acknowledge that all criticisms of their
measures have not been dictated by passion or disloyalty, that many
moderate and honest men, many enlightened ones, have really found
reason for apprehension in certain arbitrary stretches of authority,
nay, may even have been opposed to the war itself, without being in
love with slavery, and without deserving to be called Copperheads. Many
have doubted the wisdom of our financial policy, without being
unpatriotic. It is precisely this class, dispassionate and moderate in
their opinions, whose help we shall need in healing the wounds of war
and giving equanimity to our counsels. We hope to see a course of
action entered upon which shall draw them to its support. In peace,
governments cannot, as in war, find strength in the enthusiasm and even
the passions of the people, but must seek it in the approval of their
judgment and convictions. During war, all the measures of the dominant
party have a certain tincture of patriotism; declamation serves very
well the purposes of eloquence, and fervor of persuasion passes muster
as reason; but in peaceful times everything must come back to a
specific standard, and stand or fall on its own merits. Our faith is
not unmixed with apprehension when we think of the immediate future,
yet it is an abiding faith nevertheless; and with the experience of the
last four years to sustain us, we are willing to believe almost
anything good of the American people, and to say with the saint,
_Credimus quia impossibile est_. We see no good reason why, if we
use our victory with the moderation becoming men who profess themselves
capable of self-government, conceding all that can be conceded without
danger to the great principle which has been at stake, the North and
the South should not live more harmoniously together in the future than
in the past, now that the one rock of offence has been blasted out of
the way. We do not believe that the war has tended to lessen their
respect for each other, or that it has left scars which will take to
aching again with every change of the political weather. We must bind
the recovered communities to us with hooks of interest, by convincing
them that we desire their prosperity as an integral part of our own.
For a long while yet there will be a latent disaffection, even when the
outward show may be fair, as in spring the ground often stiffens when
the thermometer is above the freezing point. But we believe, in spite
of this, that all this untowardness will yield to the gradual wooing of
circumstances, and that it is to May, and not December, that we are to
look forward. Even in our finances, which are confessedly our weakest
point, we doubt if the experience of any other nation will enable us to
form a true conception of our future. We shall have, beyond question,
the ordinary collapse of speculation that follows a sudden expansion of
paper currency. We shall have that shivering and expectant period when
the sails flap and the ship trembles ere it takes the wind on the new
tack. But it is no idle boast to say that there never was a country
with such resources as ours. In Europe the question about a man always
is, What _is_ he? Here it is as invariably, What does he _do_? And in
that little difference lies the security of our national debt for
whoever has eyes. In America there is no idle class supported at the
expense of the nation, there is no splendid poor-house of rank or
office, but every man is at work adding his share to the wealth, and to
that extent insuring the solvency, of the country. Our farm, indeed, is
mortgaged, but it is a mortgage which the yearly profits will pay off.
Those who look upon the war as a wicked crusade of the North against
the divinely sanctioned institutions of the South, and those who hope
even yet to reknit the monstrous league between slavery and a party
calling itself Democratic, will of course be willing to take back the
seceding States without conditions. Neither of these classes is any
longer formidable, either by its numbers or the character of its
leaders. But there is yet a third class, who seem to have confused
their minds with some fancied distinction between civil and foreign
war. Holding the States to be indestructible, they seem to think that,
by the mere cessation of hostilities, they are to resume their places
as if nothing had happened, or rather as if this had been a mere
political contest which we had carried. But it is with the people of
the States, and not with any abstract sovereignty, that we have been at
war, and it is of them that we are to exact conditions, and not of some
convenient quasi-entity, which is not there when the battle is raging,
and is there when the terms of capitulation are to be settled. No, it
is slavery which made this war, and slavery which must pay the damages.
While we should not by any unseemly exultation remind the Southern
people that they have been conquered, we should also not be weak enough
to forget that we have won the right of the victor. And what is that
right, if it be not to exact indemnity for the past and security for
the future? And what more nobly and satisfactorily fulfils both those
conditions, than utterly to extinguish the cause of quarrel? What we
fear is the foolish and weak good-nature inherent in popular
government, but against which monarchies and aristocracies are insured
by self-interest, which the prospect of peace is sure to arouse, and
which may make our settlement a stage-reconciliation, where everybody
rushes into the arms of everybody else with a fervor which has nothing
to do with the living relations of the actors. We believe that the
public mind should be made up as to what are the essential conditions
of real and lasting peace, before it is subjected to the sentimental
delusions of the inevitable era of good feeling, in which the stronger
brother is so apt to play the part of Esau. If we are to try the
experiment of democracy fairly, it must be tried in its fullest extent,
and not half-way. The theory which grants political power to the
ignorant white foreigner need not be squeamish about granting it to the
ignorant black native, for the gist of the matter is in the dark mind,
and not the more or less dusky skin. Of course we shall be met by the
usual fallacy,--Would you confer equality on the blacks? But the answer
is a very simple one. Equality cannot be conferred on any man, be he
white or black. If he be capable of it, his title is from God, and not
from us. The opinion of the North is made up on the subject of
emancipation, and Mr. Lincoln has announced it as the one essential
preliminary to the readmission of the insurgent States. To our mind,
citizenship is the necessary consequence, as it is the only effectual
warranty, of freedom; and accordingly we are in favor of distinctly
settling beforehand some conditional right of admission to it. We have
purposely avoided any discussion on gradualism as an element in
emancipation, because we consider its evil results to have been
demonstrated in the British West Indies. True conservative policy is
not an anodyne hiding away our evil from us in a brief forgetfulness.
It looks to the long future of a nation, and dares the heroic remedy
where it is scientifically sure of the nature of the disease. The only
desperate case for a people is where its moral sense is paralyzed, and
the first symptom is a readiness to accept an easy expedient at the
sacrifice of a difficult justice. The relation which is to be final and
permanent cannot be too soon decided on and put in working order,
whether for the true interest of master or slave; and the only safe
relation is one that shall be fearlessly true to the principles in
virtue of which we asserted our own claim to autonomy, and our right to
compel obedience to the government so established. Anything short of
that has the weakness of an expedient which will erelong compel us to
reconstruct our reconstruction, and the worse weakness of hypocrisy,
which will sooner or later again lay us open to the retribution of that
eternal sincerity which brings all things at last to the test of its
own unswerving standard.
SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT?
1865
It has been said that the American people are less apt than others to
profit by experience, because the bustle of their lives keeps breaking
the thread of that attention which is the material of memory, till no
one has patience or leisure to spin from it a continuous thread of
thought. We suspect that this is not more true of us than of other
nations,--than it is of all people who read newspapers. Great events
are perhaps not more common than they used to be, but a vastly greater
number of trivial incidents are now recorded, and this dust of time
gets in our eyes. The telegraph strips history of everything down to
the bare fact, but it does not observe the true proportions of things,
and we must make an effort to recover them. In brevity and cynicism it
is a mechanical Tacitus, giving no less space to the movements of Sala
than of Sherman, as impartial a leveller as death. It announces with
equal _sangfroid_ the surrender of Kirby Smith and the capture of a
fresh rebel governor, reducing us to the stature at which posterity
shall reckon us. Eminent contemporaneousness may see here how much
space will be allotted to it in the historical compends and biographical
dictionaries of the next generation. In artless irony the telegraph is
unequalled among the satirists of this generation. But this short-hand
diarist confounds all distinctions of great and little, and roils the
memory with minute particles of what is oddly enough called intelligence.
We read in successive paragraphs the appointment of a Provisional
Governor of North Carolina, whose fitness or want of it may be the
turning-point of our future history, and the nomination of a minister,
who will at most only bewilder some foreign court with a more
desperately helpless French than his predecessor. The conspiracy trial
at Washington, whose result will have absolutely no effect on the real
affairs of the nation, occupies for the moment more of the public mind
and thought than the question of reconstruction, which involves the
life or death of the very principle we have been fighting for these
four years.
Undoubtedly the event of the day, whatever it may be, is apt to become
unduly prominent, and to thrust itself obscuringly between us and the
perhaps more important event of yesterday, where the public appetite
demands fresh gossip rather than real news, and the press accordingly
keeps its spies everywhere on the lookout for trifles that become
important by being later than the last. And yet this minuteness of
triviality has its value also. Our sensitive sheet gives us every
morning the photograph of yesterday, and enables us to detect and to
study at leisure that fleeting expression of the time which betrays its
character, and which might altogether escape us in the idealized
historical portrait. We cannot estimate the value of the _items_ in our
daily newspaper, because the world to which they relate is too familiar
and prosaic; but a hundred years hence some Thackeray will find them
full of picturesque life and spirit. The "Chronicle" of the Annual
Register makes the England of the last century more vividly real to us
than any history. The jests which Pompeian idlers scribbled on the
walls, while Vesuvius was brooding its fiery conspiracy under their
feet, bring the scene nearer home to us than the letter of Pliny, and
deepen the tragedy by their trifling contrast, like the grave-diggers'
unseemly gabble in Hamlet. Perhaps our judgment of history is made
sounder, and our view of it more lifelike, when we are so constantly
reminded how the little things of life assert their place alongside the
great ones, and how healthy the constitution of the race is, how sound
its digestion, how gay its humor, that can take the world so easily
while our continent is racked with fever and struggling for life
against the doctors.
"Let Hercules himself do what he may,
The cat will mew, the dog must have his day."
It is always pleasant to meet Dame Clio over the tea-table, as it were,
where she is often more entertaining, if not more instructive, than
when she puts on the loftier port and more ceremonious habit of a Muse.
These inadvertences of history are pleasing. We are no longer
foreigners, in any age of the world, but feel that in a few days we
could have accommodated ourselves there, and that, wherever men are, we
are not far from home. The more we can individualize and personify, the
more lively our sympathy. Man interests us scientifically, but men
claim us through all that we have made a part of our nature by
education and custom. We would give more to know what Xenophon's
soldiers gossiped about round their camp-fires, than for all the
particulars of their retreat. Sparta becomes human to us when we think
of Agesilaus on his hobby-horse. Finding that those heroic figures
romped with their children, we begin for the first time to suspect that
they ever really existed as much as Robinson Crusoe. Without these
personal traits, antiquity seems as unreal to us as Sir Thomas More's
Utopia. It is, indeed, surprising how little of real life what is
reckoned solid literature has preserved to us, voluminous as it is.
Where does chivalry at last become something more than a mere
procession of plumes and armor, to be lamented by Burke, except in some
of the less ambitious verses of the Trouvères, where we hear the
canakin clink too emphatically, perhaps, but which at least paint
living men and possible manners? Tennyson's knights are cloudy,
gigantic, of no age or country, like the heroes of Ossian. They are
creatures without stomachs. Homer is more condescending, and though we
might not be able to draw the bow of Ulysses, we feel quite at home
with him and Eumaeus over their roast pork.
We cannot deny that the poetical view of any period is higher, and in
the deepest sense truer, than all others; but we are thankful also for
the penny-a-liner, whether ancient or modern, who reflects the whims
and humors, the enthusiasms and weaknesses, of the public in unguarded
moments. Is it so certain, after all, that we should not be interesting
ourselves in other quite as nugatory matters if these were denied us?
In one respect, and no unimportant one, the instantaneous dispersion of
news and the universal interest in it have affected the national
thought and character. The whole people have acquired a certain
metropolitan temper; they feel everything at once and in common; a
single pulse sends anger, grief, or triumph through the whole country;
one man sitting at the keyboard of the telegraph in Washington sets the
chords vibrating to the same tune from sea to sea; and this
simultaneousness, this unanimity, deepens national consciousness and
intensifies popular emotion. Every man feels himself a part, sensitive
and sympathetic, of this vast organism, a partner in its life or death.
The sentiment of patriotism is etherealized and ennobled by it, is
kindled by the more or less conscious presence of an ideal element; and
the instinctive love of a few familiar hills and fields widens, till
Country is no longer an abstraction, but a living presence, felt in the
heart and operative in the conscience, like that of an absent mother.
It is no trifling matter that thirty millions of men should be thinking
the same thought and feeling the same pang at a single moment of time,
and that these vast parallels of latitude should become a neighborhood
more intimate than many a country village. The dream of Human
Brotherhood seems to be coming true at last. The peasant who dipped his
net in the Danube, or trapped the beaver on its banks, perhaps never
heard of Caesar or of Caesar's murder; but the shot that shattered the
forecasting brain, and curdled the warm, sweet heart of the most
American of Americans, echoed along the wires through the length and
breadth of a continent, swelling all eyes at once with tears of
indignant sorrow. Here was a tragedy fulfilling the demands of
Aristotle, and purifying with an instantaneous throb of pity and terror
a theatre of such proportions as the world never saw. We doubt if
history ever recorded an event so touching and awful as this sympathy,
so wholly emancipated from the toils of space and time that it might
seem as if earth were really sentient, as some have dreamed, or the
great god Pan alive again to make the hearts of nations stand still
with his shout. What is Beethoven's "Funeral March for the Death of a
Hero" to the symphony of love, pity, and wrathful resolve which the
telegraph of that April morning played on the pulses of a nation?
It has been said that our system of town meetings made our Revolution
possible, by educating the people in self-government. But this was at
most of partial efficacy, while the newspaper and telegraph, gather the
whole nation into a vast town-meeting, where every one hears the
affairs of the country discussed, and where the better judgment is
pretty sure to make itself valid at last. No memorable thing is said or
done, no invention or discovery is made, that some mention of it does
not sooner or later reach the ears of a majority of Americans. It is
this constant mental and moral stimulus which gives them the alertness
and vivacity, the wide-awakeness of temperament, characteristic of
dwellers in great cities, and which has been remarked on by English
tourists as if it were a kind of physiological transformation. They
seem to think we have lost something of that solidity of character
which (with all other good qualities) they consider the peculiar
inheritance of the British race, though inherited in an elder brother's
proportion by the favored dwellers in the British Isles. We doubt if
any substantial excellence is lost by this suppling of the intellectual
faculties, and bringing the nervous system nearer the surface by the
absorption of superfluous fat. What is lost in bulk may be gained in
spring. It is true that the clown, with his parochial horizon, his diet
inconveniently thin, and his head conveniently thick, whose notion of
greatness is a prize pig, and whose patriotism rises or falls with the
strength of his beer, is a creature as little likely to be met with
here as the dodo, his only rival in the qualities that make up a good
citizen; but this is no result of climatic influences. Such creatures
are the contemporaries of an earlier period of civilization than ours.
Nor is it so clear that solidity is always a virtue, and lightness a
vice in character, any more than in bread, or that the leaven of our
institutions works anything else than a wholesome ferment and aeration.
The experience of the last four years is enough to prove that
sensibility may consist with tenacity of purpose, and that enthusiasm
may become a permanent motive where the conviction of the worth of its
object is profound and logical. There are things in this universe
deeper and higher, more solid even, than the English Constitution. If
that is the perfection of human wisdom and a sufficing object of faith
and worship for our cousins over the water, on the other hand God's
dealing with this chosen people is preparing them to conceive of a
perfection of divine wisdom, of a constitution in the framing of which
man's wit had no share, and which shall yet be supreme, as it is
continually more or less plainly influential in the government of the
world. We may need even sterner teaching than any we have yet had, but
we have faith that the lesson will be learned at last.
If the assertion which we alluded to at the outset were true, if we,
more than others, are apt to forget; the past in the present, the work
of Mr. Moore[6] would do much in helping us to recover what we have
lost. Had its execution been as complete as its plan was excellent, it
would have left nothing to be desired. Its want of order may be charged
upon the necessity of monthly publication; but there are other defects
which this will hardly excuse. The editor seems to have become
gradually helpless before the mass of material that heaped itself about
him, and to have shovelled from sheer despair of selection. In the
documentary part he is sufficiently, sometimes even depressingly full,
and he has preserved a great deal of fugitive poetry from both sides,
much of it spirited, and some of it vigorously original;[7] but he has
frequently neglected to give his authorities. His extracts from the
newspapers of the day, especially from Southern and foreign ones, are
provokingly few, and his department of "incidents and rumors," the true
mirror of the time, inadequate both in quantity and quality. In spite
of these defects, however, there is enough to recall vividly the
features of the time at any marked period during the war, to renew the
phases of feeling, to trace the slowly gathering current of opinion,
and to see a definite purpose gradually orbing itself out of the chaos
of plans and motives, hopes, fears, enthusiasms, and despondencies. We
do not propose to review the book,--we might, indeed, almost as well
undertake to review the works of Father Time himself,--but, relying
chiefly on its help in piecing out our materials, shall try to freshen
the memory of certain facts and experiences worth bearing in mind
either for example or warning.
[6] _The Rebellion Record._ Edited by Frank Moore. Six vols.
[7] See especially _The Old Sergeant_, a remarkable poem by
Forseythe Willson, in the sixth volume.
It is of importance, especially considering the part which what are
called the "leading minds" of the South are expected to play in
reconstruction, to keep clearly before our eyes the motives and the
manner of the Rebellion. Perhaps we should say inducements rather than
motives, for of these there was but a single one put forward by the
seceding States, namely, the obtaining security, permanence, and
extension for the system of slavery. We do not use the qualifying
epithet "African," because the franker propagandists of Southern
principles affirmed the divine institution of slavery pure and simple,
without regard to color or the curse of Canaan. This being the single
motive of the Rebellion, what was its real object? Primarily, to
possess itself of the government by a sudden _coup d'état_; or that
failing, then, secondarily, by a peaceful secession, which should
paralyze the commerce and manufactures of the Free States, to bring
them to terms of submission. Whatever may have been the opinion of some
of the more far-sighted, it is clear that a vast majority of the
Southern people, including their public men, believed that their
revolution would be peaceful. Their inducements to moving precisely
when they did were several. At home the treasury was empty; faithless
ministers had supplied the Southern arsenals with arms, and so disposed
the army and navy as to render them useless for any sudden need; but
above all, they could reckon on several months of an administration
which, if not friendly, was so feeble as to be more dangerous to the
country than to its betrayers, and there was a great party at the North
hitherto their subservient allies, and now sharing with them in the
bitterness of a common political defeat.[8] Abroad there was peace,
with the prospect of its continuance; the two great maritime powers
were also the great consumers of cotton, were both deadly enemies, like
themselves, to the democratic principle, and, if not actively
interfering, would at least throw all the moral weight of their
sympathy and encouragement on the Southern side. They were not
altogether mistaken in their reckoning. The imbecility of Mr. Buchanan
bedded the ship of state in an ooze of helpless inaction, where none of
her guns could be brought to bear, and whence nothing but the tide of
indignation which followed the attack on Sumter could have set her
afloat again, while prominent men and journals of the Democratic party
hastened to assure the Rebels, not only of approval, but of active
physical assistance. England, with indecent eagerness, proclaimed a
neutrality which secured belligerent rights to a conspiracy that was
never to become a nation, and thus enabled members of Parliament to fit
out privateers to prey with impunity on the commerce of a friendly
power. The wily Napoleon followed, after an interval long enough to
throw all responsibility for the measure, and to direct all the natural
irritation it excited in this country, upon his neighbor over the way.
England is now endeavoring to evade the consequences of her hasty
proclamation and her jaunty indifference to the enforcement of it upon
her own subjects. The principle of international law involved is a most
important one; but it was not so much the act itself, or the pecuniary
damage resulting from it, as the _animus_ that so plainly prompted it,
which Americans find it hard to forgive.
[8] Mr. A. H. Stephens, Vice-President of the late Confederacy,
attributed the Secession movement to disappointed ambition.
It would be unwise in us to forget that independence was a merely
secondary and incidental consideration with the Southern conspirators
at the beginning of the Rebellion, however they may have thought it
wise to put it in the front, both for the sake of their foreign
abettors who were squeamish about seeming, though quite indifferent
about being, false to their own professions and the higher interests of
their country, and also for the sake of its traditionary influence
among the Southern people. Some, it is true, were bold enough or
logical enough to advocate barbarism as a good in itself; and in
estimating the influences which have rendered some minds, if not
friendly to the Rebellion, at least indifferent to the success of the
Union, we should not forget that reaction against the softening and
humanizing effect of modern civilization, led by such men as Carlyle,
and joined in by a multitude whose intellectual and moral fibre is too
much unstrung to be excited by anything less pungent than paradox.
Protestants against the religion which sacrifices to the polished idol
of Decorum and translates Jehovah by _Comme-il-faut_, they find even
the divine manhood of Christ too tame for them, and transfer their
allegiance to the shaggy Thor with his mallet of brute force. This is
hardly to be wondered at when we hear England called prosperous for the
strange reason that she no longer dares to act from a noble impulse,
and when, at whatever page of her recent history one opens, he finds
her statesmanship to consist of one Noble Lord or Honorable Member
asking a question, and another Noble Lord or Honorable Member
endeavoring to dodge it, amid cries of _Hear! Hear!_ enthusiastic in
proportion to the fruitlessness of listening. After all, we are
inclined to think there is more real prosperity, more that posterity
will find to have a deep meaning and reality, in a democracy spending
itself for a principle, and, in spite of the remonstrances, protests,
and sneers of a world busy in the eternal seesaw of the balance of
Europe, persisting in a belief that life and property are mere
counters, of no value except as representatives of a higher idea. May
it be long ere government become in the New World, as in the Old, an
armed police and fire-department, to protect property as it grows more
worthless by being selfishly clutched in fewer hands, and keep God's
fire of manhood from reaching that gunpowder of the dangerous classes
which underlies all institutions based only on the wisdom of our
ancestors.
As we look back to the beginnings of the Rebellion, we are struck with
the thoughtlessness with which both parties entered upon a war of whose
vast proportions and results neither was even dimly conscious. But a
manifest difference is to be remarked. In the South this
thoughtlessness was the result of an ignorant self-confidence, in the
North of inexperience and good humor. It was long before either side
could believe that the other was in earnest: the one in attacking a
government which they knew only by their lion's share in its offices
and influence, the other in resisting the unprovoked assault of a race
born in the saddle, incapable of subjugation, and unable to die
comfortably except in the last ditch of jubilant oratory. When at last
each was convinced of the other's sincerity, the moods of both might
have been predicted by any observer of human nature. The side which
felt that it was not only in the wrong, but that it had made a blunder,
lost all control of its temper, all regard for truth and honor. It
betook itself forthwith to lies, bluster, and cowardly abuse of its
antagonist. But beneath every other expression of Southern sentiment,
and seeming to be the base of it, was a ferocity not to be accounted
for by thwarted calculations or by any resentment at injuries received,
but only by the influence of slavery on the character and manners.
"Scratch a Russian," said Napoleon, "and you come to the Tartar
beneath." Scratch a slaveholder, and beneath the varnish of
conventionalism you come upon something akin to the man-hunter of
Dahomey. Nay, the selfishness engendered by any system which rests on
the right of the strongest is more irritable and resentful in the
civilized than the savage man, as it is enhanced by a consciousness of
guilt. In the first flush of over-confidence, when the Rebels reckoned
on taking Washington, the air was to be darkened with the gibbeted
carcasses of dogs and caitiffs. Pollard, in the first volume of his
_Southern History of the War_, prints without comment the letter
of a ruffian who helped butcher our wounded in Sudley Church after the
first battle of Manassas, in which he says that he had resolved to give
no quarter. In Missouri the Rebels took scalps as trophies, and that
they made personal ornaments of the bones of our unburied dead, and
that women wore them, though seeming incredible, has been proved beyond
question. Later in the war, they literally starved our prisoners in a
country where Sherman's army of a hundred thousand men found supplies
so abundant that they could dispense with their provision train. Yet
these were the "gentry" of the country, in whose struggle to escape
from the contamination of mob-government the better classes of England
so keenly sympathized. Our experience is thrown away unless it teach us
that every form of conventionalized injustice is instinctively in
league with every other, the world over, and that all institutions safe
only in law, but forever in danger from reason and conscience, beget
first selfishness, next fear, and then cruelty, by an incurable
degeneration. Having been thus taught that a rebellion against justice
and mercy has certain natural confederates, we must be blind indeed not
to see whose alliance at the South is to give meaning and permanence to
our victory over it.
In the North, on the other hand, nothing is more striking than the
persistence in good nature, the tenacity with which the theories of the
erring brother and the prodigal son were clung to, despite all evidence
of facts to the contrary. There was a kind of boyishness in the rumors
which the newspapers circulated (not seldom with intent to dispirit),
and the people believed on the authority of reliable gentlemen from
Richmond, or Union refugees whose information could be trusted. At one
time the Rebels had mined eleven acres in the neighborhood of Bull Bun;
at another, there were regiments of giants on their way from Texas,
who, first paralyzing our batteries by a yell, would rush unscathed
upon the guns, and rip up the unresisting artillerymen with
bowie-knives three feet long, made for that precise service, and the
only weapon to which these Berserkers would condescend; again, for the
fiftieth time, France and England had definitely agreed upon a forcible
intervention; finally, in order to sap the growing confidence of the
people in President Lincoln, one of his family was accused of
communicating our plans to the Rebels, and this at a time when the
favorite charge against his administration was the having no plan at
all. The public mind, as the public folly is generally called, was kept
in a fidget by these marvels and others like them. But the point to
which we would especially call attention is this: that while the war
slowly educated the North, it has had comparatively little effect in
shaking the old nonsense out of the South. Nothing is more striking, as
we trace Northern opinion through those four years that seemed so long
and seem so short, than to see how the minds of men were sobered,
braced, and matured as the greatness of the principles at stake became
more and more manifest; how their purpose, instead of relaxing, was
strained tighter by disappointment, and by the growing sense of a
guidance wiser than their own. Nor should we forget how slow the great
body of the people were in being persuaded of the expediency of
directly attacking slavery, and after that of enlisting colored troops;
of the fact, in short, that it must always be legal to preserve the
source of the law's authority, and constitutional to save the country.
The prudence of those measures is now acknowledged by all, and
justified by the result; but we must not be blind to the deeper moral,
that justice is always and only politic, that it needs no precedent,
and that we were prosperous in proportion as we were willing to be true
to our nobler judgment. In one respect only the popular understanding
seems always to have been, and still to remain, confused. Our notion of
treason is a purely traditional one, derived from countries where the
question at issue has not been the life of the nation, but the
conflicting titles of this or that family to govern it. Many people
appear to consider civil war as merely a more earnest kind of political
contest, which leaves the relative position of the parties as they
would be after a Presidential election. But no treason was ever so
wicked as that of Davis and his fellow-conspirators, for it had no
apology of injury or even of disputed right, and it was aimed against
the fairest hope and promise of the world. They did not attempt to put
one king in place of another, but to dethrone human nature and discrown
the very manhood of the race. And in what respect does a civil war
differ from any other in the discretion which it leaves to the victor
of exacting indemnity for the past and security for the future? A
contest begun for such ends and maintained by such expedients as this
has been, is not to be concluded by merely crying _quits_ and shaking
hands. The slaveholding States chose to make themselves a foreign
people to us, and they must take the consequences. We surely cannot be
expected to take them back as if nothing had happened, as if victory
rendered us helpless to promote good or prevent evil, and took from us
all title to insist on the admission of the very principle for which we
have sacrificed so much. The war has established the unity of the
government, but no peace will be anything more than a pretence unless
it rest upon the unity of the nation, and that can only be secured by
making everywhere supreme the national idea that freedom is a right
inherent in man himself, and not a creature of the law, to be granted
to one class of men or withheld from it at the option of another.
What have we conquered? The Southern States? The Southern people? A
cessation of present war? Surely not these or any one of these merely.
The fruit of our victory, as it was always the object of our warfare,
is the everlasting validity of the theory of the Declaration of
Independence in these United States, and the obligation before God and
man to make it the rule of our practice. It was in that only that we
were stronger than our enemies, stronger than the public opinion of the
world; and it is from that alone that we derive our right of the
strongest, for it is wisdom, justice, and the manifest will of Him who
made of one blood all the nations of the earth. It were a childish view
of the matter to think this is a mere trial of strength or struggle for
supremacy between the North and South. The war sprang from the inherent
antipathy between two forms of political organization radically hostile
to each other. Is the war over, will it ever be over, if we allow the
incompatibility to remain, childishly satisfied with a mere change of
shape? This has been the grapple of two brothers that already struggled
with each other even in the womb. One of them has fallen under the
other; but let simple, good-natured Esau beware how he slacken his grip
till he has got back his inheritance, for Jacob is cunninger with the
tongue than he.
We have said that the war has given the North a higher conception of
its manhood and its duties, and of the vital force of ideas. But do we
find any parallel change in the South? We confess we look for it in
vain. There is the same arrogance, the same materialistic mode of
thought, which reckons the strength and value of a country by the
amount of its crops rather than by the depth of political principle
which inspires its people, the same boyish conceit on which even defeat
wastes its lesson. Here is a clear case for the interference of
authority. The people have done their part by settling the fact that we
have a government; and it is for the government now to do its duty
toward the people by seeing to it that their blood and treasure shall
not have been squandered in a meaningless conflict. We must not let
ourselves be misled by the terms North and South, as if those names
implied any essential diversity of interest, or the claim to any
separate share in the future destiny of the country. Let us concede
every right to the several States except that of mischief, and never
again be deceived by the fallacy that a moral wrong can be local in its
evil influence, or that a principle alien to the instincts of the
nation can be consistent either with its prosperity or its peace. We
must not be confused into a belief that it is with States that we are
dealing in this matter. The very problem is how to reconstitute safely
a certain territory or population as States. It is not we that take
anything from them. The war has left them nothing that they can fairly
call their own politically but helplessness and confusion. We propose
only to admit them for the first time into a real union with us, and to
give them an equal share in privileges, our belief in whose value we
have proved by our sacrifices in asserting them. There is always a time
for doing what is fit to be done; and if it be done wisely,
temperately, and firmly, it need appeal for its legality to no higher
test than success. It is the nation and not a section, which is
victorious, and it is only on principles of purely national advantage
that any permanent settlement can be based.
The South will come back to the Union intent on saving whatever
fragments it can from the wreck of the evil element in its social
structure, which it clings to with that servile constancy which men
often show for the vice that is making them its victims. If they must
lose slavery, they will make a shift to be comfortable on the best
substitute they can find in a system of caste. The question for a wise
government in such a case seems to us not to be, Have we the right to
interfere? but much rather, Have we the right to let them alone? If we
are entitled, as conquerors,--and it is only as such that we are so
entitled,--to stipulate for the abolition of slavery, what is there to
prevent our exacting further conditions no less essential to our safety
and the prosperity of the South? The national unity we have paid so
dearly for will turn out a pinchbeck counterfeit, without that sympathy
of interests and ideas, that unity of the people, which can spring only
from homogeneousness of institutions. The successive advances toward
justice which we made during the war, and which looked so difficult and
doubtful before they were made, the proclamation of freedom and the
arming of the blacks, seem now to have been measures of the simplest
expediency, as the highest always turns out to be the simplest when we
have the wit to try it. The heavens were to have come crashing down
after both those measures; yet the pillars of the universe not only
stood firm on their divinely laid foundations, but held us up also,
and, to the amazement of many, God did not frown on an experiment of
righteousness. People are not yet agreed whether these things were
constitutional; we believe, indeed, that the weight of legal opinion is
against them, but nevertheless events are tolerably unanimous that
without them we should have had a fine Constitution left on our hands
with no body politic for it to animate.
Laws of the wisest human device are, after all, but the sheath of the
sword of Power, which must not be allowed to rust in them till it
cannot be drawn swiftly in time of need. President Lincoln had many
scruples to overcome ere he could overstep the limits of precedent into
the divine air of moral greatness. Like most men, he was reluctant to
be the bearer of that message of God with which his name will be linked
in the grateful memory of mankind. If he won an immortality of fame by
consenting to ally himself with the eternal justice, and to reinforce
his armies by the inspiration of their own nobler instincts, an equal
choice of renown is offered to his successor in applying the same
loyalty to conscience in the establishment of peace. We could not live
together half slave and half free; shall we succeed better in trying a
second left-handed marriage between democracy and another form of
aristocracy, less gross, but not less uncongenial? They who before
misled the country into a policy false and deadly to the very truth
which was its life and strength, by the fear of abolitionism, are
making ready to misrule it again by the meaner prejudice of color. We
can have no permanent peace with the South but by Americanizing it, by
compelling it, if need be, to accept the idea, and with it the safety
of democracy. At present we seem on the brink of contracting to protect
from insurrection States in which a majority of the population, many of
them now trained to arms, and all of them conscious of a claim upon us
to make their freedom strong enough to protect them, are to be left at
the mercy of laws which they have had no share in enacting.
The gravity of this consideration alone should make us pause. The more
thought we bestow upon the matter, the more thoroughly are we persuaded
that the only way to get rid of the negro is to do him justice.
Democracy is safe because it is just, and safe only when it is just to
all. Here is no question of white or black, but simply of man. We have
hitherto been strong in proportion as we dared be true to the sublime
thought of our own Declaration of Independence, which for the first
time proposed to embody Christianity in human laws, and announced the
discovery that the security of the state is based on the moral
instincts and the manhood of its members. In the very midnight of the
war, when we were compassed round with despondency and the fear of man,
that peerless utterance of human policy rang like a trumpet announcing
heavenly succor, and lifted us out of the darkness of our doubts into
that courage which comes of the fear of God. Now, if ever, may a
statesman depend upon the people sustaining him in doing what is simply
right, for they have found out the infinite worth of freedom, and how
much they love it, by being called on to defend it. We have seen how
our contest has been watched by a breathless world; how every humane
and generous heart, every intellect bold enough to believe that men may
be safely trusted with government as well as with any other of their
concerns, has wished us God-speed. And we have felt as never before the
meaning of those awful words, "Hell beneath is stirred for thee," as we
saw all that was mean and timid and selfish and wicked, by a horrible
impulsion of nature, gathering to the help of our enemies. Why should
we shrink from embodying our own idea as if it would turn out a
Frankenstein? Why should we let the vanquished dictate terms of peace?
A choice is offered that may never come again, unless after another
war. We should sin against our own light, if we allowed mongrel
republics to grow up again at the South, and deliberately organized
anarchy, as if it were better than war. Let the law be made equal for
all men. If the power does not exist in the Constitution, find it
somewhere else, or confess that democracy, strongest of all governments
for war, is the weakest of all in the statesmanship that shall save us
from it. There is no doubt what the wishes of the administration are.
Let them act up to their own convictions and the emergency of the hour,
sure of the support of the people; for it is one of the chief merits of
our form of polity that the public reason, which gives our Constitution
all its force, is always a reserve of power to the magistrate, open to
the appeal of justice, and ready to ratify the decisions of conscience.
There is no need of hurry in readmitting the States that locked
themselves out of the old homestead. It is not enough to conquer unless
we convert them, and time, the best means of quiet persuasion, is in
our own hands. Shall we hasten to cover with the thin ashes of another
compromise that smouldering war which we called peace for seventy
years, only to have it flame up again when the wind of Southern
doctrine has set long enough in the old quarter? It is not the absence
of war, but of its causes, that is in our grasp. That is what we fought
for, and there must be a right somewhere to enforce what all see to be
essential. To quibble away such an opportunity would be as cowardly as
unwise.
THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP
1866
Mr. Johnson is the first of our Presidents who has descended to the
stump, and spoken to the people as if they were a mob. We do not care
to waste words in criticising the taste of this proceeding, but deem it
our duty to comment on some of its graver aspects. We shall leave
entirely aside whatever was personal in the extraordinary diatribe of
the 22d of February, merely remarking that we believe the majority of
Americans have too much good sense to be flattered by an allusion to
the humbleness of their chief magistrate's origin; the matter of
interest for them being rather to ascertain what he has arrived at than
where he started from,--we do not mean in station, but in character,
intelligence, and fitness for the place he occupies. We have reason to
suspect, indeed, that pride of origin, whether high or low, springs
from the same principle in human nature, and that one is but the
positive, the other the negative, pole of a single weakness. The people
do not take it as a compliment to be told that they have chosen a
plebeian to the highest office, for they are not fond of a plebeian
tone of mind or manners. What they do like, we believe, is to be
represented by their foremost man, their highest type of courage,
sense, and patriotism, no matter what his origin. For, after all, no
one in this country incurs any natal disadvantage unless he be born to
an ease which robs him of the necessity of exerting, and so of
increasing and maturing, his natural powers. It is of very little
consequence to know what our President was; of the very highest, to
ascertain what he is, and to make the best of him. We may say, in
passing, that the bearing of Congress, under the temptations of the
last few weeks, has been most encouraging, though we must except from
our commendation the recent speech of Mr. Stevens of Pennsylvania.
There is a pride of patriotism that should make all personal pique seem
trifling; and Mr. Stevens ought to have remembered that it was not so
much the nakedness of an antagonist that he was uncovering as that of
his country.
[Illustration: _Andrew Johnson_]
The dangers of popular oratory are always great, and unhappily ours is
nearly all of this kind. Even a speaker in Congress addresses his real
hearers through the reporters and the post-office. The merits of the
question at issue concern him less than what _he_ shall say about
it so as not to ruin his own chance of reëlection, or that of some
fourth cousin to a tidewaitership. Few men have any great amount of
gathered wisdom, still fewer of extemporary, while there are unhappily
many who have a large stock of accumulated phrases, and hold their
parts of speech subject to immediate draft. In a country where the
party newspapers and speakers have done their best to make us believe
that consistency is of so much more importance than statesmanship, and
where every public man is more or less in the habit of considering what
he calls his "record" as the one thing to be saved in the general
deluge, a hasty speech, if the speaker be in a position to make his
words things, may, by this binding force which is superstitiously
attributed to the word once uttered, prove to be of public detriment.
It would be well for us if we could shake off this baleful system of
requiring that a man who has once made a fool of himself shall always
thereafter persevere in being one. Unhappily it is something more easy
of accomplishment than the final perseverance of the saints. Let us
learn to be more careful in distinguishing between betrayal of
principle, and breaking loose from a stupid consistency that compels
its victims to break their heads against the wall instead of going a
few steps round to the door. To eat our own words would seem to bear
some analogy to that diet of east-wind which is sometimes attributed to
the wild ass, and might therefore be wholesome for the tame variety of
that noble and necessary animal, which, like the poor, we are sure to
have always with us. If the words have been foolish, we can conceive of
no food likely to be more nutritious, and could almost wish that we
might have public establishments at the common charge, like those at
which the Spartans ate black broth, where we might all sit down
together to a meal of this cheaply beneficial kind. Among other
amendments of the Constitution, since every Senator seems to carry half
a dozen in his pocket nowadays, a sort of legislative six-shooter,
might we not have one to the effect that a public character might
change his mind as circumstances changed theirs, say once in five
years, without forfeiting the confidence of his fellow-citizens?
We trust that Mr. Johnson may not be so often reminded of his late
harangue as to be provoked into maintaining it as part of his settled
policy, and that every opportunity will be given him for forgetting it,
as we are sure his better sense will make him wish to do. For the more
we reflect upon it, the more it seems to us to contain, either directly
or by implication, principles of very dangerous consequence to the
well-being of the Republic. We are by no means disposed to forget Mr.
Johnson's loyalty when it was hard to be loyal, nor the many evidences
he has given of a sincere desire to accomplish what seemed to him best
for the future of the whole country; but, at the same time, we cannot
help thinking that some of his over-frank confidences of late have
shown alarming misconceptions, both of the position he holds either in
the public sentiment or by virtue of his office, and of the duty
thereby devolved upon him. We do not mean to indulge ourselves in any
nonsensical rhetoric about usurpations like those which cost an English
king his head, for we consider the matter in too serious a light, and
no crowded galleries invite us to thrill them with Bulwerian
commonplace; but we have a conviction that the exceptional
circumstances of the last five years, which gave a necessary
predominance to the executive part of our government, have left behind
them a false impression of the prerogative of a President in ordinary
times. The balance-wheel of our system has insensibly come to think
itself the motive power, whereas that, to be properly effective, should
always be generated by the deliberate public opinion of the country.
Already the Democratic party, anxious to profit by any chance at
resuscitation,--for it is extremely inconvenient to be dead so
long,--is more than hinting that the right of veto was given to the
President that he might bother and baffle a refractory Congress into
concession, not to his reasons, but to his whim. There seemed to be a
plan, at one time of forming a President's party, with no principle but
that of general opposition to the policy of that great majority which
carried him into power. Such a scheme might have had some chance of
success in the good old times when it seemed to the people as if there
was nothing more important at stake than who should be in and who out;
but it would be sure of failure now that the public mind is
intelligently made up as to the vital meaning of whatever policy we
adopt, and the necessity of establishing our institutions, once for
all, on a basis as permanent as human prudence can make it.
Congress is sometimes complained of for wasting time in discussion, and
for not having, after a four months' session, arrived at any definite
plan of settlement. There has been, perhaps, a little eagerness on the
part of honorable members to associate their names with the particular
nostrum that is to build up our national system again. In a country
where, unhappily, any man may be President, it is natural that a means
of advertising so efficacious as this should not be neglected. But
really, we do not see how Congress can be blamed for not being ready
with a plan definite and precise upon every point of possible
application, when it is not yet in possession of the facts according to
whose varying complexion the plan must be good or bad. The question
with us is much more whether another branch of the government,--to
which, from its position and its opportunity for a wider view, the
country naturally looks for initiative suggestion, and in which a few
months ago even decisive action would have been pardoned,--whether this
did not let the lucky moment go by without using it. That moment was
immediately after Mr. Lincoln's murder, when the victorious nation was
ready to apply, and the conquered faction would have submitted without
a murmur to that bold and comprehensive policy which is the only wise
as it is the only safe one for great occasions. To let that moment slip
was to descend irrecoverably from the vantage ground where
statesmanship is an exact science to the experimental level of
tentative politics. We cannot often venture to set our own house on
fire with civil war, in order to heat our iron up to that point of easy
forging at which it glowed, longing for the hammer of the master-smith,
less than a year ago. That Occasion is swift we learned long ago from
the adage; but this volatility is meant only of moments where force of
personal character is decisive, where the fame or fortune of a single
man is at stake. The life of nations can afford to take less strict
account of time, and in their affairs there may always be a hope that
the slow old tortoise, Prudence, may overtake again the opportunity
that seemed flown by so irrecoverably. Our people have shown so much of
this hard-shelled virtue during the last five years, that we look with
more confidence than apprehension to the result of our present
difficulties. Never was the common-sense of a nation more often and
directly appealed to, never was it readier in coming to its conclusion
and making it operative in public affairs, than during the war whose
wounds we are now endeavoring to stanch. It is the duty of patriotic
men to keep this great popular faculty always in view, to satisfy its
natural demand for clearness and practicality in the measures proposed,
and not to distract it and render it nugatory by the insubstantial
metaphysics of abstract policy. From the splitting of heads to the
splitting of hairs would seem to be a long journey, and yet some are
already well on their way to the end of it, who should be the leaders
of public opinion and not the skirmishing harassers of its march. It
would be well if some of our public men would consider that Providence
has saved their modesty the trial of an experiment in cosmogony, and
that their task is the difficult, no doubt, but much simpler and less
ambitious one, of bringing back the confused material which lies ready
to their hand, always with a divinely implanted instinct of order in
it, to as near an agreement with the providential intention as their
best wisdom can discern. The aggregate opinion of a nation moves
slowly. Like those old migrations of entire tribes, it is encumbered
with much household stuff; a thousand unforeseen things may divert or
impede it; a hostile check or the temptation of present convenience may
lead it to settle far short of its original aim; the want of some
guiding intellect and central will may disperse it; but experience
shows one constant element of its progress, which those who aspire to
be its leaders should keep in mind, namely, that the place of a wise
general should be oftener in the rear or the centre than the extreme
front. The secret of permanent leadership is to know how to be
moderate. The rashness of conception that makes opportunity, the
gallantry that heads the advance, may win admiration, may possibly
achieve a desultory and indecisive exploit; but it is the slow
steadiness of temper, bent always on the main design and the general
movement, that gains by degrees a confidence as unshakable as its own,
the only basis for permanent power over the minds of men. It was the
surest proof of Mr. Lincoln's sagacity and the deliberate reach of his
understanding, that he never thought time wasted while he waited for
the wagon that brought his supplies. The very immovability of his
purpose, fixed always on what was attainable, laid him open to the
shallow criticism of having none,--for a shooting star draws more eyes,
and seems for the moment to have a more definite aim, than a
planet,--but it gained him at last such a following as made him
irresistible. It lays a much lighter tax on the intellect, and proves
its resources less, to suggest a number of plans, than to devise and
carry through a single one.
Mr. Johnson has an undoubted constitutional right to choose any, or to
reject all, of the schemes of settlement proposed by Congress, though
the wisdom of his action in any case is a perfectly proper subject of
discussion among those who put him where he is, who are therefore
responsible for his power of good or evil, and to whom the consequences
of his decision must come home at last. He has an undoubted personal
right to propose any scheme of settlement himself, and to advocate it
with whatever energy of reason or argument he possesses, but is liable,
in our judgment, to very grave reprehension if he appeal to the body of
the people against those who are more immediately its representatives
than himself in any case of doubtful expediency, before discussion is
exhausted, and where the difference may well seem one of personal pique
rather than of considerate judgment. This is to degrade us from a
republic, in whose fore-ordered periodicity of submission to popular
judgment democracy has guarded itself against its own passions, to a
mass meeting, where momentary interest, panic, or persuasive
sophistry--all of them gregarious influences, and all of them
contagious--may decide by a shout what years of afterthought may find
it hard, or even impossible, to undo. There have been some things in
the deportment of the President of late that have suggested to
thoughtful men rather the pettish foible of wilfulness than the
strength of well-trained and conscientious will. It is by the objects
for whose sake the force of volition is called into play that we decide
whether it is childish or manly, whether we are to call it obstinacy or
firmness. Our own judgment can draw no favorable augury from meetings
gathered "to sustain the President," as it is called, especially if we
consider the previous character of those who are prominent in them, nor
from the ill-considered gossip about a "President's party;" and they
would excite our apprehension of evil to come, did we not believe that
the experience of the last five years had settled into convictions in
the mind of the people. The practical result to which all benevolent
men finally come is that it is idle to try to sustain any man who has
not force of character enough to sustain himself without their help,
and the only party which has any chance now before the people is that
of resolute good sense. What is now demanded of Congress is unanimity
in the best course that is feasible. They should recollect that Wisdom
is more likely to be wounded in the division of those who should be her
friends, than either of the parties to the quarrel. Our difficulties
are by no means so great as timid or interested people would represent
them to be. We are to decide, it is true, for posterity; but the
question presented to us is precisely that which every man has to
decide in making his will,--neither greater nor less than that, nor
demanding a wisdom above what that demands. The power is in our own
hands, so long as it is prudent for us to keep it there; and we are
justified, not in doing simply what we will with our own, but what is
best to be done. The great danger in the present posture of affairs
seems to be lest the influence which in Mr. Lincoln's case was inherent
in the occasion and the man should have held over in the popular mind
as if it were entailed upon the office. To our minds more is to be
apprehended in such a conjuncture from the weakness than from the
strength of the President's character.
There is another topic which we feel obliged to comment on, regretting
deeply, as we do, that the President has given us occasion for it, and
believing, as we would fain do, that his own better judgment will lead
him to abstain from it in the future. He has most unfortunately
permitted himself to assume a sectional ground. Geography is learned to
little purpose in Tennessee, if it does not teach that the Northeast as
well as the Southwest is an integral and necessary part of the United
States. By the very necessity of his high office, a President becomes
an American, whose concern is with the outward boundaries of his
country, and not its internal subdivisions. One great object of the
war, we had supposed, was to abolish all fallacies of sectional
distinction in a patriotism that could embrace something wider than a
township, a county, or even a State. But Mr. Johnson has chosen to
revive the paltry party-cries from before that deluge which we hoped
had washed everything clean, and to talk of treason at both ends of the
Union, as if there were no difference between men who attempted the
life of their country, and those who differ from him in their judgment
of what is best for her future safety and greatness. We have heard
enough of New England radicalism, as if that part of the country where
there is the most education and the greatest accumulation of property
in the hands of the most holders were the most likely to be carried
away by what are called agrarian theories. All that New England and the
West demand is that America should be American; that every relic of a
barbarism more archaic than any institution of the Old World should be
absolutely and irrecoverably destroyed; that there should be no longer
two peoples here, but one, homogeneous and powerful by a sympathy in
idea. Does Mr. Johnson desire anything more? Does he, alas! desire
anything less? If so, it may be the worse for his future fame, but it
will not and cannot hinder the irresistible march of that national
instinct which forced us into war, brought us out of it victorious, and
will not now be cheated of its fruits. If we may trust those who have
studied the matter, it is moderate to say that more than half the
entire population of the Free States is of New England descent, much
more than half the native population. It is by the votes of these men
that Mr. Johnson holds his office; it was as the exponent of their
convictions of duty and policy that he was chosen to it. Not a vote did
he or could he get in a single one of the States in rebellion. If they
were the American people when they elected him to execute their will,
are they less the American people now? It seems to us the idlest of all
possible abstractions now to discuss the question whether the
rebellious States were ever out of the Union or not, as if that settled
the right of secession. The victory of superior strength settled it,
and nothing else. For four years they were practically as much out of
the Union as Japan; had they been strong enough, they would have
continued out of it; and what matters it where they were theoretically?
Why, until Queen Victoria, every English sovereign assumed the style of
King of France. The King of Sardinia was, and the King of Italy, we
suppose, is still titular King of Jerusalem. Did either monarch ever
exercise sovereignty or levy taxes in those imaginary dominions? What
the war accomplished for us was the reduction of an insurgent
population; and what it settled was, not the right of secession, for
that must always depend on will and strength, but that every inhabitant
of every State was a subject as well as a citizen of the United
States,--in short, that the theory of freedom was limited by the
equally necessary theory of authority. We hoped to hear less in future
of the possible interpretations by which the Constitution may be made
to mean this or that, and more of what will help the present need and
conduce to the future strength and greatness of the whole country. It
was by precisely such constitutional quibbles, educating men to believe
they had a right to claim whatever they could sophistically demonstrate
to their own satisfaction,--and self-interest is the most cunning of
sophists,--that we were interpreted, in spite of ourselves, into civil
war. It was by just such a misunderstanding of one part of the country
by another as that to which Mr. Johnson has lent the weight of his name
and the authority of his place, that rendered a hearty national
sympathy, and may render a lasting reorganization, impossible.
If history were still written as it was till within two centuries, and
the author put into the mouth of his speakers such words as his
conception of the character and the situation made probable and
fitting, we could conceive an historian writing a hundred years hence
to imagine some such speech as this for Mr. Johnson in an interview
with a Southern delegation.
"Gentlemen, I am glad to meet you once more as friends, I wish I might
say as fellow-citizens. How soon we may again stand in that relation to
each other depends wholly upon yourselves. You have been pleased to say
that my birth and lifelong associations gave you confidence that I
would be friendly to the South. In so saying, you do no more than
justice to my heart and my intentions; but you must allow me to tell
you frankly, that, if you use the word South in any other than a purely
geographical sense, the sooner you convince yourselves of its
impropriety as addressed to an American President, the better. The
South as a political entity was Slavery, and went out of existence with
it. And let me also, as naturally connected with this topic, entreat
you to disabuse your minds of the fatally mistaken theory that you have
been conquered by the North. It is the American people who are victors
in this conflict, and who intend to inflict no worse penalty on you
than that of admitting you to an entire equality with themselves. They
are resolved, by God's grace, to Americanize you, and America means
education, equality before the law, and every upward avenue of life
made as free to one man as another. You urge upon me, with great force
and variety of argument, the manifold evils of the present unsettled
state of things, the propriety and advantage of your being represented
in both houses of Congress, the injustice of taxation without
representation. I admit the importance of every one of these
considerations, but I think you are laboring under some misapprehension
of the actual state of affairs. I know not if any of you have been in
America since the spring of 1861, or whether (as I rather suspect) you
have all been busy in Europe endeavoring to--but I beg pardon, I did
not intend to say anything that should recall old animosities. But
intelligence is slow to arrive in any part of the world, and
intelligence from America painfully so in reaching Europe. You do not
seem to be aware that _something has happened here during the last
four years_, something that has made a very painful and lasting
impression on the memory of the American people, whose voice on this
occasion I have the honor to be. They feel constrained to demand that
you shall enter into bonds to keep the peace. They do not, I regret to
say, agree with you in looking upon what has happened here of late as
only a more emphatic way of settling a Presidential election, the
result of which leaves both parties entirely free to try again. They
seem to take the matter much more seriously. Nor do they, so far as I
can see, agree with you in your estimate of the importance of
conserving your several state sovereignties, as you continue to call
them, insisting much rather on the conservation of America and of
American ideas. They say that the only thing which can individualize or
perpetuate a commonwealth is to have a history; and they ask which of
the States lately in rebellion, except Virginia and South Carolina, had
anything of the kind? In spite of my natural sympathies, gentlemen, my
reason compels me to agree with them. Your strength, such as it was,
was due less to the fertility of your brains than to that of your soil
and to the invention of the Yankee Whitney which you used and never
paid for. You tell me it is hard to put you on a level with your
negroes. As a believer in the superiority of the white race, I cannot
admit the necessity of enforcing that superiority by law. A Roman
emperor once said that gold never retained the unpleasant odor of its
source, and I must say to you that loyalty is sweet to me, whether it
throb under a black skin or a white. The American people has learned of
late to set a greater value on the color of ideas than on shades of
complexion. As to the injustice of taxation without representation,
that is an idea derived from our English ancestors, and is liable, like
all rules, to the exceptions of necessity. I see no reason why a State
may not as well be disfranchised as a borough for an illegal abuse of
its privileges; nor do I quite feel the parity of the reason which
should enable you to do that with a loyal black which we may not do
with a disloyal white. Remember that this government is bound by every
obligation, ethical and political, to protect these people because they
are weak, and to reward them (if the common privilege of manhood may be
called a reward) because they are faithful. We are not fanatics, but a
nation that has neither faith in itself nor faith toward others must
soon crumble to pieces by moral dry-rot. If we may conquer you,
gentlemen, (and you forced the necessity upon us,) we may surely impose
terms upon you; for it is an old principle of law that _cui liceat
majus, ei licet etiam minus_.
"In your part of the country, gentlemen, that which we should naturally
appeal to as the friend of order and stability--property--is blindly
against us; prejudice is also against us; and we have nothing left to
which we can appeal but human nature and the common privilege of
manhood. You seem to have entertained some hope that I would gather
about myself a 'President's party,' which should be more friendly to
you and those animosities which you mistake for interests. But you
grossly deceive yourselves; I have nor sympathy but with my whole
country, and there is nothing out of which such a party as you dream of
could be constructed, except the broken remnant of those who deserted
you when for the first time you needed their help and not their
subserviency, and those feathery characters who are drawn hither and
thither by the chances of office. I need not say to you that I am and
can be nothing in this matter but the voice of the nation's deliberate
resolve. The recent past is too painful, the immediate future too
momentous, to tolerate any personal considerations. You throw
yourselves upon our magnanimity, and I must be frank with you. My
predecessor, Mr. Buchanan, taught us the impolicy of weakness and
concession. The people are magnanimous, but they understand by
magnanimity a courageous steadiness in principle. They do not think it
possible that a large heart should consist with a narrow brain; and
they would consider it pusillanimous in them to consent to the weakness
of their country by admitting you to a share in its government before
you have given evidence of sincere loyalty to its principles, or, at
least, of wholesome fear of its power. They believe, and I heartily
agree with them, that a strong nation begets strong citizens, and a
weak one weak,--that the powers of the private man are invigorated and
enlarged by his confidence in the power of the body politic; and they
see no possible means of attaining or securing this needed strength but
in that homogeneousness of laws and institutions which breeds unanimity
of ideas and sentiments, no way of arriving at that homogeneousness but
the straightforward path of perfect confidence in freedom. All nations
have a right to security, ours to greatness; and must have the one as
an essential preliminary to the other. If your prejudices stand in the
way, and you are too weak to rid yourselves of them, it will be for the
American people to consider whether the plain duty of conquering them
for you will be, after all, so difficult a conquest as some they have
already achieved. By yourselves or us they must be conquered.
Gentlemen, in bidding you farewell, I ask you to consider whether you
have not forgotten that, in order to men's living peacefully together
in communities, the idea of government must precede that of liberty,
and that the one is as much the child of necessity as the other is a
slow concession to civilization, which itself mainly consists in the
habit of obedience to something more refined than force."
THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION
1866
The late Philadelphia experiment at making a party out of nullities
reminds us of nothing so much as of the Irishman's undertaking to
produce a very palatable soup out of no more costly material than a
pebble. Of course he was to be furnished with a kettle as his field of
operations, and after that he asked only for just the least bit of beef
in the world to give his culinary miracle a flavor, and a pinch of salt
by way of relish. As nothing could be more hollow and empty than the
pretence on which the new movement was founded, nothing more coppery
than the material out of which it was mainly composed, we need look no
further for the likeness of a kettle wherewith to justify our
comparison; as for the stone, nothing could be more like that than the
Northern disunion faction, which was to be the chief ingredient in the
newfangled pottage, and whose leading characteristic for the last five
years has been a uniform alacrity in going under; the offices in the
gift of the President might very well be reckoned on to supply the beef
which should lead by their noses the weary expectants whose hunger
might be too strong for their nicety of stomach; and the pinch of
salt,--why could not that be found in the handful of Republicans who
might be drawn over by love of notoriety, private disgusts, or that
mixture of motives which has none of the substance of opinion, much
less of the tenacity of principle, but which is largely operative in
the action of illogical minds? But the people? Would they be likely to
have their appetite aroused by the fumes of this thin decoction? Where
a Chinaman is cook, one is apt to be a little suspicious; and if the
Address in which the Convention advertised their ingenious mess had not
a little in its verbiage to remind one of the flowery kingdom, there
was something in that part of the assemblage which could claim any
bygone merit of Republicanism calculated to stimulate rather than to
allay any dreadful surmise of the sagacious rodent which our antipodes
are said to find savory. And as for the people, it is a curious fact,
that the party which has always been loudest to profess its faith in
their capacity of self-government has been the last to conceive it
possible that they should apprehend a principle, arrive at a logical
conclusion, or be influenced by any other than a mean motive. The
_cordons bleus_ of the political cooks at Philadelphia were men
admirably adapted for the petty intrigues of a local caucus, but by
defect of nature profoundly unconscious of that simple process of
generalization from a few plain premises by which the popular mind is
guided in times like these, and upon questions which appeal to the
moral instincts of men.
The Convention was well managed, we freely admit,--and why not, when
all those who were allowed to have any leading part in it belonged
exclusively to that class of men who are known as party managers, and
who, like the director of a theatre or a circus, look upon the mass of
mankind as creatures to be influenced by a taking title, by amplitude
of posters, and by a thrilling sensation or two, no matter how coarse?
As for the title, nothing could be better than that of the "Devoted
Unionists,"--and were not the actors, no less than the scenery and
decorations, for the most part entirely new,--at least in that
particular play? Advertisement they did not lack, with the whole
Democratic press and the Department of State at their service, not to
speak of the real clown being allowed to exhibit himself at short
intervals upon the highest platform in this or any other country. And
if we ask for sensation, never were so many performers exhibited
together in their grand act of riding two horses at once, or leaping
through a hoop with nothing more substantial to resist them than the
tissue-paper of former professions, nay, of recent pledges. And yet the
skill of the managers had something greater still behind, in
Massachusetts linked arm in arm with South Carolina. To be sure, a
thoughtful mind might find something like a false syllogism in pairing
off a Commonwealth whose greatest sin it has been to lead the van in
freedom of opinion, and in those public methods of enlightenment which
make it a safeguard of popular government, with an Oligarchy whose
leadership has been in precisely the opposite direction, as if both had
equally sinned against American ideas. But such incongruities are
trifles no greater than those of costume so common on every stage; and
perhaps the only person to be pitied in the exhibition was Governor
Orr, who had once uttered a hope that his own State might one day walk
abreast with the daughter of Puritan forethought in the nobler
procession of prosperous industry, and who must have felt a slight
shock of surprise, if nothing more, at the form in which Massachusetts
had chosen to incarnate herself on that particular occasion. We cannot
congratulate the Convention on the name of its chairman, for there is
something ominously suggestive in it. But, on the other hand it is to
be remembered that Mr. Doolittle has a remarkably powerful voice, which
is certainly one element in the manufacture of sound opinions. A little
too much latitude was allowed to Mr. Raymond in the Address, though on
the whole perhaps it was prudent to make that document so long as to
insure it against being read. In their treatment of Mr. Vallandigham
the managers were prudent. He was allowed to appear just enough not
quite to alienate his party, on whom the new movement counts largely
for support, and just not enough to compromise the Convention with the
new recruits it had made among those who would follow the name
Conservative into anything short of downright anarchy. The Convention,
it must be confessed, had a rather hard problem to solve,--nothing less
than to make their patent reconciliation cement out of fire and
gunpowder, both useful things in themselves, but liable in concert to
bring about some odd results in the way of harmonious action. It is
generally thought wiser to keep them apart, and accordingly Mr.
Vallandigham was excluded from the Convention altogether, and the
Southern delegates were not allowed any share in the Address or
Resolutions. Indeed, as the Northern members were there to see what
they could make, and the Southern to find out how much they could save,
and whatever could be made or saved was to come out of the North, it
was more prudent to leave all matters of policy in the hands of those
who were supposed to understand best the weak side of the intended
victim. The South was really playing the game, and is to have the
lion's share of the winnings; but it is only as a disinterested
bystander, who looks over the cards of one of the parties, and guides
his confederate by hints so adroitly managed as not to alarm the
pigeon. The Convention avoided the reef where the wreck of the Chicago
lies bleaching; but we are not so sure that they did not ground
themselves fast upon the equally dangerous mud-bank that lies on the
opposite side of the honest channel. At Chicago they were so precisely
frank as to arouse indignation; at Philadelphia they are so careful of
generalities that they make us doubtful, if not suspicious. Does the
expectation or even the mere hope of pudding make the utterance as
thick as if the mouth were already full of it? As to the greater part
of the Resolutions, they were political truisms in which everybody
would agree as so harmless that the Convention might almost as well
have resolved the multiplication table article by article. The Address
was far less explicit; and where there is so very much meal, it is
perhaps not altogether uncharitable to suspect that there may be
something under it. There is surely a suspicious bulge here and there,
that has the look of the old Democratic cat. But, after all, of what
consequence are the principles of the party, when President Johnson
covers them all when he puts on his hat, and may change them between
dinner and tea, as he has done several times already? The real
principle of the party, its seminal and vital principle alike, is the
power of the President, and its policy is every moment at the mercy of
his discretion. That power has too often been the plaything of whim,
and that discretion the victim of ill-temper or vanity, for us to have
any other feeling left than regret for the one and distrust of the
other.
The new party does not seem to have drawn to itself any great accession
of strength from the Republican side, or indeed to have made many
converts that were not already theirs in fact, though not in name. It
was joined, of course, at once by the little platoon of gentlemen
calling themselves, for some mystical reason, Conservatives, who have
for some time been acting with the Democratic faction, carefully
keeping their handkerchiefs to their noses all the while. But these
involuntary Catos are sure, as if by instinct, to choose that side
which is doomed not to please the gods, and their adhesion is as good
as a warranty of defeat. During the President's progress they must
often have been driven to their handkerchiefs again. It was a great
blunder of Mr. Seward to allow him to assume the apostolate of the new
creed in person, for every word he has uttered must have convinced
many, even of those unwilling to make the admission, that a doctrine
could hardly be sound which had its origin and derives its power from a
source so impure. For so much of Mr. Johnson's harangues as is not
positively shocking, we know of no parallel so close as in his Imperial
Majesty Kobes I.:--
"Er rühmte dass er nie studirt
Auf Universitäten
Und Reden sprachi aus sich selbst heraus,
Ganz ohne Facultäten."
And when we consider his power of tears; when we remember Mr. Reverdy
Johnson and Mr. Andrew Johnson confronting each other like two augurs,
the one trying not to laugh while he saw the other trying to cry; when
we recall the touching scene at Canandaigua, where the President was
overpowered by hearing the pathetic announcement that Stephen A.
Douglas had for two years attended the academy in what will doubtless
henceforward be dubbed that "classic locality," we cannot help thinking
of
"In seinem schönen Auge glänzt
Die Thräne, die Stereotype."
Indeed, if the exhibition of himself were not so profoundly sad, when
we think of the high place he occupies and the great man he succeeded
in it, nothing could well be so comic as some of the incidents of Mr.
Johnson's tour. No satirist could have conceived anything so
bewitchingly absurd as the cheers which greeted the name of Simeon at
the dinner in New York, whether we suppose the audience to have thought
him some eminent member of their party of whom they had never heard, or
whom they had forgotten as thoroughly as they had Mr. Douglas, or if we
consider that they were involuntarily giving vent to their delight at
the pleasing prospect opened by their "illustrious guest's" allusion to
his speedy departure. Nor could anything have been imagined beforehand
so ludicrously ominous as Mr. Seward's fears lest the platform should
break down under them at Niagara. They were groundless fears, it is
true, for the Johnson platform gave way irreparably on the 22d of
February; but they at least luckily prevented Nicholas Bottom Cromwell
from uttering his after-dinner threat against the people's immediate
representatives, against the very body whose vote supplies the funds of
his party, and whose money, it seems, is constitutional, even if its
own existence as a Congress be not. We pity Mr. Seward in his new
office of bear-leader. How he must hate his Bruin when it turns out
that his tricks do not even please the crowd!
But the ostensible object of this indecent orgy seems to us almost as
discreditable as the purpose it veiled so thinly. Who was Stephen A.
Douglas, that the President, with his Cabinet and the two highest
officers of the army and navy, should add their official dignity to the
raising of his monument, and make the whole country an accomplice in
consecrating his memory? His name is not associated with a single
measure of national importance, unless upon the wrong side. So far was
he from being a statesman that, even on the lower ground of politics,
both his principles and his expression of them were tainted with the
reek of vulgar associations. A man of naturally great abilities he
certainly was, but wholly without that instinct for the higher
atmosphere of thought or ethics which alone makes them of value to any
but their possessor, and without which they are more often dangerous
than serviceable to the commonwealth. He habitually courted those
weaknesses in the people which tend to degrade them into a populace,
instead of appealing to the virtues that grow by use, and whose mere
acknowledgment in a man in some sort ennobles him. And by doing this he
proved that he despised the very masses whose sweet breaths he wooed,
and had no faith in the system under which alone such a one as he could
have been able to climb so high. He never deserted the South to take
side with the country till the South had both betrayed and deserted
him. If such a man were the fairest outcome of Democracy, then is it
indeed a wretched failure. But for the factitious importance given to
his name by the necessity of furnishing the President with a pretext
for stumping the West in the interest of Congress, Mr. Douglas would be
wellnigh as utterly forgotten as Cass or Tyler, or Buchanan or
Fillmore; nor should we have alluded to him now but that the recent
pilgrimage has made his name once more public property, and because we
think it a common misfortune when such men are made into saints, though
for any one's advantage but their own. We certainly have no wish to
play the part of _advocatus diaboli_ on such an occasion, even were it
necessary at a canonization where the office of Pontifex Maximus is so
appropriately filled by Mr. Johnson.
In speaking of the late unhappy exposure of the unseemly side of
democratic institutions, we have been far from desirous of insisting on
Mr. Seward's share in it. We endeavored to account for it at first by
supposing that the Secretary of State, seeing into the hands of how
vain and weak a man the reins of administration had fallen, was
willing, by flattering his vanity, to control his weakness for the
public good. But we are forced against our will to give up any such
theory, and to confess that Mr. Seward's nature has been "subdued to
what it works in." We see it with sincere sorrow, and are far from
adding our voice to the popular outcry against a man the long and
honorable services of whose prime we are not willing to forget in the
decline of his abilities and that dry-rot of the mind's nobler temper
which so often results from the possession of power. Long contact with
the meaner qualities of men, to whose infection place and patronage are
so unhappily exposed, could not fail of forcing to a disproportionate
growth any germs of that cynicism always latent in temperaments so
exclusively intellectual and unmitigated by any kindly lenitive of
humor. Timid by nature, the war which he had prophesied, but had not
foreseen, and which invigorated bolder men, unbraced him; and while the
spendthrift verbosity of his despatches was the nightmare of foreign
ministries, his uncertain and temporizing counsels were the perpetual
discouragement of his party at home. More than any minister with whose
official correspondence we are acquainted, he carried the principle of
paper money into diplomacy, and bewildered Earl Russell and M. Drouyn
de Lhuys with a horrible doubt as to the real value of the verbal
currency they were obliged to receive. But, unfortunately, his own
countrymen were also unprovided with a price-current of the latest
quotation in phrases, and the same gift of groping and inconclusive
generalities which perhaps was useful as a bewilderment to would-be
hostile governments abroad was often equally effective in disheartening
the defenders of nationality at home. We cannot join with those who
accuse Mr. Seward of betraying his party, for we think ourselves
justified by recent events in believing that he has always looked upon
parties as the mere ladders of ambitious men; and when his own broke
under him at Chicago in 1860, he forthwith began to cast about for
another, the rounds of which might be firmer under his feet. He is not
the first, and we fear will not be the last, of our public men who have
thought to climb into the White House by a back window, and have come
ignominiously to the ground in attempting it. Mr. Seward's view of the
matter probably is that the Republican party deserted him six years
ago, and that he was thus absolved of all obligations to it. But might
there not have been such a thing as fidelity to its principles? Or was
Mr. Seward drawn insensibly into the acceptance of them by the drift of
political necessity, and did he take them up as if they were but the
hand that had been dealt him in the game, not from any conviction of
their moral permanence and power, perhaps with no perception of it, but
from a mere intellectual persuasion of the use that might be made of
them politically and for the nonce by a skilful gamester? We should be
very unwilling to admit such a theory of his character; but surely what
we have just seen would seem to justify it, for we can hardly conceive
that any one should suddenly descend from real statesmanship to the use
of such catch-rabble devices as those with which he has lately
disgusted the country. A small politician cannot be made out of a great
statesman, for there is an oppugnancy of nature between the two things,
and we may fairly suspect the former winnings of a man who has been
once caught with loaded dice in his pocket. However firm may be Mr.
Seward's faith in the new doctrine of Johnsonian infallibility, surely
he need not have made himself a partner in its vulgarity. And yet he
has attempted to vie with the Jack-pudding tricks of the unrivalled
performer whose man-of-business he is, in attempting a _populacity_
(we must coin a new word for a new thing) for which he was exquisitely
unfitted. What more stiffly awkward than his essays at easy
familiarity? What more painfully remote from drollery than his efforts
to be droll? In the case of a man who descends so far as Mr. Seward,
such feats can be characterized by no other word so aptly as by
tumbling. The thing would be sad enough in any prominent man, but in
him it becomes a public shame, for in the eyes of the world it is the
nation that tumbles in its Prime Minister. The Secretary of State's
place may be dependent on the President, but the dignity of it belongs
to the country, and neither of them has any right to trifle with it.
Mr. Seward might stand on his head in front of what Jenkins calls his
"park gate," at Auburn, and we should be the last to question his
perfect right as a private citizen to amuse himself in his own way, but
in a great officer of the government such pranks are no longer
harmless. They are a national scandal, and not merely so, but a
national detriment, inasmuch as they serve to foster in foreign
statesman a profound misapprehension of the American people and of the
motives which influence them in questions of public policy. Never was
so great a wrong done to democracy, nor so great an insult offered to
it, as in this professional circuit of the presidential Punch and his
ministerial showman.
Fortunately, the exhibitions of this unlucky pair, and their passing
round the hat without catching even the greasy pence they courted,
have very little to do with the great question to be decided at the
next elections, except in so far as we may be justified in suspecting
their purity of motive who could consent to such impurity of means,
and the soundness of their judgment in great things who in small ones
show such want of sagacity. The crowds they have drawn are no index of
popular approval. We remember seeing the prodigious nose of Mr. Tyler
(for the person behind it had been added by nature merely as the handle
to so fine a hatchet) drawn by six white horses through the streets,
and followed by an eager multitude, nine tenths of whom thought the
man belonging to it a traitor to the party which had chosen him. But
then the effigy at least of a grandiose, if not a great man, sat beside
him, and the display was saved from contempt by the massive shape of
Webster, beneath which he showed like a swallow against a thunder-cloud.
Even Mr. Fillmore, to whom the Fugitive Slave Law denies the complete
boon of an otherwise justly earned oblivion, had some dignity given to
his administration by the presence of Everett. But in this late
advertising-tour of a policy in want of a party, Cleon and Agoracritus
seem to have joined partnership, and the manners of the man match those
of the master. Mr. Johnson cannot so much as hope for the success in
escaping memory achieved by the last of those small Virginians whom the
traditionary fame of a State once fertile in statesmen lifted to four
years of imperial pillory, where his own littleness seemed to heighten
rather than lower the grandeur of his station; his name will not be
associated with the accomplishment of a great wrong against humanity,
let us hope not with the futile attempt at one; but he will be
indignantly remembered as the first, and we trust the last, of our
chief magistrates who believed in the brutality of the people, and gave
to the White House the ill-savor of a corner-grocery. _He_ a tribune of
the people? A lord of misrule, an abbot of unreason, much rather!
No one can object more strongly than we to the mixing of politics with
personal character; but they are here inextricably entangled together,
and we hold it to be the duty of every journal in the country to join
in condemning a spectacle which silence might seem to justify as a
common event in our politics. We turn gladly from the vulgarity of the
President and his minister to consider the force of their arguments.
Mr. Johnson seems to claim that he has not betrayed the trust to which
he was elected, mainly because the Union party have always affirmed
that the rebellious States could not secede, and therefore _ex vi
termini_ are still in the Union. The corollary drawn from this is,
that they have therefore a manifest right to immediate representation
in Congress. What we have always understood the Union party as meaning
to affirm was, that a State had no right to secede; and it was upon
that question, which is a very different thing from the other, that the
whole controversy hinged. To assert that a State or States could not
secede, if they were strong enough, would be an absurdity. In point of
fact, all but three of the Slave States did secede, and for four years
it would have been treason throughout their whole territory, and death
on the nearest tree, to assert the contrary. The law forbids a man to
steal, but he may steal, nevertheless; and then, if he had Mr.
Johnson's power as a logician, he might claim to escape all penalty by
pleading that when the law said _should not_ it meant _could
not_, and therefore he _had not_. If a four years' war, if a
half million lives, and if a debt which is counted by the thousand
million are not satisfactory proofs that somebody did contrive to
secede practically, whatever the theoretic right may have been, then
nothing that ought not to be done ever has been done. We do not,
however, consider the question as to whether the Rebel States were
constitutionally, or in the opinion of any political organization, out
of the Union or not as of the least practical importance; for we have
never known an instance in which any party has retreated into the
thickets and swamps of constitutional interpretation, where it had the
least chance of maintaining its ground in the open field of common
sense or against the pressure of popular will. The practical fact is,
that the will of the majority, or the national necessity for the time
being, has always been constitutional; which is only as much as to say
that the Convention of 1787 was not wholly made up of inspired
prophets, who could provide beforehand for every possible contingency.
The doctrine of a strict and even pettifogging interpretation of the
Constitution had its rise among men who looked upon that instrument as
a treaty, and at a time when the conception of a national power which
should receive that of the States into its stream as tributary was
something which had entered the head of only here and there a dreamer.
The theorists of the Virginia school would have dammed up and diverted
the force of each State into a narrow channel of its own, with its
little saw-mill and its little grist-mill for local needs, instead of
letting it follow the slopes of the continental water-shed to swell the
volume of one great current ample for the larger uses and needful for
the higher civilization of all. That there should always be a school
who interpret the Constitution by its letter is a good thing, as
interposing a check to hasty or partial action, and gaining time for
ample discussion; but that in the end we should be governed by its
spirit, living and operative in the energies of an advancing people, is
a still better thing; since the levels and shore-lines of politics are
no more stationary than those of continents, and the ship of state
would in time be left aground far inland, to long in vain for that open
sea which is the only pathway to fortune and to glory.
Equally idle with the claim that the Union party is foreclosed from now
dealing with the Rebel States as seceded, because four years ago it
declared that they had no right to secede, is the assertion that the
object of the war was proclaimed to be for the restoration of the Union
and the Constitution as they were. Even were we to admit that 1861 is
the same thing as 1866, the question comes back again to precisely the
point that is at issue between the President and Congress, namely, What
is the wisest way of restoring the Union? for which both profess
themselves equally anxious. As for the Constitution, we cannot have
that as it was, but only as its framers hoped it would be, with its one
weak and wicked element excluded. But as to Union, are we in favor of a
Union in form or in fact? of a Union on the map and in our national
style merely, or one of ideas, interests, and aspirations? If we cannot
have the latter, the former is a delusion and a snare; and the strength
of the nation would be continually called away from prosperous toil to
be wasted in holding a wolf by the ears, which would still be a wolf,
and known by all our enemies for such, though we called heaven and
earth to witness, in no matter how many messages or resolves, that the
innocent creature was a lamb. That somebody has a right to dictate some
kind of terms is admitted by Mr. Johnson's own repeated action in the
matter; but who that somebody should be, whether a single man, of whose
discretion even his own partisans are daily becoming more doubtful, or
the immediate representatives of that large majority of the States and
of the people who for the last five years have been forced against
their will to represent and to be the United States, is certainly too
grave an affair to be settled by that single man himself.
We have seen to what extremes the party calling itself Conservative has
hinted its willingness to go, under the plea of restored Union, but
with the object of regained power. At Philadelphia, they went as far as
they publicly dared in insinuating that the South would be justified in
another rebellion, and their journals have more than once prompted the
President to violent measures, which would as certainly be his ruin as
they would lead to incalculable public disaster. The President himself
has openly announced something like a design of forcibly suppressing a
Congress elected by the same votes and secured by the same guaranties
that elected him to his place and secure him in it,--a Congress whose
validity he has acknowledged by sending in his messages to it, by
signing its bills, and by drawing his pay under its vote; and yet
thinking men are not to be allowed to doubt the propriety of leaving
the gravest measure that ever yet came up for settlement by the country
to a party and a man so reckless as these have shown themselves to be.
Mr. Johnson talks of the danger of centralization, and repeats the old
despotic fallacy of many tyrants being worse than one,--a fallacy
originally invented, and ever since repeated, as a slur upon democracy,
but which is a palpable absurdity when the people who are to be
tyrannized over have the right of displacing their tyrants every two
years. The true many-headed tyrant is the Mob, that part of the
deliberative body of a nation which Mr. Johnson, with his Southern
notions of popular government, has been vainly seeking, that he might
pay court to it, from the seaboard to St. Louis, but which hardly
exists, we are thankful to say, as a constituent body, in any part of
the Northern States outside the city of New York.
Mr. Seward, with that playfulness which sits upon him so gracefully,
and which draws its resources from a reading so extensive that not even
_John Gilpin_ has escaped its research, puts his argument to the people
in a form where the Socratic and arithmetic methods are neatly
combined, and asks, "How many States are there in the Union?" He
himself answers his own question for an audience among whom it might
have been difficult to find any political adherent capable of so
arduous a solution, by asking another, "Thirty-six?" Then he goes on to
say that there is a certain party which insists that the number shall
be less by ten, and ends by the clincher, "Now how many stars do you
wish to see in your flag?" The result of some of Mr. Johnson's
harangues was so often a personal collision, in which the more ardent
on both sides had an opportunity to see any number of new
constellations, that this astronomical view of the case must have
struck the audience rather by its pertinence than its novelty. But in
the argument of the Secretary, as in that of the President, there is a
manifest confusion of logic, and something very like a _petitio
principii_. We might answer Mr. Seward's question with, "As many fixed
stars as you please, but no more shooting stars with any consent of
ours." But really this matter is of more interest to heralds of arms
than to practical men. The difference between Congress and the
President is not, as Mr. Seward would insinuate, that Congress or
anybody else wishes to keep the ten States out, but that the Radical
party (we cheerfully accept our share in the opprobrium of the name)
insists that they shall come in on a footing of perfect equality with
the rest; while the President would reward them for rebellion by giving
them an additional weight of nearly one half in the national councils.
The cry of "Taxation without representation" is foolish enough as
raised by the Philadelphia Convention, for do we not tax every
foreigner that comes to us while he is in process of becoming a citizen
and a voter? But under the Johnsonian theory of reconstruction, we
shall leave a population which is now four millions not only taxed
without representation, but doomed to be so forever without any
reasonable hope of relief. The true point is not as to the abstract
merits of universal suffrage (though we believe it the only way toward
an enlightened democracy and the only safeguard of popular government),
but as to whether we shall leave the freedmen without the only adequate
means of self-defence. And however it may be now, the twenty-six States
certainly _were_ the Union when they accepted the aid of these people
and pledged the faith of the government to their protection. Jamaica,
at the end of nearly thirty years since emancipation, shows us how
competent former masters are to accomplish the elevation of their
liberated slaves, even though their own interests would prompt them to
it. Surely it is a strange plea to be effective in a democratic
country, that we owe these people nothing because they cannot help
themselves; as if governments were instituted for the care of the
strong only. The argument against their voting which is based upon
their ignorance strikes us oddly in the mouths of those whose own hope
of votes lies in the ignorance, or, what is often worse, the prejudice,
of the voters. Besides, we do not demand that the seceding States
should at once confer the right of suffrage on the blacks, but only
that they should give them the same chance to attain it, and the same
inducement to make themselves worthy of it, as to every one else. The
answer that they have not the right in some of the Northern States may
be a reproach to the intelligence of those States, but has no relevancy
if made to the general government. It is not with these States that we
are making terms or claim any right to make them, nor is the number of
their non-voting population so large as to make them dangerous, or the
prejudice against them so great that it may not safely be left to time
and common sense. It was not till all men were made equal before the
law, and the fact recognized that government is something that does not
merely preside over, but reside in, the rights of all, that even white
peasants were enabled to rise out of their degradation, and to become
the strength instead of the danger of France. Nothing short of such a
reform could have conquered the contempt and aversion with which the
higher classes looked upon the emancipated serf. Norman-French
literature reeks with the outbreak of this feeling toward the
ancestors, whether Jews or villeins, of the very men who are now the
aristocracy of South Carolina,--a feeling as intense, as nauseous in
its expression, and as utterly groundless, as that against the negro
now. We are apt, it would seem, a little to confound the meaning of the
two terms _government_ and _self-government_, and the principles on
which they respectively rest. If the latter has its rights, the former
has quite as plainly its duties; and one of them certainly is to see
that no freedom should be allowed to the parts which would endanger the
safety of the whole. An occasion calling for the exercise of this duty
is forced upon us now, and we must be equal to it. Self-government, in
any rightful definition of it, can hardly be stretched so far that it
will cover, as the late Rebels and their Northern advocates contend,
the right to dispose absolutely of the destinies of four millions of
people, the allies and hearty friends of the United States, without
allowing them any voice in the matter.
[Illustration: _William H. Seward_]
It is alleged by reckless party orators that those who ask for
guaranties before readmitting the seceded States wish to treat them
with harshness, if not with cruelty. Mr. Thaddeus Stevens is
triumphantly quoted, as if his foolish violence fairly represented the
political opinions of the Union party. They might as well be made
responsible for his notions of finance. We are quite willing to let Mr.
Stevens be paired off with Mr. Vallandigham, and to believe that
neither is a fair exponent of the average sentiment of his party.
Calling names should be left to children, with whom, as with too large
a class of our political speakers, it seems to pass for argument. We
believe it never does so with the people; certainly not with the
intelligent, who make a majority among them, unless (as in the case of
"Copperhead") there be one of those hardly-to-be-defined realities
behind the name which they are so quick to detect. We cannot say that
we have any great sympathy for the particular form of mildness which
discovers either a "martyr," or a "pure-hearted patriot," or even a
"lofty statesman," in Mr. Jefferson Davis, the latter qualification of
him having been among the discoveries of the London _Times_ when
it thought his side was going to win; but we can say that nothing has
surprised us more, or seemed to us a more striking evidence of the
humanizing influence of democracy, than the entire absence of any
temper that could be called revengeful in the people of the North
toward their late enemies. If it be a part of that inconsistent mixture
of purely personal motives and more than legitimate executive action
which Mr. Johnson is pleased to call his "policy,"--if it be a part of
that to treat the South with all the leniency that is short of folly
and all the conciliation that is short of meanness,--then we were
advocates of it before Mr. Johnson. While he was yet only ruminating in
his vindictive mind, sore with such rancor as none but a "plebeian," as
he used to call himself, can feel against his social superiors, the
only really agrarian proclamation ever put forth by any legitimate
ruler, and which was countersigned by the now suddenly "conservative"
Secretary of State, we were in favor of measures that should look to
governing the South by such means as the South itself afforded, or
could be made to afford. It is true that, as a part of the South, we
reckoned the colored people bound to us by every tie of honor, justice,
and principle, but we never wished to wink out of sight the natural
feelings of men suddenly deprived of what they conceived to be their
property,--of men, too, whom we respected for their courage and
endurance even in a bad cause. But we believed then, as we believe now,
and as events have justified us in believing, that there could be no
graver error than to flatter our own feebleness and uncertainty by
calling it magnanimity,--a virtue which does not scorn the society of
patience and prudence, but which cannot subsist apart from courage and
fidelity to principle. A people so boyish and conceited as the
Southerners have always shown themselves to be, unwilling ever to deal
with facts, but only with their own imagination of them, would be sure
to interpret indecision as cowardice, if not as an unwilling tribute to
that superiority of which men who really possess it are the last to
boast. They have learned nothing from the war but to hate the men who
subdued them, and to misinterpret and misrepresent the causes of their
subduing; and even now, when a feeling has been steadily growing in the
rest of the country for the last nine months deeper and more intense
than any during the war, because mixed with an angry sense of
unexpected and treacherous disappointment, instead of setting their
strength to the rebuilding of their shattered social fabric, they are
waiting, as they waited four years ago, for a division in the North
which will never come, and hailing in Andrew Johnson a scourge of God
who is to avenge them in the desolation of our cities! Is it not time
that these men were transplanted at least into the nineteenth century,
and, if they cannot be suddenly Americanized, made to understand
something of the country which was too good for them, even though at
the cost of a rude shock to their childish self-conceit? Is that a
properly reconstructed Union in the Southern half of which no Northern
man's life is safe except at the sacrifice of his conscience, his
freedom of speech, of everything but his love of money? To our minds
the providential purpose of this intervention of Mr. Johnson in our
affairs is to warn us of the solemn duty that lies upon us in this
single crisis of our history, when the chance is offered us of stamping
our future with greatness or contempt, and which requires something
like statesmanship in the people themselves, as well as in those who
act for them. The South insisted upon war, and has had enough of it; it
is now our turn to insist that the peace we have conquered shall be so
settled as to make war impossible for the future.
But how is this to be done? The road to it is a very plain one. We
shall gain all we want if we make the South really prosperous; for with
prosperity will come roads, schools, churches, printing presses,
industry, thrift, intelligence, and security of life and property.
Hitherto the prosperity of the South has been factitious; it has been a
prosperity of the Middle Ages, keeping the many poor that a few might
show their wealth in the barbarism of showy equipages and numerous
servants, and spend in foreign cities the wealth that should have built
up civilization and made way for refinement at home. There were no
public libraries, no colleges worthy of the name; there was no art, no
science,--still worse, no literature but Simms's: there was no desire
for them. We do not say it in reproach; we are simply stating a fact,
and are quite aware that the North is far behind Europe in these
things. But we are not behind her in the value we set upon them; are
even before her in the price we are willing to pay for them, and are in
the way to get them. The South was not in that way; could not get into
it, indeed, so long as the labor that made wealth was cut off from any
interest in its expenditure, nor had any goal for such hopes as soared
away from the dreary level of its lifelong drudgery but in the grave
and the world beyond it. We are not blind to what may be said on the
other side, nor to that fatal picturesqueness, so attractive to
sentimental minds and so melancholy to thoughtful ones, which threw a
charm over certain exceptional modes of Southern life among the older
families in Virginia and South Carolina. But there are higher and
manlier kinds of beauty,--barer and sterner, some would call
them,--with less softly rounded edges, certainly, than the Wolf's Crag
picturesqueness, which carries the mind with pensive indolence toward
the past, instead of stirring it with a sense of present life, or
bracing it with the hope of future opportunity, and which at once veils
and betrays the decay of ancient civilizations. Unless life is arranged
for the mere benefit of the novelist, what right had these bits of
last-century Europe here? Even the virtues of the South were some of
them anachronisms; and even those that were not existed side by side
with an obtuseness of moral sense that could make a hero of Semmes, and
a barbarism that could starve prisoners by the thousand.
Some philosophers, to be sure, plead with us that the Southerners are
remarkable for their smaller hands and feet, though so good an observer
as Thackeray pronounced this to be true of the whole American people;
but really we cannot think such arguments as this will give any pause
to the inevitable advance of that democracy, somewhat rude and raw as
yet, a clumsy boy-giant, and not too well mannered, whose office it
nevertheless is to make the world ready for the true second coming of
Christ in the practical supremacy of his doctrine, and its incarnation,
after so many centuries of burial, in the daily lives of men. We have
been but dimly, if at all, conscious of the greatness of our errand,
while we have already accomplished a part of it in bringing together
the people of all nations to see each other no longer as aliens or
enemies, but as equal partakers of the highest earthly dignity,--a
common manhood. We have been forced, whether we would or no, first to
endure, then to tolerate, and at last to like men from all the four
corners of the world, and to see that each added a certain virtue of
his own to that precious amalgam of which we are in due time to fashion
a great nation. We are now brought face to face with our duty toward
one of those dusky races that have long sat in the shadow of the world;
we are to be taught to see the Christ disguised also in these, and to
find at last that a part of our salvation is inextricably knit up with
the necessity of doing them justice and leading them to the light. This
is no sentimental fancy; it is written in plain characters upon the
very surface of things. We have done everything to get rid of the
negro; and the more we did, the more he was thrust upon us in every
possible relation of life and aspect of thought. One thing we have not
tried,--a spell before which he would vanish away from us at once, by
taking quietly the place, whatever it be, to which Nature has assigned
him. We have not acknowledged him as our brother. Till we have done so
he will be always at our elbow, a perpetual discomfort to himself and
us. Now this one thing that will give us rest is precisely what the
South, if we leave the work of reconstruction in their hands, will make
it impossible for us to do; and yet it must be done ere America can
penetrate the Southern States. It is for this reason, and not with any
desire of establishing a standing garrison of four hundred thousand
loyal voters in the South, that we insist on the absolute necessity of
justice to the black man. Not that we have not a perfect right to
demand the reception of such a garrison, but we wish the South to
govern itself; and this it will never be able to do, it will be
governed as heretofore by its circumstances, if we allow it to replace
slavery by the disenfranchisement of color, and to make an Ireland out
of what should be the most productive, populous, and happy part of the
Union. We may evade this manifest duty of ours from indolence, or
indifference, or selfish haste; but if there is one truth truer than
another, it is that no man or nation ever neglected a duty that was not
sooner or later laid upon them in a heavier form, to be done at a
dearer rate. Neither man nor nation can find rest short of their
highest convictions.
This is something that altogether transcends any partisan politics. It
is of comparatively little consequence to us whether Congress or the
President carry the day, provided only that America triumph. That is,
after all, the real question. On which side is the future of the
country,--the future that we cannot escape if we would, but which our
action may embarrass and retard? If we had looked upon the war as a
mere trial of physical strength between two rival sections of the
country, we should have been the first to oppose it, as a wicked waste
of treasure and blood. But it was something much deeper than this, and
so the people of the North instinctively recognized it to be from the
first,--instinctively, we say, and not deliberately at first; but
before it was over, their understandings had grasped its true meaning,
as an effort of the ideal America, which was to them half a dream and
half a reality, to cast off an alien element. It was this ideal
something, not the less strongly felt because vaguely defined, that
made them eager, as only what is above sordid motives can, to sacrifice
all that they had and all that they were rather than fail in its
attainment. And it is to men not yet cooled from the white-heat of this
passionate mood that Mr. Johnson comes with his paltry offer of "my
policy," in exchange for the logical consequences of all this devotion
and this sacrifice. What is any one man's policy, and especially any
one weak man's policy, against the settled drift of a nation's
conviction, conscience, and instinct? The American people had made up
not only their minds, but their hearts, and no man who knows anything
of human nature could doubt what their decision would be. They wanted
only a sufficient obstacle to awaken them to a full consciousness of
what was at stake, and that obstacle the obstinate vanity of the
President and the blindness or resentment of his prime minister have
supplied. They are fully resolved to have the great stake they played
for and won, and that stake was the Americanization of all America,
nothing more and nothing less. Mr. Johnson told us in New York, with so
profound a misconception of the feeling of the Northern States as was
only possible to a vulgar mind, and that mind a Southern one, that the
South had set up slavery as its stake, and lost, and that now the North
was in danger of losing the stake it had risked on reconstruction in
the national debt. Mr. Johnson is still, it would seem, under that
delusion which led the South into the war; namely, that it was that
section of the country which was the chief element in its wealth and
greatness. But no Northern man, who, so long as he lives, will be
obliged to pay his fine of taxes for the abolition of slavery which was
forced upon us by the South, is likely to think it very hard that the
South should be compelled to furnish its share toward the common
burden, or will be afraid that the loyal States, whose urgent demands
compelled a timid Congress at last to impose direct taxes, will be
unable to meet their obligations in the future, as in the past.
We say again that the questions before the country are not to be
decided on any grounds of personal prejudice or partiality. We are far
from thinking that Congress has in all respects acted as became the
dignity of its position, or seized all the advantage of the
opportunity. They have seemed to us sometimes afraid of coming before
the people with a direct, frank, and simple statement of what was not
only the best thing that could be done, but the one thing that must be
done. They were afraid of the people, and did not count securely, as
they should have done, on that precious seeing which four years of
gradually wakening moral sense had lent to the people's eyes. They
should not have shrunk from taking upon themselves and their party all
the odium of being in the right; of being on the side of justice,
humanity, and of the America which is yet to be, whoever may fear to
help and whoever may try to hinder. The vulgar cry would be against
them, at any rate, and they might reckon on being accused of principles
which they thought it prudent to conceal, whether they committed their
party to them or not. With those who have the strong side, as they
always do who have conscience for an ally, a bold policy is the only
prosperous one. It is always wisest to accept in advance all the
logical consequences that can be drawn from the principles we profess,
and to make a stand on the extremest limits of our position. It will be
time enough to fall back when we are driven out. In taking a half-way
position at first, we expose ourselves to all the disadvantage and
discouragement of seeming to fight on a retreat, and cut ourselves off
from our supplies. For the supplies of a party which is contending for
a clear principle, and not for its own immediate success, are always
drawn from the highest moral ground included in its lines. We are not
speaking here of abstractions or wire-drawn corollaries, but of those
plain ethical axioms which every man may apprehend, and which are so
closely involved in the question now before the country for decision.
We at least could lose nothing by letting the people know exactly what
we meant; for we meant nothing that could not claim the suffrage of
sincere democracy, of prudent statesmanship, or of jealousy for the
nation's honor and safety. That the Republican party should be broken
up is of comparatively little consequence; for it would be merged in
the stronger party of those who are resolved that no by-questions, no
fallacies of generosity to the vanquished, shall turn it aside from the
one fixed purpose it has at heart; that the war shall not have been in
vain; and that the Rebel States, when they return to the Union, shall
return to it as an addition of power, and under such terms as that they
_must_, and not merely _may_, be fixed there. Let us call things by
their right names, and keep clearly in view both the nature of the
thing vanquished and of the war in which we were victors. When men talk
of generosity toward a suppliant foe, they entirely forget what that
foe really was. To the people of the South no one thinks of being
unmerciful. But they were only the blind force wielded by our real
enemy,--an enemy, prophesy what smooth things you will, with whom we
can never be reconciled and whom it would be madness to spare. And this
enemy was not any body of kindred people, but that principle of evil
fatally repugnant to our institutions, which, flinging away the hilt of
its broken weapon, is now cheating itself with the hope that it can
forge a new one of the soft and treacherous metal of Northern
disloyalty. The war can in no respect be called a civil war, though
that was what the South, in its rash ignorance, threatened the North
with. It was as much a war between two different nations, and the
geographical line was as distinctly drawn between them, as in the late
war between North and South Germany. They had been living, it is true,
under the same government, but the South regarded this as implying no
tie more intimate than that which brought the representatives of
Prussia and Austria together in the Frankfort Diet. We have the same
right to impose terms and to demand guaranties that Prussia has, that
the victor always has.
Many people are led to favor Mr. Johnson's policy because they dislike
those whom they please to call the "Republican leaders." If ever a
party existed that had no recognized leaders, it is the Republican
party. Composed for the last five years, at least, of men who,
themselves professing all shades of opinion, were agreed only in a
determination to sustain the honor and preserve the existence of the
nation, it has been rather a majority than a party, employing the
legislative machine to carry out the purposes of public opinion. The
people were the true inspirers of all its measures, and accordingly it
was left without a definite policy the moment the mere politicians in
its ranks became doubtful as to what direction the popular mind would
take. It had no recognized leader either in the House or Senate just at
the time when it first stood in need of such. The majority of its
representatives there tried in vain to cast any political horoscope by
which it would be safe for them individually to be guided. They showed
the same distrust of the sound judgment of the people and their power
to grasp principles that they showed at the beginning of the war, and
at every discouraging moment while it was going on. Now that the signs
of the times show unmistakably to what the popular mind is making
itself up, they have once more a policy, if we may call that so which
is only a calculation of what it would be "safe to go before the people
with," as they call it. It is always safe to go before them with plain
principles of right, and with the conclusions that must be drawn from
them by common sense, though this is what too many of our public men
can never understand. Now joining a Know-Nothing "lodge," now hanging
on the outskirts of a Fenian "circle," they mistake the momentary
eddies of popular whimsy for the great current that sets always
strongly in one direction through the life and history of the nation.
Is it, as foreigners assert, the fatal defect of our system to fill our
highest offices with men whose views in politics are bounded by the
next district election? When we consider how noble the science
is,--nobler even than astronomy, for it deals with the mutual
repulsions and attractions, not of inert masses, but of bodies endowed
with thought and will, calculates moral forces, and reckons the orbits
of God's purposes toward mankind,--we feel sure that it is to find
nobler teachers and students, and to find them even here.
There is another class of men who are honestly drawn toward the policy
of what we are fain, for want of a more definite name, to call the
Presidential Opposition party, by their approval of the lenient
measures which they suppose to be peculiar to it. But our objection to
the measures advocated by the Philadelphia Convention, so far as we can
trace any definite shape amid the dust-cloud of words, is, not they
would treat the Rebel States with moderation, but that they propose to
take them back on trust. We freely admit that we should have been
inclined to see more reasonableness in this course if we had not the
examples of Jamaica and New Orleans before our eyes; if we had not seen
both there and in other instances with which history supplies us, that
it is not safe to leave the settlement of such matters in the hands of
men who would be more than human if they had not the prejudices and the
resentments of caste. Here is just one of those cases of public concern
which call for the arbitrament of a cool and impartial third
party,--the very office expected of a popular government,--which should
as carefully abstain from meddling in matters that may be safely left
to be decided by natural laws as it should be prompt to interfere where
those laws would to the general detriment be inoperative. It should be
remembered that self-interest, though its requirements may seem plain
and imperative to an unprejudiced bystander, is something which men,
and even communities, are often ready to sacrifice at the bidding of
their passions, and of none so readily as their pride. As for the
attachment between master and slave, whose existence is sometimes
asseverated in the face of so many glaring facts to the contrary, and
on which we are asked to depend as something stronger than written law,
we have very little faith in it. The system of clanship in the Scottish
Highlands is the strongest case to which we can appeal in modern times
of a truly patriarchal social order. In that, the pride of the chief
was answered by the willing devotion of the sept, and the two were
bound together as closely as kindred blood, immemorial tradition, and
mutual dependence could link them; and yet, the moment it became for
the interest of the chieftain, in whom alone was the landed title, to
convert the mountain slopes into sheep-walks, farewell to all
considerations of ancestral legend and ideal picturesqueness! The
clansmen were dispossessed of their little holdings, and shipped off to
the colonies like cattle, by the very men for whom they would have
given their lives without question. The relation, just like that of
master and slave, or the proposed one of superior and dependent, in the
South, had become an anachronism, to preserve which would have been a
vain struggle against that power of Necessity which the Greeks revered
as something god-like. In our own case, so far from making it for the
interest of the ruling classes at the South to elevate the condition of
the black man, the policy of Mr. Johnson offers them a bribe to keep
him in a state of hopeless dependency and subjection. It gives them
more members of Congress in proportion as they have more unrepresented
inhabitants. Mr. Beecher asks us (and we see no possible reason for
doubting the honesty of his opinions, whatever may be their soundness)
whether we are afraid of the South, and tells us that, if we allow them
to govern us, we shall richly deserve it. It is not that we are afraid
of, nor are we in the habit of forming our opinions on any such
imaginary grounds; but we confess that we are afraid of committing an
act of national injustice, of national dishonor, of national breach of
faith, and therefore of national unwisdom and weakness. Moderation is
an excellent thing; but taking things for granted is not moderation,
and there may be such a thing as being immoderate in concession and
confidence. Aristotle taught us long ago that true moderation was as
far from the too-much of blind passion on the one hand as from that of
equally blind lukewarmness on the other. We have an example of wise
reconstructive policy in that measure of the Bourbon-restoration
ministry, which compensated the returned emigrants for their
confiscated estates by a grant from the public treasury. And the
measure was wise, for the reason that it enabled the new proprietors
and the ousted ones to live as citizens of the same country together
without mutual hatred and distrust. We do not propose to compensate the
slaveholder for the loss of his chattels, because the cases are not
parallel, and because Mr. Johnson no less than we acknowledges the
justice and validity of their emancipation. But the situation of the
negro is strikingly parallel with that of the new holders of land in
France. As they were entitled to security, so he has a right not only
to be secured in his freedom, but in the consequences which
legitimately flow from it. For it is only so that he can be insured
against that feeling of distrust and uncertainty of the future which
will prevent him from being profitable to himself, his former master,
and the country. If we sought a parallel for Mr. Johnson's "policy," we
should find it in James II., thinking his prerogative strong enough to
overcome the instincts, convictions, and fears of England.
However much fair-minded men may have been wearied with the backing and
filling of Congress, and their uncertainty of action on some of the
most important questions that have come before them,--however the
dignity, and even propriety, of their attitude toward Mr. Johnson may
be in some respects honestly called in question,--no one who has looked
fairly at the matter can pronounce the terms they have imposed on the
South as conditions of restoration harsh ones. The character of
Congress is not before the country, but simply the character of the
plan they propose. For ourselves, we should frankly express our disgust
at the demagogism which courted the Fenians; for, however much we may
sympathize with the real wrongs of Ireland, it was not for an American
Congress to declare itself in favor of a movement which based itself on
the claim of every Irish voter in the country to a double citizenship,
in which the adopted country was made secondary, and which, directed as
it was against a province where Irishmen are put on equal terms with
every other inhabitant, and where their own Church is the privileged
one, was nothing better than burglary and murder. Whatever may be Mr.
Seward's faults, he was certainly right in his dealing with that
matter, unless he is to be blamed for slowness. But as regards the
terms offered by Congress to the South, they are very far from harsh or
unreasonable; they are lamb-like compared to what we had reason to fear
from Mr. Johnson, if we might judge by his speeches and declarations of
a year or two ago. But for the unhappy hallucination which led Mr.
Johnson first to fancy himself the people of the United States, and
then to quarrel with the party which elected him for not granting that
he was so, they would not have found a man in the North to question
their justice and propriety, unless among those who from the outset
would have been willing to accept Mr. Jefferson Davis as the legitimate
President of the whole country. The terms imposed by Congress really
demand nothing more than that the South should put in practice at home
that Monroe Doctrine of which it has always been so clamorous a
supporter when it could be used for party purposes. The system of
privileged classes which the South proposes to establish is a relic of
old Europe which we think it bad policy to introduce again on this
continent, after our so fresh experience in the war of the evil
consequences that may spring from it. Aristocracy can form no more
intimate and hearty union with democracy under one form than under
another; and unless such a union be accomplished, or we can see some
reasonable hope of its future accomplishment, we are as far from our
object as ever.
The plan proposed disfranchises no one, does not even interfere with
the right of the States to settle the conditions of the franchise. It
merely asks that the privilege shall be alike within reach of all,
attainable on the same terms by those who have shown themselves our
friends as by those whose hands were so lately red with the blood of
our nearest and dearest. We have nothing to do with the number of
actual loyalists at the South, but with the number of possible ones.
The question is not how many now exist there, and what are their
rights, but how many may be made to exist there, and by what means. The
duty of the country to itself transcends all private claims or class
interests. And when people speak of "the South," do they very clearly
define to themselves what they mean by the words? Do they not really
mean, without knowing it, the small body of dangerous men who have
misguided that part of the country to its own ruin, and almost to that
of the Republic? In the mind of our government the South should have no
such narrow meaning. It should see behind the conspirators of yesterday
an innumerable throng of dusky faces, with their dumb appeal, not to
its mercy, its generosity, or even its gratitude, but to its plighted
faith, to the solemn engagement of its chief magistrate and their
martyr. Any theory of the South which leaves out the negro is a scandal
and reproach to our honesty; any attempt at another of those fatal
compromises which ignore his claims upon us, but cannot ignore his
claims upon nature and God and that inevitable future which we may hope
to put far from us, but which is even now at our door, would be an
imputation on our judgment, and an acknowledgment that we were unworthy
to measure our strength with a great occasion when it met us face to
face.
We are very far from joining in the unfeeling outcry which is sometimes
raised by thoughtless persons against the Southern people, because they
decorate with flowers the graves of their dead soldiers, and cherish
the memory of those who fell in the defence of a cause which they could
not see to be already fallen before they entered its service. They have
won our respect, the people of Virginia especially, by their devotion
and endurance in sustaining what they believed to be their righteous
quarrel. They would rather deserve our reprobation, if they were
wanting in these tributes to natural and human feeling. They are as
harmless as the monument to the memory of those who fell for the
Pretender, which McDonald of Glenaladale raised after the last of the
Stuarts was in his grave. Let us sympathize with and respect all such
exhibitions of natural feeling. But at the same time let us take care
that it shall not be at the risk of his life that the poor black shall
fling his tribute on the turf of those who died, with equal sacrifice
of self, in a better cause. Let us see to it that the Union men of the
South shall be safe in declaring and advocating the reasons of their
faith in a cause which we believe to be sacred. Let us secure such
opportunities of education to the masses of the Southern people,
whether white or black, as shall make any future rebellion
impracticable, and render it possible for the dead of both sides to
sleep peaceably together under the safeguard of a common humanity,
while the living dwell under the protection of a nationality which both
shall value alike. Let us put it out of the power of a few ambitious
madmen to shake, though they could not endanger, the foundations of a
structure which enshrines the better hope of mankind. When Congress
shall again come together, strong in the sympathy of a united people,
let them show a dignity equal to the importance of the crisis. Let them
give the President a proof of their patriotism, not only by allowing
him the opportunity, but by making it easy for him, to return to the
national position he once occupied. Let them not lower their own
dignity and that of the nation by any bandying of reproaches with the
Executive. The cause which we all have at heart is vulgarized by any
littleness or show of personal resentment in its representatives, and
is of too serious import to admit of any childishness or trifling. Let
there be no more foolish talk of impeachment for what is at best a poor
infirmity of nature, and could only be raised into a harmful importance
by being invested with the dignity of a crime against the state.
Nothing could be more unwise than to entangle in legal quibbles a cause
so strong in its moral grounds, so transparent in its equity, and so
plain to the humblest apprehension in its political justice and
necessity. We have already one criminal half turned martyr at Fortress
Monroe; we should be in no hurry to make another out of even more
vulgar material,--for unhappily martyrs are not Mercuries. We have only
to be unswervingly faithful to what is the true America of our hope and
belief, and whatever is American will rise from one end of the country
to the other instinctively to our side, with more than ample means of
present succor and of final triumph. It is only by being loyal and
helpful to Truth that men learn at last how loyal and helpful she can
be to them.
THE RIVERSIDE PRESS
Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A.
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