Читать книгу The History of the Confederate War - George Cary Eggleston - Страница 14

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With the aid of a considerable Northern vote in Congress the South succeeded in passing the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, repealing the Missouri Compromise, and under the doctrine of "Squatter Sovereignty" throwing all the territories open to slavery at least as a possibility.

The North at once took alarm and the Free-soil party, newly named the Republican party, grew in numbers and enthusiasm as no other party had ever done before.

Events mightily aided this growth, driving into the Free-soil or Republican party many thousands of men who had before held aloof from a movement which they thought to be dangerous to the perpetuity of the Union and to peace within its borders.

First of these events was the outbreak of civil war in Kansas. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise opened that territory at once to settlement by men from both sections and at the same time opened the question whether it should become a free or a slave state. Incidentally a contest of factions began which raged hotly to the end.

Whether Kansas should be a slave state or a free state depended upon the will of the settlers alone. The land was in many respects a tempting one to emigrants in spite of the aridity of its western part, so that even without any incentive of politics its speedy settlement was quite a matter of course. But politics North and South enormously aided in that behalf. There was a rush from both sections to fill up and occupy the land in order to control it. From the Missouri border and from farther south slaveholders and the representatives of slavery poured into the territory in great numbers with the purpose of voting it into the Union as a slave state. In the slang of the period these were called "border ruffians." On the other hand there was an "assisted emigration" from the North, the emigration of men whose way was paid in consideration of their votes and their rifle practice against slavery in Kansas. These called themselves "Free State Men" but they were called by their adversaries "Jayhawkers."

In order to promote the emigration of these men to Kansas societies were formed in Massachusetts and other states which not only paid their way but furnished them with rifles of an improved pattern and ammunition in plenty, with the distinct understanding that it was their duty to ply both the bullet and the ballot in aid of the cause they represented.

These two groups of men quickly fell by the ears, as it was intended that they should, and civil war in the strictest sense of that term ensued.

John Brown—an able, adventurous, and fanatical man—took command of the free state forces and between him and his adversaries there was a contest for supremacy which involved every outrage to which civil war, waged by uncivilized man, can give birth. Small battles were fought. Men on either side were shot or hanged without mercy. Homes were desolated. Women and children were driven forth to suffer all the agonies of starvation, of cold, and of homelessness—all in aid of the voting one way or the other.

In our time such a situation in a territory subject to national control would be instantly ended by the sending of troops to the disturbed region with instructions to preserve order, to suppress all manner of lawlessness, and to protect all citizens equally in the enjoyment of the peaceful possession of the land. But in the fifties the government of the United States was still unused to such exercise of its authority—parties were too evenly divided, political feeling was too hot and voters were far too sensitive, to admit of such a treatment of the situation as would in our time seem quite a matter of course. Troops were sent to Kansas, it is true, but in quite insufficient numbers and under inadequate instructions. So the war in Kansas went on and otherwise peaceful citizens of the Union actively aided it upon the one side or the other quite as if it had not been a civil war within the Union and in a territory in which the authority of Congress was supreme beyond even the possibility of question.

At the South companies of armed men were organized, equipped, and sent into Kansas nominally to settle there and vote to make a slave state of the territory, but really, if possible, to drive out every "Free State" man or to overawe or overcome them all, so that the voting might be all one way. At the North similar companies of men were organized and armed and aided to emigrate for the purpose of doing very much the same thing to the representatives of slavery and achieving a contrary result at the ballot box.

Many of the men on both sides were not genuine settlers at all but merely armed bandits engaged in a mission of violence. Yet on both sides they were supported, encouraged, and defended in their lawlessness by the pulpit, the press, and every other agency of civilization.

Elections were held in the territory in which both sides voted their men without question as to their age, the length of their residence within the territory or any other qualification for voting which the loose laws of the time provided. Every devilish device of fraud and swindling that had up to that time been invented by ingeniously unscrupulous politicians was employed on the one side or the other without so much as a qualm of conscience or a scruple of conventionality.

It was war that these men were engaged in and elections were a mere pretense. War habitually has no scruples as to the means it uses for the overcoming of an adversary. On each side men voted who had arrived within the territory just in time for the election, cheerfully perjuring themselves in order to do so, an incident which nobody seemed to regard as a serious matter. Each side voted its men as often as it could under the loose election laws of the time and in some cases that was very often. Ballot boxes were stuffed with fraudulent votes by one side and were seized and destroyed by the other.

Conventions fraudulently chosen by such practices as these framed constitutions which were one after another rejected by Congress.

The story need not be told here in further detail. The struggle continued until the end of the decade and it was not until after the Confederate War had begun that the territory was admitted to the Union as a state. In the meanwhile the eyes and minds of all the people in the country were concentrated upon that center of disturbance and the situation there enormously increased the intensity of that acrimony which already characterized the relations of men North and South.

Another event which tended to increase the acrimony between the two sections of the country and ultimately to bring about war was the rendering of the "Dred Scott" decision, which alarmed and intensely angered the North.

Dred Scott was a negro slave in Missouri, owned by an army surgeon who, about twenty years before, had taken him as a servant to an army post in Illinois. Under the laws of Illinois any slave taken by his master into that state was by that act set free.

Dred Scott remained however in the position of a slave and after a time he was taken back to Missouri. There he was sold to a new master whom he presently sued for assault on the ground that his former master had in effect set him free by voluntarily taking him into a free state, and that therefore he was not liable to sale or to a chastisement at the hands of a master.

The negro won in the lower courts but was defeated upon appeal. Later, circumstances enabled him to bring suit in the United States Court, and finally the case went on appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States. The questions directly and indirectly involved in it were of so great national and political interest that four of the greatest constitutional lawyers in all the land volunteered to argue it—two of them on the one side and two upon the other. The argument was a contest of intellectual giants with the whole country looking on and listening. At the end of it the judgment of the court was rendered by Chief Justice Taney in March, 1857. The decision negatived all of Dred Scott's contentions and it affirmed principles that were even more offensive to Northern sentiment than its negations were. It amounted in fact to a judgment that state laws setting free such slaves as might be brought into the states concerned by voluntary act of their masters were null and void. It expressly declared unconstitutional that part of the Missouri Compromise which forbade slavery in territories north of 36° 30´ north latitude.

So completely did the court decide upon the slavery side of the question that Thomas H. Benton, the great Democratic senator from Missouri, characterized this deliberate and very carefully considered judgment of the Supreme Court as one which made slavery the organic law of the land with freedom as a casual exception.

The victory of the pro-slavery radicals was here complete. The decision gave them the definite judgment of that Supreme Court whose decisions rise above congressional enactment and set aside statutes—that court from whose judgments there is nowhere any appeal to any other authority on earth—in behalf of their most extreme contentions.

If that decision had been accepted by the people, as the decisions of the Supreme Court usually are, it would indeed have made slavery a national institution subject only to such limitations as the individual states might impose upon it within their own borders and without interference with slaveholders who might choose to take their slaves into free states and hold them there.

But the victory of the slave advocates—complete as it was—gave them no practical advantage. Such a doctrine as that laid down by the court simply could not find acceptance in the minds of men at the North. Logically it ought not to have found acceptance with the ultra pro-slavery men of the South for the reason that it distinctly negatived that contention for states' rights and state sovereignty upon which they relied in their contest with their adversaries.

Unfortunately for them, in the course of his decision Chief Justice Taney used one unhappy phrase which gave even greater offense perhaps than the decision itself did. That phrase was in fact no part of the decision but was what the lawyers call an obiter dictum—a saying apart. It was a mere statement of what the Chief Justice believed to be a fact of history. It was not at all a ruling of the court. As an illustration of his meaning he made the perfectly true statement that before the time of the American Revolution—and he might have included a much later date—the negroes "had been regarded as beings of an inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit."

This statement of fact as to the attitude of the public mind toward the negro before the Revolution was entirely correct, as every educated reader knows, and as the history of the African slave-trade—carried on not only before the adoption of the Constitution but for a dozen years after 1808 when the constitutional prohibition of that nefarious traffic went into effect—perfectly and completely shows.

But Chief Justice Taney's simple statement of this historical fact was everywhere interpreted to be a part of his legal decision. This was natural enough under the circumstances for the reason that slavery itself, in behalf of which the decision seemed to have been rendered, rested solely upon the doctrine that a negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect.

Even if this unfortunate phrase had not been used and even if it had not been misinterpreted as it was, the decision itself must of necessity have wrought something like a revolution in the thought of the Northern people. The most conservative among them had reconciled themselves to the existence of slavery in certain of the states upon the ground that each state had a right to legislate for itself upon that question and therefore that each state was alone responsible for its own legislation. They were startled now by the challenge of a Supreme Court decision which denied to them even this relief of conscience and even this liberty of individual state action. They were asked to accept the doctrine that slavery was a national institution against which state laws were futile except in a very limited way.

This extreme decision in favor of slavery, coming as it did at the very time when civil war was on in Kansas, not only inflamed public sentiment at the North but alarmed it. Already the political party opposed to the extension of slavery had mightily grown in numbers and in enthusiasm. In 1852 it had cast less than 157,000 votes. In 1856 its vote amounted to 1,341,264, carrying with it 114 electoral votes as against 174 secured by its chief antagonist and eight thrown away on a third candidate.

During that four years the Anti-slavery party had drawn to itself through force of circumstance all of the Free-soil Democracy and the greater part of the Northern Whigs.

In 1856 for the first time in the Republic's history the election of a president was contested by a party strictly sectional in its composition and the fact was alarming not only at the South but almost equally so at the North. The conviction was general that such a contest meant mischief for the country. It was the first sure foreboding of that war which was destined to come a little later between the sections.

The Republican party existed exclusively at the North. It made no pretense of existing in the Southern half of the Republic. It did not even go through the empty form of nominating electors in the Southern states either in 1856 or four years later in 1860. It did not hope in either of those years for a single electoral vote from any state lying south of the Potomac or the Ohio. Its purpose was to carry the election and to control the country by a strictly sectional and geographical vote—a thing that had never before been attempted or thought of by any party, and a thing the very suggestion of which caused great alarm throughout the country. For, men anxiously asked, if one section of the Union is thus to dominate the other how shall we be able to maintain the Union in its present disturbed and distracted condition? Hitherto, they reflected, majorities have been drawn from all the states in contests that were purely national in their inspiration and in their significance, and all men have held themselves bound to submit to the will of such majorities, as representing the ultimate judgment of all the states and all the people; but, they anxiously asked themselves, how long will the states or the people of one part of the country consent to be governed by the elected candidates of a party which exists solely in the other part of the country; a party which does not even ask for votes except in that other part, in support of its candidates; a party whose platform is one of avowed hostility to the industrial, social and domestic labor system of the southern half of the Republic; a party which has no existence or recognition or representation in that part of the Union, and which includes among its most active and aggressive members those who openly declare their purpose to overthrow the domestic institutions of the South, in defiance of all constitutional guarantees, and by any means that may be available, even including servile war in states where the negroes outnumber the whites by two or three to one?

Considerations of this kind undoubtedly restrained many voters at the North in the election of 1856, and for a time after that election there seemed to be a promise of peace in the influence of conservatism on the one side and on the other in spite of what was going on in Kansas.

At the same time the state of feeling throughout the country was well-nigh indistinguishable from that which prevails during the existence of actual civil war. Only the old devotion to the Union which existed in both the Northern and Southern mind prevented men from flying at each other's throats.

Then, as if to emphasize the inevitableness of war and to hasten its coming, there occurred the raid of John Brown at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in the autumn of 1859—only a year before a presidential election must occur.

John Brown had been the chief leader of the Free State men in the warlike operations in Kansas. He was a man of extraordinary fanaticism, limitless daring, large capacity, and relentless determination. His hostility to slavery knew absolutely no bounds. With a courage which had no balance wheel of discretion to regulate it, he had no hesitation in undertaking great enterprises with ridiculously inadequate means, and in the end he showed that he had no flinching from the personal consequences of his acts.

In June, 1859, he went secretly to the neighborhood of Harper's Ferry, with a band so small that even after its reinforcement it was manifestly inadequate to be trusted by any but a madman to accomplish the work that Brown had laid out for it to do. He was both morally and materially supported by men of wealth and influence at the North who blindly entrusted him with arms, ammunition, and money, not knowing or inquiring whither he was going or what his purposes might be.

By the end of June, 1859, he had established himself near Harper's Ferry with a band of devoted followers about him. One by one the men who had enlisted in his service joined him until the company numbered twenty-two. Still his purpose was wholly unsuspected by his Virginian neighbors.

In the meanwhile the two hundred rifles contributed by George L. Stearns of Medford, Mass., in aid of the Kansas controversy, were delivered to John Brown who had, besides, a war chest of five hundred dollars in gold given to him by Boston enthusiasts in aid of an enterprise concerning which they had no definite information whatsoever.

His purpose was to establish in the mountain fastnesses near Harper's Ferry a fugitive slave camp which a few men could easily defend while the rest of those coming into it could be run off to Canada and freedom with ease and certainty. In effect he contemplated a general insurrection of the slaves, their concentration in easily defensible mountain camps and their removal to Canada from these military posts as rapidly as that end could be accomplished.

This program if successful could have resulted in nothing less than a slave insurrection and a bloody servile war.

But John Brown's program failed of its accomplishment for two reasons. There was far less of active discontent among the negroes of northern Virginia than John Brown had supposed. Most of those negroes in fact were entirely satisfied with their condition and treatment and so they refused to flee to him for rescue from an oppression which they did not feel.

It is noteworthy that Frederick Douglass, the ablest representative of the negro race and by all odds the ablest negro representative of abolitionism, disapproved and discouraged John Brown's enterprise. Especially Frederick Douglass advised against John Brown's policy of making war upon the United States. That was the second and the controlling cause of his failure. It seems to have been his thought that with the country in the tempestuous condition it was then in he might hopefully assail the National Government itself and that in such an assault he would have behind him the entire Northern people. How badly he misunderstood the signs of the times the events clearly show.

On the 16th of October, 1859, he marched with eighteen men upon the undefended United States arsenal at Harper's Ferry, broke down its doors and took forcible possession of the premises.

This in itself was an easy thing to do for the reason that the Government, seeing no occasion to apprehend violence of such sort, had made no adequate provision for the defense of its arsenal. But John Brown's act was a direct, open, and flagrant levying of war against the United States and it was promptly treated as such by the Government at Washington. A force of marines was sent to Harper's Ferry to eject the intruder and to repossess the national arsenal.

There was a little skirmish. Many of John Brown's men were killed and he and his surviving companions were promptly made prisoners, tried for treason, convicted and hanged.

In the number of men engaged, in the amount of damage done, and in its immediate consequences this raid of John Brown's was a matter of no moment whatever. It was conspicuously a failure so far as its ulterior purpose of inducing slaves to flee from bondage and engage in insurrection was concerned. It was still more conspicuously a failure in so far as it meant war upon the United States. A single company of marines brought it to an end without the necessity of calling in any larger force. But the raid had a very important influence nevertheless, upon the future history of the country.

It illustrated and emphasized as no previous event had done, the implacability of the sentiment hostile to slavery. It demonstrated, as the fact had never been demonstrated before, the hopelessly irrepressible character of the controversy concerning slavery. It alarmed and angered the South as it had never been alarmed and angered before. It indicated to the Southern people the fact that there were agencies active at the North which would stop at nothing that might help to the abolition of slavery; that even a servile war, with all the brutality and bloodthirstiness that servile war must mean to the South, was lightly contemplated by a certain and rapidly growing Northern opinion, as a legitimate means for the accomplishment of abolition. It indicated an implacability of sentiment against which there seemed to be no defense except in that dissolution of the Union which the extremists on both sides had so long and so freely invoked as a remedy for the hopeless division of the Republic into two antagonistic camps.

John Brown's invasion would have counted for little if it had stood alone. But the rifles that he had in possession, with which to arm fugitive slaves, had been contributed by a citizen of Massachusetts under urgency of conspicuous representatives of the political party that sought the abolition of slavery. The five hundred dollars that Brown carried with him as a part of the equipment with which he hoped to create a servile war, was contributed by Boston citizens and represented a hostility as unkind as it was unlawful. The sanction given to John Brown's insane and treasonable raid by many newspapers and a certain part of the public at the North served to convince even the most moderate and conservative men at the South that there was no longer any hope or prospect of reconciliation between the two sections upon any basis of reasonable and mutual concession.

It was in this mood that the country approached the presidential election of 1860. On either side there was a strongly surviving love for the Federal Union, an abiding conviction that it alone could guarantee the perpetuity of the American idea of local self-government and personal liberty. But on either side there was an aggressive party of disunion which must be reckoned with in politics. On the side of the North the disunionist party desired and insisted upon the utter and immediate and unconditional abolition of slavery as the sole condition of the Union's further existence. On the Southern side the extremists demanded that slavery should be recognized and protected as a national institution, with local and state freedom from it as a casual incident which should in no way be permitted to interfere with the right of the slaveholder to hold his slaves in bondage even when his convenience led him to carry them into any free state; and still further that the people of every territory should be free to decide for themselves whether or not slavery should be permitted within the domain controlled by them. Between these two opposing parties stood the overwhelming but rapidly weakening majority of the people, insisting that the perpetuity of the Union was of greater importance to liberty than either the maintenance or the extinction of slavery.

How these forces fought the matter out must be the subject of another chapter.