Читать книгу The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences - Hilary A. Herbert - Страница 5

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The Constitution of the United States attempts to define and limit the power of our Federal Government.

Lord Brougham somewhere said that such an instrument was not worth the parchment it was written on; people would pay no regard to self-imposed limitations on their own will.

When our fathers by that written Constitution established a government that was partly national and partly federal, and that had no precedent, they knew it was an experiment. To-day that government has been in existence one hundred and twenty-three years, and we proudly claim that the experiment of 1789 has been the success of the ages.

Happy should we be if we could boast that, during all this period, the Constitution had never been violated in any respect!

The first palpable infringement of its provisions occurred in the enactment of the alien and sedition laws of 1798. The people at the polls indignantly condemned these enactments, and for years thereafter the government proceeded peacefully; the people were prosperous, and the Union and the Constitution grew in favor.

Later, there grew up a rancorous sectional controversy about slavery that lasted many years; that quarrel was followed by a bloody sectional war; after that war came the reconstruction of the Southern States. During each of these three trying eras it did sometimes seem as if that old piece of "parchment," derided by Lord Brougham, had been utterly forgotten. Nevertheless, and despite all these trying experiences, we have in the meantime advanced to the very front rank of nations, and our people have long since turned, not only to the Union, but, we are happy to think, to the Constitution as well, with more devotion than ever.

It may be further said that, notwithstanding all the bitter animosities that for long divided our country into two hostile sections, that wonderful old Constitution, handed down to us by our fathers, was always, and in all seasons, in the hearts of our people, and that never for a moment was it out of mind. Even in our sectional war Confederates and Federals were both fighting for it—one side to maintain it over themselves as an independent nation; the other to maintain it over the whole of the old Union. In the very madness of reconstruction the fundamental idea of the Constitution, the equality of the States, ultimately prevailed—this idea it was that imperatively demanded the final restoration of the seceded States, with the right of self-government unimpaired.

The future is now bright before us. The complex civilization of the present is, we do not forget, continually presenting new and complex problems of government, and we are mindful, too, that, for the people who must deal with these problems, a higher culture is required, but to all this our national and State governments seem to be fully alive. We are everywhere erecting memorials to our patriotic dead, we have our "flag day" and many ceremonies to stimulate patriotism, and, throughout our whole country, young Americans are being taught more and more of American history and American traditions.

The essence of these teachings presumably is that time has hallowed our Constitution, and that experience has fully shown the wisdom of its provisions. In this land of ours, where there are so much property and so many voters who want it, and where the honor and emoluments of high place are so tempting to the demagogue, there can be no such security for either life, liberty, or property as those safeguards which our fathers devised in the Constitution of the United States.

Our teachers of history must therefore expose fearlessly every violation in the past of our Constitution, and point out the penalties that followed; and, above all, they cannot afford to condone, or to pass by in silence, the conduct of those who have heretofore advocated, or acted on, any law which to them was higher than the American Constitution.

One of the most serious troubles in the past, many think our greatest, was our terrible war among ourselves. Perhaps, after the lapse of nearly fifty years, we can all now agree that if our people and our States had always, between 1830 and 1860, faithfully observed the Federal Constitution we should have not had that war. However that may be, the crusade of the Abolitionists, which began in 1831, was the beginning of an agitation in the North against the existence of slavery in the South, which continued, in one form or another, until the outbreak of that war.

The negro is now located, geographically, much as he was then. If another attempt shall be made to project his personal status into national politics, the voters of the country ought to know and consider the mistakes that occurred, North and South, during the unhappy era of that sectional warfare. This little book is a study of that period of our history. It concludes with a glance at the war between the North and South, and the reconstruction that followed.

The story of Cromwell and the Great Revolution it was impossible for any Englishman to tell correctly for nearly or quite two centuries. The changes that had been wrought were too profound, too far-reaching; and English writers were too human. The changes—economic, political, and social—wrought in our country by the great controversy over slavery and State-rights, and by the war that ended it, have been quite as profound, and the revolution in men's ideas and ways of looking at their past history has been quite as complete as those which followed the downfall of the government founded by Cromwell. But we are now in the twentieth century; history is becoming a science, and we ought to succeed better in writing our past than the Englishmen did.

The culture of this day is very exacting in its demands, and if one is writing about our own past the need of fairness is all the more imperative. And why not? The masses of the people, who clashed on the battlefields of a war in which one side fought for the supremacy of the Union and the other for the sovereignty of the States, had honest convictions; they differed in their convictions; they had made honest mistakes about each other; now they would like their histories to tell just where those mistakes were; they do not wish these mistakes to be repeated hereafter. Nor is there any reason why the whole history of that great controversy should not now be written with absolute fairness; the two sections of our country have come together in a most wonderful way. There has been reunion after reunion of the blue and the gray. The survivors of a New Jersey regiment, forty-four years after the bloody battle of Salem Church, put up on its site a monument to their dead, on one side of which was a tablet to the memory of the "brave Alabama boys," who were their opponents in that fight. One of those "Alabama boys" wrote the story of that battle for the archives of his own State, and the State of New Jersey has published it in her archives, as a fair account of the battle.

The author has attempted to approach his subject in a spirit like this, and while he hopes to be absolutely fair, he is perfectly aware that he sees things from a Southern view-point. For this, however, no apology is needed. Truth is many-sided and must be seen from every direction.

Nearly all the school-books dealing with the period here treated of, and now considered as authority, have been written from a Northern stand-point; and many of the extended histories that are most widely read seem to the writer to be more or less partisan, although the authors were apparently quite unconscious of it. Attempts made here to point out some of the errors in these books are, as is conceived, in the interests of history.

Of course it is important that readers should know the stand-point of an author who writes at this day of events as recent as those here treated of. Dr. Albert Bushnell Hart, professor of history in Harvard University, in the preface to his "Slavery and Abolition" (Harper Brothers, 1906), says of himself: "It is hard for a son and grandson of abolitionists to approach so explosive a question with impartiality." Following this example, the writer must tell that he was born in the South, of slave-holding parents, three years after the Abolition crusade began in 1831. Growing up in the South under the stress of that crusade, he maintained all through the war, in which he was a loyal Confederate soldier, the belief in which he had been educated—that slavery was right, morally and economically.

One day, not long after Appomattox, he told his father he had reached the conclusion that slavery was wrong. The reply was, to the writer's surprise, that his mother in early life had been an avowed emancipationist; that she (who had lived until the writer was sixteen years old) had never felt at liberty to discuss slavery after the rise of the new abolitionists and the Nat Turner insurrection; and then followed the further information that when, in 1846, the family removed from South Carolina to Alabama, Greenville, Ala., was chosen for a home because it was thought that the danger from slave insurrections would be less there than in one of the richer "black counties."

What a creature of circumstances man is! The writer's belief about a great moral question, his home, his school-mates, and the companions of his youth, were all determined by a movement begun in Boston, Massachusetts, before he was born in the far South!

With a vivid personal recollection of the closing years of the great anti-slavery crusade always in his mind, the writer has studied closely many of the histories dealing with that movement, and he has found quite a consensus of opinion among Northern writers—a view that has even been sometimes accepted in the South—that it was not so much the fear of insurrections, created by Abolition agitation, that shut off discussion in the South about the rightfulness of slavery as it was the invention of the cotton-gin, that made cotton growing and slavery profitable. The cotton-gin was invented in 1792, and was in common use years before the writer's mother was born. A native of, she grew to maturity entirely in, the South, and in 1830 was an avowed emancipationist. The subject was then being freely discussed.

The author has ventured to relate in the pages that follow this introduction two or three incidents that were more or less personal, in the hope that their significance may be his sufficient excuse.

And now, having spoken of himself as a Southerner, the author thinks it but fair, when invoking for the following pages fair consideration, to add that, since 1865, he has never ceased to rejoice that slavery is no more, and that secession is now only an academic question; and, further, that he has, since Appomattox, served the government of the United States for twenty years as loyally as he ever served the Confederacy. He therefore respectfully submits that his experiences ought to render him quite as well qualified for an impartial consideration of the anti-slavery crusade and its consequences as are those who have never, either themselves or through the eyes of their ancestors, seen more than one side of those questions. Certain he is, in his own mind, that this Union has now no better friend than is he who submits this little study, conscious of its many shortcomings, claiming for it nothing except that it is the result of an honest effort to be fair in every statement of facts and in the conclusions reached.

Not much effort has been made in the direction of original research. Facts deemed sufficient to illustrate salient points, which alone can be treated of in a short story, have been found in published documents, and other facts have been purposely taken, most of them, from Northern writers; and the authorities have been duly cited. These facts have been compressed into a small compass, so that the book may be available to such students as have not time for a more extended examination.

Of the results of the crusade of the Abolitionists, and the consequent sectional war, George Ticknor Curtis, one of New England's distinguished biographers, says in his "Life of Buchanan," vol. II, p. 283:

"It is cause for exultation that slavery no longer exists in the broad domain of this republic—that our theory of government and practice are now in complete accord. But it is no cause for national pride that we did not accomplish this result without the cost of a million of precious lives and untold millions of money."