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The Brothers' War, by John Calvin Reed

Title: The Brothers' War

Author: John Calvin Reed

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THE BROTHERS' WAR

THE BROTHERS' WAR

BY

JOHN C. REED OF GEORGIA

AUTHOR OF "AMERICAN LAW STUDIES," "CONDUCT OF LAWSUITS" "THE OLD AND NEW SOUTH"

BOSTON

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

1905

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Copyright, 1905,

By Little, Brown, and Company.

All rights reserved

Published October, 1905

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.

[Pg v] PREFACE

I WOULD explain the real causes and greater consequences of the bloody brothers' war. I pray that all of us be delivered, as far as

may be, from bias and prejudice. The return of old affection between the sections showed gracious beginning in the centennial year. In the war with Spain southerners rallied to the stars and stripes as enthusiastically as northerners. Reconcilement has accelerated its pace every hour since. But it is not yet complete. The south has these things to learn:

1. A providence, protecting the American union, hallucinated Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Mrs. Stowe, Sumner, and other radical abolitionists, as to the negro and the effect of southern slavery upon him, its purpose being to destroy slavery because it was the

sine qua non of southern nationalization, the only serious menace ever made to that union. This nationalization was stirring strongly before the federal constitution was adopted. The abolitionists, as is the case with all forerunners of great occurrences, were trained and educated by the powers directing evolution, and they were constrained to do not their own will but that of these mighty powers.

2. The cruel cotton tax; the constitution amended to prevent repentance of uncompensated emancipation, which is the greatest confiscation on record; the resolute effort to put the southern whites under the[Pg vi] negroes; and other such measures; were but natural outcome of the frenzied intersectional struggle of twenty-five years and the resulting terrible war. Had there been another event, who can be sure that the south would not have committed misdeeds of vengeance against citizens of the north?

3. We of the south ought to tolerate the freest discussion of every phase of the race question. We should ungrudgingly recognize that the difference of the northern masses from us in opinion is natural and honest. Let us hear their expressions with civility, and then without warmth and show of disrespect give the reasons for our contrary faith. This is the only way for us to get what we need so much, that is, audience from our brothers across the line. Consider some great southerners who have handled most exciting sectional themes without giving offence. There is no invective in Calhoun's speech, of March 4, 1850, though he clearly discerned that abolition was forcing the south into revolution. Stephens, who had been vice-president of the Confederate States, reviewed in detail soon after the brothers' war the conflict of opinion which caused it, and yet in his two large volumes he spoke not a word of rancor. When congress was doing memorial honor to Charles Sumner, it was Lamar, a southerner of southerners, that made the most touching panegyric of the dead. And the other day was Dixon's masterly effort to prove that the real, even if unconscious, purpose of the training at Tuskegee is ultimately to promote fusion, which the southern whites deem the greatest of evils. His language is entirely free from passion or asperity. He wonders in admiration at the marvellous rise of Booker Washington from lowest estate to unique greatness. And he[Pg vii] gives genuine sympathy to Professor DuBois, in whose book, "The Souls of Black Folk," as he says, "for

the first time we see the naked soul of a negro beating itself to death against the bars in which Aryan society has caged him."

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These examples of Calhoun, Stephens, Lamar, and Dixon should be the emulation of every southerner speaking to the nation upon any subject that divides north and south. This done, we will get the audience we seek. It was this which not long ago gave Clark Howell's strong paper opposing negro appointments to office in the south prominent place in Collier's, and which last month obtained for Dixon's article just mentioned the first pages of the Saturday Evening Post. When we get full audience, other such

discussions as those of Howell and Dixon, and that in which Tom Watson, in the June number of his magazine, showed Dr. Booker

Washington a thing or two, will be digested by the northern public, to the great advantage of the whole country.

The last I have to say here is as to differing opinions upon social recognition of prominent negroes. We of the south give them great honor and respect. Could not Mr. Roosevelt have said to us of Georgia protesting against his entertainment of Booker Washington, "Have I done worse than you did when you had him to make that address at the opening of your Exposition in 1895, and applauded it to the echo?" Suppose, as is true, that hardly a man in the south would eat at the same table with Dr. Washington or Professor DuBois, how can that justify us in heaping opprobrium upon a northern man who does otherwise because he has been taught to believe it right? What has been said in denunciation of the president and Mr. Wanamaker for[Pg viii] their conduct towards Booker Washington seems to me rather a hullabaloo of antediluvian moss-backs than the voice of the best and wisest southerners.

Amid all her gettings let the south get complete calmness upon everything connected with the race question--complete deliverance

from morbid sensitiveness and intemperate speech in its discussion.

Now here is what the north should learn:

1. Slavery in America was the greatest benefit that any large part of the negro race ever received; and sudden and unqualified emancipation was woe inexpressible to nearly all the freedmen. The counter doctrine of the abolitionists who taught that the negro is equal to the Caucasian worked beneficently to save the union, but it ought now to be rejected by all who would understand him

well enough to give him the best possible development. The fifteenth amendment was a stupendous blunder. It took for granted that the southern negroes were as ready for the ballot as the whites. The fact is that they were as a race in a far lower stage of evolution. Consider the collective achievement of this race, not in savage West Africa, but where it has been long in contact with civilization, in Hayti, and the south. Hayti has been independent for more than a hundred years. "Sir Spencer St. John ... formerly British Minister Resident in Hayti, after personally knowing the country for over twenty years, claims that it is ... in rapid decadence, and regards

the political future of the Haytians as utterly hopeless. At the termination of his service on the island, he said: 'I now quite agree

with those who deny that the negro can ever originate a civilization, and who assert that with the best of educations he remains an

inferior type of man.'

[Pg ix]"According to Sir Spencer, Hayti is sunk in misery, bloodshed, cannibalism, and superstition of the most sensual and degrading character. Ever since the republic has been established Haytians have been opposed to progress, but of recent years retrogression has been particularly rapid."[1]

In the south, where reversion to West African society has been checked by white government, this is a full catalogue of the main institutions evolved by the freedmen. They have provided themselves with cheaply built churches, in which their frequent and long worship is mainly sound and fury. In the pinch of crop cultivation or gathering they flock away from the fields to excursion trains and "protracted meetings." Perhaps their most noticeable institutions are "societies," some prohibiting hiring as domestic servants, except where subsistence cannot otherwise be had, and others providing the means of decent burial. Compare these feeble negro race performances with such white institutions, made in the same territory and at the same time, as Memorial Day, which the north has adopted; the Ku Klux Klan; enactment of stock laws when the freedmen's refusal to split rails made much fencing impossible; and the white primary.

Institutions--what I have just called the collective achievement of a race--mark in their character its capacity for improvement, and also its plane of development. When the negro, with his self-evolved institutions, is compared with the race which has furnished itself with fit organs of self-government all the way up from town-meeting to federal constitution, and is now[Pg x] about to crown

its grand work with direct legislation, it is like comparing the camel dressed to counterfeit an elephant, of which dear old Peter Parley told us in his school history, with a real elephant, or trying to make a confederate dollar in an administrator's return of 1864 count as a gold one.

And yet the negro, Professor Kelly Miller, replying to Tom Watson, assumes that Franks, Britons, Germans, Russians, and Aztecs have severally been in historical times as incapable as West Africans of rising from savagery and crossing barbarism into civilization. He outdoes even this--he would have it believed that Hayti is now a close second behind Japan in striding progress.

Surely the good people of the north ought to learn the difference between the negro race and the white. There is a small class of exceptional negroes which is assumed by a great many at the north to be most fair samples of the average negro of the south. Dr.

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Washington and Professor DuBois severally lead the opposing sections of this class. It consists of authors, editors, preachers, speakers, some who with small capital in banking, farming, and other business, have each by Booker Washington's blazon been exalted into a national celebrity, and others. Its never-sleeping resolve, fondly cherished by the greater part, is to "break into" white society and some day fuse with it. Its members are nearly all at least half white, and many are more than half white. But when a Bourbon snub

to one of them is received, as it often is, with dignity and proper behavior, Mr. Louis F. Post, and a few more, exclaim to the country, "See how this coalblack and pure negro excels his would-be superiors!" This man, almost white, is to[Pg xi] them a coalblack, genuine, unmixed negro. Ought not attention to facts incontrovertibly cardinal to rule here as everywhere else? To what is due the great accomplishment of Dumas, Douglass, and Booker Washington--to their negro blood or to their white blood? If half negro blood can do so well, why is it that pure negro blood does not do far better?

I have seen it asserted that Professor Kelly Miller is pure negro. His head has the shape of a white man's. The greyhound crossed once with the bulldog, as Youatt tells, and each succeeding generation of offspring recrossed with pure greyhound until not a suggestion of bulldog was visible, occurs to me. Thus there was bred a greyhound, possessing the desired trait of the bulldog. Who can say that there is not among the professor's American ancestors one of half white blood? If there is in fact no such, he is, in his high attainment, almost a lusus naturae.

The north, by due attention, will discern that the small number constituting what I provisionally name the upper class of negroes, is

hardly involved in the race question.

The negroes in the south outside of the upper class--the latter not amounting to more than five percent of the entire black population--are slowly falling away from the benign elevation above West Africa wrought by slavery. That they are here, is felt every year to be more injurious. They greatly retard the evolution of a white-labor class, which has become the head-spring of all social amelioration in enlightened communities. There appears to be but one salvation for them if they stay, which is fusion with the whites. Though Herbert Foster, and a few others, confidently assume that our[Pg xii] weakening Caucasian strain would be bettered by infusion of African blood, we see that while amalgamation would bless the negro it would incalculably injure us. It would be stagnation and blight for centuries, not only to the south but to the north also. Northerners are more and more attracted to the south by climate and other advantages, and intermarriage between the natives of each section increases all the while. The powers, protecting America, inscrutably to contemporaries kept busy certain agencies that saved the union. It seems to me that these same powers are now in

both sections increasing white hostility to the blacks, of purpose to prevent their getting firm foothold and becoming desirable in

marriage to poorer whites. One will think at once of the frequent lynchings in the south. But let him also think of how the strikers in Chicago were moved to far greater passion by the few black than the many white strike-breakers, the late inexplicable anti-negro riot in New York City, and the negro church dynamited the other day in Carlisle, Indiana. These powers, who have protected our country from the first settlement of the English upon the Atlantic coast down to the present time, appear to speak more plainly every day the fiat, "If Black and White are not separated, Black shall perish utterly." I am convinced that at the close of the century, if this separation has not been made long before, Professor Willcox's apparently conservative estimate of what will then be their numbers will prove to be gross exaggeration. In my judgment he comes far short of allowing the anti-fusion forces their full destructiveness.

Let the north purge itself from all delusion as to the negro, and help the south do him justice and loving[Pg xiii] kindness, by trans-

planting him into favorable environment.

2. It is high time that the Ku Klux be understood. When in 1867 it was strenuously attempted to give rule to scalawags and negroes, the very best of the south led the unanimous revolt. Their first taste of political power incited the negroes to license and riot imperilling every condition of decent life. In the twinkling of an eye the Ku Klux organized. It mustered, not assassins, thugs, and cutthroats, as has been often alleged, but the choicest southern manhood. Every good woman knew that the order was now the solitary defence of her purity, and she consecrated it with all-availing prayers. In Georgia we won the election of December, 1870, in the teeth of gigantic odds. This decisive deliverance from the most monstrous and horrible misrule recorded among Anglo-Saxons was the achievement of the Ku Klux. Its high mission performed, the Klan, burning its disguises, ritual, and other belongings, dis-banded two or three months later. Its reputation is not to be sullied by what masked men--bogus Ku Klux, as we, the genuine, called them--did afterwards. The exalted glorification of Dixon is not all of the Klan's desert. It becomes dearer in memory every year. I shall always remember with pride my service in the famous 8th Georgia Volunteers. I was with it in the bloody pine thicket at First Manassas, where it outfought four times its own number; at Gettysburg, where, although thirty-two out of its thirty-six officers were killed or wounded, there was no wavering; and in many other perilous places, the last being Farmville, two days before Appomattox, where this regiment and its sworn brother, the 7th Georgia, of Anderson's brigade, coming up on the run, grappled hand-to-hand with a superior force pushing back Mahone, and won[Pg xiv] the field. But I am prouder of my career in the Ku Klux Klan. The part of it under my command rescued Oglethorpe county, in which the negroes had some thousand majority, at the presidential election

of 1868,--the very first opportunity,--and held what had been the home of William H. Crawford, George R. Gilmer, and Joseph H. Lumpkin, until permanent victory perched upon the banners of the white race in Georgia.

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3. I observe that the north begins in some sort the learning of the two lessons above mentioned. But now comes one which seems hard indeed. Calhoun, Toombs, Davis, and the other pro-slavery leaders, ought to be thoroughly studied and impartially estimated. They were not agitators, nor factionists, nor conspirators. They were the extreme of conservatism. Their conscientious faithfulness to country has never been surpassed. Their country was the south, whose meat and bread depended upon slavery. The man whose sight can pierce the heavy mists of the slavery struggle still so dense cannot find in the world record of glorious stands for countries doomed by fate superiors in moral worth and great exploit. In their careers are all the comfort, dignity, and beauty of life, supreme virtue, and happiness of that old south, inexpressibly fair, sweet and dear to us who lived in it; and in these careers are also all the varied details of its inexpressibly pathetic ruin. What is higher humanity than to grieve with those who grieve? Brothers and sisters

of the north, you will never find your higher selves until you fitly admire the titanic fight which these champions made for their sacred cause, and drop genuine tears over their heart-breaking failure.

The foregoing summarizes the larger obstacles which[Pg xv] bar true sight of the south and the north. The devastation attending Sherman's march beyond Atlanta, the alleged inhumanity at Andersonville, and many other things that were bitterly complained of during the brothers' war, and afterwards, by one side or the other, seem to me almost forgotten and forgiven. Brothers who wore

the gray with me, brothers who wore the blue against me, I would have all of you freed from the delusions which still keep you from that perfect love which Webster, Lincoln, and Stephens gave south and north alike. I am sure that you must make the corrections indicated above before you can rightly begin the all-important subject of this book. With this admonition I commit you to the opening chapter, which I hope you will find to be a fit introduction.

JOHN C. REED. Atlanta, Ga.,

September, 1905.

[Pg xvi]

[Pg xvii] Contents

Chapter Page

I. Introductory 1

II. A Beginning made with Slavery 35

III. Unappeasable Antagonism of Free and Slave Labor 45

IV. Genesis, Course, and Goal of Southern Nationalization 51

V. American Nationalization, and how it made the Bond of Union stronger and stronger 62

VI. Root-and-Branch Abolitionists and Fire-eaters 84

VII. Calhoun 93

VIII. Webster 130

IX. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" 161

X. Slavery impelled into a Defensive Aggressive 208

XI. Toombs 212

XII. Help to the Union Cause by Powers in the Unseen 282

XIII. Jefferson Davis 296

XIV. The Curse and Blessing of Slavery 330

XV. The Brothers on Each Side were True Patriots and Morally Right--both those [Pg xviii]who fought for the Union and those who fought for the Confederacy 346

XVI. The Race Question: General and Introductory 359

XVII. The Race Question: the Situation in Detail 378

Appendix 429

Index 451

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[Pg 1]

THE BROTHERS' WAR

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY

THE inhabitants of the English colonies in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are all of the same race, language, religion, and

institutions of government. Such homogeneousness, as has long been recognized, works powerfully for the political coalescence of separate communities. With the adjacent ones of the colonies just mentioned there has always been trend to such coalescence, as

is impressively illustrated by the recent establishment of the Australian Federation. The thirteen colonies out of which the United States developed were likewise English, and there was the same homogeneousness in their population, which made in due time, and also maintained for a few generations, a union of them all--a continental union. But there had crept in a heterogeneity, overlooked for many years, during which time it acquired such force that it at last overcame the homogeneousness just emphasized and carried

a part of the inhabitants of the United States out of the continental union. African slavery dying out in the north, but prospering in the south, was this heterogeneity. By a most natural course the south grew into a nation--the Confederate States--whose end and purpose was to protect slavery,[Pg 2] which had become its fundamental economical interest, against the north standing by the original union, and which having gained control of the federal government was about to use its powers to extirpate slavery. The

continental or Pan-American nation--the American union, as we most generally think of it--could not brook dismemberment, nor

tolerate a continental rival, and consequently it warred upon and denationalized the Confederate States. The last two sentences tell how the brothers' war was caused, what was its stake on each side, and the true result. This compendious summary is to serve as a proposition, the proof of which we now purpose to outline.

Our first step is to emphasize how the free-labor system which prevailed in the north, and the slave-labor system which prevailed in the south, were utterly incompatible. Free labor is far cheaper and more efficient than slave labor. It had consequently superseded slavery in the entire enlightened world. But certain exceptional peculiarities of climate, soil, and products planted made slavery profitable in the south.

To maintain the market value of the slaves two things were needed: (1) the competition of free labor and the import of cheap slaves must be rigorously prevented; (2) a vast reserve of virgin soil, both to replace the plantations rapidly wearing out and to afford more land for the multiplying slaves. The fact last mentioned made it vital to the south to appropriate such parts of the soil of the Territories as suited her cotton and other staples. Therefore whenever she made such an appropriation she turned it into a slave State; for thus the competition of free labor would be effectually excluded therefrom. The much more rapid increase of her population made appropriation of lands in the Territories likewise vital to the north. Hers were all free-labor interests, as the[Pg 3] south's were

all slave-labor interests; and whenever the former appropriated any of the Territories, she made a State prohibiting slavery in order to protect her free-labor interests. The north was not excluded by nature from any part of the public domain as the other section was. Her free labor could be made productive everywhere in it, and she really needed the whole.

Thus the brothers of the north and the brothers of the south commenced to strive with one another over dividing their great inheritance. The former wanted lands for themselves, their sons, and daughters in all the Territories possible made into States protecting their free-labor system; the latter wanted all of the Territories suiting them made into States protecting their slave-labor system. What ought especially to be recognized by us now is that this contention was between good, honest, industrious, plain, free-labor people

on one side, and good, honest, industrious, plain, slave-labor people on the other, those on each side doing their best, as is the most common thing in the world, to gain and keep the advantage of those of the other. It was natural, it was right, it was most laud-

able that every householder, whether northerner or southerner, should do his utmost to get free land for himself and family. This fact--which is really the central, foundation, and cardinal one of all the facts which brought the brothers' war--must be thoroughly understood, otherwise the longer one contemplates this exciting theme the further astray from fact and reasonableness he gets.

The foregoing shows in brief how there came an eager contention for the public lands between parents, capitalists, workers, employers, manufacturers, and so forth, bred to free labor and hostile to slavery on the one side--that is, in the northern States; and the same classes bred to slavery and hostile to free labor on the other[Pg 4] side--that is, in the southern States. The contention grew

to a grapple. As this waxed hotter the combating brothers became more and more angry, called one another names more and more opprobrious; and at last each side, in the height of righteous indignation, denounced their opponents as enemies of country, morality, and religion. Here the root-and-branch abolitionist and the fire-eater begin their several careers, and get more and more excited

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audience, the former in the north and the other in the south. Both were emissaries of the fates who had decreed that there must be a brothers' war, to the end that slavery, the only peril to the American union, be cast out.

Under the necessity of defending slavery against free labor there came early an involuntary concretion of the southern States. This was very plainly discernible when the epoch-making convention was in session. It was the beginning of a process which has been well-named nation-making. After a while--say just before Toombs takes the southern lead from Calhoun--it had developed, as we can now see, from concretion into nationalization--not nationality, yet--of the south. It was bound, if slavery was denied expansion over the suitable soil of the Territories and the restoration of its runaways, to cause in the ripeness of time secession and the founding of the Confederate States. But there was another nationalization, older, of much deeper root and wider scope--what we

have already mentioned as the continental or Pan-American. Its origin was in an involuntary concretion of all the colonies--both the

northern and the southern--antedating the commencement of the southern concretion mentioned a moment ago. While southern nationalization was the guardian of the social fabric, the property, the occupations, the means of subsistence of the southern people, the greater[Pg 5] nationalization was not only the guardian of the same interests of the northern people, but it had a higher office. This was in due time to give the whole continent everlasting immunity from war and all its prospective, direct, and consequential

evils, by federating its different States under one democratic government--this higher office was to perpetuate the American union. This continental nationalization had probably ripened into at least the inchoate American nation by 1776. It was this nation, as I am confident the historical evidence rightly read shows, that made the declaration of independence and the articles of confederation, carried the Revolutionary war on to the grandest success ever achieved for real democracy, and then drafted and adopted the federal constitution. The constitution was not the creator of this nation, as lawyers and lawyer-bred statesmen hold, but the union and the constitution are both its creatures. This nation is constantly evolving, and as it does it modifies and unmakes the constitution and system of government of the United States, and the same of each State, as best suits itself. Why do we not trace our history from

the first colonial settlements down to the present, and learn that the nation develops in both substance and form, in territory, in aims and purposes, not under the leading hand of conventions, congress, president, State authority, of even the fully decisive conquest of seceding States by the armies of the rest, but by the guidance of powers in the unseen, which we generally think of as the laws of evolution? To illustrate: For some time after I had got home from Appomattox I was disheartened, as many others were, at the men-ace of centralization. A vision of Caleb Cushing's man on horseback--the coming American Caesar--seared my eyeballs for a few years. But after the south had been actually reconstructed I[Pg 6] was cheered to note that the evolutionary forces maintaining and developing local self-government were holding their own with those maintaining and developing union. To-day, you see the people

of different localities all over the north--in many cities, in a few States--driven forward by a power which they do not understand,

in a struggle which will never end till they have rescued their liberties from the party machine wielded everywhere by the public-

service corporations.

To resume what we were saying just before this short excursion. Of course when the drifting of the south toward secession became decided and strong, Pan-American nationalization set all of its forces in opposing array. As soon as the southern confederacy was a fact, the brothers' war began. I emphasize it specially here that this war was mortal rencounter between two different nations.

The successive stages by which her nationalization impelled the south to secession are roughly these:

1. The concretion mentioned above probably passes into the beginning of nationalization when the south was aroused by the resistance of the free-labor States to the admission of Missouri as a slave State. With a most rude shock of surprise she was made to contemplate secession. Although there was much angry discussion and the crisis was grave, you ought to note that the root-and-branch abolitionist and fire-eater had not come. That crisis over, which ended the first stage, there was apparently profound peace between the free-labor communities and the slave-labor communities for some while.

2. The south rises against the tariff which taxes, as she believes, her slave-grown staples for the profit of free-labor manufacturers. Here the next stage begins. Perhaps the advent of nullification, proposed and [Pg 7]advocated by Calhoun as a union weapon with which a State might defend itself against federal aggression, signalizes this stage more than anything else.

3. The second gives place to the third stage, when the congressional debate over anti-slavery petitions opens. It is in this stage that the root-and-branch abolitionist and the fire-eater begin their really effective careers. Opposition to the restoration of fugitive

slaves was spreading through the north and steadily strengthening. It ought to be realized by one who would understand these times that this actual encouragement of the slaves to escape was a direct attack upon slavery in the southern States, becoming stronger

and more formidable as the root-and-branch abolitionists became more zealous and influential, and increased in numbers, and the slaveholder was bound to recognize what it all portended to him. It was natural that when he had these root-and-branch abolitionists before himself in mind, he should say of them:

"The lands of the Territories suiting slave labor are much less in area than the due of the south therein. She will soon need all these

lands, as the slaves are multiplying rapidly, and the virgin soil of her older States is going fast. With an excess of slaves and a lack of

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fit land soon to come, if we are barred from the Territories our property must depreciate until it is utterly worthless. But these abolitionists attempt a further injury. They instigate our slaves to fly into the north, and then encourage the north not to give them up when we reclaim them. They deny our property the expansion into what is really our part of the Territories which it ought to have in order to maintain its value; and further they try to steal as many of our slaves from us in the States as they can."

This was the double peril, as it were, which gathered in full view against the south.

[Pg 8]I cannot emphasize it enough that the hot indignation of such as Garrison against slavery as a hideous wrong was not excited before the competition between north and south over the public lands had become eager and all-absorbing. It is nearly always the case that such excitement does not appear until long after an actual menace by a rival to the personal or selfish interest of another has shown itself. It is not until the menace becomes serious that the latter wakes up to discover that the former is violating some capital article of the decalogue. This was true of the root-and-branch abolitionist. And his high-flown morality was made still more Quixotic by his conscientiously assuming that the negro slave was in all respects just such a human being as his white master.

This third stage extends from about January, 1836, until the country was alarmed as never before by the controversy of 1849-50 over the admission of California, in southern latitude, with an anti-slavery constitution. At its end the southern leadership of Calhoun standing upon nullification, a remedy that contemplated remaining in the union, is displaced by that of Toombs, who begins to feel strongly, if not to see clearly, that the south cannot preserve slavery in the union.

4. The fourth stage begins with the compromise of 1850. Afterwards during the same year was an occurrence which cannot be overrated in importance by the student of these times. That was the consideration of the pending question in Georgia, and action upon it by a convention of delegates elected for that special purpose. The Georgia Platform, promulgated by that convention, is as follows:

"To the end that the position of this State may be clearly apprehended by her confederates of the south and of the north, and that she may be blameless of all future consequences, Be[Pg 9] it resolved by the people of Georgia in convention assembled, First,

that we hold the American union secondary in importance only to the rights and principles it was designed to perpetuate. That past

associations, present fruition, and future prospects, will bind us to it so long as it continues to be the safeguard of these rights and

principles.

Second. That if the thirteen original parties to the compact, bordering the Atlantic in a narrow belt, while their separate interests were in embryo, their peculiar tendencies scarcely developed, their Revolutionary trials and triumphs still green in memory, found union impossible without compromise, the thirty-one of this day may well yield somewhat in the conflict of opinion and policy, to preserve that union which has extended the sway of republican government over a vast wilderness to another ocean, and proportionally advanced their civilization and national greatness.

Third. That in this spirit the State of Georgia has considered the action of congress, embracing a series of measures for the admission of California into the union, the organization of territorial governments for Utah and New Mexico, the establishment of a boundary between the latter and the State of Texas, the suppression of the slave-trade in the District of Columbia, and the extradition of fugitive slaves, and (connected with them) the rejection of propositions to exclude slavery from the Mexican Territories, and to abolish it in the District of Columbia; and, whilst she does not wholly approve, will abide by it as a permanent adjustment of this sectional controversy.

Fourth. That the State of Georgia, in the judgment of this convention, will and ought to resist, even--as a last resort--to a disruption of every tie which binds her to the union, any future act of congress abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, without

the consent and petition of the slaveholders thereof, or any act abolishing slavery in places within the slaveholding States, purchased by the United States for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other like purposes; or any act suppressing the slave-trade between slaveholding States; or any refusal to admit as a State any Territory [Pg 10]applying, because of the existence of slavery therein; or any act prohibiting the introduction of slaves into the Territories of Utah and New Mexico; or any act repealing or materially modifying the laws now in force for the recovery of fugitive slaves.

Fifth. That it is the deliberate opinion of this convention, that upon the faithful execution of the fugitive slave bill by the proper authorities depends the preservation of our much loved union."

This platform was the work of statesmen who had added to the wisdom of the fathers, making the declaration of independence, articles of confederation, and the great constitution, worthy wisdom of their own from a far more varied experience and better training in government. These statesmen came indiscriminately from all parties. The people in the State, from the highest in authority through every intermediate circle down to the humblest citizen, deliberately, without excitement or passion, endorsed this platform with practical unanimity. And all parties stood upon it to the end. This was not an ignorant, debased, corrupt, unrighteous people;

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but it was even better in everything that makes a people great and good than the former generation which had given the country

Washington and Jefferson.

Especially should the student meditate what this solemn declaration shows was the sentiment of the people of the State at that time towards the American union. Every one of the five planks contains its own most convincing proof of deepest devotion. Think of the child who at last resolves to fly from the home which had been inexpressibly sweet until the stepmother came; of the father whose conscience commands him to save the mother's life by killing the assailing son; of what the true Othello felt when he had

to execute the precious Desdemona for what he believed to be her falseness--think of these examples, if you would realize the agony[Pg 11] of the better classes of the southern people when they at last discovered that the union had changed from being their best friend into their most fell enemy.

The Georgia Platform was actually drafted, I believe, by A. H. Stephens, then a whig. It was probably moulded in its substance--especially in the fourth and fifth planks--more by Toombs, also a whig, than any other. Howell Cobb, a democrat, approved, and was elected governor upon it the next year, receiving the ardent support of Toombs and Stephens. Toombs was just forty, Stephens a year or two, and Cobb some six or seven years, less than forty. These three were the leading authors. Note how much younger they

were than Calhoun, who had a few months before died in his sixty-ninth year. The platform indicates the new sentiment, not only of Georgia but of the entire south. When its contents are compared with the doctrine of nullification, it clearly shows as the production of a new era in the history of southern nationalization; for it marks what we may somewhat metaphorically distinguish as the close

of the pro-union and opening of the anti-union defence of slavery. The proclivity to secession uninterruptedly increases from this

point on.

I would have it noted that the tactics of this fourth stage are unaggressive. The Georgia Platform was no more than most grave and serious warning against being driven to the wall. It did not bully nor hector. The threat of what must be done in case certain menaced blows to slavery were struck was so calmly, deprecatingly, and decorously made, that one wonders it was not heeded. He ceases to wonder only when history reveals to him that fate had become adverse to the good cause of this noble people.

5. A change of tactics characterizes the fifth stage. The faster growing population of the north, furnishing[Pg 12] settlers in far greater number than that of the south, was sweeping away all chance of new slave States. The situation commanded that the defence of the south change to the aggressive, just as Stoessel was constrained the other day to take the offensive against 203 Meter Hill. In the first sortie the south got the Missouri compromise repealed. Then she tried to make a slave State of Kansas. She failed. When she

had lost Kansas--like California in southern latitude--she could not help recognizing that the outlook for slavery in the union had become desperate. My northern countrymen, if you were as free from the surviving influence of the old intersectional quarrel as we all ought to be, you would applaud the ability and valor with which the south had fought this losing fight for the welfare and comfort of her people; and especially would you admire her supreme effort in behalf both of that people, and also of the union which she loved next to the cause of her people. Not quailing before odds incalculable, she was as brave and self-sustained as Miltiades, coming forth with his little ten thousand to fight the host of Mardonius hand-to-hand. The only thing for her now was new aggression, to make a demand never seriously urged before. That was that congress protect the master's property in every Territory until it became

a State. If this were done, she could, perhaps, keep slavery in some of the Territories long enough for it to strike root permanently.

If it could not be done she must choose between her own cause and the union. Her persistence in the demand mentioned--and she was obliged to persist--split the democratic party, which had until this time been her main upholder in the union. The north refused her demand by electing Lincoln. This was the end of the fifth stage. Her nationality had become fully ripe. She seceded into the

[Pg 13]Confederate States, her only opportunity of conserving the property and occupation interests of her people. Of course she expected to get her part of the public domain, and to enforce extradition of her fugitive slaves.

The foregoing is the barest outline of the rise and conflict between the two nationalizations. The subject has been neglected too long. There begins to be some faint understanding of the greater nationalization, but that understanding is far short of completeness. There is hardly a suspicion of the other. And yet as to our own special subject it is really the more important, for in it is the initiative of the brothers' war. There has been made by nobody any investigation at all of the main parts of that train of events which

I designate as southern nationalization. Not Wilson's "The Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in the United States," nor any book by a partisan of either side in the struggle, gives any help towards this investigation. The historical sources have never been studied at all; such as the colonial records now publishing, the records and papers of the probate court in some of the older and more important counties of the south--especially the returns of administrators, executors, and guardians, and files of newspapers advertising their citations. Here can be found the prevailing prices of slaves, their rate of multiplication, all details of their management, from the very beginning. The trial and equity courts contain records of litigation about slaves; of advice of chancellors to trustees seeking to

make or change investment; of wills manumitting slaves; and a thousand other relevant matters. The course of legislation as to slaves from the first to the end is also important. From these, from local literature such as "Georgia Scenes," "Simon Suggs," biography,

and various pamphlets, and other[Pg 14] original sources,--far better historical evidence than any which is now generally invoked,--

can be learned the real facts as to the growth of slavery; and especially how in its economic potency consequent upon the invention

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of the gin it supplanted or made dependent upon itself all other property, and became the solitary foundation of every kind of production and mode of making a living; so that even by 1820 to abolish slavery would have been almost to beggar the southern people for two or three generations. It is to be hoped that Professor Brown, finding the opportunity which he desires, may yet exhaust not only the sources I have mentioned, but also important ones that I have not even thought of, and give the true ante-bellum history of the lower south. Some such work is necessary to explain the active principle, the raison d'etre of southern nationalization.

How north and south were sundered by the different nationalizations is yet to be told in full detail without any censure of the people of either. Practically every American was born into an occupation or way of life connected with or founded upon either slave or free labor interests, and so was born into one or the other of these two nationalizations, and his conscience coerced him to stay with it. These nationalizations made two different publics and two different countries in the United States. After the slavery agitation had become active the masses in either public knew but little of the other, and cared for it less; and when war broke out between the two countries every man, woman, and child was ready to die, if there was need, for his own. When the history of the times has been impartially and adequately written the world will recognize that the patriotism and moral worth of neither side excels that of the other, and it will crown both.

[Pg 15]The evolution indicated above produced not only the two hostile peoples, but also their leaders and representatives of every class. I have taken pains in a relevant chapter to show how the fire-eaters and the root-and-branch abolitionists were at last brought upon the stage. Every fierce controversy in history has had their like on each side. Their coming is late. The antagonists have become excited. The intelligence guiding evolution deceives them as to the parts they must play. They believe that their mission is to arouse the public conscience in order to right some alleged moral wrong. Their real mission is to excite to angry action. Cicero condemns

the Peripatetics for asserting that proneness to anger has been usefully given by nature.[2] He overlooked the fact that the outbreak

of the passion is intended to spur us into doing something important for our own protection; and that it is therefore an indispensable weapon in our self-defensive armory. These fanatics, as we often call them, instigated north and south to quarrel more and more fiercely, and finally to fight. The purpose of the powers in the unseen in causing the fight has already been stated.

What especially concerns us here is that we avoid adhering to the mistakes of these partisans which still have injurious effect upon opinion. Thus the fire-eater could see no good whatever in the yankees, as he called them, denying them honesty, trustworthiness, and other elementary virtues; accusing them of robbing us by the tariff and other measures, and hating us for the prosperity and comfort which the slavery system had blessed us with. Other of his false charges are still lodged in the memory of some influential southerners. But the fire-eater's predictions were all completely falsified by the result of the war; and he has become so much [Pg 16] discredited as an authority, there is no very great need for consuming much time and effort in correcting his misstatements. On the other hand the decisive success of their side has kept thousands at the north fully believing the wildest fabrications of the root-

and-branch abolitionists. The latter believed that the African slave of the south was just such a human being, ready for liberty and

self-government in all particulars, as civilized and enlightened whites. They believed that the condition of his immediate ancestors in West Africa was one of high physical, mental, moral, and social development, and that if there was in him now any inferiority

to his master it was entirely due to the sinister influence of American slavery. They also believed that the system was fraught with such cruelties as frequent separation of man and wife and of mother and young children, under-feeding and clothing, and grinding overwork,--that, in short, the average slave was daily exposed to something like the torture of the Inquisition. All this was invention. American slavery found the negro gabbling inarticulately and gave him English; it found him a cannibal and fetishist and gave him

the Christian religion; it found him a slave to whom his savage master allowed no rights at all, and it gave him an enlightened master bound by law to accord him the most precious human rights; it found him an inveterate idler and gave him the work habit; it found him promiscuous in the horde and gave him the benign beginning of the monogamic family,--in short, as now appears very strongly probable, American slavery gave him his sole opportunity to rise above the barbarism of West Africa.

These tremendous mistakes of fact, after knitting the north in solid phalanx against dividing the Territories with the south and restoring fugitive slaves and thus[Pg 17] hasting forward the war, prompted that folly of follies the fifteenth amendment, and have ever since kept the north from understanding the race question.

I am sure that it is high time that we of each section should school ourselves into impartially appreciating the civil leaders of the other side. The south has made more progress towards this than the north. Certain causes have operated to help her onward. One of these is that practically all of us recognize it is far better for the section that the union side won. Another is that the great mass have learned that slavery both effeminated and paralyzed the whites and was a smothering incubus upon our due social and material development. It is natural that although we give our pro-slavery political leaders and the confederate soldiers increasing love, we should more and more commend the pro-union and anti-slavery activity of the northern statesmen. Nothing like this has led the north to revise the reprobation which in the heat and passion of the conflict it bestowed upon the public men of the south. If I ever read a good word from a northern writer as to them, it is for something in their careers disconnected with the southern cause. Even Mr. Rhodes, the ablest and most impartial of northern historians of the times, finds in Calhoun only a closet spinner of utterly impractical theories. Further, I could hardly believe it when I read it--and it is hard for me to believe it yet--that, citing some flippant words

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of Parton in which a slander of contemporary politics is toothsomely repeated as his voucher, he flatly charges the lion-hearted knight of the south with playing the coward in the most heroic episode of his grand career. My faith is strong that this mode of treating the good and great southern leaders will soon go out of fashion.

I am greatly in earnest to vindicate these [Pg 18]leaders--especially Calhoun, Toombs, and Davis. Much of the public life of each one was concerned with matters of national interest. To this I give special attention, for I want my northern readers to know what true Americans they all were. Without this they cannot have their full glory. And their justification is that of their people. Such effective leaders are always representative. It is a misnomer to call them leaders. They were really followers of their constituents who were struggling for the subsistence of themselves and their dear ones. During this time Calhoun, Toombs, and Davis, had they not labored in every way to protect this great cause--the cause of their own country--as they did, would have been as recreant as the confederate soldier, skulking away from the line defending home and fireside. When our country is in peril the unseen lords of its destiny do not take any one of us, from the greatest to the humblest, into their confidence as to the event. Every man of us must support in politics and on the field the cause of our people. If that must go down it will make defeat glorious to go down with it, as contentedly and bravely as did Demosthenes, Cicero, and Davis.

Whoever diligently studies the facts will be convinced that southern nationalization, with a power superior to human resistance, carried the southern people into secession, and that their so-called leaders were carried with them. He will discern that the parts of the latter were merely to serve as floats to mark the course of the current beneath. Therefore be just to these leaders for justice' sake. Further, you brothers and sisters of the north ought to bethink yourselves and keep in mind how we regard them. The reputation of these our civil champions and their graves are as dear to us as those of our mothers. If you adopted an orphan, you would feel it to be unpardonable to speak slightingly to him[Pg 19] of his parents. Cleopatra, her conqueror sending her word to study on what fair demands she would have, answered:

"That majesty to keep decorum, must

No less beg than a kingdom."

Let those who wore the blue and their descendants think over it long enough to realize how unspeakably low and treacherous it

would be in us to abet any condemnation whatever of these men for their anti-union acts--these men whom we or our fathers voted for and supported because of these acts. If you deny justification to them, how can we keep decorum in accepting it ourselves?

I would say one more word, where perhaps I am a little over-earnest. These southern leaders have contributed richly to the treasures of American history. Their moral worth,--nay, moral grandeur,--their great natural parts, their statesmanly ability, their eloquence, their heroic fidelity to their people,--by these each has won indefeasible title to the best of renown. Whenever the north has made real study of them, she will give them as generous admiration as she now does to the charge of Pickett. I have done my utmost to present Calhoun, Toombs, and Davis faithfully, using, as I believe, all the main facts which are relevant and incontrovertible. I am sure that every northerner who reads them, after he has laid aside all prejudice, will admit that I did not claim too much when I was recounting their merits a moment ago.

I invite close consideration of all that I say of Webster. The purpose of providence, bestowing birthplace, early environment, training, and career as preparation for a paramount mission, shows more conspicuously in him than in any other of America's great, with the solitary exception of Washington. How the names of detracting agitators and mere politicians written over his in the[Pg 20] temple of fame are now fading off, and how the invincible and lovable champion of the brother's union looms larger upon us every year!

I am painfully conscious of how certain omissions, unavoidable in my limited space, mar the symmetry of my ground-plan. The average reader will probably think that I ought to have sketched Lincoln, Grant, and Lee. I was convinced that the public had already become reasonably instructed as to them.

John Q. Adams is one of the most conspicuous men of his day. Standing aloof from parties, completely self-reliant, opulently endowed with every high power of moderation, insight, and effective presentation, his good genius gave him the championship in congress of the free-labor cause during the critical years that it was preparing for the decisive meeting with the slave-labor cause. In this time it seems to me that single-handed he achieved more for the latter than all its other champions. A pleasant parallel between him and Lee occurs to me. Each had filled the proudest place in the chosen avocation of his life. Adams had been the chief magistrate

of the great republic, elected by the votes of a continent. Lee had been the foremost general of the bravest and most puissant nation that ever lost its existence by war. Each one of the two passed from power down into what is usually a condition of inaction and accumulating rust till the end of life, and to each was most kindly granted the achievement of new fame and glory. In the national house of representatives, Adams, during the last twelve years of his life,--1836-48,--did the great deeds which we have just lauded. In the last years of his life Lee, as the head of an humble institution of learning, showed not only the youth in his charge, but all of

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his stricken people, how to conquer direst adversity with such grand success in an example of[Pg 21] unmurmuring endurance that every future generation of men will give it more loving appreciation.

John Q. Adams, as I have tried to explain, is almost an American epoch of himself; but I could not give him the chapter that is his due.

I felt that it would have been well to pair Stephen A. Douglas of the north with Alexander H. Stephens of the south. They are in nearly exact antithetical contrast. The former clung to the south, the other to the union, until the clock struck the dread hour of separation. How they loved each other and each other's people! They most strikingly exemplify the adamantine grip which each one of the two nationalizations kept upon its greatest and best.

Wendell Phillips and William L. Yancey should be contrasted. Each one was the very prince of sectional agitators, helping with great efficiency to make the public opinion that carried forward Seward and Lincoln, the actual leaders of the north, and Toombs, the actual leader of the south. It is my strong conviction that Phillips and Yancey were the most gifted, eloquent, and influential stump speakers in America since Patrick Henry.

Chase steadily rises in my estimate. His solid parts, his consistent, conscientious, and able anti-slavery career, and especially that decisive speech in the Peace Congress,--these, and other relevancies that can be mentioned, drew me powerfully. The firm candor with which he avowed in that memorable speech that the north had decided against the expansion of slavery, demonstrates the clearness of his vision. The part of it which recurs to me most frequently is that in which he impressively recounts the intersectional dissension over the fugitive slave law,--the south believing slavery right, the north believing it wrong,--and proposes that in place

of the[Pg 22] remedy given by that law the master be paid the value of his slave. "Instead of judgment for rendition," he said, "let there be judgment for compensation determined by the true value of the services, and let the same judgment assure freedom to the fugitive. The cost to the national treasury would be as nothing in comparison with the evils of discord and strife. All parties would be gainers."

Calhoun devised to restrain the sections from mutual aggression by endowing each with an absolute veto against the other. Webster fondly believed that if he could be president he would bring back the wrangling brothers to love one another again as much as he loved them all. Chase also had his pet impracticable project. Each one of the three recoiled and racked all of his invention to save his country from the huge fraternal slaughter that his divining soul whispered to him was near.

The south will cherish the memory of Chase more and more fondly as she learns better how he firmly stood for civil law against military rule, and that he was heart and soul for universal amnesty.

It was all I could do to deny a chapter to William H. Seward. He seems to me to have been the only northern man whose foresight of the coming convulsion equalled that of Calhoun. He did not become a Jeremiah as the other did, for his section was not, after it had just emerged from a gulf of blood, to be plunged and held for years in a gulf of poverty and disorder. He was far less serious and much more optimistic in his nature than Calhoun. Affectionate, sympathetic, rarely agreeable in his manners--how well Mrs. Davis depicts him in what is to me one of the pleasantest passages of her book.[3] He was spoils politician, able popular leader,[Pg

23] and great statesman in rare combination. While his heart was extremely warm, his head was never turned by his feelings. Lincoln ardently believed in his soul what Choate calls "the glittering generalities" of the declaration of independence. But to Seward current illusions were the same as they were to Napoleon Bonaparte--he was to lead the masses with them just as far as possible, but not to deceive himself. Read in your closet his two epochal speeches, the "higher law" one of March 11, 1850, and that proclaiming the irrepressible conflict at Rochester, October 25, 1858, then read that of Chase at the Peace Congress, and you cannot avoid feeling that while Chase opposes slavery mainly because he conceives it to be a gross moral wrong, the other opposes because it is the belonging of an inferior civilization. In my opinion no man of that time had such a clear conception as Seward of the utter economical incompatibility of the free-labor system and the slave-labor system, and of the doom of the latter in their conflict then on. While he had this superior insight and wisdom it was the better way for him to follow the tide of morbid moral sentiment and unreasoning zeal carrying the country on to his goal. Following thus he proved a leader unsurpassed. The longer I contemplate Seward the stronger becomes my conviction that he is the most entertaining subject and the most delightful in variety of parts and traits of all American statesmen for the essayist portrait painter. To give a picture true to life demands the very best and highest art.

In my last two chapters I do all I can to clear up the race question, which is now densely beclouded with northern misunderstanding and southern prejudice. The negro has a nature that in some material particulars differs so widely from that of the Caucasian that it ought[Pg 24] to be duly allowed for; and yet as people are so prone to think all others just like themselves, this is hardly ever done. Now, forty years after emancipation, we see that the promptings and consequences of his nature just emphasized in combination with the social forces operating upon him have caused changes in the situation, of the gravest import to him. His native idleness, coming back stronger and stronger the further he gets in time from the steady work of slavery, his lack of forecast, his vice, inveter-

12

ate pauperism, increasing disease and insanity, on one side; the hostility excited against him by the inexpressibly unwise grant to him of equal political rights, and the rapid invasion by white labor since the early nineties of the province which he appropriated during the years when the whites had not recovered from the paralyzing shock and surprise of emancipation, on the other side, example these changes. There has evolved a division of the southern negroes into two classes. One class, which I most roughly distinguish as the upper, contains all those who are not compelled by their circumstances to be unskilled laborers in country and town. It hardly amounts to one-twentieth of the whole. The millions are all in the other class, which I again most roughly distinguish as the lower. Ponder what I tell you of them, their helplessness, their accelerating degradation, their mounting death rate, their gloomy pros-

pects. I try hard also to have the upper class well understood. To a southerner it is amazing how many outside people of education, intelligence, and fair-mindedness assume that the multitude in the lower class are the same in every material detail of character and ability as those few who by various favors of fortune have found place in the upper class. To stress here, in the beginning, a fact as its very great importance demands, nearly all the negroes who get high station are[Pg 25] part white. Dumas, the father, was at least half white. The son Dumas was probably three-quarters white. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Anglo-African composer, is half white.

Such as these are the samples by which nearly all the continent and England, and many northerners, estimate the capacity of the pure negroes of the south, grovelling in depths out of which one climbs only now and then by a miracle. The men just mentioned are not real negroes. It is the same with nearly all the so-called negroes of America, from Douglass to Dr. Washington, who have become famous. They are but examples of what whites can do against adversity. The coalblack equalling these in achievement would be as rare among his fellows as Hans, the Berlin thinker, is among horses. This palpable distinction between men who are largely, if not nearly all, Caucasian, and men who are purely West African in descent, is utterly overlooked by many most conscientious and earnest ones of the north, like Mr. Louis F. Post, who is always telling us of the south what the negro is--not, and how we should treat him, magisterially reading us lessons in A B C democracy.

There will be fewer and fewer part-white negroes in the south by reason of the steadily increasing hostility of each race to mixed procreation. This upper class has long shown a drift northward. Under the expulsion of many of its members from certain occupations by white competition, lately commenced and fast increasing, this drift now gathers strength. From what I see every day it seems to me that the destiny of much the greater part of this upper class is disappearance partly by absorption and partly by euthanasy.

It is the millions of the lower class that should be our deepest concern. If they be left where their utopian emancipators and enfran-chisers have placed them, it is[Pg 26] almost certain that nearly the whole will go into the jaws of destruction, now opening wide before them and sucking them in. Such a result of the three amendments--that is, to have annihilated hosts upon hosts of pure negroes in order to make just a few part-whites all-white--would be a fit monument to the statesmanship of the maddest visionaries in all history. We must come resolutely and lovingly to the help of these wretched creatures. I tell you at large how it is our duty to give the black man his own State in our union, and supervise him in it even better than we are now doing for the Philippine.

I believe that the foregoing, re-enforced by a glance over the chapter-titles, will give a reader the preconception which he ought to get from an introduction to a book which he is about to begin. In dealing with the causes and some of the more important consequences of the brothers' war my method is rationale rather than narrative. My first purpose is to indicate how everything happened according to laws that with cosmic force reared two great economic powers, divided the whole land into a vast host standing up for one of the two in the south, and a still larger host standing up for the other in the north, and how these same laws were most faithfully served by all the actors on each side. I try to set out and explain what are the principles of evolution and the ways of human action, and especially the commanding view-points, which must be rightly attended to in their supreme importance before the greater one of the two critical American eras can have its fit history. The man who writes it will be entirely free from the monomania and orgiastic fury of both fire-eater and root-and-branch abolitionist, from their excessively emotional assumptions, their explosive and exclamatory argumentation; he will have the industry,[Pg 27] the undisturbed vision, and the perfect fairness of the foremost sociologists of our time; he will show how each side was right from first to last in upholding its own separate country,--all belonging to it, statesmen, agitators, demagogues, fanatical fire-eaters and abolitionists, generals and soldiers. He will show that such things which

in expedience ought not to have been done were unavoidable, and therefore to be excused. He will show what erroneous judgments of each section should now be challenged and kept from working injury. Especially do I emphasize it, he will convince every average reader that north and south were equally conscientious, honest, heroic, and lovable from beginning to end. Such a history will

be even greater than that by which Thucydides realized his soaring ambition to give the world an everlasting possession; and it will

become the bible of America, treasured and loved alike by the people both north and south.

This bible is coming, as many signs show. I will illustrate by examples from three northern authors, given not exactly in the order of time, but in that of their approximation to full attainment. After a circumstantial description of each one of the three days' fighting at Gettysburg, fair and impartial in the extreme, Mr. Vanderslice eulogizes both sides, without invidious distinction, for "their fidelity and gallantry, their fortitude and valor," and because there was nothing done by either "to tarnish their record as soldiers," and most becomingly emphasizes the "martial fame and glory" thereby won "for the American soldier." But just here he sounds a most unpleasantly discordant note by saying, "One was right and the other wrong."[4] He forgot that brothers who fight as those did at Gettysburg are all right, and that whenever[Pg 28] one falls on either side flights of angels sing him to his rest.

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In June, 1902, Mr. Charles F. Adams, making an academic address at Chicago, startled many of his auditors with this outspoken

vindication of the south:

"Legally and technically,--not morally,-- ... and wholly irrespective of humanitarian considerations,--to which side did the weight of argument incline during the great debate which culminated in our civil war?... If we accept the judgment of some of the more modern students and investigators of history,--either wholly unprejudiced or with a distinct union bias,--it would seem as if the weight of argument falls into what I will term the confederate scale."[5]

Mr. Adams, having made further inquiry of his own, December 22 of the same year, announced a still more advanced conclusion. He had said at Chicago that the confederate scale preponderated; but now his vision having become more certain he said the scales hung even.[6] Note that in the passage just quoted from him I have italicized the two words "not morally." I do not understand that in the Charleston speech he meant to revoke the italicized words, and to say anything more than that each side was right in its own view of the nature of the government. Even with this reservation, the utterances of Mr. Adams evince a grateful improvement upon the dogmatism which characterizes nearly every other northerner or southerner who has treated the subject.

Professor Wendell sees clearly that both sides were morally right, and he is impartially just and equally loving to both. I feel that the quotations from a late work of his which I now make are the chief merits of[Pg 29] this chapter. Considering the controversy between the sections, he says, with the truest insight, "The constitution of the United States was presenting itself more and more in the light of an agreement between two incompatible sets of economic institutions, assuming to each the right freely to exist within its own limits."[7]

In this next passage as to the same subject, rising above Mr. Adams to the high frankness which the facts demand, he says, "The truth is that an irrepressible social conflict was at hand, and that both sides were as honorable as were both sides during the American Revolution, or during the civil wars of England."[8]

How just to north and south each, and how fraternally compassionate towards the south is this: "Solemn enough to the uninvaded north, the war meant more than northern imagination has yet realized to those southern States into whose heart its horrors were slowly, surely carried. Such a time was too intense for much expression; it was a moment rather for heroic action; and in south and north alike it found armies of heroes. Of these there are few more stirring records than a simple ballad made by Dr. Ticknor, of Georgia, concerning a confederate soldier."[9] And then he quotes "Little Giffen" in full.

Professor Wendell reaches a still greater height when he decorates the Tyrtaeus of the Confederate States and the supereminent anti-slavery lyricist of the north with equal homage and admiration. He says:

"The civil war brought forth no lines more fervent [than the concluding thirty-six of Timrod's 'The Cotton Boll,' which are set out], and few whose fervor rises to such lyric height. In the days of conflict, north regarded south, and south north, as the incarnation of evil. Time, however, has begun its healing [Pg 30]work; at last our country begins to understand itself better than ever before; and as our new patriotism strengthens, we cannot prize too highly such verses as Whittier's, honestly phrasing noble northern sentiment, or as Timrod's, who with equal honesty phrased the noble sentiment of the south. A literature which in the same years could produce work so utterly antagonistic in superficial sentiment, and yet so harmonious in their common sincerity and loftiness of feeling, is a literature from which riches may come."[10]

These words are more golden than I can tell. They parallel the elevation of Webster, showing the same love for South Carolina and

Massachusetts, in the pertinent parts of the reply to Hayne, which since my boyhood I have cherished as a nonpareil. It is cheering to a faithful southerner to receive such sure proof that the day must soon come when all obloquy will be lifted from the fame of Calhoun, Toombs, and Davis. What a grand triumph of contrast, almost surpassing the best achievement of Shakspeare, it will be when some honest Griffith, having shown Webster, Lincoln, and Grant in all the worth which merited their unspeakably happy lot, each radiant with the victor's glory, places opposite the great civic heroes of the southern nation, their due renown at last fitly

blazoned. That renown will be that they devoted the very greatest human powers and virtues all their lives, with never remitted effort and spotless fidelity, to save a doomed country,--the imperishable renown of grand failure in a cause which adverse fate cannot keep from being ever dear to all humanity.

My last word as to what I have just quoted from the three northern authors is that all of us--and especially the fast widening public of readers--ought to be forever in earnest to applaud such sentiments and chide[Pg 31] every manifestation of excessive sectional bias or prejudice from either northerner or southerner. This has been my incessantly kept faith for years. As proof I refer to my article, "The Old and New South," nearly all of it written in the early part of 1875--thirty years ago--and which I published the next year. I give an exact copy of it in the Appendix. As you go through it remember these things of the author: The election of Lincoln

14

made me believe, as it did thousands of other southerners, that secession was the only patriotic course. I therefore voted for secession delegates to the State convention. I served in the confederate army all the war, taking part in the First Manassas and many other battles; and when I had been surrendered and paroled at Appomattox I walked back to my home in Georgia. Ten years after this I had found full solace and comfort for the direful event to the south of the brothers' war; and I had learned that the brothers on each side had complete justification in conscience for their contrary parts as statesmen, public leaders, voters, and at the end as soldiers. I want my readers of each section to see that I have long practised what I am now preaching.

I beg attention to the article on another score. It shows that the opinions expressed in this book have not been formed in haste. Nearly all of the more important will be found therein, in embryo, at least; and the present book will show, I hope, that they have prosperously grown. There are passages in the article, such as those touching the relations of the races, the future of the negro, the maintenance by the decentralizing forces of the union of their balance with the counter ones, and also others, which I might now justly claim to have proved prophetic; and I do not believe that a serious misprediction can be found in the entire article. This is, I hope, such corroboration by after occurrences as [Pg 32]indicates that even my early studies of the transcendently important theme were not unfruitful.

Further, the article serves in some sort to mark a definite stage in evolution. To give but one illustration: Although my close attention to planting interests at the time and for the seven or eight preceding years had kept me closely watching the negro, I had not then discovered even the beginning of that division of the race into two classes which is now so plain to me.

Possibly some readers may shy away from my book, deeming that its subject is hackneyed and worn out. They will exclaim, What can this author say that has not been said in the vast library of books already written upon the civil war? This will be asked, I am sure, only by the unobservant and unreflecting. If one but turn away from the assumptions, dogmas, and philippics, with which north

and south cannonaded each other's morality with increasing fury from 1831 to 1861, to the rerum causae, the play of resistless social forces, and the other actualities and great things indicated above, their huge stores of varied novelty, interest, romance, and wisdom will greatly embarass him--as has been my painful experience--both in making the best selection and in his felt inability to give what he does at last select its fit presentation.

As illustration I will say that every thoroughly impartial northern reader who meditates what I narrate as to Toombs will, I believe, be astonished to learn that one so prodigally gifted with supreme virtue and supreme genius, and who was of unexampled success

in doing all the common and all the extraordinary duties of high place, has become worse than forgotten in almost his own day; and such a reader will suspect, as I do myself, that there is much more of value in his career that I have overlooked.

[Pg 33]Perhaps this chapter is too long already. But I pray my reader to allow me to say a little more. We are upon the threshold of

a new American era. Evidently because of our western coast we are to dominate the Pacific ocean commerce and to develop it into proportions so enormous as to be now almost inconceivable. That coast will soon outstrip the Atlantic in population and great cities. Our people, safe against wars on the continent, maintaining armies only of workers, taught better methods every year by practice

and science, will soon be far in advance of their present enviable prosperity and comfort. Cheering as is the promise of their material progress, that of their progress in virtue and good government is still more cheering. Everywhere in the north--which was not impoverished, deprived of familiar modes of production, and paralyzed with a race question by the event of the brothers' war--the State electorates are rebelling successfully against the party machine, cashiering the boss, and subverting the corporation oligarchy. That in the last election the voters most intelligently split their tickets assures the early expulsion of spoilsmen, grafters, and public-service franchise-grabbers from the control of our politics, legislation, and administration of government, and the real and permanent elevation of the people to being their own absolute governors. In several States--one of these a southern--the vote was for the most democratic and anti-plutocratic president since Lincoln, while at the same time the anti-plutocratic State candidates, either of the other party or independent, were elected. Our population will soon outstrip all the world in average riches, comfort, virtue, and education. The special note to be made of this new American era now beginning is that we are to lead the nations into a war-abolishing United States of the world, which in the end will make[Pg 34] and keep them our equals in solid welfare and happiness.

With this prospect in view, the brighter and more enrapturing as I cannot keep from contrasting it with the black and hopeless future

which settled around me at Appomattox, I would do all that I can to bring about that better understanding between north and south which befits the good time near at hand.

[Pg 35]

CHAPTER II

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A BEGINNING MADE WITH SLAVERY

AS a distinguished southerner, familiar with the subject, says, slavery in the United States was "a stupendous anachronism."[11] It is almost incredible to the average northerner of to-day that the enlightened people of the south sank backwards in social development a thousand years or more, and hugged to their bosoms for several generations such a monstrous evil and peril.

The co-operation of two facts fully explains the wonder just noted. Now let us try to understand this.

The first fact is the part played by tobacco and cotton before the anti-slavery sentiment became influential. At a time when there was practically no industry but agriculture these two staples became the most lucrative of all common American crops. Tobacco found its true soil in Virginia, and cotton farther south. It developed in time that both could be made far more profitably with African slaves than by free white labor, the only other labor to be had. Of course you are to remember that slave cultivation of tobacco did not be-come general in Virginia until near the end of the seventeenth century, and that it was the invention of the gin soon after the adoption of the federal constitution in 1789 that started cotton production on a large scale. What you[Pg 36] are especially to grasp here

is the economic conditions which naturally spread slavery from its beginning at Jamestown, first over Virginia, and then throughout the entire south, either settled in large measure from Virginia, or looking thither for example. The Virginian who could not replace his exhausted fields with virgin soil at home went with his slaves either west or south, and hacked down enough of the primeval forest to give his working force its quantum of arable land. We need not stop here to tell of rice and cane, nor of other crops and industries which for a while engaged slave labor in northern regions of the south where the soil did not suit tobacco. The foregoing suggests adequately for this place how slavery became general in the south.

The second fact is that the prevalent opinion of that time was far different from that of to-day, for certain reasons, to which I would now have you attend.

Long before the discovery of America personal slavery had fallen under the ban of the christian church and become in Europe a thing of the past. The Divine Comedy catalogues in detail the religious, political, moral, and social events of its age. It is utterly silent throughout as to slavery. Dante died in 1321, soon after he had finished the Divine Comedy. That was nearly three hundred years before the appearance of African slavery in Virginia.

Now for something of very great importance to us here, which occurred soon afterwards, and before the introduction of African slavery into America. It is that by the Renascence the literature of slaveholding Greece and Rome suddenly acquired and long held commanding influence upon almost every educator of the public in the enlightened world. It was in the last quarter of the fourteenth century--some fifty years after Dante[Pg 37] had died--that the classics revived in Italy. Spreading thence over Europe, they are found dominating the great Elizabethan divines, philosophers, poets, and other opinion-forming writers at the end of the

fifteenth century. And during all of the time from the landing of the twenty Africans at Jamestown by the Dutch man-of-war in 1619

until slavery had become the solitary prop of southern industry and property, the Greek and Latin ancient writers were in our moth-er country almost the sole subjects of school or university education, and the main reading of all those that read at all. And every page of this literature, studied with enthusiastic worship and resorted to day in and day out for instruction and inspiration, disclosed that in Greece and Rome the average family was dependent for its maintenance upon slaves; and that so far from slavery being a relic of barbarism, as the American root-and-branch abolitionists afterwards fulminated in a platform, it was the very foundation of the state in those two great nations whose philosophy, learning, science, jurisprudence, poetry, art, and eloquence are still the models in every enlightened land. Naturally the educated classes, now that it had been several hundred years since slavery was a burning question, had forgotten or had never heard of the old disinclination of the church, and could not see any evil in that which their most admired and dearest ones had all practised. The classics did not stop with giving slavery the negative support just mentioned. Although such authors as Quintilian and Seneca, and the later jurists--all of the discredited silver, and not of the glorified Ciceronian and Augustan ages--do express, theatrically and academically, anti-slavery opinions, yet what they say was merely dust in the balance when weighed against the commendations of the institution to be found in the writings of Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero,[Pg 38] who had now become the great idols of intellectual society.[12]

The church would not stay out in the cold and dark, whither it had been suddenly and rudely cast by the Renascence. It woke up to discover that as the African was a heathen barbarian it was God's mercy to kidnap him for a christian master, and thus give him his only opportunity of saving his soul. And although it is not right to enslave other races, the descendants of Ham are an exception, who by reason of Noah's curse are to be the servants of servants to the end of time--that is what Holy Church taught by precept and example.

"Sir John Hawkins has the unenviable distinction of being the first English captain of a slave-ship, about the year 1552."[13] His venture proved a great success. Good Queen Bess reproached him for his mistreatment of human beings. He answered that it was

16

far better for the African thus to become a slave in a christian community, than to live the rest of his life in his native home of idolatry; and this was so convincing that "in the subsequent expeditions of this most heartless man-stealer, she was a partner and protector."[14] Until the end of the seventeenth century the masses regarded the negro as being rather wild beast than man, showing no more scruples in catching and making a drudge of him than later generations did in lassoing wild horses and working them under curb-bit, spur, and whip. And the more understanding ones, who recognized that the negro [Pg 39]belonged to humanity, re-enforced Aristotle[15] and Pliny[16] with much that they found both in the Old and New Testaments.[17] The many who preached liberty or the true religion posed as humanitarians, pharisaically comparing themselves with the best characters of Greece and Rome. The citizens of those great republics, they said, in spite of their advanced democracy, tore men and women of their own race and blood away from home and country and forced them with the scourge to toil in chains, while we do that only with savages and heathens, who cannot be civilized or christianized in any other way. We eschew slavery in the abstract. We tolerate it only in the concrete, which is the slavery of those destined for it by God and nature. Slave-catcher, slaveholder, and the public seriously and conscientiously held this creed.

You must now add to the list of influences planting and stimulating slavery in America the protection it got in the constitution under which the federal government started in 1789. As Mr. Blaine says:

"The compromises on the slavery question, inserted in the constitution, were among the essential conditions upon which the federal government was organized. If the African slave-trade had not been permitted to continue for twenty years, if it had not been conceded that three-fifths of the slaves should be counted in the apportionment of representatives in congress, if it had not been agreed that fugitives from service should be returned to their owners, the thirteen States would not have been able in 1787 'to form a more perfect union.'"[18]

[Pg 40]Think over it until you can fully take in the prodigious favor to slavery which this countenance of it by the American bible of

bibles naturally created in the north and south.

The forces rapidly sketched in the foregoing were so powerful in their co-operation to bring in slavery that its establishment and a long era of vigorous growth were inevitable. Note the years during which they met no sensible or only a fitful opposition. The first anti-slavery agitation that shook the entire country was that over the Missouri question, which having lasted a little more than two years ended in 1821, thirty-two years after the adoption of the constitution. This agitation was only against the extension of slavery. It was not until 1835 that the presentation to Congress of petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia disclosed to the far-seeing Calhoun alone that serious and mighty aggression upon slavery in the States was commencing. Here we may date

the beginning of the abolition movement. But that movement did not become respectable with the great mass of northern people until the application of California in 1850 for admission into the union as a free State widened the chasm between the sections so that it commenced to show to the dullest eye, and "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which came out in 1852, stirred the north to its depths. The growth of slavery was then and had been for a quarter of a century complete. The soil, climate, and best agricultural interests of

the south, at a time when she was to be wholly agricultural or economically nothing at all, the practice and precepts of the sages of Greece and Rome, of the patriarchs of Israel, of Jesus and his disciples and apostles, of the great and good of modern times,--all these had, with oracular consensus, led her understanding and conscience into adopting, nurturing, and on into extending slavery

over her [Pg 41]territory. Thus when abolition first emerged into open day, slavery had become the very economical life of the south. It had so permeated and informed the combined property, social, and political structure, that abolition would subvert the community fabric and beggar the population of the southern States now living in content and comfort.

I trust that the foregoing shows you that it is not so strange after all that slavery ran the career just described.

But some one says, how could the southerners as Americans, the especial champions of liberty, stultify themselves by slaveholding? how could they forget the world-arousing words of the declaration of independence that all men are created equal, and endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness?

This has already been answered. The slaveholding republics of Greece and Rome had advanced in democracy so far beyond anything

to be found in Europe at the revival of learning, that from that time on for many years the political doctrine in the recovered classics was the very greatest of all the intellectual influences that made for mere democracy. The celebrated passage in which Burke eulogizes the stubborn maintenance of their freedom by free slaveholders has been the text of speakers from Pinkney, addressing

the United States senate on the Missouri question, to Toombs, lecturing in Tremont Temple, Boston, and it has never been confuted. History shows no instance where such men ever reproached themselves for slaveholding, and while it was profitable put it aside because it is undemocratic.

As to the words which you quote from the declaration of independence, Jefferson, the draftsman, doubtless, meant them to include the African; but the majority of the congress making it, and the American people[Pg 42] actually ratifying it, almost unanimously

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held that the African was not enough of man to come within the words.

A Roman law parallel aptly illustrates. In the Institutes it is said that slavery is contrary to the law of nature, for under this every

one is born free;[19] and again, that slavery was established by the jus gentium under which a man is made subject to the dominion of another contra naturam, that is, against nature, against jus naturale, or the law of nature.[20] And in the Pandects this is weakly echoed.[21] But the actual enactment of the corpus juris civilis fortifies slavery as it had been established all over the world by the jus gentium with these plain words: "The master has power of life and death over his slave; and whatever property the slave acquires, he acquires for the master."[22]

Our forefathers making the declaration of independence, and the Romans of Justinian's time, sentimentalized in the same words over the natural right to equality[Pg 43] and liberty of all human beings, and also resolutely held on to their slaves. The solemn assertion that all men are created equal and of inalienable liberty made by American slaveholders was but a repetition of what Roman slaveholders had already said; and it is curious that the fact has not attracted due attention.

I fancy that my objector now shoots his last bolt. He exclaims that southerners were incredibly dull and obtuse not to discern that resistlessly puissant economical, political, moral, and intellectual forces, not of America only but of the entire world, were leaguing together against slavery, and therefore they ought to have fled in time from the coming wrath and evil day.

A satisfactory reply need not postulate any other than ordinary intelligence and alertness for the south. Note how people dwell near overflowing rivers, or a sea of tidal waves, or live volcanoes, or in earthquake districts, or near a tribe of scalping redskins, where they, their wives and children, keep merry as the day is long until calamity comes. The warning of the abolitionists was too late. Sup-

pose we had given the inhabitants of Herculaneum or Pompeii or St. Pierre timely counsel to abandon their homes and settle beyond the reach of eruption. How many would have done it? I knew hundreds of people, and among all of them there was but one who showed by his actions that he foresaw the early fall of slavery. That was Mr. Frank L. Upson of Lexington, Georgia, a highly accomplished and well-informed man. In 1856, I think it was, he sold all of his slaves, declaring as his reason that he believed if he kept them he would see them freed without compensation. He was so serious that he declared this even to his purchasers. They merely laughed, and everybody else laughed too, to think how green he was to give them the good bargain that he did. But after the war[Pg

44] he enjoyed comfort from the money those slaves had brought him, when all his neighbors had been plunged into hard times by emancipation. There may have been others that did like him. There could not have been many such, for I have never been able to hear of a single one.

We did like the rest of mankind do or would have done. We stuck to our homes and business until the tidal wave washed them away. Yet there are wise ones who are positive that had we not been far more dull and unforeseeing than the average we would have understood many years before the final convulsion that the forces arrayed against slavery were irresistible, and surrendered it in time to get compensated emancipation. Look at the monopolists now preying upon the public in every corner of the land. They are confident that their holdings are impregnable against democracy coming invincibly against them. Look at the great mass of our population, shutting the fresh air out of their houses in order to be comfortably warm, and thereby rearing parents--especially mothers--who unawares are incessantly developing tuberculosis to destroy themselves and their children. Some years hence when resumption by government of its functions now granted to private persons has dispossessed all the monopolists, and when every dwelling-house is kept perfectly ventilated and free from infected air, there will be other wise ones to believe that hindsight is just the same as foresight, and to inveigh against the monopolists and parents just mentioned for their unwonted stupidity and improvidence.

[Pg 45]

CHAPTER III

UNAPPEASABLE ANTAGONISM OF FREE LABOR AND SLAVE LABOR, AND THEIR MORTAL COMBAT OVER THE PUBLIC LANDS

NOW a brief explanation of the antagonism between free and slave labor. The expense of his slaves to the farmer is the same whether they are resting or at work. Sundays, days and even seasons of unfavorable weather, in long do-nothing intervals succeeding the making and also the gathering of the crop, they cost him just as much as when he can work them from sun to sun. But this is not all of his load. The year round he must subsist the numerous non-workers in the families of his laborers, whether young, superannuated, or afflicted. Suppose another farmer to be on adjoining land who can employ laborers just as he wants them, and discharge

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them as soon as he has no further use for them. Do you not perceive that this free-labor farmer can produce far more cheaply than the slave farmer? And do you not also perceive that if there is a supply of free labor to be had in a slave country, and it can be got by every farmer ad libitum, slaves must lose their value as property and be driven to the wall? Free labor was kept out of the south by

the repugnance of the white laborer to the negro. Note also that when the number of slaves had become considerable their owners would naturally combine to protect the market value of their property by preventing the coming in of cheaper labor. This was the real reason why Virginia and Delaware opposed the[Pg 46] extension of the African slave-trade from 1800 to 1808, and the Confederate States' constitution refused to reopen it. Slavery made some headway in the north. But not finding there the stimulus of such products as tobacco and cotton, it could not become so widespread and deep-seated as to sweep out free labor. The latter under favorable conditions commenced the competition in which it could not fail to win; and in due time slavery died out in the north. We especially desire to emphasize the attitude towards extension of slavery that free labor was bound to take. That it had already ejected slavery from every other enlightened community will occur to the reader at once as weighty proof that the two cannot live together. [23] Think of the free worker's suffrage, and you cannot believe that he could long be induced to vote for the protection and further spread of a system taking the bread out of his own mouth, and degrading him by engendering profound disrespect for his class; and then think of the vast and rapidly growing numbers of the free laborers of the north, receiving every day great accessions of foreign immigrants avoiding the south as they would the plague; think of all these, and you begin to discern what a mighty power was rising against slavery.

This has brought us to the place where we can properly treat the contention for the Territories. Consider their vast area. Remember that our people have settled thereon in such numbers that thirty-two new States have been added to the old thirteen, and others

still are to be added. Here for some generations was land for the landless; the full meaning of which Henry George has made us plainly see. The adventurous and [Pg 47]enterprising of the old States of each section set their faces thitherward in a constantly swelling stream. Attend to the only material difference for us between the northerner and the southerner going west. Each settler wanted a community like his native one. The northerner had not been trained to manage slave labor and property; he did not like it; he thought it out of date and vastly inferior to free labor; and he could not endure to have himself and family live among negroes, repulsive to him because of unfamiliarity. He had learned from its history in the south that wherever slavery established itself it superseded all other labor. Therefore he would none of it in his new home; and he settled in a non-slave community. Of course the southerner, knowing nothing of free labor and bred into a love of the slave system, settled among slaveholders. And so for a generation or two free and slave States were steadily added to the union in pairs.

But the unsettled lands were diminishing in area. Its population multiplying so marvellously, the north felt urgent need for the whole of these lands. The great majority of settlers going thence into the Territories were farmers. Note some of the more influential classes left behind them. The parents, relatives, and friends who wanted them suited in the west--this was the largest class of all,

and it was of prodigious intellectual, political, and moral potency. Then the manufacturers of agricultural implements, and of many articles, all of which the southerners either had their mechanic slaves to make by hand, and of oldtime fashion, or did without; the millers, and many sorts of wholesale merchants who had found slave owners poor and the employers of free labor good customers; and these manufacturers and merchants were greedy for the new markets which they could get only in free States.

[Pg 48]These are but the merest hints, but they serve somewhat to suggest the all-powerful motives which at last united the great majority of northern people, east and west, in intelligent and inveterate opposition to the further spread of slavery.

Now look at the southern situation. At the outset, note that his slaves were the southerner's only laborers, and practically his only property. And note especially that this property was not only self-supporting, but it was also the most rapidly self-reproducing that Tom, Dick, and Harry ever had in all history. A reliable witness tells this: "On my father's plantation an aged negro woman could call together more than one hundred of her lineal descendants. I saw this old negro dance at the wedding of her great-granddaugh- ter."[24]

Let me repeat that slaves were not only money-making laborers, but also things of valuable property, which of themselves multiplied as dollars do at compound interest. Let the northern man unfamiliar with slavery try to understand this one of its phases by suppos-ing that he has orchards abundantly yielding a fruit which is in good demand, and that the trees plant and tend themselves, gather

and store the fruit, set out other orchards, and do all things else necessary to care for the property and keep it steadily growing. Such trees with their yearly produce and prodigious increase--each by an easy organic or natural, and not by a difficult artificial, process, relieving the owner from all but the slightest attention and labor of superintendence--would soon be the only ones in their entire zone of production; bringing it about that all other occupations and property therein would be dependent upon this main and really only industry. Such orchards would be somewhat like the slaves in their automatic production[Pg 49] and accumulation, but they would be much inferior as marketable property in many particulars.

Although the profits of slave-planting were considerable, the greatest profit of all was what the master thought of and talked of all the day long,--the natural increase of his slaves, as he called it. His negroes were far more to him than his land. His planting was the

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furthest removed of all from a proper restorative agriculture. Quickly exhausting his new cleared fields, he looked elsewhere for oth-er virgin soil to wear out. The number of the slaves in the south was growing fast, and the new lands in the older slave States were nearly gone. To keep the hens laying the golden eggs of natural increase, nests must be found for them on the cotton, sugar, and rice lands of the Territories. In other words, the area of slave culture must be extended; for whenever there is no land for a considerable number of our workers, it is evident that we have a surplus of slaves; and the effect of that will be at the first to lower the market value of our only property, and then gradually to destroy it. So the instincts of the southerners whispered in their ears.

We hope that we now have helped you to an understanding of the active principles each of free labor and of slave labor; how by reason of them the interests of north and south in dividing the public domain were in irreconcilable conflict; and how it was natural that the free States should band together against, and the slave States band together for, slavery. Thus the country split into two geographical though not political sections, the political division which ripened later being as yet only imminent and inchoate. That these sections had been made by deadly war between free labor and slave labor is all that we have to say here. The development went further, as we shall explain in the next[Pg 50] chapter--all of it under the propulsion of the two active principles. They were always the ultimate and supreme motors. Often they are not to be seen at all. Still more often what they did was disguised. To read the facts of that time aright you must always and everywhere look for their work. Do that patiently, and you will detect every one of the many controversies over matters affecting an interest of either section as such--whether questions apparently of national politics, of mor-als, or religion, in newspapers, pamphlets, reviews, books, and all the vast contemporary literature, in the pulpit, on the platform, and in every place and corner of the entire land where policy and impolicy or right and wrong were mooted--to be but a part of one or the other of two great complexes of machinery, each geared to its particular motor and kept going by its mighty push.

[Pg 51] CHAPTER IV

GENESIS, COURSE, AND GOAL OF SOUTHERN NATIONALIZATION

NATIONALIZATION is the process by which a nation makes itself. The process may be active for a long while without completion, as we see in the case of Ireland; it may form a nation, but to be overturned and wiped out, as the southern confederacy was; or it may find its consummation in such a powerful one as the United States. The most conspicuous effect of the process we now have in hand is to make one of many communities. But sometimes a part breaks off from a nation and sets up and maintains its independence as a country. Thus a portion of the territory of Mexico was settled over from our States, and after a while these settlers

tore themselves loose from Mexico and became the nation of Texas. We shall tell you more fully in another chapter how the separate colonies became nationalized into the United States, and what we say here of southern nationalization will illustrate to the reader that important transformation, to understand which is of especial moment to us in examining the brothers' war. But we must empha-

size the characteristic feature of the nationalization of the south. I have searched the pages of history in vain for an example like it. The idiosyncrasy is that the south was homogeneous in origin, race, language, religion, institutions, and customs with the north, and yet she developed away from the north into a separate[Pg 52] nation. I have long been accustomed to parallel the case of Ireland's repulsion from Great Britain, but I always had to admit that there was dissimilarity in everything except the strong drift towards independence and the struggle to win it;[25] for the Irish are largely different from the English in origin, race, language, religion, institutions, and customs. The more you consider it the more striking becomes this uniqueness of southern nationalization. Think

of it for a moment. Thirteen adjacent colonies; each a dependency of the same nation; all settled promiscuously from every part and parcel of one mother country, and therefore the settlers rapidly becoming in time more like one another everywhere than the English were who at home were clinging to their several localities and dialects; governed alike; standing together against Indians, French, and Spanish, and after a while against the mother country;--where can you find another instance of so many common ties and tendencies, all prompting incessantly and mightily to union in a political whole, which is ever the goal of the nationalizing process. That the colonies did grow into a political whole is not at all wonderful to the historical student. The wonder is that after they had done this a number of them just like the others in the particulars above pointed out, which fuse adjacent communities into a nation, turn away from the old union and seek to form one of their own. The southern States all did the same thing with such practical unanimity that even the foreigner may know that the same cause was at work in every one of them. Manifestly there was a nationalizing element in them which was not in the others, and which made the former [Pg 53]homogeneous with one another and heterogeneous to the rest. And that element which differenced the south from the rest of the union so greatly that it was, from a time long before either she

or the north had become conscious of it, impelling her irresistibly towards an independent nationality of her own, all of us natives

know was the constructive and plastic principle of her slave industrial and property system.

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It is not the purpose of the foregoing expatiation to prove to you such a familiar and well-known fact as that slavery parted north and south and caused the brothers' war. Its purpose is to arouse you to consider nationalization, and have you see how it acts according to a will of its own and not of man, and now and then works out most stupendous results contrary to all that mortals deem probabilities. You ought to recognize that the forces which produced the Confederate States were just as all-powerful and opposeless as those which produced the United States; that in fact they were exactly the same in kind, that is, the forces of nationalization.

To have you see that even at the time of making the federal constitution the south had grown into a pro-slavery section and was far on the road towards independence, it is necessary to correct the prevalent opinion that there was then below Mason and Dixon's line a very widespread and influential hostility to slavery. The manumission of his slaves by Washington, the fearless and outspoken opposition to the institution by Jefferson and some other prominent persons, and certain facts indicating unfavorable sentiment, have been too hastily accepted by even historians as demonstrations that the opinion is true. Here are the facts which prove it to be utterly untrue. In 1784, three years before our epochal convention assembled, Jefferson, as chairman of an appropriate committee

consisting besides himself[Pg 54] of Chase of Maryland and Howell of Rhode Island, reported to congress a plan for the temporary

government of the West Territory. This region contained not only all the territory that was subsequently covered by the famous ordinance of 1787, but such a vast deal more that it was proposed to make seventeen States out of the whole. Consider this provision of the report, the suggestion and work of Jefferson:

"That after the year 1800 of the christian era there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of said States, otherwise than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been convicted to have been personally guilty."

When the report was taken up by congress, Spaight of North Carolina made a motion to strike out the provision just quoted, and

it was seconded by Reed of South Carolina. On the vote North Carolina was divided; but all the other southern States represented, to wit, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, voted for the motion, the colleagues of Jefferson of Virginia and those of Chase of Maryland outvoting these two southerners standing by the provision. All the northern States represented, which were the then four New England States, New York, and Pennsylvania, voted for the provision. But as it failed to get the necessary seven States it was not retained.

Thus it appears that at the close of the Revolutionary war the interest of the south in and her attachment to slavery were so great that by her representatives in congress she appears to be almost unanimous against the proposal to keep the institution from extending.

This action of the south shows that both Virginia in ceding that part of the West Territory which was three years afterwards by the ordinance of 1787 put under Jefferson's provision which had been rejected when it[Pg 55] had been proposed for all the territory, and the south in voting unanimously for the ordinance, were not actuated by hostility to slavery. The soil of the territory north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi to which the ordinance applied probably may have been thought by Virginians unsuited to

tobacco, the then sole crop upon which slave labor could be lucratively used. Be that as it may, that the southern States in subsequent cessions made not long afterwards guarded against slavery prohibition must be kept in mind. When they are, it is proved that always from the time that Jefferson's provision failed to carry in 1784, as has been told above, the prevalent sentiment of the southern people overwhelmingly favored slavery.

Let us illustrate from later times. Writers who claim that the south, meditating secession, purposed to reopen the African slave-trade, adduce some relevant evidence which at first flush appears to be very weighty, if not convincing. They show that A. H. Stephens of Georgia, who afterwards became vice-president of the confederacy, in 1859 used language indicating that he thought it vital to the south, in her struggle to extend the area of slavery, to get more Africans; and they further show similar utterances made at the time by certain papers and other prominent men of the south.

But the constitution of the Confederate States, adopted in 1861, contains this provision:

"The importation of negroes of the African race from any foreign country other than the slaveholding States or Territories of the

United States of America is hereby forbidden, and congress is required to pass such laws as shall effectually prevent the same."

Of course this solemn act unanimously voted for by the members of the congress, Stephens being one of them, counts incalculably more in weight to prove that[Pg 56] predominant southern sentiment was against reopening the African slave-trade, than the counter evidence just stated. Likewise all that Washington, Jefferson, and other of their contemporaries may have done or said against slavery is outweighed by the contemporary pro-slavery legislation and measures dictated by the south. It is very probable that during the

time we are now contemplating anti-slavery men were really as few in the south as union men were after the first blood spilled in the

brothers' war.

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Recall the three compromises between north and south, mentioned above, by which the union was formed, and you will understand that the fathers were preaching but to stones when they impugned slavery. And at this point meditate the language of Madison in

the historic convention, which shows that he saw accurately even then the permanence of slavery, and the unequivocal geographical division it had made. He was discussing the apprehension of the small States, New Jersey, Delaware, and Rhode Island, that under the union proposed they would be absorbed by the larger adjacent States. He affirmed there was no such danger; and that the only danger arose from the antagonism between the slave and the non-slave sections. To avert this danger he proposed to arm north

and south each with defensive power against the other by conceding to the former the superiority it would get in one branch of the federal legislature by reason of its greater population if the members thereof came in equal numbers from every State, large or small, and at the same time giving the south superiority in the other branch by allowing it increased representation therein for all its slaves counted as free inhabitants. This prepares you for the language which we now give from the report, and which we would have you meditate:

[Pg 57]"He [Madison] admitted that every peculiar interest, whether in any class of citizens, or any description of States, ought to be secured as far as possible. Wherever there is danger of attack, there ought to be given a constitutional power of defence. But he contended that the States were divided into different interests, not by their difference of size, but by other circumstances; the most material of which resulted partly from climate, but principally from the effects of their having or not having slaves. These causes concurred in forming the great division of interests in the United States. It did not lie between the large and small States. It lay between the northern and southern; and if any defensive power were necessary, it ought to be mutually given to these two interests. He was so strongly impressed with this important truth, that he had been casting about in his mind for some expedient that would answer the purpose. The one which had occurred was that, instead of proportioning the votes of the States in both branches to their respective number of inhabitants, computing the slaves in the ratio of 5 to 3, they should be represented in one branch according to the number of free inhabitants only; and in the other according to their whole number, counting the slaves as free. By this arrangement the southern scale would have the advantage in one house and the northern in the other."

Madison meant to say that the great danger of disunion was that--we emphasize his statement by repeating and italicizing the essential part--"the States were divided into different interests ... principally from the effects of their having or not having slaves. These causes concurred in forming the great division of interests in the United States."

How truly he expresses the economical antagonism of the southern and northern States, although he hints nothing of the nationalizing tendency of the former which was bound in time to show itself as one of "the effects of their having slaves."

It seems to me that Mr. Adams overeulogizes the[Pg 58] political instinct and prophecy evinced by Madison at this tune. I cannot see that the latter does anything more than merely recognize the fact then plain to all. Note as proof this other passage quoted by Mr. Adams from Madison in the convention, in which the material words are given by me in italics: "It seems now well understood that the real difference of interests lies, not between the large and small, but between the northern and southern States."

If the historical expert but duly consider the important facts marshalled in the foregoing he must find them to be incontrovertible proofs that in 1787, when our fathers were making the federal constitution, and for some years before, southern nationalization

was not simply inchoate, but that it was growing so rapidly its course could be stopped in but one way; that is, by the extirpation of slavery, which was both its germ and active principle. This was before the invention of the gin. After that the lower south and west quickly added a vast territory to the empire of slavery, and southern nationalization received throughout its whole domain a new, a lasting, and a far more powerful impetus. And when the cotton States, as we call them, had really developed their industry, the southern confederacy was inevitable.

The fact of this nationalization is indisputable. When the confederates organized their government at Montgomery, everybody looking on felt and said that a new nation was born. Why ignore what is so plain and so important? Thus Mr. Adams most graphically contrasts the two widely different northern and southern civilizations which were flourishing side by side,[26] and with a momentary inadvertence he ascribes national development only to the civilization north of the Potomac[Pg 59] and Ohio, and treats State sovereignty as antinational. The fact is that a nationalization, the end of which was southern independence, had been long active, as we have perhaps too copiously shown, and the doctrine of State sovereignty was really nothing but its instrument, nurse, and organ. Every southern State that invoked State sovereignty and seceded was shortly afterwards found in the new southern nation. Had that nation prospered, the doctrine would soon have died a natural death even in the confederacy. Nationalization is the cardinal fact,

the vis major, on each side. The free-labor nationalization of the north, purposing to appropriate and hold the continent, fashioned

a self-preserving weapon of the assumption that the fathers made by the constitution an indissoluble union; the slave nationalization of the south, purposing to appropriate and hold that part of the continent suiting its special staples, assumed that the fathers preserved State sovereignty intact in the federal union.

The closer you look the plainer you will see that the United States held within itself two nationalities so inveterately hostile to each

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other that gemination was long imminent before it actually occurred. The hostility between the statesmen of Virginia and her daughter States and those of the north, and especially New England,--Jefferson on one side and Hamilton and Adams on the other,--the party following the former calling itself republican and that following the latter calling itself federalist, was really rooted in the hostility of the two nationalities; and a survival of this hostility is now unpleasantly vigorous between many northern and southern writers and lecturers, each class claiming too much of the good in our past history for its own section and ascribing too much of the bad

to the other. As a lady friend, a native of Michigan who has lived in the south some[Pg 60] years, remarked to me not long since, as soon as one going north crosses the Ohio he feels that he has entered another country; behind him is a land of corn-pone, biscuit, three cooked meals a day, and houses tended untidily by darkey servants; before him is a land of bakers' bread of wheat, where there is hardly more than one warm meal a day, and the houses are kept as neat as a pin by the mothers and daughters of the family. Greater public activity of the county while there is hardly any at all of its subdivisions, the representative system almost everywhere in the municipalities, no government by town-meeting and no direct legislation except occasionally, a most crude and feeble rural common school system, distinguish and characterize the south; buoyant energy of the township in public affairs, government by town-meeting instead of by representatives, a common-school system energetically improving, distinguish and characterize the north. The manners and customs of southerners are peculiar. To use an expressive cant word, they "gush" more than northeners. In cars and public meetings they give their seats to ladies, while northerners do not. Southerners are quick to return a blow for insulting words, and in the consequent rencounter they are prone to use deadly weapons; while northerners are generally as averse to personal violence as were the Greeks and Romans in their palmiest time. The battle-cry of the confederates was a wild cheering--a fox-hunt yell, as we called it; that of the union soldiers was huzza! huzza! huzza! From the beginning to the end, even at Franklin and Bentonville, and at Farmville, just two days before I was surrendered at Appomattox, the confederates always, if possible, took the offensive; the union soldiers were like the sturdy Englishmen, whose tactics from Hastings to Waterloo have generally been defensive.

[Pg 61]This battle yell, this impetuous charge after charge until the field is won, marks the fighting of the Americans at King's Mountain--all of them southerners; and it is another weighty proof of the early coalescence of the south as a community on its way to independence.

Many other contrasts could be suggested. Think over the foregoing. They are the respective effects of two different causes,--a free-labor nationalization above, and a slave-labor nationalization below, Mason and Dixon's line. The latter--its origin and course--is the especial subject of this chapter. I believe that the proofs marshalled above demonstrate to the fair and unprejudiced reader that

southern nationalization commenced before the making of the federal constitution, and afterwards went directly on, gathering force and power all the while, until it culminated in

"A storm-cradled nation that fell."

[Pg 62]

CHAPTER V

AMERICAN NATIONALIZATION, AND HOW IT MADE THE BOND OF UNION STRONGER AND STRONGER GREECE was going down in her contest with Macedon when she gave the world to come the Achaean league, the first historical

example of full-grown federation. As Freeman says of such a federal government: "Its perfect form is a late growth of a very high

state of political culture."[27] This historian thus summarizes its essentials:

"Two requisites seem necessary to constitute federal government in this its most perfect form. On the one hand, each of the members of the union must be wholly independent in those matters which concern each member only. On the other hand, all must be subject to a common power in those matters which concern the whole body of members collectively."[28]

No author has yet shown a better-considered and more accurate appreciation of the benefits to different communities of federal union. But the islander could not conceive--even at the centre of the British empire spread over the world--the advanced phase of Anglo-Saxon federation in America and Australia, which for want of a better name we may call, using a grand word of our fathers, continental federation.

And Americans of every generation have misunderstood the true nature of our union, and especially how it was made and how it could be unmade. The fathers[Pg 63] were as much mistaken as to the real authorship of the declaration of independence, the

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articles of confederation, and the federal constitution, as Burke and many people of his time were as to the true causes of the French revolution, or as the brothers were as to those of their war. In all that the fathers did they were sure that they acted as agents solely of their respective colonies or States, which they believed to be independent and sovereign. Therefore they maintained that

the authorship of the three great documents just mentioned was that of the separate States, when in truth it was that of the union. When the latter, which had been long forming its rudiments, came into something like consciousness, it at once spurred our fathers to make the declaration of independence. The declaration corresponds to the later ordinances of secession. And this union, gathering strength, led our fathers to make the old confederation; and its articles and the belonging government are closely paralleled by the constitution of the Confederate States and its belonging government. As southern nationalization brought forth the southern confederacy, so it was American nationalization that caused secession from England, the declaration of independence, and the

confederation which won the Revolutionary war. To summarize the foregoing: Southern nationalization evolved the southern union,

and American nationalization evolved the American union. The fathers, with the usual undiscernment of contemporaries, by a most natural hysteron proteron conceived the latter union to be the work, product, and result of the constitution. In the intersectional contention, the south accepted the mistakes of the fathers and rested her cause upon them, and the north, instead of correcting them, substituted a huge and glaring mistake of her own. Advocating the maintenance of the[Pg 64] constitution over all the States, she sought to refute the doctrine of State sovereignty urged by the south with the arguments of those who had opposed the adoption of the federal constitution. Patrick Henry and Nathan Dane--we omit the others--argued that the constitution, if ratified,

would really wipe out State lines and make the central government supreme in authority over the States, and actually sovereign. Could

the people of the thirteen States have been made to believe this, they would have unanimously rejected the instrument. Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and many others competent to advise, stood in solid phalanx on the other side, and the people were convinced by them that adoption would have no such effect. They decided that the arguments were not good, and the constitution was ratified. But the discredited arguments were afterwards, by a very queer psychological process, taken up by Story, Webster, and a great host, and paraded as unanswerable refutation of the doctrine of State sovereignty, and demonstration that by the constitution the United States had acquired absolute supremacy over the different States.[29] At a later place we will try to show you how Webster's glory outshines that of every other actor, except Lincoln, in the great struggle between north and south. But here we must emphasize

how, when supporting the fallacies of Patrick Henry and Nathan Dane, he met the one real and signal defeat of his life, to which the drubbing he received from Binney in the Girard College case was a small affair--a defeat none the less signal because at the time,

and long afterwards, it was and still is crowned as a glorious victory by thousands upon thousands.

[Pg 65]The force-bill had just been introduced into the senate of the United States. It provided for the collection of the revenue in defiance of the nullification ordinance of South Carolina. The next day, January 22, 1833, Calhoun offered in that body his famous resolutions, embodying his doctrine of nullification, under which he justified the ordinance just mentioned. The 16th of the next month, Webster discussed the two cardinal ones of these resolutions at length. As he summarized them, they affirmed:

"1. That the political system under which we live, and under which congress is now assembled, is a compact, to which the people of

the several States, as separate and sovereign communities, are the parties.

2. That these sovereign parties have a right to judge, each for itself, of any alleged violation of the constitution by congress; and in

case of such violation, to choose, each for itself, its own mode and measure of redress."

He had not long before contemplated making an address to the public in answer to Calhoun's pro-nullification letter to Governor Hamilton in the form of a letter from himself to Kent; and it cannot be doubted that he had got himself ready for this; nor can it be doubted that in the twenty-five days' interim he had not only worked over and adapted the unused materials of the address mentioned, but he had most diligently made special preparation for his speech--in short, it may be assumed that he had bestowed upon the subject of the resolutions the most searching examination and profound meditation of which, with his superhuman powers, he was capable. In spite of all his conscientious labors, as I am now especially concerned to impress upon you, he injured and set back the cause of the union by defending it with answerable arguments--nay, rather, with arguments helping the other side.

[Pg 66]At the outset he severely and sternly rebukes two terms of Calhoun's, one being the use of constitutional compact for constitution, and the other being the accession of a State to the constitution. These terms are utterly impermissible, and are to be scouted. If we accept them, we must acquiesce in the monstrous conclusions which the author of the resolutions draws from them. That is really what Webster says. Note the confident positiveness of his pertinent language, some of which we subjoin:

"It is easy, quite easy, to see why the honorable gentleman has used it [constitutional compact] in these resolutions. He cannot open the book, and look upon our written frame of government, without seeing that it is called a constitution. This may well be appalling to him. It threatens his whole doctrine of compact, and its darling derivatives, nullification and secession, with instant confutation. Because, if he admits our instrument of government to be a constitution, then, for that very reason, it is not a compact between sovereigns; a constitution of government and a compact between sovereign powers being things essentially unlike in their very natures, and incapable of ever being the same.

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We know no more of a constitutional compact between sovereign powers than we know of a constitutional indenture of copartner-ship, a constitutional bill of exchange. But we know what the constitution is; we know what the bond of our union and the security of our liberties is; and we mean to maintain and to defend it, in its plain sense and unsophisticated meaning."

This is enough of the exorcism of that malignant spirit, constitutional compact. Now as to the other malignant spirit. Webster says: "The first resolution declares that the people of the several States 'acceded' to the constitution, or to the constitutional compact, as it

is called. This word 'accede,' not found either in the constitution itself, or in the ratification of it by any one of[Pg 67] the States, has been chosen for use here, doubtless, not without a well-considered purpose.

The natural converse of accession is secession; and, therefore, when it is stated that the people of the States acceded to the union, it may be more plausibly argued that they may secede from it. If in adopting the constitution, nothing was done but acceding to a compact, nothing would seem necessary to break it up, but to secede from the same compact. But the term is wholly out of place.... The people of the United States have used no such form of expression in establishing the present government. They do not say

that they accede to a league, but they declare that they ordain and establish a constitution. Such are the very words of the instrument itself; and in all the States, without exception, the language used by their conventions was, that they 'ratified the constitution;' some

of them employing the additional words 'assented to' and 'adopted,' but all of them 'ratifying.'"

Note that I have italicized in the quotation certain admissions of Webster, which, in case his premises should be disproved, concede the cause to his adversary. And we will now tell you how Calhoun did disprove those premises.

He showed that Webster himself had in a senate speech called the constitution a constitutional compact; and that President Washington, in his official announcement to congress, described North Carolina as acceding to the union by the ratification she had at last made of the constitution.

As to these two points Calhoun further sustained himself with unquestionable authority and also argument inconfutable by one who, like Webster, did not find the true ratio decidendi, that is, the effect of evolution to bring forth the nation.

The rest of Calhoun's answer will be considered a little later. But what of it has already been given covers the[Pg 68] essentials of the controversy. In supporting his proposition that the States were sovereign when they made the constitution, and kept their entire sovereignty intact afterwards, he was too strong for his antagonist. And yet had his knowledge of the facts been fuller, how much better he could have done. He could have quoted from all the great men who made the constitution and secured its ratification language, in which accede is used again and again in the same sense as it is in his resolutions.

Likewise, he could have quoted language in which they designated the constitution as a compact or something synonymous. Madison--to mention only one of many instances--advocating ratification in the Virginia convention, called the constitution "a government of a federal nature, consisting of many coequal sovereignties." What an effective argumentum ad hominem could Calhoun have found in the provision of the constitution of the State of Webster, to wit: that Massachusetts is free, sovereign, and independent, retaining every power which she has not expressly delegated to the United States.[30]

Webster also made blunders in construing the context of the constitution, as well as the clauses specially involved, in contrasting the constitution with the articles of confederation, and in his reading of our constitutional history. These blunders were exhaustively, ably, relentlessly exposed.

We who are trained either in forensic or parliamentary debate well know the conquering and demolishing reply. Although, as we have just shown, Calhoun's reply could[Pg 69] have been far more effective than it really was, still its success and triumph were so evident that when he closed, John Randolph, who had heard it, wanted a hat obstructing his sight removed, so that, as he said, he might see "Webster die, muscle by muscle."

Master the question at issue, and read the two speeches as impartially as you strive to read the discussion of AEschines and Demosthenes, and if you are qualified to judge of debate between intellectual giants you must admit that Webster was driven from every inch of ground chosen by him as his very strongest, and which he confidently believed that he could hold against the world.

Yet the union men, who were hosts in the north and numerous even in the south at that time, accepted Webster's speech as the bible of their political faith, and as its reward ennobled him with the preeminent title of Expounder of the Constitution. They ignored,

or they never learned of, the pulverizing refutation. But the State-rights men and the south generally understood. Webster also understood. He did not make any real rejoinder. And his subsequent utterances are in harmony with the State-rights doctrine to which

25

Calhoun seems to have converted him.[31] I fancy that with that rare humor which was one of his shining gifts, he dubbed himself in his secret meditations, "Expounder because not expounding." Later I shall tell you how Webster builded better than he knew, and that there was, after all, in the speech that which fully justifies the worship it received from the union men.

But there is something else pertinent to be learned here. That the north generally found out only what Webster said in the debate for his side, and never even[Pg 70] heard of what was said on the other, and that the south became at once familiar with both speeches, proves that each section had already formed its own belonging and independent public, and that the southern public kept attentive watch upon all affairs of fact or opinion interesting the other, while the northern public knew hardly anything at all of the south. A large percentage of the southern leaders had studied in northern schools and colleges. In this and many other ways they had been instructed as to the north. Such instruction contributed very greatly to southern supremacy in the federal government until the election of Lincoln. We can now see that the powers in charge, as a part of their work, made the great northern public, which, as Lincoln observed, was to be the savior of the union, stop its ears to all anti-union sentiments or arguments. How else can you understand it that the ante-bellum notices of Webster, the memoir by Everett, the different utterances of Choate, and many, many other sketches, are so utterly dumb as to Calhoun's great reply? And is not the same dumbness of Curtis, Von Holst, and McMaster, writing after

the war, due to the survival in the north of the old constraint? a constraint so powerful that, while Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge, in 1883,

did concede just a little to Calhoun, he stopped far short of the full justice that I believe he would now render were he to traverse the

ground again.

We must now go beyond what we have already hinted, and show you plainly how both the union men and the State-rights men assumed untenable premises, and how the south, maintaining a cause foredoomed, vanquished in the forum of discussion her adversary, maintaining the side which fate had decreed must win. In no other way can the reader be better made to understand the incalculable potency of the forces which preserved the[Pg 71] American union after its orators and advocates had all been discomfited; and in no other way can he better learn what principles are to be invoked if he would grasp the real essence of the union.

We emphasize the material and cardinal mistake of the union men, thus phrased by Webster in the speech we have discussed: "Whether the constitution be a compact between States in their sovereign capacities, is a question which must be mainly argued from what is contained in the instrument itself."

This was to abandon inexpugnable ground. That ground was the great body of pertinent facts, known to all, which begun the mak-ing of the union before the declaration of independence, and which, from that time on to the very hour that Webster was speaking, had been making the union stronger and more perfect. He ought to have contended that a nation grows; that it cannot be made, or be at all modified, even by a constitution. Any constitution is its creature, not its creator.

How weak he was when he invoked construction of the federal constitution as the main umpire. That constitution had been always construed against him. The three departments of the federal government had each uniformly treated it as a compact between sovereign States; and they kept this up until the brothers' war broke out. Mr. Stephens, in his great compilation,[32] demonstrates this unanswerably. But the State-rights men had a still greater strength than even this, if the question be conceded to be one of construction. As the author of the Republic of Republics shows by a mountain of proofs, the illustrious draftsmen of the constitution and their contemporaries who finally got the constitution adopted--all the people, high and low, who favored[Pg 72] the cause--declared at the time that the sovereignty of the States would remain unimpaired after adoption.[33]

To sum up, the generation that drafted and adopted the constitution, and all the succeeding ones who had lived under it, agreed that the States were sovereign.

How could even Webster talk these facts out of existence? At every stage of the intersectional debate the cause of the south supporting State sovereignty became stronger. And there were great hosts at the north who understood the record as the south did; and, while they hoped and prayed that separation would never come, they conscientiously conceded State sovereignty to the full. It seems to me to be the fact that, although the federal soldiers cherished deep love for the union, a very great majority of the more intelligent among them did not long keep at its height the emotion excited by the attack on Fort Sumter, and soon settled back into their for-mer creed, holding, because of the reasons summarized above, the States to be sovereign; and while they thought it supreme folly in the south to set[Pg 73] up the confederacy, they still believed that to do so was but the exercise of an indubitable right of the States creating it. From what I saw at the time, and the many proofs that appeared to accumulate upon me afterwards, this explains the unprecedented panic with which the federal army abandoned the field at the First Manassas. Consider just a moment. The federal army, giving the confederates a complete surprise, turns their position and drives them back in rout. The confederates make an unexpected stand, fight for some hours, and at last, assuming the offensive, win the field. The troops on each side practically all raw volunteers, very much alike in race and character. But the federals had much more than two to one engaged, as is demonstrated by the fact that the confederates had only twenty-five regiments of infantry in action, and they took prisoners from fifty-five. The more one who,

like me, observed much of the war, thinks it over, the more clearly he sees that the flight from Manassas is not to be explained

26

because of the superior courage and stamina of the southern soldiers. I believe that the union men, observing how brave and death-defying their brothers on the other side were in facing disaster that seemed irretrievable and odds irresistible, at last became convinced that these brothers, defending home and firesides, were right, and that they themselves, invading an inviolably sovereign State, were heinously wrong; and thus awakened conscience made cowards of all these gallant men. And it is thoroughly established,

I believe, that everywhere in the first engagements of the war, the southern volunteers, if they were commanded by a fighter, showed far more spirit and stomach than their adversaries. In the amicable meetings, often occurring upon the picket line, when we confederates would with good humor ask the union men how it was[Pg 74] that we won so many fights, it was a stereotyped reply of the

latter, "Why, you are fighting for your country and we only for $13 a month." It was but natural that, by reason of what has been told in the foregoing, the south unanimously, and a very large number at the north, should believe any State could under its reserved pow-ers rightfully secede from the union whenever and for whatever cause it pleased.

We see now what the angry brothers did not see. The absolute sovereignty of the States, and the right of secession both de facto

and de jure could have been conceded, and at the same time the war for the union justified. The unionists could well have said to the

south:

"Your independence is too great a menace to our interests to be tolerated, and the high duty of self-defence commands that we

resist to the death. The status quo is better for us all. Now that you have set up for yourself, we must tell you, sadly but firmly, that if you do not come back voluntarily, we must resort to coercion,--not under the constitution, for you have thrown that off, but under the law of nations to which you have just subjected yourself."

The man who of all southerners has given State sovereignty its most learned and able defence--Sage, the author of "The Republic of Republics"--says: "To coerce a state is unconstitutional; but it is equally true that the precedent of coercing states is established, and that it is defensible under the law of nations."[34]

To have received the confederate commissioners as representing an independent nation, and made demand that the seceding States return to the union, would have[Pg 75] been a far stronger theory than that on which the war was avowedly waged; for it would have taken from the south that superiority in the argument which had given her great prestige in Europe, and even in the north. And

lastly, under the law of nations, the federal government, after coercing the seceding States back, would have had--even according to

the theory of State rights as maintained in the south--perfectly legitimate power to abolish slavery. The statement that emancipation was "sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the constitution, upon military necessity," protests so much that one sees that the highly conscientious man hesitated and doubted. And well may he have doubted; for what warrant can be found in the constitution for destroying that property which it solemnly engaged to defend and protect as a condition precedent of its adoption?-- that is, if the southern States were still in the union and under the constitution, as was claimed by all who justified the proclamation? But if the southern States had gone out of the union, they had revoked their ratification and had thrown away all the protection of slavery given by the constitution; and while the constitution did not direct how the federal government should act in the matter, the law of nations gave full and ample directions. Its authority was not stinted nor hampered by any rights recognized in the constitution as reserved to the States under it. The subsequent amendment, imposed as a condition of reconstruction, shows that the people of the north seriously questioned if slavery had been abolished by the proclamation and its enforcement by the union armies.

But this, strong as it was, would not have been the true theory. The true theory--the real fact--is that at the outbreak of the brothers' war, and long before, the States had become more closely connected than the[Pg 76] Siamese Twins,--indissolubly united as integral parts of the same organism, like the different trunks of the Banyan tree; and while the southern nationalization was opposing the union forces with might and main, it was really but an excrescence, with roots far more shallow than those of the American union--a parasite like the mistletoe, growing upon the American body politic, fated to die of itself if not destroyed by its fell foe. For, as we have explained, the sole motor of this southern nationalization--slavery--could no more maintain itself permanently against free labor than the handloom could stand against the steam-loom, or the draft-horse can much longer compete with artificial traction power.

Now let us rapidly set in array the stronger supports of this true theory. We should start with the impulse to combine which adjacency always gives to communities of the same origin; and external compression and joint interest to those of diverse origin, as we see in the case of the Swiss. How clearly does our great American sociologist trace the effect of this impulse in ancient society. First a body of consanguinei grows into a gens; after a while, neighboring gentes of the same stock-language form a tribe; then neighboring tribes, as some of the Iroquois and Aztecs, form a confederacy. At this point the development of the American Indians was arrested by the coming of the whites. "A coalescence of tribes into a nation had not occurred in any case in any part of America," says the great authority.[35] But we can easily understand what would have occurred had the Indians been left to themselves. They

would have passed out of the nomadic state into settlements of fixed abodes, local and geographical political divisions evolving from the old gentes and tribes, the contiguous[Pg 77] ones often uniting. History furnishes many examples of neighboring communities coalescing into nations. One of the most remarkable of all is the environment which has constrained peoples of four different lan-

27

guages to coalesce into the little Swiss nation. Turning away from prehistoric times and also ancient history, let the student re-enforce the case of the Swiss, just alluded to, with the modern nation-making in Italy and Germany. These few of the many instances which can be given show how and what sorts of adjacent communities are prone to co-operate or combine for a common purpose, and how such combination develops at last an irresistible proneness to national union. Drops of liquid in proximity to one another on a

plane may long maintain each their independent forms; but bring them into actual contact, and presto! all the globules have coalesced into a single mass. After the belonging part of the evolutionary science of sociology has been fully developed--which time does not seem very far off--the subject will receive adequate illustration. Then all of us will understand that, many years before Alamance

and Lexington, the colonies, in their defence of themselves against the Indians and the French, in their intercommunication over innumerable matters of joint interest, in the beneficent example of the Iroquois confederacy and the advice of our fathers by the Iroquois, as early as 1755, to form one of the colonies similar to their own,[36] and in many other things that can be suggested, were steadily becoming one people, and more and more predisposed to political union. We shall also see, much more clearly than we do yet, that the Revolutionary war, by keeping them some years under a general government, imparted new and powerful impetus to

the nationalizing forces, which were working none the less[Pg 78] surely because unobserved. Our lesson will be completely learned

when we recognize that about the time the war with the mother country commenced the globules, that is, the separate colonies, had become actually a quasi-political whole,--a stage of evolution so near to that of full nationality that it is hard to distinguish the two. It seems to me that the nation had come at least into rudimentary existence when the declaration of independence was made. Surely from that time on something wondrously like a de facto national union of the old colonies grew rapidly, and became stronger and stronger; and this to me is the sufficient and only explanation of the seismic popular upheaval that displaced the weaker government under the articles of confederation with one endowed by the federal constitution with ample powers to administer the affairs of the nation now beginning to stir with consciousness. And yet so blind was everybody that in 1787 the delegates and their constituents

all believed the convention to be the organ of the States, when in truth it was the organ of the new American nation. Prompted by a self-preserving instinct, this nationality deftly kept itself hid. Had it been disclosed, the federal constitution could not have been adopted; and had a suspicion of it come a few years later, there would have been successful secession. And so each State dreamed on its sweet dream of dominion until the call to the stars and stripes rang through the north. Then its people began darkly and dimly to discern the nationalization which had united the States and become a hoop of adamant to hold the union forever stanch. Of course to the south nothing appeared but the State sovereignty of the fathers. Her illuded sight was far clearer and more confident than the true vision of the north, and she magnified State sovereignty which she thought she saw, and damned the American [Pg 79]nationality preached by the north as anti-State-rights, when at that very time a nationality of her own had really put all the southern States at its feet. It mattered not for the thick perception of the north and the optical illusion of the south, the American nation was now full grown; and by the result of the brothers' war it made good its claim to sovereignty.

The historian must accurately gauge the effect wrought by the wonderfully successful career of the United States under the federal constitution in its first years. War with France imminent, Pinckney's winged word, "Millions for defence, but not a cent for tribute," the sword buckled on again by the father of his country--and peace; the extension of our domain from the Mississippi to the Pacific by the Louisiana purchase; the victories won against the men who used to say scornfully that our fathers could not stand the bayonet, and the still more surprising victories won with an improvised navy against the mistress of the seas, in the war of 1812; the brilliant operations of Decatur against Algiers; the military power of the Indians decisively and permanently outclassed, until soon our wom-en and children on the border were practically secure against the tomahawk and scalping knife; and perhaps above all the world-wide spaciousness, as it were, and the inexpressibly greater dignity and splendor of the public arena, as compared with that of any single colony or State, which was opened at once to every ambitious spirit--these are some, only, of the feats and achievements which gave the United States unquestioned authority at home and incomparable prestige around the world. And on and on the American nation rushed, from one stage of growth into and through another, until the result was that for some years before secession State sovereignty, for all of the high airs it gave itself[Pg 80] and the imposing show of respect it extorted, had become merely a survival.

Thus did the American nation form, from a number of different neighboring, cognate, and very closely-akin communities, under

that complex of the forces of growth and those of combination which imperceptibly and resistlessly steers the social organism along the entire track of its evolution. The nationalizing leaven was hidden by the powers in charge of our national destiny in the colonial meal, and it had in time so completely leavened the whole lump that Rhode Island, and North Carolina, trying hard to stay out, and Texas desporting joyfully and proudly under the lone star in her golden independence, could not break the invisible leading strings, which pulled all three into the United States. Note how Oregon and California, though largely settled from the south yet being without slavery, in their extreme remoteness from the brothers' war adhered to the union cause. And had the southern confederacy triumphed in the war, the States in it would have staid out of the federal union only the few years necessary for slavery to run its course. When there was no more virgin soil for cotton, the southern nation, which was merely a growth upon the American nation, would have collapsed of itself, as did the State of Frankland; and that continental brotherhood which brought in Rhode Island,

North Carolina, and Texas, would have commandingly reasserted itself. The more you contemplate the facts, the more it is seen that

this continental brotherhood was and is the most vigorous tap-root and stock of nationality in all history. The providence which at first gradually and surely mixed the colonies into one people, then into a feeble and infirm political whole, rapidly hardening in consistency, and lastly into an indissoluble union, and which was from the beginning more and more developing us into[Pg 81] a na-

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tion--this overruling evolution, and not constitution or lawmaking organs, has been, is, and always will be the ultimate and supreme authority, the opposeless lawgiver, the resistlessly self-executing higher law in America, creating, altering, modifying or abolishing man-made constitutions, laws, ordinances, and statutes, as suits its own true democratic purpose, often inscrutable to contemporaries.

The foregoing is the substance of the argument that must now take the place of that made by Webster and the unionists after him, which was convincingly confuted by the south. It proves the complete and immaculate justice of the war for the union.

This view differs from the other, which we admitted above to be very strong, mainly in refusing to concede that a State is sovereign and can legitimately secede at will. But under it, it ought to be conceded that the States in the southern confederacy were for the time actually out of the American union by revolution. It is not possible to say they were in rebellion; that is an offence of individuals standing by an authority hastily improvised and manifestly sham. It was not by the action of individuals, but it was by the action of States, veritable political entities and quasi sovereigns, that the confederacy was organized. When these States were coerced back, they could not invoke the protection to their slaves given in a constitution which they had solemnly repudiated. The United States could therefore deal with them as it had with the Territories from which it excluded slavery. While of course adequate protection of the freedmen against their former masters ought to have been provided, it should at the same time have been made clear to the world

that slavery was abolished solely because events had demonstrated it to be the only root and cause of dismemberment of the[Pg 82]

union. Such a familiar example as the often-exercised power of a municipality to blow up a house, without compensation therefor, to stop the progress of conflagration, and many other seemingly arbitrary acts done by society in its self-preservation, would have occurred to conscientious people contemplating. And it would have been a long flight in morals above the proclamation, merely to have justified emancipation on the ground that the existence of slavery was a serious menace to the life of the nation.

One's logic may be often wrong, and yet his proposition has been rightly given him by an instinct, as we so often see in the case of good women. O this subliminal self of ours, how it bends us hither and thither, as the solid hemisphere does the little human figure upon it, posing with a seeming will of his own! Hence, and not from our argument-making faculty, come not only our own most important principles of action, but also our very strongest persuasive influence. And it is the subconscious mental forces moving great masses of men and women all the same way--that is, the national instincts--which are the all-conquering powers that the apostle

of a good cause arouses and sets in array. And while it is true that the mere logic of Webster's anti-nullification speech is puerile, the after world will more and more couple that speech with the reply to Hayne, and keep the two at the top--above every effort of all other orators. In the reply to Hayne, in 1830, he had magnified the union in a passage which ever since has deservedly led all selections for American speech books. And now, in 1833, when dismemberment actually makes menace of its ugly self, the great wizard of speech that takes consciences and hearts captive,[37][Pg 83] proclaimed to his countrymen that there could be no such thing as lawful secession or nullification. The earnestness and the emphasis with which he said this were supreme merits of the speech. And

thenceforth it was enough to the hosts of the north to remember that the American, towering like a mountain above them all, had in

his high place solemnly declared that secession is necessarily revolution. And, to one who is familiar with the hypnotizing effect of subconscious national suggestion it is not strange that they scouted Calhoun's demolishing reply, and treasured Webster's false logic as supreme and perfect exposition of the constitution.

[Pg 84]

CHAPTER VI

ROOT-AND-BRANCH ABOLITIONISTS AND FIRE-EATERS

FOR a long while opposition to slavery was moderate and not unreasoning. The first actual quarrel over it between the sections was when Missouri applied for admission to the union in 1818. That was settled by the famous compromise of 1820. The most of the anti-slavery men of that day stood only against the extension of slavery. While many a one of them believed his conviction was dictated, independently and entirely, by his conscience, it was in fact given him because of his relation to the free-labor nationalization claiming the public lands for itself. That was also true of the great mass of northerners opposed to slavery down to the very beginning of the war. They wanted the Territories for themselves. The contest between the United States and England for Oregon

is a parallel case. The American felt, if this territory falls to the United States, I and my children and children's children can get cheap land somewhere in it; but if it falls to England, I and they are forever shut out. In the intersectional contest over the public lands northerners felt that they would be practically excluded from any part of them into which slavery was carried; for infinitely preferring, as they did, the free-labor system, to which they had been bred, to the slavery system, of which they had no experience, and