_PART ONE._
The American crisis, actual and impending; the causes which have led to
it through the years that have passed; the consequences which must flow
from it; the new responsibilities which it devolves on us as a people in
the practical sphere; the new theoretical problems which it forces upon
our consideration--everything, in fine, which concerns it, constitutes
it a subject of the most momentous importance. The greatest experiment
ever yet instituted to bring the progress of humanity to a higher plane
of development is being worked out on this continent and in this age;
and the war now progressing between the Northern and the Southern States
is, in a marked sense, the acme and critical ordeal to which that
experiment is brought.
First in order, in any methodical consideration of the subject, is the
question of the causes which have led to this open outburst of collision
and antagonism between the two great sections of a common country, whose
institutions have hitherto been--with one remarkable exception--so
similar as to be almost identical. Look at the subject as we will, the
fact reveals itself more and more that the one exception alluded to is
the 'head and front of this offending,' the heart and core of this
gigantic difficulty, the one and sole cause of the desperate attempt now
being waged to disturb and break up the process of experiment, otherwise
so peacefully and harmoniously progressing, in favor of the freedom of
man. There is no possibility of grappling rightly with the difficulty
itself, unless we understand to the bottom the nature of the disease.
When the question is considered of the causes of the present war, the
superficial and incidental features of the subject--the mere symptoms of
the development of the deep-seated affection in the central constitution
of our national life--are firstly observed. Some men perceive that the
South were disaffected by the election of Abraham Lincoln and the
success of the Republican party, and see no farther than this. Some see
that the Northern philanthropists had persisted in the agitation of the
subject of slavery, and that this persistency had so provoked and
agitated the minds of Southern man that their feelings had become heated
and irritated, and that they were ready for any rash and unadvised step.
Others see the causes of the war in the prevalence of ignorance among
the masses of the Southern people, the exclusion of the ordinary sources
of information from their minds, the facility with which they have been
imposed on by false and malignant reports of the intentions of the
Northern people, or a portion of the Northern people. Others find the
same causes in the unfortunate prevalence at the South of certain
political heresies, as Nullification, Secession, and the exaggerated
theory of State Rights.
A member of President Lincoln's cabinet, speaking of its causes, near
the commencement of the war, says:
'For the last ten years an angry controversy has existed upon this
question of Slavery. The minds of the people of the South have been
deceived by the artful representations of demagogues, who have
assured them that the people of the North were determined to bring
the power of this Government to bear upon them for the purpose of
crushing out this institution of slavery. I ask you, is there any
truth in this charge? _Has the Government of the United States, in
any single instance, by any one solitary act, interfered with the
institutions of the South? No, not in one._'
But let us go behind the symptoms--let us dive deeper than the
superficial manifestations--let us ask why is it that the South were so
specially disaffected by the election of a given individual, or the
success of a given political party, to an extent and with an expression
given to that disaffection wholly disproportionate to any such cause,
and wholly unknown to the political usages of the land? Why is the South
susceptible to this intense degree of offence at the ordinary
contingency of defeat in a political encounter? Why, again, does the
persistent discussion or agitation of _any_ subject tend so specially to
inflame the Southern mind beyond all the ordinary limits of
moderation--to the denial of the freedom of speech, the freedom of the
press, and finally of the right of national existence itself to the
North--except in conformity with preconceived opinions and theories of
its own? Why were they of the South standing ready, as to their mental
posture, for any or every rash and unadvised step? Why, again, are the
Southern people uneducated and ignorant, as the predominant fact
respecting a majority of their population? Why is the state of popular
information in that whole region of a nominally free country, such as to
make it an easy thing to impose upon their credulity and instruct them
into a full belief in the most absurd and monstrous fabrications, or
falsifications of the truth? Why were the ordinary sources of
information excluded from their minds, more than from ours, or from the
population of any other country? Why this fatal facility on the part of
the Southern public for being misled by the designing purposes of
ambitious demagogues; imbued with unjust prejudices; deluded into a
murderous assault upon their best friends, and into the infliction of
the most serious political injury upon themselves? Why, as a people, are
they prompt to rush from the pursuits of peace into all the horrors and
contingencies of war?--from the enjoyment of political freedom, at least
nominal and apparent, into the arms of a military despotism, the natural
and necessary ultimatum of the course which they have chosen to adopt?
The one and sole answer to all these questions is, Slavery. Some one has
said, in speaking of the present crisis, that the sentiment of loyalty
has never been prevalent at the South. This is a grand mistake. No
people on the surface of the planet have more sincerely felt or more
invariably and unflinchingly demonstrated loyalty than they. But it is
not loyalty to the American Government, nor indeed to any political
institutions whatsoever. It is loyalty to slavery and to cotton. No
other ideas exist, with any marked prominence, at the South. The
Northern people have never understood the South, and their greatest
danger in the present collision results from that ignorance. The
difference between the two peoples is indeed so wide that it is not
equalled by that which exists between any two nations of Europe--if we
except, perhaps, the Western nations and the Turks. The single
institution of slavery has, for the last sixty or seventy years, taken
absolute possession of the Southern mind, and moulded it in all ways to
its own will. Everything is tolerated which does not interfere with it;
nothing whatsoever is tolerated which does. No system of despotism was
ever established on earth so thorough, so efficient, so all-seeing, so
watchful, so permeating, so unscrupulous, and so determined.
The inherent, vital principle of slavery is irresponsible, despotic
rule. The child is born into the exercise of that right; his whole
mental constitution is imbued with its exercise. Hence for twenty or
thirty years--not by virtue of law, but against law--the mails have been
searched throughout the South for incendiary matter, with a strictness
of censorship unknown to any Government of Europe. Northern men and
Europeans immigrating to the South have uniformly been quietly dragooned
and terrorized into the acceptance of theories and usages wholly unknown
to any free country;--quietly, only because the occasion for doing the
same thing violently and barbarously had not yet arrived.
The two civilizations, North and South, are wholly unlike. Without the
slavery of four millions of men, to be kept in subjection by a
conspiracy to that effect, on the part of the whole free population--the
lack of fidelity to which conspiracy is the only treason known in those
regions--the existence of a people like the inhabitants of the Southern
States would be a riddle incapable of solution. Slavery itself, is _a
remnant of barbarism overlapping the period of civilization_; but,
unlike the slaveries of the barbaric ages, American slavery has been
stimulated into all the enterprising and audacious energy of this
advanced and progressive age. It is an engine of ancient barbarism
worked by the steam of modern intelligence. The character of the people
which has been created under this rare and anomalous state of things is
alike rare and anomalous. No other people ever so commingled in
themselves the elements of barbarous and even savage life with traits of
the highest civilization. No other community were ever so instinct with
the life of the worst ages of the past, and so endowed with the physical
and intellectual potencies of the present. The national character of the
South is that of the gentlemanly blackleg, bully, and desperado.
Courteous when polished, but always overbearing; pretentious of a
conventional sense of honor--which consists solely in a readiness to
fight in the duel, the brawl, or the regular campaign, and to take
offence on every occasion; with no trace of that modesty or delicacy of
sentiment which constitutes the soul of true honor; ambitious,
unscrupulous, bold; dashing and expert; with absolutely no restrictions
from conscience, routine, or the ordinary suggestions of prudence; false
and, like all braggarts, cowardly when beaten; confident of their own
strength until brought to the severest tests; capable of endurance and
shifts of all kinds; awaiting none of the usual conditions of
success--the Southern man and the Southern people are neither
comfortable neighbors in a state of peace, nor enemies to be slightly
considered or despised in war.
The anomalous character of Southern society, it cannot be too often
repeated, is not understood and cannot be understood by the people of
the North, or of Europe, otherwise than through the sharp experience of
hostile and actual contact; nor otherwise than in the light of the
inherent tendency and necessary educational influences of the one
institution of slavery. Of the whole South, in degree, and of the
Southwestern States preëminently, it may be said as a whole description
in a single form of expression: _They know no other virtue than brute
physical courage, and no other crime than abolitionism or
negro-stealing._
All this is said, not for the purpose of blackening the South, not from
partisan rancor or local prejudice, or exaggerated patriotic zeal, but
because it is true. It is not true, however, of the whole population of
the South, nor true, perhaps, in the absolute sense of any portion. It
is impossible to characterize any people without a portion of individual
injustice, or to state the drift of an individual character even,
without a like injustice to better traits, adverse to the general drift,
and which, to constitute a complete inventory of national or personal
attributes, should be enumerated. There is at the South a large
counterpoise, therefore, of adverse statement, which might be, and
should be made if the object of the present writing were a complete
analysis of the subject. It is, however, not so, but a statement of the
preponderance of public character and opinion in those States. As a
people they have their countervailing side of advantage--a great deal of
amiability and refinement in certain neighborhoods, so long as their
inherent right of domination is not disputed. Men and women are found,
all over the South, who as individuals are better than the institution
by which their characters are affected, and whose native goodness could
not be wholly spoiled by its adverse operation. Slavery, too, offers
certain advantages for some special kinds of culture. We of the North,
on the other hand, have our own vices of a kind not to be disguised nor
denied; so that the present statement should not be mistaken for an
attempt to characterize in full either population. It is simply
perceived that the grand distinctive drift of Southern society is
directly away from the democratic moorings of our favorite republican
institutions; is rapid in its current and irresistible in its momentum;
and that already the divergency attained between the political and
popular character of the people at the North and the South is immense;
that these constantly widening tendencies--one in behalf of more and
more practical enlargement of the liberty of the individual; the other
backward and downward toward the despotic political dogmas and practices
of the ignorant and benighted past--have proceeded altogether beyond
anything which has been seen and recognized by the people of the North;
and that, consequently, the whole North has been acting under a
misapprehension.
The spirit of the South is and has been belligerent, rancorous, and
unscrupulous. The idea of settling any question by the discussion of
principles, by mutual concessions, by the understanding, admission, and
defence of the rights of each, is not in all their thoughts. They are
inherently and essentially invaders and conquerors, in disposition, and
so far as it might chance to prove for them feasible, would ever be so
in fact. War with them is therefore no matter of child's play, no matter
of courtesy or chivalry toward enemies, except from a pompous and
theatrical show of a knightly character, which they do not possess;--it
is simply a question of pillaging and enslaving, without let or
hindrance from moral or humanitary considerations, to any extent to
which they may find, by the experiment now inaugurated, their physical
power to extend. The North, let it be repeated, entered into this war
under a misapprehension of the whole state of the case. It is at the
present hour, to a fearful extent, under the same misapprehension. There
is still a belief prevailing that the South only needs to be coaxed or
treated kindly or magnanimously to be convinced that she has mistaken
the North; that she has not the grievances to complain of which she
supposes she has, and that she can yet obtain just and equitable
treatment from us. There is a tacit assumption in the minds of men that
she _must_ be content to receive the usage at our hands which we are
conscious that we are ready to bestow, and which has in it no touch of
aggressive and unjust intention. It is not realized that the spirit of
the South, in respect to the North, in respect to Mexico, in respect to
the islands of the sea, and--should their power prove proportionate to
their unscrupulous piratical aspirations--in respect to all the nations
of the earth, is that of the burglar and the highwayman. It is not
realized that the institution of slavery--itself essential robbery of
the rights of man; covering the area of half a continent, and the number
of four millions of subjects; planted in the midst of an intellectually
enlightened people, whose moral sense it has utterly sapped--is
essentially a great educational system, as all-pervading and influential
over the minds of the whole population as the common schools of New
England; and that this grand educational force tends toward and
culminates in this same tendency toward robbery and the suppression of
human rights or the individual and national rights of all other
people--expressed _in a collective and belligerent way_. It is not, as
said before, that all men at the South are of this filibustering cast;
but the bold, enterprising, and leading class of the population are so,
and the remainder are passive in their hands. Virtually and practically,
therefore, the South are a nation of people having far more relationship
in thought and purpose with the old Romans during the period of the
republic and the empire, or with the more modern Goths and Vandals and
Huns, than they have with the England or New England of to-day.
It is such a people, planted on our borders and aroused for the first
time to an exhibition on a large scale of those abiding and augmenting
national attributes and propensities which have thus been indicated,
with whom we are now brought into hostile array. They are at present
trying their hand at the collective and organic activities of a national
cutthroatism which, in an individual and sporadic way, has for many
years past constituted the national life of that people. Who at the
North, at the commencement of the war, impressively understood these
facts? Who even now sees and knows, as the fact is, that the military
success of Jefferson Davis; that his triumphant march on Philadelphia,
New York, and Boston--as they of the South threaten, and intend if they
have the power, and have already twice unsuccessfully attempted--would
terminate not, in a separation of these States by a permanent disruption
of the old Union; nor in new compromises of any kind whatsoever; but in
the absolute conquest of the whole North--not conquest even in any sense
now understood among civilized people; but conquest with more than all
the horrors which fourteen centuries ago were visited on Southern Europe
by the overwhelming avalanche of Northern barbarian invasion?--that in
that event, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of
locomotion without question, freedom in any sense which makes life
valuable to the man once educated into the conception of freedom, is
lost?--that the whole progress of modern civilization and development,
as it has been working itself out in the Northern American States, would
not only be diverted from its course, but positively reversed and made
to contribute all its accumulations of power to the building up, not of
the temple of Freedom for the blessing of the nations, but of an
infernal pantheon of Despotism and human oppression?
The North was forced, reluctantly and unwillingly, into this war: with
her as yet it has hardly become a matter of earnest. She has endeavored
to carry it on considerately and tenderly, for the well-being of the
South as well as of the North, much in the spirit of a quiet Quaker
gentleman unexpectedly set upon by a drunken rowdy, 'spoiling for a
fight,' and whom in his benevolence and surprise, he is anxious indeed
to restrain, but without inflicting on him serious injury. In an
especial degree was this tenderness felt on the part of the Government
and people of the North toward that peculiar institution of the South
which is distinctively known to be, in some way, fundamentally related
to this unprovoked and unreasonable attack. While the South was
attributing to the whole North a rabid abolitionism; while the North
itself was half suspecting that it had committed some wrong in the
excess of its devotion to human rights; the simple fact on the contrary
was, that the whole North had been and was still 'psychologized' into a
positive respect for slavery, and for slaves as property, which we feel
for no other species of property whatsoever. The existence of this
sentiment of veneration for what our Abolition apostles have for some
years been denominating the 'sum of all villanies,' is a curious fact
in the spiritual history of our people, which had very generally escaped
critical observation.
At the South, the individual planter, owning and possessing ten slaves,
of an aggregate value, it may be, of ten thousand dollars, ranks higher,
socially, is regarded indeed, in some subtile way, as a richer man, than
the merchant or banker who may be worth his hundred thousand or half
million of dollars, provided he has no slaves. To come to be the owner
of negroes, and of more and more negroes, is the social ambition, the
aristocratic purpose and pretension of the whole Southern people. It is
by virtue of this mystical _prestige_ of the institution itself; which
couples the charms of wealth with the exercise of authority, or a
certain show of official supremacy on the part of the master; which
begins by subjugating the imagination of the poorer classes, the whites
throughout the South, whose direct interests are wholly opposed to those
of the slaveholding class, and ends by subjecting them, morally and
spiritually, and binding them in the bonds of the most abject allegiance
to the oligarchy of slaveholders. It is in this way that the South is
made a unit out of elements seemingly the most incongruous and radically
opposed. For a series of years past, the South has sent forth its annual
caravan of wealthy planters to visit the watering places, and inhabit
the great hotels of the North. Coming in intimate contact with the
superior classes of our own population; floating up in the atmosphere of
serene self-complacency; radiating, shedding down upon those with whom
they chanced to associate, the ineffable consciousness of their own
unquestionable superiority; they have communicated without effort on
their part, and without suspicion on the part of those who were
inoculated by their presence, the exact mould and pressure of their own
slaveholding opinion. To this extent, and in this subtile and ethereal
way, the North had imposed upon it, unconsciously, a certain respect,
amounting to veneration, for what may be called the sanctity of slavery,
as it rests in and constitutes the aromal emanation from every Southern
mind. Hence not only did we begin this war with the feeling of
tenderness toward the Southern man and the Southern woman as brother and
sister in the common heritage of patriotism, but, superadded to this,
with a _special_ sentiment of tenderness toward that _special_
institution for which it is known that they, our brethren, entertain
such _special_ regard.
Now all this is rapidly changing; the outrages inflicted on citizens of
the North residing at the South at the opening of the war--hardly
paralleled in the most barbarous ages in any other land;--their reckless
and bloodthirsty methods of war; their bullying arrogance and
presumption; the true exposition, in fine, of the Southern character as
it is, in the place of a high-toned chivalry which they have claimed for
themselves, and which the people of the North have been tacitly inclined
to accord--are all awakening the Government and the people to some
growing sense of the real state of the case. Still, however, we are so
far dominated by these influences of the past, that we are not fighting
the South upon anything like a fair approximation to equal terms. They
have no other thought than to inflict on us of the North the greatest
amount of evil; the _animus_ of deadly war. We, on the other hand, fight
an unwilling fight, with a constant _arrière pensée_ to the best
interests of the people whom we oppose--not even as _we_ might construe
those interests, but, by a curious tenderness and refinement of
delicacy, for those interests as _they_, from their point of view,
conceive them to be. We forbear from striking the South in their most
vital and defenceless point, while they forbear _in nothing_, and have
no purpose of forbearance.
Who doubts for a moment that a thousand mounted men, acting with the
freedom which characterized the movements of the detachment of Garibaldi
in the Italian war, acting with the authorization of the Government,
actuated by the spirit of a John Brown or a Nat Turner, sent, or rather
let go, into the mountains of Virginia, North Carolina, or Georgia, with
the authority to assemble and arm the slaves, retreating whenever
assailed to the fastnesses of the mountains, would cause more terror in
those States; would do more, in a word, toward the actual conquest in
three months' time of those rebel commonwealths, than fifty or a hundred
times their number organized in the regular forms of modern warfare,
operating against the whites only, and half-committed to the coöperative
protection of the institution of slavery, would accomplish in a year?
Who doubts for a moment that, if the South could find a like vulnerable
point in the openings of our armor, she would make, with no hesitation,
the most fearful and tremendous use of her advantage? The whole North is
aware of its possession, in its own hands, of this immense engine of
destructive power over its enemy. The whole civilized world stands by,
beholding us possessed of it, and expecting, as a simple matter of
course, that we shall not fail to employ it--standing by indeed,
perplexed and confused at the seeming lack of any significance in the
war itself, unless we make use of the power at our command in this
fortuitous struggle, not only to inflict the greatest injury upon our
enemy, but to extinguish forever the cause of the whole strife. Still we
forbear to make the most efficient use of our advantage. We for a long
time embarrassed and partially crippled ourselves in all our movements
by an almost unconscious sense of responsibility for the protection of
this very institution of slavery from the disastrous consequences which
were liable to fall upon it as the results of the war.
True, we are slowly and gradually recovering from this perversion of
opinion. The Emancipation Proclamation was probably issued as soon, or
nearly as soon, as the Northern sentiment was prepared to give it even a
moral support. Another term had to expire to accustom the same public
mind to appropriate the spirit of that document as matter of earnest; to
come to regard it as anything more than a mere _brutum fulmen_, a Pope's
bull, as President Lincoln once called it himself, against the comet. Up
to this hour, its effect on the war has been far more as a moral
influence preparing for a great change of opinion and of conduct, than
as a charter of efficient operations. General Thomas's action at the
South, just previous to the capture of Vicksburg, began experimentally
to inaugurate, on something like an adequate scale, the new programme of
practical work in the conduct of the war. Even a month earlier his
movement would hardly have been tolerated by the same army, which, just
then beginning to appreciate the tremendous difficulty of the enterprise
of conquering the South, were ready to accept anything new which
promised to augment their own strength and to weaken that of the enemy.
Still another term of waiting and suffering is requisite to change the
habit of mind which has so long despised and maltreated the negro,
before he will be put, in all respects, upon the footing of his own
merit as a patriot and a soldier; and before all of his uses as the
severest goad in the sides of the hostile South will be fairly
appreciated.
Thus in all ways we are only now in the midst of a revolution of
opinion, which, when it is accomplished, will be seen to be the greatest
triumph of the war. Though we have spoken of this change as slowly and
gradually occurring, yet, viewed with reference to the long periods of a
nation's life, it is an immense revolution almost instantly effected. We
are perhaps already one half prepared adequately to use our tremendous
advantage. New disasters may be providentially requisite to quicken our
education in the right direction; more punishment for our complicity in
the crimes of the South; new incentives to a more perfect love of
justice as a people; but every indication points to the early
achievement of these substantial victories over ourselves, while, at the
same time, we conquer the powerful array of Southern intrepidity and
desperation, in behalf of their bad cause, upon the external battle
field.
To resume the question of causes. Why is there, and why has there always
been at the South this unfortunate prevalence of certain political
heresies, as Nullification, Secession, and the exaggerated theory of
State Rights?
The answer is still, slavery. The cause of causes, lying back of the
whole wide gulf of difference in Northern and Southern politics is
still, slavery. From the date of our Constitution, opinion has divided
into two great currents, North and South, in behalf of paramount
allegiance to the General Government at the North, and paramount
allegiance to the several State Governments at the South. The
resolutions of '98 and '99 began the public expression of a political
heresy, which has gone on augmenting at the South from that day to this.
At the North, the Government of the United States was never feared as
likely to become injurious in any sense to the inhabitants of the
States. Each State fell quietly and harmoniously into its true
subordinate orbit, acknowledging gladly and without question the
supremacy of the new Government, representative of the whole of the
people, in simple accord with the spirit and intention of the
Constitution and the Government which the people had formed. At the
South, on the contrary, the United States Government was, from the
first, looked upon with a suspicion plainly expressed in the speech, for
example, of Patrick Henry, in the Virginia convention, which consented
reluctantly that the State should come into the Union, lest the National
Government might, in some unforeseen contingency, interfere with the
interests of the institution of slavery. That fear, the determination to
have it otherwise, to make the General Government, on the contrary, the
engine and supporter of slavery, the propagandist of slavery, in fine;
has been always, since, the animating spirit of Southern political
doctrine. A doctrine so inaugurated and developed has endeavored to
engraft itself by partisan alliance upon the Democratic party of the
North, but always hitherto with an imperfect success. State Rights, as
affirmed at the North, has never been a dogma of any considerable power,
because it has rested on no substratum of suspicion against the General
Government, nor of conspiracy to employ its enginery for special or
local designs. At the South it has been vital and significant from the
first, and it has grown more mischievous to the last. President Lincoln,
in his first message, discussed, ably enough, the right of secession as
a mere constitutional or legal right. Others have done the same before
and since. The opinion of the lawyer is all very well, but it has no
special potency to restrain the nocturnal activities of the burglar. All
such discussions are, for the present behalf, utterly puerile.
Secession, revolution, the bloody destruction and extinction of the
whole nation, were for years before the war foregone determinations in
the Southern mind, to be resorted to at any instant at which such
extreme measures might become necessary; not merely to prevent any
interference with the holy institution; but equally to secure that
absolute predominance of the slaveholding interest over the whole
political concerns of the country which should protect it from
interference, and give to it all the expansion and potency which it
might see fit to claim. So long as that absolute domination could be
maintained within the administration of the Government, slavery and
slaveholders were content to remain nominally republican and
democratic--actually despots and unlimited rulers. But a contingency
threatened them in the future. The numerical growth of population at the
North, the moral convictions of the North--both of these united, or some
other unforeseen circumstance, might withdraw the operations of the
General Government from their exclusive control. To provide for that
possible contingency, the doctrine of paramount allegiance to the
individual States, and secondary allegiance merely to the General
Government--a perpetual indoctrination of incipient treason--was
invented, and has been sedulously taught at the South from the very
inception of the Government. Hardly a child in attendance upon his
lessons in an 'old-field' schoolhouse throughout that region but has
been imbued with this primary devotion to the interests of his State;
certainly, not a young lawyer commencing to acquire his profession, and
riding the circuit from county court-house to court-house, but has had
the doctrine drummed into his ears, of allegiance to his State; and when
the meaning and importance of that teaching was inquired for, he was
impressively and confidentially informed that the occasion might arise
of collision between the South and the General Government on the subject
of slavery; and that then it would be of the last importance that every
Southern man should be true to his section. Thus the way has been
prepared through three generations of instruction, for the precise event
which is now upon us, flaunting its pretensions as a new and accidental
occurrence.
Meantime, the North has suspected nothing of all this. Her own devotion
and loyalty to the General Government have been constantly on the
increase, and she has taken it for granted that the same sentiments
prevailed throughout the South. Hence the utter surprise felt at the
enormous dimensions which the revolt so suddenly took on, and at the
unaccountable defection of such numbers of Southern men from the army
and the navy at the first call upon sectional loyalty. The question is
not one of legal or constitutional rights in accordance with the literal
understanding of any parchment or document whatsoever. The most
triumphant arguments of President Lincoln or of anybody else have had in
the past, and have now, no actual relevancy to the question at the
South, and might as well be totally spared. It is purely and simply that
the South are in dead earnest to have their own way, unchecked by any
considerations of justice or right, or any other considerations of any
kind whatsoever--less than the positive demonstration of their physical
inability to accomplish their most cherished designs. Even in a
technical way, the question is not most intelligibly stated as one of
the right of secession; it is the bald question of Paramount Allegiance;
it is so understood at the South. The whole action of the South is based
upon a thorough indoctrination into a political dogma never so much as
fairly conceived of at the North as existing anywhere, until events now
developing themselves have revealed it, and which is not now even well
understood among us. Back of this indoctrination again, and the sole
cause of it, is the existence of the institution of slavery; its own
instinct from the first that it had no other ground of defence or hope
of perpetuation but physical force; its fears of invasion and its
obstinate determination to invade.
The supposition has, until quite recently, extensively prevailed in the
Northern mind that slavery is or was regarded at the South as a
necessary evil, borne because it was inherited from the past and because
its removal had become now next to impossible. A certain school of
Northern philanthropists, headed, we believe, by Elihu Burritt, had gone
so far, previous to the war, as to form a society and appeal to the
Northern people for aid to enable their Southern brethren, through such
aid, and finally, perhaps, through the interposition of the General
Government, to rid themselves of this monster evil. This handful of
kindly individuals must soon have discovered, had they come into actual
contact with the prevailing sentiment of the South, that their whole
movement was based upon a misapprehension of that sentiment. Thirty-five
years ago, and before the Northern abolition movement had taken root in
the land, it was a pleasant fiction for the Southern mind to speak
deprecatingly of the blame which they otherwise might seem to incur in
the mind of mankind for adhering to their barbarous institution; to
plead their own conviction of its entire wrongfulness, and to
commiserate themselves for their utter inability to free themselves from
its weight. A certain considerable freedom of discussion in relation to
its abstract merits was allowed, with the tacit condition imposed,
however, just as really though not as consciously as now, that slavery
itself must not be disturbed. Talk which had in it any touch of genuine
feeling in favor of active exertion to rid the country of the
institution as an evil, was then as effectually tabooed as it is to-day,
with some minor exceptions on the borders of the slaveholding region, in
Baltimore, North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, etc., and with the further
exception when Virginia was terrified for a few weeks or months by the
results of a desperate insurrection. On the strength of these few
exceptions, it has been claimed at the South, and still more
persistently by Southern sympathizers at the North, that the whole drift
and tendency of things at the South prior to the commencement of the
abolition agitation at the North were toward gradual emancipation, and
that they would have ultimated at an early day in that result. This,
too, is a pleasant fiction with the least possible percentage of truth
at the bottom of it.
The institution of slavery, under the stimulus given to it by the
invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney, and the consequent
development of the cotton-growing industry--aided, curiously enough, in
a certain sense, by the prohibition of the African slave trade, giving
rise to the slave-rearing business in Virginia and Maryland--has all
along been exhibiting a steady, sturdy, and rapid growth. By the
alliance, accidentally as it were, resulting from the prohibition of the
slave trade, between the Southern and the Northern slaveholding States,
a robustness and consistency were given to the whole slaveholding
interest which possibly it might never have had under a different
policy. If the foreign importation of slaves had continued, that species
of population would gradually have overrun the cotton-raising border of
States--would have overrun them to an extent threatening the safety of
the institution there by its own plethora--while from the southern line
of North Carolina and Tennessee northward, where this extra-profitable
industry could not readily be extended, the temptation to the
importation of slaves would have been slight, no market existing for the
home increase. The hold of the institution would have been constantly
weakened there in the affections of the white population; and, in those
States, there is a seeming probability that white labor and free labor
would have taken the place of the present system, as it did in the
States farther north. This would have deprived the Southern belt of
cotton-raising and negro-holding States of that sympathy which, under
existing circumstances, they have steadily had from their more northern
sisters, and favored an early extinction of the system. However this
might have been, as things are and have been actually, it is certain
that at no period has the growth of the slaveholding institution
exhibited any weakness or defect of vitality. Like an infant giant, it
has steadily waxed stronger and stronger, and more and more arrogant
and aggressive.
When the anti-slavery agitation commenced at the North, the parties who
engaged in it had no consciousness of the immense magnitude and potent
vitality of the institution against which they proposed to carry on a
moral warfare. They supposed that, as a matter of course, they would
find a universal sympathy throughout the North with doctrines in behalf
of freedom, where freedom was the basis of all our institutions, and
where, apparently, there was no alliance of interest, no possible reason
for a sympathy with slavery or the denial of freedom to man. They were
met unexpectedly by a powerful current of semi-slaveholding opinion
pervading the whole area of the Free States, and ready to deny to them
free speech or the rightfulness of any effort to arouse the people to a
consideration of the subject. When, after some years of contest, this
current of prejudgment was partially reversed, and their new thought
began to find audience by the Northern ear; when, strengthened by
numbers and the better comprehension of the subject by themselves; the
increased determination and enthusiasm which arose from the _esprit du
corps_; and the assurance--satisfactory to themselves at least--that
they were engaged in a good cause; they began to grapple more directly
with intensified and genuine pro-slavery sentiment at the South itself,
they were astonished to find that, instead of battling with a weak
thing, they had engaged in moral strife with one of the most mighty
institutions of the earth.
Pro-slavery sentiment at the South, inherently arrogant and aggressive,
as already said, was, at the same time and from the same causes, aroused
to the consciousness of its own strength. Called on to answer for the
unseemly fact of its existence in the midst of these modern centuries,
when the world boasts of human freedom and progression, it began by
blushing for its hideous aspect and uttering feeble and deprecative
apologies. Not that it was at bottom ashamed of its existence, for
slavery, like despotism of all sorts, is characteristically
self-confident and proud; but because it had been allowed to grow up
under protest in the midst of free institutions, and among a people
conscious of the incongruity of the relationship existing between them
and it; and had so contracted the habit of apology, and the hypocritical
profession of regret for its own inherent wrongfulness. Provoked,
however, to try its strength against the feeble assaults of the new
friends of freedom, finding all its demands readily yielded to, and
itself victorious in every conflict, it soon threw off its false
professions of modesty, pronounced itself free from every taint of
wrong-doing, claimed to be the very corner stone and basis of free
institutions themselves, the condition _sine qua non_ of all successful
experiment in republican and democratic organizations, and became boldly
and openly the assailant and propagandist, instead of occupying any
longer the position of defence. Then followed the various attempts to
overthrow and extinguish free speech in the capital of the nation by the
use of the bludgeon, to extend slavery by illegal and bloodthirsty means
over the soil of Kansas, to strengthen the enactments of the fugitive
slave law by new and more offensive provisions, and to cause the
authority of the Slave Power to be openly and confessedly recognized
throughout the whole land, as it had been for years secretly and warily
predominant. The opposition to these measures of aggression ceased to be
wholly confined to the mere handful of technical abolitionists, and to
spread and to take possession of the minds of the whole people, exciting
surprise and alarm, and arousing them to some slight efforts at
resistance. With this rising tendency to resist arose in like measure
the tendency of the slaveholding power to invade. The alternative was
quietly but resolutely chosen in the minds of the leading politicians
of the South to 'rule or ruin.' Preparation was made for retaining the
absolute control of the General Government at Washington, and for
extending the influence of the peculiar institution over the whole North
and all adjacent countries, so long as that policy should prove
practicable; and, if by any contingency defeated in it, to break up the
Union as it existed, and reconstruct it upon terms which should place
the slaveholding aristocracy in that front rank of authority without
question, to which, as a settled conviction, ever present and dominant
in their minds, they alone, of all men, are preëminently entitled.
Accordingly they imposed their weight more and more heavily upon the
successive administrations from Van Buren down to Buchanan, and were
encouraged to find that, in proportion as they pressed harder in their
demands, proportionate concessions seldom failed to be made. The
reaction at the North was nevertheless steadily progressing. Wisely
perceiving that the first part of their _programme_ of action had nearly
served its day; that preparation must be made for entering on the second
and more desperate part of their conspiracy against free government;
they forced on the crisis at the Democratic Convention in Charleston, by
demanding terms which, with the fire in the rear now regularly organized
and steadily operative at the North, that party could not accede to,
without consenting to its own death. A disruption ensued of the
unnatural alliance between the Southern oligarchy and the Northern
Democracy, and the Southern leaders from that hour availed themselves of
their sole remaining lease of power under the administration of Mr.
Buchanan to strengthen their position by all means, honorable and
dishonorable, for the coming conflict, which by them had been long
planned or at least looked forward to, as the probable contingency.
Having virtually the entire control of the General Government, they used
their power for sending South the arms of the common country, for
disposing the army and navy in such ways as to leave them in the least
degree effective for opposing their designs; and with all the quietness
and deliberation of a dying millionaire making his will, they prepared
to begin the conflict which the lazy and confiding North had not even
begun to suspect as among the possibilities of the future; and to begin
it absolutely upon their own terms.
Enough has now been said, perhaps, in relation to the causes of the
present war. The present stage of its development is such as might have
been fairly anticipated from such a commencement. The South has had the
advantage of earnestness and concentration of purpose; of a warlike and
aggressive spirit; of prior preparation, and of a full knowledge from
the first of the desperate nature of the enterprise upon which they were
about to enter, with a readiness to meet all its contingencies, and,
since the great uprising, with no anticipation of easy work. The North
was hurried into a war for which it had no preparation, to which it had
never looked as a serious probability, and for which it had been
stripped in a great measure, through the pilfering policy of the South,
of the ordinary means at its command. A peaceable and highly civilized
people, among whom actual war upon its own soil had been unknown for
nearly fifty years, and among whom the spirit of war, always so rife at
the South, was opposed and neutralized by a thousand industrial and
peaceful propensities, was suddenly called into the field. Uninstructed
at first in the real nature of the conflict, regarding it as an
unreasonable disaffection, and therefore necessarily limited in extent,
not aroused even yet to a full consciousness of the momentous
consequences involved in the struggle and its gigantic proportions, they
have come to the work, in a great measure, unprepared. Their condition
at its commencement was even less favorable than that of the British
nation at the commencement of the Russian war. Both of these great
industrial peoples, with whom war had fallen among the traditions of the
past, had to begin new struggles by learning anew the theory and
practice of war. The Northern people rose, after the assault on Fort
Sumter demonstrated to them that the South was in earnest, with the
unanimity and power as of a single man, but bewildered and uncertain
which way to turn, or how to grapple with the strange and unaccountable
monster of rebellion which had suddenly precipitated himself among them.
The whole habits of the nation had to undergo a violent and rapid
change. A new educational experience had to be hurried through its
successive courses of instruction. The gristle on the bone of the new
military organization had to have time to harden. Sharp experiences had
to be undergone, and will still have to be endured, as part of the price
of tuition in the novel career to which we have been so unexpectedly
called. Still, we have great power in reserve; no feeling of
discouragement, no thought of abandoning the purpose of maintaining our
integrity as a people, no sense of weakness possesses our minds. Great
and triumphant successes are attending our arms. State after State,
swept at first wholly or in part into the vortex of revolt, is again
included within our military lines and brought back to a partial
allegiance. New questions are rising into importance. We pass from the
consideration of causes to that of results. It is a different and a
difficult work to forecast the future. It is a perilous experiment to
enact the prophet or seer, but in another paper we shall venture at
least upon some suggestions which may have their uses in modulating that
national destiny which none of us have the power actually to create or
even to foretell.