the divinely sanctioned institutions of the South, and those who hope
even yet to reknit the monstrous league between slavery and a party
calling itself Democratic, will of course be willing to take back the
seceding States without conditions. Neither of these classes is any
longer formidable, either by its numbers or the character of its
leaders. But there is yet a third class, who seem to have confused
their minds with some fancied distinction between civil and foreign
war. Holding the States to be indestructible, they seem to think that,
by the mere cessation of hostilities, they are to resume their places
as if nothing had happened, or rather as if this had been a mere
political contest which we had carried. But it is with the people of
the States, and not with any abstract sovereignty, that we have been at
war, and it is of them that we are to exact conditions, and not of some
convenient quasi-entity, which is not there when the battle is raging,
and is there when the terms of capitulation are to be settled. No, it
is slavery which made this war, and slavery which must pay the damages.
While we should not by any unseemly exultation remind the Southern
people that they have been conquered, we should also not be weak enough
to forget that we have won the right of the victor. And what is that
right, if it be not to exact indemnity for the past and security for
the future? And what more nobly and satisfactorily fulfils both those
conditions, than utterly to extinguish the cause of quarrel? What we
fear is the foolish and weak good-nature inherent in popular
government, but against which monarchies and aristocracies are insured
by self-interest, which the prospect of peace is sure to arouse, and
which may make our settlement a stage-reconciliation, where everybody
rushes into the arms of everybody else with a fervor which has nothing
to do with the living relations of the actors. We believe that the
public mind should be made up as to what are the essential conditions
of real and lasting peace, before it is subjected to the sentimental
delusions of the inevitable era of good feeling, in which the stronger
brother is so apt to play the part of Esau. If we are to try the
experiment of democracy fairly, it must be tried in its fullest extent,
and not half-way. The theory which grants political power to the
ignorant white foreigner need not be squeamish about granting it to the
ignorant black native, for the gist of the matter is in the dark mind,
and not the more or less dusky skin. Of course we shall be met by the
usual fallacy,--Would you confer equality on the blacks? But the answer
is a very simple one. Equality cannot be conferred on any man, be he
white or black. If he be capable of it, his title is from God, and not
from us. The opinion of the North is made up on the subject of
emancipation, and Mr. Lincoln has announced it as the one essential
preliminary to the readmission of the insurgent States. To our mind,
citizenship is the necessary consequence, as it is the only effectual
warranty, of freedom; and accordingly we are in favor of distinctly
settling beforehand some conditional right of admission to it. We have
purposely avoided any discussion on gradualism as an element in
emancipation, because we consider its evil results to have been
demonstrated in the British West Indies. True conservative policy is
not an anodyne hiding away our evil from us in a brief forgetfulness.
It looks to the long future of a nation, and dares the heroic remedy
where it is scientifically sure of the nature of the disease. The only
desperate case for a people is where its moral sense is paralyzed, and
the first symptom is a readiness to accept an easy expedient at the
sacrifice of a difficult justice. The relation which is to be final and
permanent cannot be too soon decided on and put in working order,
whether for the true interest of master or slave; and the only safe
relation is one that shall be fearlessly true to the principles in
virtue of which we asserted our own claim to autonomy, and our right to
compel obedience to the government so established. Anything short of
that has the weakness of an expedient which will erelong compel us to
reconstruct our reconstruction, and the worse weakness of hypocrisy,
which will sooner or later again lay us open to the retribution of that
eternal sincerity which brings all things at last to the test of its
own unswerving standard.
SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT?
1865
It has been said that the American people are less apt than others to
profit by experience, because the bustle of their lives keeps breaking
the thread of that attention which is the material of memory, till no
one has patience or leisure to spin from it a continuous thread of
thought. We suspect that this is not more true of us than of other
nations,--than it is of all people who read newspapers. Great events
are perhaps not more common than they used to be, but a vastly greater
number of trivial incidents are now recorded, and this dust of time
gets in our eyes. The telegraph strips history of everything down to
the bare fact, but it does not observe the true proportions of things,
and we must make an effort to recover them. In brevity and cynicism it
is a mechanical Tacitus, giving no less space to the movements of Sala
than of Sherman, as impartial a leveller as death. It announces with
equal _sangfroid_ the surrender of Kirby Smith and the capture of a
fresh rebel governor, reducing us to the stature at which posterity
shall reckon us. Eminent contemporaneousness may see here how much
space will be allotted to it in the historical compends and biographical
dictionaries of the next generation. In artless irony the telegraph is
unequalled among the satirists of this generation. But this short-hand
diarist confounds all distinctions of great and little, and roils the
memory with minute particles of what is oddly enough called intelligence.
We read in successive paragraphs the appointment of a Provisional
Governor of North Carolina, whose fitness or want of it may be the
turning-point of our future history, and the nomination of a minister,
who will at most only bewilder some foreign court with a more
desperately helpless French than his predecessor. The conspiracy trial
at Washington, whose result will have absolutely no effect on the real
affairs of the nation, occupies for the moment more of the public mind
and thought than the question of reconstruction, which involves the
life or death of the very principle we have been fighting for these
four years.
Undoubtedly the event of the day, whatever it may be, is apt to become
unduly prominent, and to thrust itself obscuringly between us and the
perhaps more important event of yesterday, where the public appetite
demands fresh gossip rather than real news, and the press accordingly
keeps its spies everywhere on the lookout for trifles that become
important by being later than the last. And yet this minuteness of
triviality has its value also. Our sensitive sheet gives us every
morning the photograph of yesterday, and enables us to detect and to
study at leisure that fleeting expression of the time which betrays its
character, and which might altogether escape us in the idealized
historical portrait. We cannot estimate the value of the _items_ in our
daily newspaper, because the world to which they relate is too familiar
and prosaic; but a hundred years hence some Thackeray will find them
full of picturesque life and spirit. The "Chronicle" of the Annual
Register makes the England of the last century more vividly real to us
than any history. The jests which Pompeian idlers scribbled on the
walls, while Vesuvius was brooding its fiery conspiracy under their
feet, bring the scene nearer home to us than the letter of Pliny, and
deepen the tragedy by their trifling contrast, like the grave-diggers'
unseemly gabble in Hamlet. Perhaps our judgment of history is made
sounder, and our view of it more lifelike, when we are so constantly
reminded how the little things of life assert their place alongside the
great ones, and how healthy the constitution of the race is, how sound
its digestion, how gay its humor, that can take the world so easily
while our continent is racked with fever and struggling for life
against the doctors.
"Let Hercules himself do what he may,
The cat will mew, the dog must have his day."
It is always pleasant to meet Dame Clio over the tea-table, as it were,
where she is often more entertaining, if not more instructive, than
when she puts on the loftier port and more ceremonious habit of a Muse.
These inadvertences of history are pleasing. We are no longer
foreigners, in any age of the world, but feel that in a few days we
could have accommodated ourselves there, and that, wherever men are, we
are not far from home. The more we can individualize and personify, the
more lively our sympathy. Man interests us scientifically, but men
claim us through all that we have made a part of our nature by
education and custom. We would give more to know what Xenophon's
soldiers gossiped about round their camp-fires, than for all the
particulars of their retreat. Sparta becomes human to us when we think
of Agesilaus on his hobby-horse. Finding that those heroic figures
romped with their children, we begin for the first time to suspect that
they ever really existed as much as Robinson Crusoe. Without these
personal traits, antiquity seems as unreal to us as Sir Thomas More's
Utopia. It is, indeed, surprising how little of real life what is
reckoned solid literature has preserved to us, voluminous as it is.
Where does chivalry at last become something more than a mere
procession of plumes and armor, to be lamented by Burke, except in some
of the less ambitious verses of the Trouveres, where we hear the
canakin clink too emphatically, perhaps, but which at least paint
living men and possible manners? Tennyson's knights are cloudy,
gigantic, of no age or country, like the heroes of Ossian. They are
creatures without stomachs. Homer is more condescending, and though we
might not be able to draw the bow of Ulysses, we feel quite at home
with him and Eumaeus over their roast pork.
We cannot deny that the poetical view of any period is higher, and in
the deepest sense truer, than all others; but we are thankful also for
the penny-a-liner, whether ancient or modern, who reflects the whims
and humors, the enthusiasms and weaknesses, of the public in unguarded
moments. Is it so certain, after all, that we should not be interesting
ourselves in other quite as nugatory matters if these were denied us?
In one respect, and no unimportant one, the instantaneous dispersion of
news and the universal interest in it have affected the national
thought and character. The whole people have acquired a certain
metropolitan temper; they feel everything at once and in common; a
single pulse sends anger, grief, or triumph through the whole country;
one man sitting at the keyboard of the telegraph in Washington sets the
chords vibrating to the same tune from sea to sea; and this
simultaneousness, this unanimity, deepens national consciousness and
intensifies popular emotion. Every man feels himself a part, sensitive
and sympathetic, of this vast organism, a partner in its life or death.
The sentiment of patriotism is etherealized and ennobled by it, is
kindled by the more or less conscious presence of an ideal element; and
the instinctive love of a few familiar hills and fields widens, till
Country is no longer an abstraction, but a living presence, felt in the
heart and operative in the conscience, like that of an absent mother.
It is no trifling matter that thirty millions of men should be thinking
the same thought and feeling the same pang at a single moment of time,
and that these vast parallels of latitude should become a neighborhood
more intimate than many a country village. The dream of Human
Brotherhood seems to be coming true at last. The peasant who dipped his
net in the Danube, or trapped the beaver on its banks, perhaps never
heard of Caesar or of Caesar's murder; but the shot that shattered the
forecasting brain, and curdled the warm, sweet heart of the most
American of Americans, echoed along the wires through the length and
breadth of a continent, swelling all eyes at once with tears of
indignant sorrow. Here was a tragedy fulfilling the demands of
Aristotle, and purifying with an instantaneous throb of pity and terror
a theatre of such proportions as the world never saw. We doubt if
history ever recorded an event so touching and awful as this sympathy,
so wholly emancipated from the toils of space and time that it might
seem as if earth were really sentient, as some have dreamed, or the
great god Pan alive again to make the hearts of nations stand still
with his shout. What is Beethoven's "Funeral March for the Death of a
Hero" to the symphony of love, pity, and wrathful resolve which the
telegraph of that April morning played on the pulses of a nation?
It has been said that our system of town meetings made our Revolution
possible, by educating the people in self-government. But this was at
most of partial efficacy, while the newspaper and telegraph, gather the
whole nation into a vast town-meeting, where every one hears the
affairs of the country discussed, and where the better judgment is
pretty sure to make itself valid at last. No memorable thing is said or
done, no invention or discovery is made, that some mention of it does
not sooner or later reach the ears of a majority of Americans. It is
this constant mental and moral stimulus which gives them the alertness
and vivacity, the wide-awakeness of temperament, characteristic of
dwellers in great cities, and which has been remarked on by English
tourists as if it were a kind of physiological transformation. They
seem to think we have lost something of that solidity of character
which (with all other good qualities) they consider the peculiar
inheritance of the British race, though inherited in an elder brother's
proportion by the favored dwellers in the British Isles. We doubt if
any substantial excellence is lost by this suppling of the intellectual
faculties, and bringing the nervous system nearer the surface by the
absorption of superfluous fat. What is lost in bulk may be gained in
spring. It is true that the clown, with his parochial horizon, his diet
inconveniently thin, and his head conveniently thick, whose notion of
greatness is a prize pig, and whose patriotism rises or falls with the
strength of his beer, is a creature as little likely to be met with
here as the dodo, his only rival in the qualities that make up a good
citizen; but this is no result of climatic influences. Such creatures
are the contemporaries of an earlier period of civilization than ours.
Nor is it so clear that solidity is always a virtue, and lightness a
vice in character, any more than in bread, or that the leaven of our
institutions works anything else than a wholesome ferment and aeration.
The experience of the last four years is enough to prove that
sensibility may consist with tenacity of purpose, and that enthusiasm
may become a permanent motive where the conviction of the worth of its
object is profound and logical. There are things in this universe
deeper and higher, more solid even, than the English Constitution. If
that is the perfection of human wisdom and a sufficing object of faith
and worship for our cousins over the water, on the other hand God's
dealing with this chosen people is preparing them to conceive of a
perfection of divine wisdom, of a constitution in the framing of which
man's wit had no share, and which shall yet be supreme, as it is
continually more or less plainly influential in the government of the
world. We may need even sterner teaching than any we have yet had, but
we have faith that the lesson will be learned at last.
If the assertion which we alluded to at the outset were true, if we,
more than others, are apt to forget; the past in the present, the work
of Mr. Moore[6] would do much in helping us to recover what we have
lost. Had its execution been as complete as its plan was excellent, it
would have left nothing to be desired. Its want of order may be charged
upon the necessity of monthly publication; but there are other defects
which this will hardly excuse. The editor seems to have become
gradually helpless before the mass of material that heaped itself about
him, and to have shovelled from sheer despair of selection. In the
documentary part he is sufficiently, sometimes even depressingly full,
and he has preserved a great deal of fugitive poetry from both sides,
much of it spirited, and some of it vigorously original;[7] but he has
frequently neglected to give his authorities. His extracts from the
newspapers of the day, especially from Southern and foreign ones, are
provokingly few, and his department of "incidents and rumors," the true
mirror of the time, inadequate both in quantity and quality. In spite
of these defects, however, there is enough to recall vividly the
features of the time at any marked period during the war, to renew the
phases of feeling, to trace the slowly gathering current of opinion,
and to see a definite purpose gradually orbing itself out of the chaos
of plans and motives, hopes, fears, enthusiasms, and despondencies. We
do not propose to review the book,--we might, indeed, almost as well
undertake to review the works of Father Time himself,--but, relying
chiefly on its help in piecing out our materials, shall try to freshen
the memory of certain facts and experiences worth bearing in mind
either for example or warning.
[6] _The Rebellion Record._ Edited by Frank Moore. Six vols.
[7] See especially _The Old Sergeant_, a remarkable poem by
Forseythe Willson, in the sixth volume.
It is of importance, especially considering the part which what are
called the "leading minds" of the South are expected to play in
reconstruction, to keep clearly before our eyes the motives and the
manner of the Rebellion. Perhaps we should say inducements rather than
motives, for of these there was but a single one put forward by the
seceding States, namely, the obtaining security, permanence, and
extension for the system of slavery. We do not use the qualifying
epithet "African," because the franker propagandists of Southern
principles affirmed the divine institution of slavery pure and simple,
without regard to color or the curse of Canaan. This being the single
motive of the Rebellion, what was its real object? Primarily, to
possess itself of the government by a sudden _coup d'etat_; or that
failing, then, secondarily, by a peaceful secession, which should
paralyze the commerce and manufactures of the Free States, to bring
them to terms of submission. Whatever may have been the opinion of some
of the more far-sighted, it is clear that a vast majority of the
Southern people, including their public men, believed that their
revolution would be peaceful. Their inducements to moving precisely
when they did were several. At home the treasury was empty; faithless
ministers had supplied the Southern arsenals with arms, and so disposed
the army and navy as to render them useless for any sudden need; but
above all, they could reckon on several months of an administration
which, if not friendly, was so feeble as to be more dangerous to the
country than to its betrayers, and there was a great party at the North
hitherto their subservient allies, and now sharing with them in the
bitterness of a common political defeat.[8] Abroad there was peace,
with the prospect of its continuance; the two great maritime powers
were also the great consumers of cotton, were both deadly enemies, like
themselves, to the democratic principle, and, if not actively
interfering, would at least throw all the moral weight of their
sympathy and encouragement on the Southern side. They were not
altogether mistaken in their reckoning. The imbecility of Mr. Buchanan
bedded the ship of state in an ooze of helpless inaction, where none of
her guns could be brought to bear, and whence nothing but the tide of
indignation which followed the attack on Sumter could have set her
afloat again, while prominent men and journals of the Democratic party
hastened to assure the Rebels, not only of approval, but of active
physical assistance. England, with indecent eagerness, proclaimed a
neutrality which secured belligerent rights to a conspiracy that was
never to become a nation, and thus enabled members of Parliament to fit
out privateers to prey with impunity on the commerce of a friendly
power. The wily Napoleon followed, after an interval long enough to
throw all responsibility for the measure, and to direct all the natural
irritation it excited in this country, upon his neighbor over the way.
England is now endeavoring to evade the consequences of her hasty
proclamation and her jaunty indifference to the enforcement of it upon
her own subjects. The principle of international law involved is a most
important one; but it was not so much the act itself, or the pecuniary
damage resulting from it, as the _animus_ that so plainly prompted it,
which Americans find it hard to forgive.
[8] Mr. A. H. Stephens, Vice-President of the late Confederacy,
attributed the Secession movement to disappointed ambition.
It would be unwise in us to forget that independence was a merely
secondary and incidental consideration with the Southern conspirators
at the beginning of the Rebellion, however they may have thought it
wise to put it in the front, both for the sake of their foreign
abettors who were squeamish about seeming, though quite indifferent
about being, false to their own professions and the higher interests of
their country, and also for the sake of its traditionary influence
among the Southern people. Some, it is true, were bold enough or
logical enough to advocate barbarism as a good in itself; and in
estimating the influences which have rendered some minds, if not
friendly to the Rebellion, at least indifferent to the success of the
Union, we should not forget that reaction against the softening and
humanizing effect of modern civilization, led by such men as Carlyle,
and joined in by a multitude whose intellectual and moral fibre is too
much unstrung to be excited by anything less pungent than paradox.
Protestants against the religion which sacrifices to the polished idol
of Decorum and translates Jehovah by _Comme-il-faut_, they find even
the divine manhood of Christ too tame for them, and transfer their
allegiance to the shaggy Thor with his mallet of brute force. This is
hardly to be wondered at when we hear England called prosperous for the
strange reason that she no longer dares to act from a noble impulse,
and when, at whatever page of her recent history one opens, he finds
her statesmanship to consist of one Noble Lord or Honorable Member
asking a question, and another Noble Lord or Honorable Member
endeavoring to dodge it, amid cries of _Hear! Hear!_ enthusiastic in
proportion to the fruitlessness of listening. After all, we are
inclined to think there is more real prosperity, more that posterity
will find to have a deep meaning and reality, in a democracy spending
itself for a principle, and, in spite of the remonstrances, protests,
and sneers of a world busy in the eternal seesaw of the balance of
Europe, persisting in a belief that life and property are mere
counters, of no value except as representatives of a higher idea. May
it be long ere government become in the New World, as in the Old, an
armed police and fire-department, to protect property as it grows more
worthless by being selfishly clutched in fewer hands, and keep God's
fire of manhood from reaching that gunpowder of the dangerous classes
which underlies all institutions based only on the wisdom of our
ancestors.
As we look back to the beginnings of the Rebellion, we are struck with
the thoughtlessness with which both parties entered upon a war of whose
vast proportions and results neither was even dimly conscious. But a
manifest difference is to be remarked. In the South this
thoughtlessness was the result of an ignorant self-confidence, in the
North of inexperience and good humor. It was long before either side
could believe that the other was in earnest: the one in attacking a
government which they knew only by their lion's share in its offices
and influence, the other in resisting the unprovoked assault of a race
born in the saddle, incapable of subjugation, and unable to die
comfortably except in the last ditch of jubilant oratory. When at last
each was convinced of the other's sincerity, the moods of both might
have been predicted by any observer of human nature. The side which
felt that it was not only in the wrong, but that it had made a blunder,
lost all control of its temper, all regard for truth and honor. It
betook itself forthwith to lies, bluster, and cowardly abuse of its
antagonist. But beneath every other expression of Southern sentiment,
and seeming to be the base of it, was a ferocity not to be accounted
for by thwarted calculations or by any resentment at injuries received,
but only by the influence of slavery on the character and manners.
"Scratch a Russian," said Napoleon, "and you come to the Tartar
beneath." Scratch a slaveholder, and beneath the varnish of
conventionalism you come upon something akin to the man-hunter of
Dahomey. Nay, the selfishness engendered by any system which rests on
the right of the strongest is more irritable and resentful in the
civilized than the savage man, as it is enhanced by a consciousness of
guilt. In the first flush of over-confidence, when the Rebels reckoned
on taking Washington, the air was to be darkened with the gibbeted
carcasses of dogs and caitiffs. Pollard, in the first volume of his
_Southern History of the War_, prints without comment the letter
of a ruffian who helped butcher our wounded in Sudley Church after the
first battle of Manassas, in which he says that he had resolved to give
no quarter. In Missouri the Rebels took scalps as trophies, and that
they made personal ornaments of the bones of our unburied dead, and
that women wore them, though seeming incredible, has been proved beyond
question. Later in the war, they literally starved our prisoners in a
country where Sherman's army of a hundred thousand men found supplies
so abundant that they could dispense with their provision train. Yet
these were the "gentry" of the country, in whose struggle to escape
from the contamination of mob-government the better classes of England
so keenly sympathized. Our experience is thrown away unless it teach us
that every form of conventionalized injustice is instinctively in
league with every other, the world over, and that all institutions safe
only in law, but forever in danger from reason and conscience, beget
first selfishness, next fear, and then cruelty, by an incurable
degeneration. Having been thus taught that a rebellion against justice
and mercy has certain natural confederates, we must be blind indeed not
to see whose alliance at the South is to give meaning and permanence to
our victory over it.