and which draws its resources from a reading so extensive that not even
_John Gilpin_ has escaped its research, puts his argument to the people
in a form where the Socratic and arithmetic methods are neatly
combined, and asks, "How many States are there in the Union?" He
himself answers his own question for an audience among whom it might
have been difficult to find any political adherent capable of so
arduous a solution, by asking another, "Thirty-six?" Then he goes on to
say that there is a certain party which insists that the number shall
be less by ten, and ends by the clincher, "Now how many stars do you
wish to see in your flag?" The result of some of Mr. Johnson's
harangues was so often a personal collision, in which the more ardent
on both sides had an opportunity to see any number of new
constellations, that this astronomical view of the case must have
struck the audience rather by its pertinence than its novelty. But in
the argument of the Secretary, as in that of the President, there is a
manifest confusion of logic, and something very like a _petitio
principii_. We might answer Mr. Seward's question with, "As many fixed
stars as you please, but no more shooting stars with any consent of
ours." But really this matter is of more interest to heralds of arms
than to practical men. The difference between Congress and the
President is not, as Mr. Seward would insinuate, that Congress or
anybody else wishes to keep the ten States out, but that the Radical
party (we cheerfully accept our share in the opprobrium of the name)
insists that they shall come in on a footing of perfect equality with
the rest; while the President would reward them for rebellion by giving
them an additional weight of nearly one half in the national councils.
The cry of "Taxation without representation" is foolish enough as
raised by the Philadelphia Convention, for do we not tax every
foreigner that comes to us while he is in process of becoming a citizen
and a voter? But under the Johnsonian theory of reconstruction, we
shall leave a population which is now four millions not only taxed
without representation, but doomed to be so forever without any
reasonable hope of relief. The true point is not as to the abstract
merits of universal suffrage (though we believe it the only way toward
an enlightened democracy and the only safeguard of popular government),
but as to whether we shall leave the freedmen without the only adequate
means of self-defence. And however it may be now, the twenty-six States
certainly _were_ the Union when they accepted the aid of these people
and pledged the faith of the government to their protection. Jamaica,
at the end of nearly thirty years since emancipation, shows us how
competent former masters are to accomplish the elevation of their
liberated slaves, even though their own interests would prompt them to
it. Surely it is a strange plea to be effective in a democratic
country, that we owe these people nothing because they cannot help
themselves; as if governments were instituted for the care of the
strong only. The argument against their voting which is based upon
their ignorance strikes us oddly in the mouths of those whose own hope
of votes lies in the ignorance, or, what is often worse, the prejudice,
of the voters. Besides, we do not demand that the seceding States
should at once confer the right of suffrage on the blacks, but only
that they should give them the same chance to attain it, and the same
inducement to make themselves worthy of it, as to every one else. The
answer that they have not the right in some of the Northern States may
be a reproach to the intelligence of those States, but has no relevancy
if made to the general government. It is not with these States that we
are making terms or claim any right to make them, nor is the number of
their non-voting population so large as to make them dangerous, or the
prejudice against them so great that it may not safely be left to time
and common sense. It was not till all men were made equal before the
law, and the fact recognized that government is something that does not
merely preside over, but reside in, the rights of all, that even white
peasants were enabled to rise out of their degradation, and to become
the strength instead of the danger of France. Nothing short of such a
reform could have conquered the contempt and aversion with which the
higher classes looked upon the emancipated serf. Norman-French
literature reeks with the outbreak of this feeling toward the
ancestors, whether Jews or villeins, of the very men who are now the
aristocracy of South Carolina,--a feeling as intense, as nauseous in
its expression, and as utterly groundless, as that against the negro
now. We are apt, it would seem, a little to confound the meaning of the
two terms _government_ and _self-government_, and the principles on
which they respectively rest. If the latter has its rights, the former
has quite as plainly its duties; and one of them certainly is to see
that no freedom should be allowed to the parts which would endanger the
safety of the whole. An occasion calling for the exercise of this duty
is forced upon us now, and we must be equal to it. Self-government, in
any rightful definition of it, can hardly be stretched so far that it
will cover, as the late Rebels and their Northern advocates contend,
the right to dispose absolutely of the destinies of four millions of
people, the allies and hearty friends of the United States, without
allowing them any voice in the matter.
[Illustration: _William H. Seward_]
It is alleged by reckless party orators that those who ask for
guaranties before readmitting the seceded States wish to treat them
with harshness, if not with cruelty. Mr. Thaddeus Stevens is
triumphantly quoted, as if his foolish violence fairly represented the
political opinions of the Union party. They might as well be made
responsible for his notions of finance. We are quite willing to let Mr.
Stevens be paired off with Mr. Vallandigham, and to believe that
neither is a fair exponent of the average sentiment of his party.
Calling names should be left to children, with whom, as with too large
a class of our political speakers, it seems to pass for argument. We
believe it never does so with the people; certainly not with the
intelligent, who make a majority among them, unless (as in the case of
"Copperhead") there be one of those hardly-to-be-defined realities
behind the name which they are so quick to detect. We cannot say that
we have any great sympathy for the particular form of mildness which
discovers either a "martyr," or a "pure-hearted patriot," or even a
"lofty statesman," in Mr. Jefferson Davis, the latter qualification of
him having been among the discoveries of the London _Times_ when
it thought his side was going to win; but we can say that nothing has
surprised us more, or seemed to us a more striking evidence of the
humanizing influence of democracy, than the entire absence of any
temper that could be called revengeful in the people of the North
toward their late enemies. If it be a part of that inconsistent mixture
of purely personal motives and more than legitimate executive action
which Mr. Johnson is pleased to call his "policy,"--if it be a part of
that to treat the South with all the leniency that is short of folly
and all the conciliation that is short of meanness,--then we were
advocates of it before Mr. Johnson. While he was yet only ruminating in
his vindictive mind, sore with such rancor as none but a "plebeian," as
he used to call himself, can feel against his social superiors, the
only really agrarian proclamation ever put forth by any legitimate
ruler, and which was countersigned by the now suddenly "conservative"
Secretary of State, we were in favor of measures that should look to
governing the South by such means as the South itself afforded, or
could be made to afford. It is true that, as a part of the South, we
reckoned the colored people bound to us by every tie of honor, justice,
and principle, but we never wished to wink out of sight the natural
feelings of men suddenly deprived of what they conceived to be their
property,--of men, too, whom we respected for their courage and
endurance even in a bad cause. But we believed then, as we believe now,
and as events have justified us in believing, that there could be no
graver error than to flatter our own feebleness and uncertainty by
calling it magnanimity,--a virtue which does not scorn the society of
patience and prudence, but which cannot subsist apart from courage and
fidelity to principle. A people so boyish and conceited as the
Southerners have always shown themselves to be, unwilling ever to deal
with facts, but only with their own imagination of them, would be sure
to interpret indecision as cowardice, if not as an unwilling tribute to
that superiority of which men who really possess it are the last to
boast. They have learned nothing from the war but to hate the men who
subdued them, and to misinterpret and misrepresent the causes of their
subduing; and even now, when a feeling has been steadily growing in the
rest of the country for the last nine months deeper and more intense
than any during the war, because mixed with an angry sense of
unexpected and treacherous disappointment, instead of setting their
strength to the rebuilding of their shattered social fabric, they are
waiting, as they waited four years ago, for a division in the North
which will never come, and hailing in Andrew Johnson a scourge of God
who is to avenge them in the desolation of our cities! Is it not time
that these men were transplanted at least into the nineteenth century,
and, if they cannot be suddenly Americanized, made to understand
something of the country which was too good for them, even though at
the cost of a rude shock to their childish self-conceit? Is that a
properly reconstructed Union in the Southern half of which no Northern
man's life is safe except at the sacrifice of his conscience, his
freedom of speech, of everything but his love of money? To our minds
the providential purpose of this intervention of Mr. Johnson in our
affairs is to warn us of the solemn duty that lies upon us in this
single crisis of our history, when the chance is offered us of stamping
our future with greatness or contempt, and which requires something
like statesmanship in the people themselves, as well as in those who
act for them. The South insisted upon war, and has had enough of it; it
is now our turn to insist that the peace we have conquered shall be so
settled as to make war impossible for the future.
But how is this to be done? The road to it is a very plain one. We
shall gain all we want if we make the South really prosperous; for with
prosperity will come roads, schools, churches, printing presses,
industry, thrift, intelligence, and security of life and property.
Hitherto the prosperity of the South has been factitious; it has been a
prosperity of the Middle Ages, keeping the many poor that a few might
show their wealth in the barbarism of showy equipages and numerous
servants, and spend in foreign cities the wealth that should have built
up civilization and made way for refinement at home. There were no
public libraries, no colleges worthy of the name; there was no art, no
science,--still worse, no literature but Simms's: there was no desire
for them. We do not say it in reproach; we are simply stating a fact,
and are quite aware that the North is far behind Europe in these
things. But we are not behind her in the value we set upon them; are
even before her in the price we are willing to pay for them, and are in
the way to get them. The South was not in that way; could not get into
it, indeed, so long as the labor that made wealth was cut off from any
interest in its expenditure, nor had any goal for such hopes as soared
away from the dreary level of its lifelong drudgery but in the grave
and the world beyond it. We are not blind to what may be said on the
other side, nor to that fatal picturesqueness, so attractive to
sentimental minds and so melancholy to thoughtful ones, which threw a
charm over certain exceptional modes of Southern life among the older
families in Virginia and South Carolina. But there are higher and
manlier kinds of beauty,--barer and sterner, some would call
them,--with less softly rounded edges, certainly, than the Wolf's Crag
picturesqueness, which carries the mind with pensive indolence toward
the past, instead of stirring it with a sense of present life, or
bracing it with the hope of future opportunity, and which at once veils
and betrays the decay of ancient civilizations. Unless life is arranged
for the mere benefit of the novelist, what right had these bits of
last-century Europe here? Even the virtues of the South were some of
them anachronisms; and even those that were not existed side by side
with an obtuseness of moral sense that could make a hero of Semmes, and
a barbarism that could starve prisoners by the thousand.
Some philosophers, to be sure, plead with us that the Southerners are
remarkable for their smaller hands and feet, though so good an observer
as Thackeray pronounced this to be true of the whole American people;
but really we cannot think such arguments as this will give any pause
to the inevitable advance of that democracy, somewhat rude and raw as
yet, a clumsy boy-giant, and not too well mannered, whose office it
nevertheless is to make the world ready for the true second coming of
Christ in the practical supremacy of his doctrine, and its incarnation,
after so many centuries of burial, in the daily lives of men. We have
been but dimly, if at all, conscious of the greatness of our errand,
while we have already accomplished a part of it in bringing together
the people of all nations to see each other no longer as aliens or
enemies, but as equal partakers of the highest earthly dignity,--a
common manhood. We have been forced, whether we would or no, first to
endure, then to tolerate, and at last to like men from all the four
corners of the world, and to see that each added a certain virtue of
his own to that precious amalgam of which we are in due time to fashion
a great nation. We are now brought face to face with our duty toward
one of those dusky races that have long sat in the shadow of the world;
we are to be taught to see the Christ disguised also in these, and to
find at last that a part of our salvation is inextricably knit up with
the necessity of doing them justice and leading them to the light. This
is no sentimental fancy; it is written in plain characters upon the
very surface of things. We have done everything to get rid of the
negro; and the more we did, the more he was thrust upon us in every
possible relation of life and aspect of thought. One thing we have not
tried,--a spell before which he would vanish away from us at once, by
taking quietly the place, whatever it be, to which Nature has assigned
him. We have not acknowledged him as our brother. Till we have done so
he will be always at our elbow, a perpetual discomfort to himself and
us. Now this one thing that will give us rest is precisely what the
South, if we leave the work of reconstruction in their hands, will make
it impossible for us to do; and yet it must be done ere America can
penetrate the Southern States. It is for this reason, and not with any
desire of establishing a standing garrison of four hundred thousand
loyal voters in the South, that we insist on the absolute necessity of
justice to the black man. Not that we have not a perfect right to
demand the reception of such a garrison, but we wish the South to
govern itself; and this it will never be able to do, it will be
governed as heretofore by its circumstances, if we allow it to replace
slavery by the disenfranchisement of color, and to make an Ireland out
of what should be the most productive, populous, and happy part of the
Union. We may evade this manifest duty of ours from indolence, or
indifference, or selfish haste; but if there is one truth truer than
another, it is that no man or nation ever neglected a duty that was not
sooner or later laid upon them in a heavier form, to be done at a
dearer rate. Neither man nor nation can find rest short of their
highest convictions.
This is something that altogether transcends any partisan politics. It
is of comparatively little consequence to us whether Congress or the
President carry the day, provided only that America triumph. That is,
after all, the real question. On which side is the future of the
country,--the future that we cannot escape if we would, but which our
action may embarrass and retard? If we had looked upon the war as a
mere trial of physical strength between two rival sections of the
country, we should have been the first to oppose it, as a wicked waste
of treasure and blood. But it was something much deeper than this, and
so the people of the North instinctively recognized it to be from the
first,--instinctively, we say, and not deliberately at first; but
before it was over, their understandings had grasped its true meaning,
as an effort of the ideal America, which was to them half a dream and
half a reality, to cast off an alien element. It was this ideal
something, not the less strongly felt because vaguely defined, that
made them eager, as only what is above sordid motives can, to sacrifice
all that they had and all that they were rather than fail in its
attainment. And it is to men not yet cooled from the white-heat of this
passionate mood that Mr. Johnson comes with his paltry offer of "my
policy," in exchange for the logical consequences of all this devotion
and this sacrifice. What is any one man's policy, and especially any
one weak man's policy, against the settled drift of a nation's
conviction, conscience, and instinct? The American people had made up
not only their minds, but their hearts, and no man who knows anything
of human nature could doubt what their decision would be. They wanted
only a sufficient obstacle to awaken them to a full consciousness of
what was at stake, and that obstacle the obstinate vanity of the
President and the blindness or resentment of his prime minister have
supplied. They are fully resolved to have the great stake they played
for and won, and that stake was the Americanization of all America,
nothing more and nothing less. Mr. Johnson told us in New York, with so
profound a misconception of the feeling of the Northern States as was
only possible to a vulgar mind, and that mind a Southern one, that the
South had set up slavery as its stake, and lost, and that now the North
was in danger of losing the stake it had risked on reconstruction in
the national debt. Mr. Johnson is still, it would seem, under that
delusion which led the South into the war; namely, that it was that
section of the country which was the chief element in its wealth and
greatness. But no Northern man, who, so long as he lives, will be
obliged to pay his fine of taxes for the abolition of slavery which was
forced upon us by the South, is likely to think it very hard that the
South should be compelled to furnish its share toward the common
burden, or will be afraid that the loyal States, whose urgent demands
compelled a timid Congress at last to impose direct taxes, will be
unable to meet their obligations in the future, as in the past.
We say again that the questions before the country are not to be
decided on any grounds of personal prejudice or partiality. We are far
from thinking that Congress has in all respects acted as became the
dignity of its position, or seized all the advantage of the
opportunity. They have seemed to us sometimes afraid of coming before
the people with a direct, frank, and simple statement of what was not
only the best thing that could be done, but the one thing that must be
done. They were afraid of the people, and did not count securely, as
they should have done, on that precious seeing which four years of
gradually wakening moral sense had lent to the people's eyes. They
should not have shrunk from taking upon themselves and their party all
the odium of being in the right; of being on the side of justice,
humanity, and of the America which is yet to be, whoever may fear to
help and whoever may try to hinder. The vulgar cry would be against
them, at any rate, and they might reckon on being accused of principles
which they thought it prudent to conceal, whether they committed their
party to them or not. With those who have the strong side, as they
always do who have conscience for an ally, a bold policy is the only
prosperous one. It is always wisest to accept in advance all the
logical consequences that can be drawn from the principles we profess,
and to make a stand on the extremest limits of our position. It will be
time enough to fall back when we are driven out. In taking a half-way
position at first, we expose ourselves to all the disadvantage and
discouragement of seeming to fight on a retreat, and cut ourselves off
from our supplies. For the supplies of a party which is contending for
a clear principle, and not for its own immediate success, are always
drawn from the highest moral ground included in its lines. We are not
speaking here of abstractions or wire-drawn corollaries, but of those
plain ethical axioms which every man may apprehend, and which are so
closely involved in the question now before the country for decision.
We at least could lose nothing by letting the people know exactly what
we meant; for we meant nothing that could not claim the suffrage of
sincere democracy, of prudent statesmanship, or of jealousy for the
nation's honor and safety. That the Republican party should be broken
up is of comparatively little consequence; for it would be merged in
the stronger party of those who are resolved that no by-questions, no
fallacies of generosity to the vanquished, shall turn it aside from the
one fixed purpose it has at heart; that the war shall not have been in
vain; and that the Rebel States, when they return to the Union, shall
return to it as an addition of power, and under such terms as that they
_must_, and not merely _may_, be fixed there. Let us call things by
their right names, and keep clearly in view both the nature of the
thing vanquished and of the war in which we were victors. When men talk
of generosity toward a suppliant foe, they entirely forget what that
foe really was. To the people of the South no one thinks of being
unmerciful. But they were only the blind force wielded by our real
enemy,--an enemy, prophesy what smooth things you will, with whom we
can never be reconciled and whom it would be madness to spare. And this
enemy was not any body of kindred people, but that principle of evil
fatally repugnant to our institutions, which, flinging away the hilt of
its broken weapon, is now cheating itself with the hope that it can
forge a new one of the soft and treacherous metal of Northern
disloyalty. The war can in no respect be called a civil war, though
that was what the South, in its rash ignorance, threatened the North
with. It was as much a war between two different nations, and the
geographical line was as distinctly drawn between them, as in the late
war between North and South Germany. They had been living, it is true,
under the same government, but the South regarded this as implying no
tie more intimate than that which brought the representatives of
Prussia and Austria together in the Frankfort Diet. We have the same
right to impose terms and to demand guaranties that Prussia has, that
the victor always has.