THE UNDERLYING FORCES
Two master passions strove for leadership in the mind and heart of
America. One was love of the united nation and ardor to maintain its
union. The other was the aspiration to purify the nation, by removing
the wrong of slavery. Unionist and Abolitionist stood face to face.
After many years they were to stand shoulder to shoulder, in a common
cause. In a larger sense than he gave the words, Webster's utterance
became the final watchword: "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and
inseparable."
In the retrospect of history, our attention naturally fastens on the
conspicuous and heroic figures. But we must not forget the underlying
and often determining forces,--the interests, beliefs, and passions, of
the mass of the community. And, while listening intently to the
articulate voices, the impressive utterances, we are to remember that
the life of the community as of the individual is shaped oftenest by the
inarticulate, unavowed, half-unconscious sentiments:
Below the surface stream, shallow and light,
Of what we say we feel,--below the stream,
As light, of what we think we feel, there flows
With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed.
The underlying human force in the slavery question was the primitive
instinct in man to keep all he has got; the instinct of the man who
lives at another's expense to keep on doing so. That underlay all the
fine theories about differences of race, all the theological deductions
from Noah's curse upon Canaan. Another great and constant factor was the
absorption of men and communities, not personally concerned in a social
wrong, in pursuits and interests of their own which shut out all outlook
beyond. In our day we hear much about the crowding rush of material
interests, but that crowd and rush was felt almost as much in the
earlier generations, when hardly less than the most strident tones of
the agitator could pierce the absorption of the street and market-place.
There was the inertia of custom; there were the commercial interests
closely interwoven of the Southern planter and the Northern
manufacturer; there was the prejudice of color and race; and all these
influences, open or latent, told powerfully for keeping slavery as it
was.
The great default, the fatal failure, was the omission of the Southern
whites, especially their leaders by education and by popular
recognition, to take deliberate and systematic measures for the removal
of slavery. Difficult? Yes, very. Impossible? Why, almost every other
country of North and South America,--including the Spanish-Americans on
whom the English-Americans look down with such superiority,--these all
got rid of slavery without violence or revolution. Whatever the case
required,--of preparation, compensation, new industrial
arrangement,--the Southern whites had the whole business in their hands,
to deal with as they pleased. Whatever cries might be raised by a few
for instant and unconditional emancipation, there never was a day when
the vast mass of the American people, of all sections, were not avowedly
and unmistakably committed to letting the Southern States treat slavery
as their own matter, and deal with it as they pleased, provided only
they kept it at home. Excuses for non-action there were, of
course,--the perplexities of the situation, the irritation of criticism
from without,--but Nature has no use for excuses. If there is a cancer
in the system it is useless to plead the expense of the surgery or the
pain of the knife. The alternative is simple--removal or death.
It is always impossible to distinguish closely in the causes of events
between the action of human will and the wider forces which we call
Nature or Providence. But in some eras we distinguish more clearly than
in others the effect of human personalities. For example, in the making
of the Constitution we see a difficult situation taken wisely and
resolutely in hand by a group of strong men; they made themselves a part
of Fate. But in the fluctuating history of slavery, with its final
catastrophe, we seem to be looking at elemental movements; masses of men
drifting under impulses, with no leadership adequate to the occasion.
The men who seemingly might have mastered the situation, and brought it
to a peaceful and right solution, either could not or would not do it.
What happened was, that two opposite social systems, existing within the
same political body, came into rivalry, into hostility, and at last into
direct conflict. In the early stages, slavery had on its side the
advantage of an established place under the law, the support of its
local communities becoming more and more determined, the long-time
indifference and inertia of the free States, custom, conservatism,
timidity, race prejudice. But against all this were operating steadily
two tremendous forces. In the race for industrial advantage which is at
last the decisive test, free society was superior to slave society by as
much as the freeman is superior to the slave. The advantage of the
Northern farmer or mechanic over the negro slave was the measure of the
advantage of the North over the South. In increase of wealth; in
variety, intensity, and productiveness of social life; in immigration;
in intellectual progress, the free States outstripped the slave States
by leaps and bounds. And, again, in the conscience of humanity,--in
mankind's sense of right and wrong, which grows ever a more potent
factor in the world's affairs,--the tide was setting steadily and
swiftly against slavery. To impatient reformers who, as Horace Mann
said, were always in a hurry, while God never is,--the tide might seem
motionless or refluent, as to him who looks hastily from the ocean
shore; but as the sea follows the moon, the hearts of men were following
the new risen luminary of humanity's God-given rights.
And so, under each special phase of the conflict, slavery had against it
that dominant force which acts on one side in the material progress of
society, and on the other side in the human conscience; that
force--"some call it Evolution, and others call it God."