THREE TYPICAL SOUTHERNERS
In the group of leaders of public sentiment in the '30s and '40s, as
sketched in Chapter V, some of the foremost--Clay, Webster, and
Birney--were influential in both sections of the country. But in the
next decade the division is clear between the leaders of the South and
of the North. Let us glance at two separate groups.
Jefferson Davis was in many ways a typical Southerner. He was a sincere,
able, and high-minded man. The guiding aim of his public life was to
serve the community as he understood its interests. Personal ambition
seemingly influenced him no more than is to be expected in any strong
man; and, whatever his faults of judgment or temper, it does not appear
that he ever knowingly sacrificed the public good to his own profit or
aggrandizement. But he was devoted to a social system and a political
theory which bound his final allegiance to his State and his section.
After a cadetship at West Point and a brief term of military service, he
lived for eight years, 1837-45, on a Mississippi plantation, in joint
ownership and control with an older brother. In these early years, and
in the seclusion of a plantation, his theories crystallized and his
mental habits grew. The circumstances of such life fostered in Southern
politicians the tendency to logical and symmetrical theories, to which
they tenaciously held, unmodified by the regard for experience which is
bred from free and various contact with the large world of affairs.
Davis fully accepted the theory of State sovereignty which won general
favor in the South. In this view the States were independent powers,
which had formed with each other by the Constitution a compact, a
business arrangement, a kind of limited partnership. If the compact was
broken in any of its articles, or if its working proved at any time to
be unsatisfactory and injurious, the partners could withdraw at will.
This theory found more or less support among the various utterances and
practices of the framers of the Constitution and founders of the
government. In truth, they had as a body no consistent and exact theory
of the Federal bond. Later circumstances led their descendants to
incline to a stronger or a looser tie, according to their different
interests and sentiments. The institution of slavery so strongly
differentiated the Southern communities from their Northern neighbors,
that they naturally magnified their local rights and favored the view
which justified them in the last resort in renouncing the authority of
the Union if it should come to be exercised against their industrial
system. State sovereignty was the creed, and the slavery interest was
the motive.
To a man living like Davis on his own plantation, the relation of master
and slave seemed a fundamental condition of the social order. Not only
his livelihood rested on it, but through this relation his practical
faculties found their field; his conscience was exercised in the right
management and care of his slaves; there was a true sentiment of
protection on his side and loyalty on theirs. His neighbors and friends
were situated like himself. The incidental mischiefs of the system, the
abuses by bad masters, the ignorance and low morality of the
slaves,--these things they regarded, let us say, as an upright and
benevolent manufacturer to-day regards the miseries of sweatshops and
the sufferings of unemployed labor. Such things were bad, very bad, but
they were the accidents and not the essentials of the industrial
system. They resented the strictures of their critics; they were
apprehensive of the growing hostility in the North to their
institutions; if the national partnership was to last they must have
their rights under it; and one of those rights was an equal share in the
national domain.
Davis entered into active politics when he was elected to Congress in
1844. Repudiation was then in favor in Mississippi, and he opposed and
denounced it. He supported the Mexican War in the most practical way, by
taking command of a volunteer regiment from Mississippi. He served with
distinguished gallantry, and was severely wounded at Buena Vista. After
the war he entered the United States Senate. He supported the compromise
of 1850, regarding it as substantially a continuance of the truce
between the sections, and not now sympathizing with those who threatened
disunion. Later, President Pierce made him Secretary of War; in the
Cabinet he was the leading spirit; and this, with a weak President,
meant large power and responsibility. He showed the extent of his
partisanship by supporting with the full power of the administration the
Territorial government imposed on Kansas by a palpably fraudulent vote.
In 1856 he returned to the Senate, and came to be recognized as the
foremost champion of the Southern interest. He was not a leader in any
such sense as Jefferson or Clay or Calhoun; but he was a representative
man, thoroughly trusted by his associates, their most effective
spokesman, and going by conviction in the midstream of the dominant
tendency. He had that degree of ambition which is natural and normal in
a strong man. He was an effective and elegant orator. When secession
came he was not its originator, but one of a set of men--on the whole
the most considerate and influential men of the Gulf and cotton
States--who took the responsibility of leading their section into
revolution, in the interest of slavery.
In this typical Southern leader, as in his class, were blended the
elements of a disposition and will that would halt before no barrier to
its claim of mastery. A slaveholder, accustomed to supremacy over his
fellowmen as their natural superior; a planter, habituated to the
practical exercise of such supremacy over hundreds of dependents; a
member of an aristocracy, the political masters of their section, and
long the dominant force in the nation; a theorist, wedded to the dogma
of State sovereignty, and convinced of the superiority of Southern
civilization; the self-confident and self-asserting temper bred by such
conditions--here was a union of forces that would push its cause against
all opposition, at the cost if need be of disunion, of war, of all
obstacles and all perils.
By a natural exaggeration, at a later time the President of the
Confederacy was regarded at the North as the very embodiment of its
cause. To the unmeasured hostility on this account was added the
opprobrium of deeds in which he had no part. He was charged for a time
with complicity in the murder of Lincoln. He was branded with
responsibility for the miseries in Andersonville and the other
prison-pens in the war,--but without a particle of evidence. Admiration
was yielded by the North to Stonewall Jackson even in his life-time;
there was early recognition of Lee's magnanimous acceptance of defeat;
but the bitterest odium was long visited upon Davis. It was heightened
by the tenacity with which his intense nature clung to "the lost cause"
as a sentiment, after the reality was hopelessly buried. The South
itself gave its highest favor to Lee, its most effective defender, and a
man of singularly impressive character; while Davis's mistakes of
administration, and his reserved and over-sensitive temper chilled a
little the recognition of his disinterested and loyal service. But in
the retrospect of history he stands out as an honorable and pathetic
figure. The single warping influence of his whole career was the mistake
he shared with millions of his countrymen,--the acceptance and
exaltation of slavery. He was faithful to his convictions; he was free
from covetousness and meanness; and in his personality there were high
and fine elements of manhood. "A very intense man and a very lovable
man" was the judgment of one who was his intimate associate through the
war.
"Love of power was so much weaker in him than love of his theories that
when Congress passed laws enlarging his prerogatives he wrote long
messages declining them on constitutional grounds." A friend described
him as "a game-cock--with just a little strut." Said one who stood in
close relations with him: "He was so sensitive to criticism and even to
questioning that I have passed months of intimate official association
with him without venturing to ask him a question." Pure in his personal
morals, but never having made a religious profession, under the
responsibilities of the Presidency he turned for support to religion,
and was confirmed in the Episcopal Church. Under imprisonment,
indignities, obloquy, long seclusion with the memories of a ruined
cause, he bore himself with manly fortitude and dignity. Schooled by
inexorable reality, he finally acquiesced in the established order, and
his last public words were of fidelity and faith for the new America.
Before the war, Robert Toombs of Georgia played some such part to the
Northern imagination as Phillips or Sumner to the Southern. He was
regarded as the typical fire-eater and braggart. He was currently
reported to have boasted that he would yet call the roll of his slaves
at the foot of Bunker Hill monument. But in truth this ogre was made of
much the same human clay as the Massachusetts Abolitionists. He is well
pictured, together with Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, in Trent's
_Southern Statesmen of the Old Regime_,--a book admirable in its spirit
and its historic fidelity. Both Toombs and Stephens represented, as
compared with Davis, the more moderate sentiment of the South, until
they parted company with each other on the question of secession. Trent
prefaces the companion portraits with a sketch of the typical Georgian;
his State, like the other Gulf States, less civilized and orderly than
Virginia and South Carolina, less critical and more enthusiastic; the
Georgian, "the southern Yankee," "loving success, strength,
straightforwardness, and the solid virtues generally, neither is he
averse to the showy ones; but above all he loves virtue in action."
Among Southerners, says Trent, the Georgian is nearest to a normal
American. Toombs inherited property; grew up like other Southern boys of
the prosperous class; rode and hunted and studied a little in the
interims. As a lawyer, he would not take a case unless satisfied of its
justice. He was of robust physique, vigorous intellect, and high
spirits; and he was happy in his family life.
Stephens worked his way up from poverty, and never lost an active
sympathy with the struggling. He helped more than fifty young men to get
an education. He was of a slight and fragile frame, and had much
physical suffering, which he bore with indomitable courage. His
conscientiousness was almost morbid. His temperament was melancholy, and
his life was lonely. In early life he was twice in love, but poverty
forbade his marriage. He was a clear and logical thinker, much given to
refined exposition of constitutional theories, but deficient in large
culture and philosophy. He held the doctrine of State sovereignty, but
from first to last he opposed secession as against the true interest of
the States. At the beginning of his career he was active in opposing
the vigilance committees organized to harry anti-slavery men. He
supported the annexation of Texas, though objecting to doing it in the
interest of slavery,--slavery, he said, was a domestic matter, which the
Federal government had no call to take care of. He and Toombs generally
stood together, as Whigs and Unionists. They opposed the Mexican War, on
the ground that the Union was not to be extended by force; neither, they
both said later, was it to be maintained by force. But they opposed the
exclusion of slavery from the Territories by the Wilmot proviso; and in
the debate Stephens declared that the morality of slavery stood "upon a
basis as firm as the Bible," and as long as Christianity lasted it could
never be considered an offense against the divine laws. The two men did
yeoman's service in carrying through the 1850 compromise, and afterward
in persuading Georgia not to take part in the Nashville convention--a
disunionist scheme which proved abortive. They, with Howell Cobb, held
Georgia for the compromise and for the Union, and thus fixed the pivotal
point of Southern politics for the next decade. They became leaders in
the Constitutional Union party, which, in Georgia, succeeded the Whig.
They made vigorous and successful fights against the Know-nothing folly.
They accepted the gains which came to the South through Douglas's
breaking down of the Missouri compromise, and, a little later, the Dred
Scott decision of the Supreme Court; but they diverged from Davis, by
not favoring the active intervention of Congress to protect slavery in
the Territories. Toombs was accused of abetting Brooks's attack on
Sumner, which he disclaimed; but he found nothing to hinder his taking
part in a banquet in Brooks's honor a few months later, and on this most
ill-omened occasion he joined in the threats of disunion if Fremont
should be elected. But still the catastrophe lingered, and seemed
improbable. Stephens left Congress in 1858. Two years more, and
secession became a burning question; Stephens and Toombs took opposite
sides, but, the issue decided, they both made common cause with their
State. Toombs served in the Confederate Cabinet and Army. Stephens,
vice-president of the Confederacy, seven years after the close of the
war again became a member of the House; an attenuated figure, confined
to a wheel-chair, but still vital and vigorous; respected by all; his
presence a visible symbol of the spanning of "the bloody chasm."