HOW THEY DIFFERED
If the typical Secessionist and the typical Unionist, as just described,
could rally a united South and a united North to their respective views,
there was no escape from a violent clash. Whether the two sections could
be so united each in itself appeared extremely doubtful. But below these
special questions of political creed were underlying divergences of
sentiment and character between North and South, which fanned the
immediate strife as a strong wind fans a starting flame. There was first
a long-growing alienation of feeling, a mutual dislike, rooted in the
slavery controversy, and fed partly by real and partly by imaginary
differences. Different personal and social ideals were fostered by the
two industrial systems. The Southerner of the dominant class looked on
manual labor as fit only for slaves and low-class whites. His ideal of
society was a pyramid, the lower courses representing the physical
toilers, the intermediate strata supplying a higher quality of social
service, while the crown was a class refined by leisure and cultivation
and free to give themselves to generous and hospitable private life,
with public affairs for their serious pursuit. He regarded the
prominence of the laboring class in Northern communities as marking the
inferiority of their society, and in the absorption of the wealthier
class in trade he read a further disadvantage. The virtues he most
honored were courage, courtesy, magnanimity,--all that he delighted to
characterize as "chivalry." He was inclined to consider the North as
materialistic and mercenary, and even its virtues as based largely on
"honesty is the best policy."
This low opinion was heartily reciprocated by the Northerner. He
believed the very foundation of Southern society to be injustice,--the
unpaid labor of the slave,--and the superstructure to correspond. He
looked on the slave-holders as cruel to their slaves and arrogant
toward the world at large, especially toward himself. The popular
opinion of slavery fastened on its abuses and ignored its mitigations.
On the average reader of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, Legree made a deeper
impression than St. Clare or Mrs. Shelby.
Even the religious and intellectual life of the two sections had grown
unsympathetic and often antagonistic. The South held tenaciously to the
traditional orthodox theology. In the North there was free discussion
and movement of thought. Even the conservative Presbyterian church had
its New School and Old School; and in New England the Congregational
body was divided by the birth and growth of Unitarianism. At all this
turmoil the South looked askance, and was genuinely shocked by the
disintegration of the old creed. The North in turn looked with something
like suspicion, if not scorn, on a Christianity which used the Bible as
an arsenal to fortify slavery. The Northern brood of reforms and
isms,--wise, unwise, or fantastic,--moved the South to a hostility which
made little discrimination between the idealism of Emerson, the
iconoclasm of Parker, and the vagaries of "free love." The group of
literary lights,--Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Holmes, and
their compeers,--won Southern dislike by their hostility to slavery. The
South itself, singularly barren of original literature,--its prolific
new births in our own day are one of the most conspicuous fruits of
emancipation,--clung fondly to the classical and feudal traditions, and
hardly admitted any literary sovereign later than Scott and Byron.
In a national union, as in marriage, there may be long continuance and
even substantial happiness in spite of many differences. So was it with
England and Scotland, so is it with Germany and with Italy. But in
slavery there was so profound an incompatibility with the fact and idea
of personal freedom as held by the American people at large, that the
inevitable opposition of the two systems was desperate almost beyond
cure. That opposition, and all the attendant circumstances of
divergence, were aggravated in their divisive effects by the extreme
bitterness of the foremost debaters on both sides. The very nature of
the subject tempted to vehement criticism, and defense of equal
vehemence. But there was a great aggravation of bitterness when, in the
van of the attack on slavery, the temper of Woolman and Lundy, of
Jefferson and Franklin and Channing, was replaced by the temper of
Garrison and his followers. Their violence inflamed alike the North and
the South, and, with the answering violence it provoked, worked the two
peoples into a largely false and unjust conception of each other's
character. The South's retort was no less passionate in words, while in
act it took form in expulsion of citizens and suppression of free
speech. Garrison's burning words, and the polished invective of
Phillips, live in literature; the wrath which answered them in Southern
orators and newspapers has left less of record; but on both sides the
work was effectually done of sowing mutual suspicion and hate.
If only North and South could have known each other's best, as they knew
each other's worst! They were kept apart by the want of any stream of
migration between them, like that which united East and West, with the
resulting network of family connections and friendly intercourse.
Sometimes a Northern visitor, or an English traveler like Thackeray, saw
and appreciated the cultivated society of Charleston or Richmond, or
plantation life at its best,--a hospitable, genial, outdoor life, with
masters and mistresses who gave their best thought and toil to the care
of their servants. Sometimes a Southerner had a revelation like that of
General Zachary Taylor, when, looking from one of the heights in
Springfield, "the city of homes," on a landscape thick dotted with the
cheerful abodes of an industrial community, he exclaimed: "You can see
no such sight as that in a Southern State!" And always there were some
men and women who out of wide knowledge or a natural justice recognized
and loved the people of the whole land. But too frequently, in those
days, the Southerner saw in the North only a mass of plebeian laborers
excited by political and religious fanaticism; while the Northerner
looked south to a group of tyrannical and arrogant slaveholders lording
it over their victims. To the one, the typical figure of the North was
John Brown; to the other, the representative of the South was Brooks of
South Carolina.
There were two other marked differences between the sections. The first
was the greater concentration of interest in the South on national
politics, and the leadership conceded to the political class. In the
North, the general occupation in laborious and gainful pursuits,
and the wide variety of social interests which competed for
attention,--education, reform, the debating society, the
town-meeting,--all acted to hold men in other fields than those of
national politics. The best brains were invited by commerce, the
factory, the railroad, the college, the laboratory, the newspaper,--as
well as by the Capitol. But to the Southern planter and his social
compeer no pursuit compared in attraction with the political field, and
above all the public life of the nation. The mass of the people,
especially in the country districts, found in the political meeting an
interest whose only rival was the camp-meeting. Besides, when the
burning political question was slavery, it came home to the business and
bosoms of the South, while to the North it was remote. And thus, when
the secession movement broke upon the land, the Southern people grasped
it with a concentration, energy, and response to their habitual leaders,
in strongest contrast to the surprise, hesitation, and division, which
at first characterized the North.
And, as the last distinction to be here noted, one section was far more
habituated than the other to methods of physical force in private and
public affairs. It was an instance of this that the duel was in common
practice at the South up to the Civil War, while at the North it had
disappeared sixty years earlier, after the encounter of Burr and
Hamilton. At the South the street affray was common. There is a picture
of Southern life which ought to have a wide reading, in _Kate Beaumont_,
a story of South Carolina, written by J. W. De Forest, a Northerner and
a Union soldier. Its tone is sympathetic, and neither the negro nor the
sectional question plays a part. It portrays admirable and delightful
people; old Judge Kershaw is indeed "the white rose of South Carolina
chivalry," and the Beaumonts and McAllisters, with all their foibles,
are a strong and lovable group. But the pistol is the ready arbiter of
every quarrel; the duelist's code is so established that it can hardly
be ignored even by one who disapproves it; and the high-toned gentleman
is no whit too high for the street encounter with his opponent. Old-time
Southerners know how faithful is that picture. So, too, the Southern
people turned readily to public war. They supplied the pioneers who
colonized Texas and won by arms its independence of Mexico. They not
only supported the Mexican war by their votes, but many of the flower
of their youth enlisted for it. From their young men were recruited the
"filibusters" who, from time to time, tried to revolutionize or annex
Cuba or some Central American State. The soldier figured largely in the
Southern imagination. But the North inclined strongly to the ways of
peace. That is the natural temper of an industrial democracy. It is the
note of a civilization advanced beyond slavery and feudalism. And of the
moral leaders of the North, some of the foremost had been strong
champions of peace. Channing had pleaded for it as eloquently as he
pleaded for freedom. Intemperance, slavery, and war had been the trinity
of evil assailed by earnest reformers. Sumner had gone to the length of
proclaiming the most unjust peace better than the justest war,--an
extreme from which he was destined to be converted. Garrison and
Phillips, while their language fanned the passions whose inevitable
tendency is toward war, had in theory declared all warfare to be
unchristian. And, apart from sentiment or conviction, the industrial and
peaceful habit was so widely diffused that it was questionable how much
remained of the militant temper which can and will fight on good
occasion. The South rashly believed that such temper was extinct in the
North, and the North on its part doubted how far the vaunts of Southern
courage had any substance.