WHY THEY FOUGHT
Now, when the issue was about to be joined, let it be noted that
Secession based itself, in profession and in reality, wholly on the
question of slavery. There lay the grievance, and for that alone a
remedy was to be had even at the price of sundering the Union. Later,
when actual war broke out, other considerations than slavery came into
play. To unite and animate the South came the doctrine of State rights,
the sympathy of neighborhood, and the primal human impulse of
self-defense. But the critical movement, the action which first sundered
the Union and so led to war,--was inspired wholly and solely by the
defense and maintenance of slavery. The proposition is almost too plain
for argument. But it receives illustration from the great debate in the
Georgia Legislature, when Toombs advocated Secession and Stephens
opposed it. Toombs, evidently unwilling to rest the case wholly on
slavery, alleged three other grievances at the hands of the North--the
fishery bounties, the navigation laws, and the protective tariff.
Stephens easily brushed aside the bounties and navigation laws as bygone
or unimportant. As to the tariff, he showed that the last tariff law,
enacted in 1857, was supported by every Massachusetts member of Congress
and every Georgia member, including Toombs himself. What further he said
belongs to a later chapter. But he was unquestionably right, and all
rational history confirms it, that the one force impelling the South to
Secession was the imperilled interest of slavery.
But the resistance which Secession encountered from the North was from
the outset other and wider than hostility to slavery. Anti-slavery
feeling was indeed strong in the Northern heart; the restriction of
slavery was the supreme principle of the Republican party; the
resentment that the national bond should be menaced in the interest of
slavery gave force to the opposition which Secession instantly aroused.
But, on the one hand, the extreme opponents of slavery, Garrison and his
followers, were now, as they had always been, willing and more than
willing that the South should go off and take slavery with it. And on
the other hand, the anti-secessionists of the nation included a
multitude, North and South, who were either friendly to slavery or
indifferent to it. Even of the Republican party the mass were more
concerned for the rights of the white man than of the black man. They
were impatient of the dominance of the government by the South, and
meant to unseat the Southern oligarchy from the place of power at
Washington.
They intended that the territories should be kept for the free
immigrant, who should not be degraded by slaves at work in the next
field. Only a minority of the party,--though a minority likely in the
long run to lead it--looked with hope and purpose to ultimate
emancipation. And when the question of Secession was at issue by the
people's votes and voice, and had not yet come to the clash of arms, the
rights and interests of the slave fell into the background. The supreme
question of the time was felt to be the unity or the division of the
nation.
The Secessionists' plea was in two clauses; that their States were
aggrieved by Northern action, and that they had a legal right to leave
the Union without let or hindrance. A double answer met them, from their
fellow-Southerners that it was impolitic to secede, and from the North
that secession was illegal, unpermissible, and to be resisted at all
costs.
The Secessionists were fluent in argument that the framers of the
Constitution intended only a partnership of States, dissoluble by any at
will. However difficult to prove that the original builders purposed
only such a temporary edifice, there was at least ground for maintaining
that they gave no authority for coercing a State into obedience or
submission, and indeed rejected a proposal to give such authority. If
there were no legal or rightful authority to keep a State in the Union
by force, then for all practical purposes its right to go out of the
Union was established. But against that right, as ever contemplated by
the fathers, or allowable under the Constitution, there was strong
contention on legal and historic grounds.
But deeper than all forensic or academic controversy was the substantial
and tremendous fact, that the American people had grown into a nation,
organic and vital. That unity was felt in millions of breasts, cherished
by countless firesides, recognized among the peoples of the earth.
There had developed that mysterious and mighty sentiment, the love of
country. It rested in part on the recognition of material benefits. From
the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Lakes to the Gulf, the tides of
commerce flowed free, unvexed by a single custom-house. The Mississippi
with its traffic united the Northern prairies and the Louisiana delta
like a great artery. Safety to person and property under the laws,
protection by an authority strong enough to curb riot or faction at
home, and with a shielding arm that reached wherever an American
traveler might wander,--these benefits rooted patriotism deep in the
soil of homely usefulness. And the tree branched and blossomed in the
upper air of generous feeling. Man's sympathy expands in widening
spheres, and his being enlarges as he comes into vital union, first
with wife and children, then successively with neighborhood, community,
country, and at last with humanity. The Russian peasant, in his
ignorance and poverty, or facing the foe in war, is sublimated by his
devotion to the White Czar and Holy Russia. Still more inspiring and
profound is the patriotism of a citizen whose nation is founded on equal
brotherhood. Deeper than analysis can probe is this passion of
patriotism. Gladstone characterized it well, when, writing in August,
1861, he recognized among the motives sustaining the Union cause, "last
and best of all, the strong instinct of national life, and the
abhorrence of Nature itself toward all severance of an organized body."
This sentiment, though strained and weakened in the South, was still
powerful even in that section. This was especially true of the border
States, where slavery was of less account than in the Gulf and Cotton
States. The spirit of Clay was still strong in Kentucky, and was
represented by the venerable John J. Crittenden in the Senate. Of a like
temper was John Bell of Tennessee, Presidential candidate of the Union
and Constitutional party in 1860. From the same State Andrew Johnson, in
the Senate, stood for the sturdy and fierce Unionism of the white
laboring class. Virginia was strongly bound to the Union by her great
historical traditions. North Carolina, Missouri, and Arkansas were,
until the war broke out, attached to the Union rather than the Southern
cause. It was in the belt of States from South Carolina to Texas, in
which the planter class was altogether dominant, that the interest of
slavery, and the pride of class and of State, had gradually loosened the
bonds of affection and allegiance to the national idea. Calhoun himself
had been an ardent lover of the Union. The clash between the national
and sectional interests had been to him a tragedy. Nullification was his
device for perpetuating the Union while allowing its members relief
from possible oppression,--but nullification had failed, in fact as in
logic.
Now the Secessionists went further than Calhoun had ever found occasion
to go. They proposed to break up the nation, at first by the withdrawal
of their separate States, to be followed by the organization of a
Southern Confederacy. Their grievance was the restriction of their
industrial system, and its threatened destruction, and the failure of
the Union to serve its proper ends of justice and fraternity. But they
wholly disclaimed any revolutionary action. They maintained that the
withdrawal of their States was an exercise of their strictly legal and
constitutional right. This is the plea which is insistently and
strenuously urged by their defenders. Their foremost actors in the
drama, Davis and Stephens, became at a later day its historians, not so
much to record its events, as to plead with elaboration and reiteration
that Secession was a constitutional right. But all their fine-spun
reasoning ran dead against a force which it could no more overcome than
King Canute's words could halt the tide,--the fact of American unity, as
realized in the hearts of the American people.
The mass of men live not by logic, but by primal instincts and passions.
Where one man could explain why the nation was an indestructible
organism rather than a partnership dissoluble at will, a thousand men
could and would fight to prevent the nation from being dissolved. But
here and there on this planet is a man who must think things through to
the end, and have a solid reason for what he does. Such a man was
Abraham Lincoln. He never could rest contented till he had worked the
problem out clearly in his own head, and then had stated the answer in
words that the common man could understand. Such an answer to the whole
Secessionist argument, quite apart from the slavery question, he gave in
one brief paragraph of his inaugural. "There is no alternative for
continuing the government but acquiescence on the one side or the other.
If the minority in such a case will secede rather than acquiesce, they
make a precedent which in turn will ruin and divide them; for a minority
of their own will secede from them, whenever a majority refuses to be
controlled by such a minority. For instance, why not any portion of a
new Confederacy, a year or so hence, arbitrarily secede again, precisely
as portions of the present Union now claim to secede from it? All who
cherish disunion sentiments are now being educated to the exact temper
of doing this. Is there such perfect identity of interests among the
States to compose a new Union as to produce harmony only, and prevent
renewed Secession? Plainly, the central idea of Secession is the essence
of anarchy." That was the key-word of the situation, in the court of
reason and conscience,--"the central idea of Secession is the essence of
anarchy."
The system which the Secessionists proposed to break up had a part of
its highest value in that very division of authority between State and
nation which gave them their pretext for a separation. The Federal plan
was the special contribution of America to the evolution of popular
self-government. Until that step had been taken, not only did the
practical difficulties of democracy increase enormously with the
increase of area and population, but a vast centralized democracy was
liable to be itself an oppressive despotism, as France has learned at
bitter cost. The Federal plan, like most other great advances, came not
as the conception of an ingenious brain, but from the growth of social
facts. The thirteen colonies started and grew as individual offshoots
from Great Britain. Under a common impulse they broke loose from the
mother-country; then, by a common necessity, they bound themselves
together in a governmental Union, each member retaining jurisdiction in
such affairs as were its special concern. The resulting Federal Union
was a combination of strength and freedom such as the world had never
seen. With this for its organic form, with its spiritual lineage drawn
from the Puritan, the Quaker and the Cavalier, with Anglo-Saxon stock
for its core, yet with open doors and assimilating power for all races,
and with a continent for its field of expansion,--the American people
became the leader and the hope of humanity. This was the nation which
the Secessionists proposed to rend asunder.
All government implies a principle of authority, and requires the
occasional sacrifice of the individual's pleasure. The national bond has
one strand in mutual good-will, but another strand is personal
sacrifice, and another is stern command. The Union required some
sacrifices, not only of material price,--as when a man pays just taxes,
or acquiesces in a fiscal system which he considers unjust,--but
sacrifices sometimes even of moral sentiment. Lincoln, explaining his
position in 1855 to his old friend Speed, of Kentucky, repelled the
suggestion that he had no personal interest in slavery. He says that
whenever he crosses the border he sees manacled slaves or some similar
sight which is a torment to him. "You ought to appreciate how much the
great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings in order to
maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and the Union."
That acquiescence,--a costly sacrifice to the higher good; and the
typical attitude of the Republicans and the moderate anti-slavery
men,--seemed to Garrison and Phillips and their school a sinful
compliance with evil. The extreme Abolitionists, as much as the
extremists of the South, were opposed to the Union. They had no
comprehension of the interests and principles involved in the
preservation of the national life. One of the pleasant traits told of
Garrison's private life is this: He was fond of music, especially
religious music, but had little cultivation in that direction; and he
would sit at the piano and pick out the air of the good old hymn-tunes
with one hand, not knowing how to play the bass which makes a harmony.
That was typical of his mental attitude,--he knew and loved the melody
of freedom, but the harmony blended of freedom and national unity he did
not comprehend.
The Southern disunionists finally carried their section, but the
Abolition disunionists never made the slightest approach to converting
the North. It was not merely that many at the North were indifferent to
slavery, while to the whole community its interest was remote compared
to what it was to the South. There was another reason for the failure of
the Northern disunionists. Among the class to whom the appeal for
freedom came closest home, the idealists, the men of moral conviction
and enthusiasm, were many to whose ideality and enthusiasm American
unity also spoke with powerful voice. Patriotism was more to them than a
material interest, more than an enlarged and glowing sentiment of
neighborhood and kinship,--it was devotion to moral interests of which
the national organism was the symbol and the agent. They saw, as Webster
saw, that "America is inseparably connected, fast bound up, in future
and by fate, with these great interests,"--of free representative
government, entire religious liberty, improved systems of national
intercourse, the spirit of free inquiry, and the general diffusion of
knowledge. They looked still higher than this,--they saw that America
rightly tended toward universal personal liberty, and full opportunity
and encouragement to man as man, of whatever race or class. That was
what America stood for to those moral enthusiasts whose sanity matched
their ardor. They saw that this ideal was still in the future, and that
progress might be slow and difficult, but they were pledged in their
souls to pursue it. And, with that purpose at heart, they were ready to
maintain the national unity at whatever cost.
This was the composite and mighty force against which the Secessionists
unwittingly set themselves,--the love of country, strong alike in the
common people and the leaders, a love rooted in material interest and
flowering in generous sentiment; and beyond that the moral ideals which,
born in prophets and men of genius, had permeated the best part of the
nation. With this, too, went the preponderance of physical resources
which free labor had been steadily winning for the North. Judging even
in the interest of slavery, was it not wise to acquiesce in the
election, to remain under the safeguards with which the Constitution
surrounded slavery in the States, to have patience, and to make the best
terms possible with the forces of nature and society? So urged the
wisest counselors, like Stephens of Georgia. But men rarely act on a
deliberate and rational calculation of their interests. They are swayed
by impulse and passion, and especially by the temper and habit which
have become a second nature. The leaders in Secession acted in a spirit
generated by the very nature of slavery, and fostered by their long
defense of slavery. That genesis of the movement is all the more
impressive when we recognize the high personal character of its leaders,
and acquit them of conscious motives of personal ambition. Slavery was
their undoing. The habit of absolute control over slaves bred the habit
of mastery whenever it could be successfully asserted. There grew up a
caste, its members equal and cordial among themselves, but
self-assertive and haughty to all besides. They brooked no opposition at
home, and resented all criticism abroad. They misread history and
present facts, misconceived their place in the order of things, and set
themselves against both the finest and the strongest forces of the
time. When the political party which had been their most effective tool
became difficult to handle, they broke it in two. When they could no
longer rule the nation, they set out to sunder it.
Thus, after forty-five years, we try to trace the springs of
action,--action which at the time moved swiftly, in cloud and storm and
seeming chaos. We have endeavored to see a little of how the men of the
North and of the South thought and felt. Now let us see what they did.