Confederates and Federals Were Patriots
Settling a Constitutional Question,
Says Ex-Secretary Herbert.
In an oration over the graves of the Confederate dead in Arlington
Cemetery a few weeks ago, Hilary A. Herbert, former Secretary of the Navy,
gave force to the opinion that General Robert E. Lee, and those who fought
with him during the Civil War, though secessionists, were not "rebels." He
said:
Was Robert E. Lee and were these dead comrades of ours
traitors? With the great war in which they fought far away
in the dim past, what we have a right to ask is, Were they,
the history and Constitution of the United States
considered, either technically or legally traitors?
This may be purely an academic question. In one sense it is,
because all admit that practically the union of these States
is indissoluble; but in another sense it is not, because
there are those in the North who are fond of repeating, even
to this day, "The North was eternally right, and the South
eternally wrong."
This is declamation with which history will have nothing to
do.
Then, again, there are those in the South who say that if
the South ever had the right to secede, it has, though it
will never exercise it, that right to-day, because war
never settles a principle. This too is declamation; it loses
sight of history.
War Has Settled Great Questions.
Every international dispute about rights, about principles,
that could not be adjusted by diplomacy, has been settled by
war. Allegiances of people, forms of government, boundaries
of kingdoms and republics, all these time out of mind have
been submitted to the arbitrament of the sword, and the
results--treaties, not voluntary, but enforced at the
cannon's mouth--have been upheld by diplomats and
parliaments and courts, by every tribunal that has authority
to speak for law and order and the peace of the world.
It does not lie in the mouth of him who believed in the
right of a State in 1861 to secede, to deny now that the
question was settled by the war, and no formal treaty was
necessary as evidence of what all the world could see. We
had the right as sovereign States to submit to the
arbitrament of war. We did it, and, like others who have
gone to war, we must abide the issue. So that now if a State
should attempt to secede those who should cast their
fortunes with it would be rebels.
But not so in 1861. Then the right of a State to withdraw
from the Union was an open question. Nothing better
illustrates the situation at that time than this incident in
the life of General Lee:
General Lee's Rebuke.
When the great war was over and defeat had come to the
armies Lee had led, he was visiting the house of a friend in
Richmond. With that love of children that always
characterized him, the old hero took upon his knee a
fair-haired boy. The proud mother, to please her guest,
asked the child, "Who is General Lee?" Parrot-like the
expected answer came, "The great Virginian who was a
patriot, true to his native State." And then came the
question, "Who is General Scott?" and the reply, "A
Virginian who was a traitor to his country."
Putting down the child and turning to the mother, the
general said:
"Madam, you should not teach your child such lessons. I will
not listen to such talk. General Scott is not a traitor. He
was true to his convictions of duty, as I was to mine."
What General Lee here said and what even when the fires of
the late war were still smoldering he would have the mothers
of the South teach to their children was that he and
General Scott were both right, because each believed himself
to be right.
And that is precisely what that noble son of New England,
Charles Francis Adams, himself a gallant Union soldier, has
more recently said in a public address--that the North and
the South were both right, because each believed itself
right. And such is to be the verdict of history. We were all
patriots settling on the field of battle a constitutional
question that could be settled in no other way. Public
opinion is already moving, and moving rapidly, to the mark
of that final verdict.
With the interment of Confederate dead at Arlington much bitterness
disappears. The comradeship of death is unassailable by the arguments of
the living.