We are told by Herbert Spencer that the political superstition of the
past having been the divine right of kings, the political superstition
of the present is the divine right of parliaments and he might have
said of peoples. The oil of anointing seems unawares, he thinks, to
have dripped from the head of the one upon the heads of the many, and
given sacredness to them also, and to their decrees.
That the Proletariat, the Bolsheviki, the People are on the way seems
plain enough. How far they will go, and where they will end, is not so
clear. With a kind of education—most men taught to read, very few to
think—the masses are likely to demand yet more and more for themselves.
They will continue strenuously and effectively to resent the startling
contrasts of fortune which aptitude and opportunity have created in a
social and political structure claiming to rest upon the formula
“equality for all, special privilege for none.”
The law of force will yield to the rule of numbers. Socialism,
disappointed of its Utopia, may then repeat the familiar lesson and
reproduce the man-on-horseback, or the world may drop into another
abyss, and, after the ensuing “dark ages,” like those that swallowed
Babylon and Tyre, Greece and Rome, emerge with a new civilization and
religion.
“Man never is, but always to be blessed.” We know not whence we came,
or whither we go. Hope that springs eternal in the human breast tells
us nothing. History seems, as Napoleon said, a series of lies agreed
upon, yet not without dispute.
V
I read in an ultra-sectional non-partisan diatribe that “Jefferson
Davis made Aaron Burr respectable,” a sentence which clearly indicates
that the writer knew nothing either of Jefferson Davis or Aaron Burr.
Both have been subjected to unmeasured abuse. They are variously
misunderstood. Their chief sin was failure; the one to establish an
impossible confederacy laid in human slavery, the other to achieve
certain vague schemes of empire in Mexico and the far Southwest, which,
if not visionary, were premature.
The final collapse of the Southern Confederacy can be laid at the door
of no man. It was doomed the day of its birth. The wonder is that sane
leaders could invoke such odds against them and that a sane people
could be induced to follow. The single glory of the South is that it
was able to stand out so long against such odds.
Jefferson Davis was a high-minded and well-intentioned man. He was
chosen to lead the South because he was, in addition, an accomplished
soldier. As one who consistently opposed him in his public policies, I
can specify no act to the discredit of his character, his one serious
mistake being his failure to secure the peace offered by Abraham
Lincoln two short months before Appomattox.
Taking account of their personalities and the lives they led, there is
little to suggest comparison, except that they were soldiers and
Senators, who, each in his day, filled a foremost place in public
affairs.
Aaron Burr, though well born and highly educated, was perhaps a
rudely-minded man. But he was no traitor. If the lovely woman,
Theodosia Prevost, whom he married, had lived, there is reason to
believe that the whole course and tenor of his career would have been
altered. Her death was an irreparable blow, as it were, a prelude to
the series of mischances that followed. The death of their daughter,
the lovely Theodosia Alston, completed the tragedy of his checkered
life.
Born a gentleman and attaining soldierly distinction and high place, he
fell a victim to the lure of a soaring ambition and the devious
experience of a man about town.
The object of political proscription for all his intellectual and
personal resources, he could not successfully meet and stand against
it. There was nothing in the affair with Hamilton actually to damn and
ruin him. Neither morally nor politically was Hamilton the better man
of the two. Nor was there treason in his Mexican scheme. He meant no
more with universal acclaim than Houston did three decades later. To
couple his name with that of Benedict Arnold is historic sacrilege.
Jefferson pursued him relentlessly. But even Jefferson could not have
destroyed him. When, after an absence of four years abroad, he returned
to America, there was still a future for him had he stood up like a
man, but, instead, like one confessing defeat, he sank down, whilst the
wave of obloquy rolled over him.
His is one of the few pathetic figures in our national history. Mr.
Davis has had plenty of defenders. Poor Burr has had scarcely an
apologist. His offense, whatever it was, has been overpaid. Even the
War of Sections begins to fade into the mist and become dreamlike even
to those who bore an actual part in it.
The years are gliding swiftly by. Only a little while, and there shall
not be one man living who saw service on either side of that great
struggle of systems and ideas. Its passions long ago vanished from
manly bosoms. That has come to pass within a single generation in
America which in Europe required ages to accomplish.
There is no disputing the verdict of events. Let us relate them truly
and interpret them fairly. If the South would have the North do justice
to its heroes, the South must do justice to the heroes of the North.
Each must render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s even as each
would render unto God the things that are God’s. As living men,
standing erect in the presence of Heaven and the world, the men of the
South have grown gray without being ashamed; and they need not fear
that History will fail to vindicate their integrity.
When those are gone that fought the battle, and Posterity comes to
strike the balance, it will be shown that the makers of the
Constitution left the relation of the States to the Federal Government
and of the Federal Government to the States open to a double
construction. It will be told how the mistaken notion that slave labor
was requisite to the profitable cultivation of sugar, rice and cotton,
raised a paramount property interest in the Southern section of the
Union, whilst in the Northern section, responding to the trend of
modern thought and the outer movements of mankind, there arose a great
moral sentiment against slavery. The conflict thus established,
gradually but surely sectionalizing party lines, was as inevitable as
it was irrepressible. It was fought out to its bitter and logical
conclusion at Appomattox. It found us a huddle of petty sovereignties,
held together by a rope of sand. It made and it left us a Nation.