CHAPTER I

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THE BROTHERS' WAR

THE BROTHERS' WAR

BY JOHN C. REED

OF GEORGIA

AUTHOR OF "AMERICAN LAW STUDIES," "CONDUCT OF LAWSUITS"

"THE OLD AND NEW SOUTH"

BOSTON

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

1905

_Copyright, 1905_,

BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.

_All rights reserved_

Published October, 1905

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.

PREFACE

I would explain the real causes and greater consequences of the bloody

brothers' war. I pray that all of us be delivered, as far as may be, from

bias and prejudice. The return of old affection between the sections

showed gracious beginning in the centennial year. In the war with Spain

southerners rallied to the stars and stripes as enthusiastically as

northerners. Reconcilement has accelerated its pace every hour since. But

it is not yet complete. The south has these things to learn:

1. A providence, protecting the American union, hallucinated Garrison,

Wendell Phillips, Mrs. Stowe, Sumner, and other radical abolitionists, as

to the negro and the effect of southern slavery upon him, its purpose

being to destroy slavery because it was the _sine qua non_ of southern

nationalization, the only serious menace ever made to that union. This

nationalization was stirring strongly before the federal constitution was

adopted. The abolitionists, as is the case with all forerunners of great

occurrences, were trained and educated by the powers directing evolution,

and they were constrained to do not their own will but that of these

mighty powers.

2. The cruel cotton tax; the constitution amended to prevent repentance of

uncompensated emancipation, which is the greatest confiscation on record;

the resolute effort to put the southern whites under the negroes; and

other such measures; were but natural outcome of the frenzied

intersectional struggle of twenty-five years and the resulting terrible

war. Had there been another event, who can be sure that the south would

not have committed misdeeds of vengeance against citizens of the north?

3. We of the south ought to tolerate the freest discussion of every phase

of the race question. We should ungrudgingly recognize that the difference

of the northern masses from us in opinion is natural and honest. Let us

hear their expressions with civility, and then without warmth and show of

disrespect give the reasons for our contrary faith. This is the only way

for us to get what we need so much, that is, audience from our brothers

across the line. Consider some great southerners who have handled most

exciting sectional themes without giving offence. There is no invective in

Calhoun's speech, of March 4, 1850, though he clearly discerned that

abolition was forcing the south into revolution. Stephens, who had been

vice-president of the Confederate States, reviewed in detail soon after

the brothers' war the conflict of opinion which caused it, and yet in his

two large volumes he spoke not a word of rancor. When congress was doing

memorial honor to Charles Sumner, it was Lamar, a southerner of

southerners, that made the most touching panegyric of the dead. And the

other day was Dixon's masterly effort to prove that the real, even if

unconscious, purpose of the training at Tuskegee is ultimately to promote

fusion, which the southern whites deem the greatest of evils. His language

is entirely free from passion or asperity. He wonders in admiration at the

marvellous rise of Booker Washington from lowest estate to unique

greatness. And he gives genuine sympathy to Professor DuBois, in whose

book, "The Souls of Black Folk," as he says, "for the first time we see

the naked soul of a negro beating itself to death against the bars in

which Aryan society has caged him."

These examples of Calhoun, Stephens, Lamar, and Dixon should be the

emulation of every southerner speaking to the nation upon any subject that

divides north and south. This done, we will get the audience we seek. It

was this which not long ago gave Clark Howell's strong paper opposing

negro appointments to office in the south prominent place in _Collier's_,

and which last month obtained for Dixon's article just mentioned the first

pages of the _Saturday Evening Post_. When we get full audience, other

such discussions as those of Howell and Dixon, and that in which Tom

Watson, in the June number of his magazine, showed Dr. Booker Washington a

thing or two, will be digested by the northern public, to the great

advantage of the whole country.

The last I have to say here is as to differing opinions upon social

recognition of prominent negroes. We of the south give them great honor

and respect. Could not Mr. Roosevelt have said to us of Georgia protesting

against his entertainment of Booker Washington, "Have I done worse than

you did when you had him to make that address at the opening of your

Exposition in 1895, and applauded it to the echo?" Suppose, as is true,

that hardly a man in the south would eat at the same table with Dr.

Washington or Professor DuBois, how can that justify us in heaping

opprobrium upon a northern man who does otherwise because he has been

taught to believe it right? What has been said in denunciation of the

president and Mr. Wanamaker for their conduct towards Booker Washington

seems to me rather a hullabaloo of antediluvian moss-backs than the voice

of the best and wisest southerners.

Amid all her gettings let the south get complete calmness upon everything

connected with the race question--complete deliverance from morbid

sensitiveness and intemperate speech in its discussion.

Now here is what the north should learn:

1. Slavery in America was the greatest benefit that any large part of the

negro race ever received; and sudden and unqualified emancipation was woe

inexpressible to nearly all the freedmen. The counter doctrine of the

abolitionists who taught that the negro is equal to the Caucasian worked

beneficently to save the union, but it ought now to be rejected by all who

would understand him well enough to give him the best possible

development. The fifteenth amendment was a stupendous blunder. It took for

granted that the southern negroes were as ready for the ballot as the

whites. The fact is that they were as a race in a far lower stage of

evolution. Consider the collective achievement of this race, not in savage

West Africa, but where it has been long in contact with civilization, in

Hayti, and the south. Hayti has been independent for more than a hundred

years. "Sir Spencer St. John ... formerly British Minister Resident in

Hayti, after personally knowing the country for over twenty years, claims

that it is ... in rapid decadence, and regards the political future of the

Haytians as utterly hopeless. At the termination of his service on the

island, he said: 'I now quite agree with those who deny that the negro can

ever originate a civilization, and who assert that with the best of

educations he remains an inferior type of man.'

"According to Sir Spencer, Hayti is sunk in misery, bloodshed,

cannibalism, and superstition of the most sensual and degrading character.

Ever since the republic has been established Haytians have been opposed to

progress, but of recent years retrogression has been particularly

rapid."[1]

In the south, where reversion to West African society has been checked by

white government, this is a full catalogue of the main institutions

evolved by the freedmen. They have provided themselves with cheaply built

churches, in which their frequent and long worship is mainly sound and

fury. In the pinch of crop cultivation or gathering they flock away from

the fields to excursion trains and "protracted meetings." Perhaps their

most noticeable institutions are "societies," some prohibiting hiring as

domestic servants, except where subsistence cannot otherwise be had, and

others providing the means of decent burial. Compare these feeble negro

race performances with such white institutions, made in the same territory

and at the same time, as Memorial Day, which the north has adopted; the Ku

Klux Klan; enactment of stock laws when the freedmen's refusal to split

rails made much fencing impossible; and the white primary.

Institutions--what I have just called the collective achievement of a

race--mark in their character its capacity for improvement, and also its

plane of development. When the negro, with his self-evolved institutions,

is compared with the race which has furnished itself with fit organs of

self-government all the way up from town-meeting to federal constitution,

and is now about to crown its grand work with direct legislation, it is

like comparing the camel dressed to counterfeit an elephant, of which dear

old Peter Parley told us in his school history, with a real elephant, or

trying to make a confederate dollar in an administrator's return of 1864

count as a gold one.

And yet the negro, Professor Kelly Miller, replying to Tom Watson, assumes

that Franks, Britons, Germans, Russians, and Aztecs have severally been in

historical times as incapable as West Africans of rising from savagery and

crossing barbarism into civilization. He outdoes even this--he would have

it believed that Hayti is now a close second behind Japan in striding

progress.

Surely the good people of the north ought to learn the difference between

the negro race and the white. There is a small class of exceptional

negroes which is assumed by a great many at the north to be most fair

samples of the average negro of the south. Dr. Washington and Professor

DuBois severally lead the opposing sections of this class. It consists of

authors, editors, preachers, speakers, some who with small capital in

banking, farming, and other business, have each by Booker Washington's

blazon been exalted into a national celebrity, and others. Its

never-sleeping resolve, fondly cherished by the greater part, is to "break

into" white society and some day fuse with it. Its members are nearly all

at least half white, and many are more than half white. But when a Bourbon

snub to one of them is received, as it often is, with dignity and proper

behavior, Mr. Louis F. Post, and a few more, exclaim to the country, "See

how this coal-black and pure negro excels his would-be superiors!" This

man, almost white, is to them a coal-black, genuine, unmixed negro. Ought

not attention to facts incontrovertibly cardinal to rule here as

everywhere else? To what is due the great accomplishment of Dumas,

Douglass, and Booker Washington--to their negro blood or to their white

blood? If half negro blood can do so well, why is it that pure negro blood

does not do far better?

I have seen it asserted that Professor Kelly Miller is pure negro. His

head has the shape of a white man's. The greyhound crossed once with the

bull-dog, as Youatt tells, and each succeeding generation of offspring

recrossed with pure greyhound until not a suggestion of bull-dog was

visible, occurs to me. Thus there was bred a greyhound, possessing the

desired trait of the bull-dog. Who can say that there is not among the

professor's American ancestors one of half white blood? If there is in

fact no such, he is, in his high attainment, almost a _lusus naturae_.

The north, by due attention, will discern that the small number

constituting what I provisionally name the upper class of negroes, is

hardly involved in the race question.

The negroes in the south outside of the upper class--the latter not

amounting to more than five percent of the entire black population--are

slowly falling away from the benign elevation above West Africa wrought by

slavery. That they are here, is felt every year to be more injurious. They

greatly retard the evolution of a white-labor class, which has become the

head-spring of all social amelioration in enlightened communities. There

appears to be but one salvation for them if they stay, which is fusion

with the whites. Though Herbert Foster, and a few others, confidently

assume that our weakening Caucasian strain would be bettered by infusion

of African blood, we see that while amalgamation would bless the negro it

would incalculably injure us. It would be stagnation and blight for

centuries, not only to the south but to the north also. Northerners are

more and more attracted to the south by climate and other advantages, and

intermarriage between the natives of each section increases all the while.

The powers, protecting America, inscrutably to contemporaries kept busy

certain agencies that saved the union. It seems to me that these same

powers are now in both sections increasing white hostility to the blacks,

of purpose to prevent their getting firm foothold and becoming desirable

in marriage to poorer whites. One will think at once of the frequent

lynchings in the south. But let him also think of how the strikers in

Chicago were moved to far greater passion by the few black than the many

white strike-breakers, the late inexplicable anti-negro riot in New York

City, and the negro church dynamited the other day in Carlisle, Indiana.

These powers, who have protected our country from the first settlement of

the English upon the Atlantic coast down to the present time, appear to

speak more plainly every day the fiat, "If Black and White are not

separated, Black shall perish utterly." I am convinced that at the close

of the century, if this separation has not been made long before,

Professor Willcox's apparently conservative estimate of what will then be

their numbers will prove to be gross exaggeration. In my judgment he comes

far short of allowing the anti-fusion forces their full destructiveness.

Let the north purge itself from all delusion as to the negro, and help the

south do him justice and loving kindness, by transplanting him into

favorable environment.

2. It is high time that the Ku Klux be understood. When in 1867 it was

strenuously attempted to give rule to scalawags and negroes, the very best

of the south led the unanimous revolt. Their first taste of political

power incited the negroes to license and riot imperilling every condition

of decent life. In the twinkling of an eye the Ku Klux organized. It

mustered, not assassins, thugs, and cutthroats, as has been often alleged,

but the choicest southern manhood. Every good woman knew that the order

was now the solitary defence of her purity, and she consecrated it with

all-availing prayers. In Georgia we won the election of December, 1870, in

the teeth of gigantic odds. This decisive deliverance from the most

monstrous and horrible misrule recorded among Anglo-Saxons was the

achievement of the Ku Klux. Its high mission performed, the Klan, burning

its disguises, ritual, and other belongings, disbanded two or three months

later. Its reputation is not to be sullied by what masked men--bogus Ku

Klux, as we, the genuine, called them--did afterwards. The exalted

glorification of Dixon is not all of the Klan's desert. It becomes dearer

in memory every year. I shall always remember with pride my service in the

famous 8th Georgia Volunteers. I was with it in the bloody pine thicket at

First Manassas, where it outfought four times its own number; at

Gettysburg, where, although thirty-two out of its thirty-six officers were

killed or wounded, there was no wavering; and in many other perilous

places, the last being Farmville, two days before Appomattox, where this

regiment and its sworn brother, the 7th Georgia, of Anderson's brigade,

coming up on the run, grappled hand-to-hand with a superior force pushing

back Mahone, and won the field. But I am prouder of my career in the Ku

Klux Klan. The part of it under my command rescued Oglethorpe county, in

which the negroes had some thousand majority, at the presidential election

of 1868,--the very first opportunity,--and held what had been the home of

William H. Crawford, George R. Gilmer, and Joseph H. Lumpkin, until

permanent victory perched upon the banners of the white race in Georgia.

3. I observe that the north begins in some sort the learning of the two

lessons above mentioned. But now comes one which seems hard indeed.

Calhoun, Toombs, Davis, and the other pro-slavery leaders, ought to be

thoroughly studied and impartially estimated. They were not agitators, nor

factionists, nor conspirators. They were the extreme of conservatism.

Their conscientious faithfulness to country has never been surpassed.

Their country was the south, whose meat and bread depended upon slavery.

The man whose sight can pierce the heavy mists of the slavery struggle

still so dense cannot find in the world record of glorious stands for

countries doomed by fate superiors in moral worth and great exploit. In

their careers are all the comfort, dignity, and beauty of life, supreme

virtue, and happiness of that old south, inexpressibly fair, sweet and

dear to us who lived in it; and in these careers are also all the varied

details of its inexpressibly pathetic ruin. What is higher humanity than

to grieve with those who grieve? Brothers and sisters of the north, you

will never find your higher selves until you fitly admire the titanic

fight which these champions made for their sacred cause, and drop genuine

tears over their heart-breaking failure.

The foregoing summarizes the larger obstacles which bar true sight of the

south and the north. The devastation attending Sherman's march beyond

Atlanta, the alleged inhumanity at Andersonville, and many other things

that were bitterly complained of during the brothers' war, and afterwards,

by one side or the other, seem to me almost forgotten and forgiven.

Brothers who wore the gray with me, brothers who wore the blue against me,

I would have all of you freed from the delusions which still keep you from

that perfect love which Webster, Lincoln, and Stephens gave south and

north alike. I am sure that you must make the corrections indicated above

before you can rightly begin the all-important subject of this book. With

this admonition I commit you to the opening chapter, which I hope you will

find to be a fit introduction.

JOHN C. REED.

ATLANTA, GA.,

September, 1905.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. INTRODUCTORY 1

II. A BEGINNING MADE WITH SLAVERY 35

III. UNAPPEASABLE ANTAGONISM OF FREE AND SLAVE LABOR 45

IV. GENESIS, COURSE, AND GOAL OF SOUTHERN NATIONALIZATION 51

V. AMERICAN NATIONALIZATION, AND HOW IT MADE THE BOND OF

UNION STRONGER AND STRONGER 62

VI. ROOT-AND-BRANCH ABOLITIONISTS AND FIRE-EATERS 84

VII. CALHOUN 93

VIII. WEBSTER 130

IX. "UNCLE TOM'S CABIN" 161

X. SLAVERY IMPELLED INTO A DEFENSIVE AGGRESSIVE 208

XI. TOOMBS 212

XII. HELP TO THE UNION CAUSE BY POWERS IN THE UNSEEN 282

XIII. JEFFERSON DAVIS 296

XIV. THE CURSE AND BLESSING OF SLAVERY 330

XV. THE BROTHERS ON EACH SIDE WERE TRUE PATRIOTS AND

MORALLY RIGHT--BOTH THOSE WHO FOUGHT FOR THE UNION

AND THOSE WHO FOUGHT FOR THE CONFEDERACY 346

XVI. THE RACE QUESTION: GENERAL AND INTRODUCTORY 359

XVII. THE RACE QUESTION: THE SITUATION IN DETAIL 378

APPENDIX 429

INDEX 451

THE BROTHERS' WAR

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

The inhabitants of the English colonies in Canada, Australia, and New

Zealand are all of the same race, language, religion, and institutions of

government. Such homogeneousness, as has long been recognized, works

powerfully for the political coalescence of separate communities. With the

adjacent ones of the colonies just mentioned there has always been trend

to such coalescence, as is impressively illustrated by the recent

establishment of the Australian Federation. The thirteen colonies out of

which the United States developed were likewise English, and there was the

same homogeneousness in their population, which made in due time, and also

maintained for a few generations, a union of them all--a continental

union. But there had crept in a heterogeneity, overlooked for many years,

during which time it acquired such force that it at last overcame the

homogeneousness just emphasized and carried a part of the inhabitants of

the United States out of the continental union. African slavery dying out

in the north, but prospering in the south, was this heterogeneity. By a

most natural course the south grew into a nation--the Confederate

States--whose end and purpose was to protect slavery, which had become

its fundamental economical interest, against the north standing by the

original union, and which having gained control of the federal government

was about to use its powers to extirpate slavery. The continental or

Pan-American nation--the American union, as we most generally think of

it--could not brook dismemberment, nor tolerate a continental rival, and

consequently it warred upon and denationalized the Confederate States. The

last two sentences tell how the brothers' war was caused, what was its

stake on each side, and the true result. This compendious summary is to

serve as a proposition, the proof of which we now purpose to outline.

Our first step is to emphasize how the free-labor system which prevailed

in the north, and the slave-labor system which prevailed in the south,

were utterly incompatible. Free labor is far cheaper and more efficient

than slave labor. It had consequently superseded slavery in the entire

enlightened world. But certain exceptional peculiarities of climate, soil,

and products planted made slavery profitable in the south.

To maintain the market value of the slaves two things were needed: (1) the

competition of free labor and the import of cheap slaves must be

rigorously prevented; (2) a vast reserve of virgin soil, both to replace

the plantations rapidly wearing out and to afford more land for the

multiplying slaves. The fact last mentioned made it vital to the south to

appropriate such parts of the soil of the Territories as suited her cotton

and other staples. Therefore whenever she made such an appropriation she

turned it into a slave State; for thus the competition of free labor would

be effectually excluded therefrom. The much more rapid increase of her

population made appropriation of lands in the Territories likewise vital

to the north. Hers were all free-labor interests, as the south's were all

slave-labor interests; and whenever the former appropriated any of the

Territories, she made a State prohibiting slavery in order to protect her

free-labor interests. The north was not excluded by nature from any part

of the public domain as the other section was. Her free labor could be

made productive everywhere in it, and she really needed the whole.

Thus the brothers of the north and the brothers of the south commenced to

strive with one another over dividing their great inheritance. The former

wanted lands for themselves, their sons, and daughters in all the

Territories possible made into States protecting their free-labor system;

the latter wanted all of the Territories suiting them made into States

protecting their slave-labor system. What ought especially to be

recognized by us now is that this contention was between good, honest,

industrious, plain, free-labor people on one side, and good, honest,

industrious, plain, slave-labor people on the other, those on each side

doing their best, as is the most common thing in the world, to gain and

keep the advantage of those of the other. It was natural, it was right, it

was most laudable that every householder, whether northerner or

southerner, should do his utmost to get free land for himself and family.

This fact--which is really the central, foundation, and cardinal one of

all the facts which brought the brothers' war--must be thoroughly

understood, otherwise the longer one contemplates this exciting theme the

further astray from fact and reasonableness he gets.

The foregoing shows in brief how there came an eager contention for the

public lands between parents, capitalists, workers, employers,

manufacturers, and so forth, bred to free labor and hostile to slavery on

the one side--that is, in the northern States; and the same classes bred

to slavery and hostile to free labor on the other side--that is, in the

southern States. The contention grew to a grapple. As this waxed hotter

the combating brothers became more and more angry, called one another

names more and more opprobrious; and at last each side, in the height of

righteous indignation, denounced their opponents as enemies of country,

morality, and religion. Here the root-and-branch abolitionist and the

fire-eater begin their several careers, and get more and more excited

audience, the former in the north and the other in the south. Both were

emissaries of the fates who had decreed that there must be a brothers'

war, to the end that slavery, the only peril to the American union, be

cast out.

Under the necessity of defending slavery against free labor there came

early an involuntary concretion of the southern States. This was very

plainly discernible when the epoch-making convention was in session. It

was the beginning of a process which has been well-named nation-making.

After a while--say just before Toombs takes the southern lead from

Calhoun--it had developed, as we can now see, from concretion into

nationalization--not nationality, yet--of the south. It was bound, if

slavery was denied expansion over the suitable soil of the Territories and

the restoration of its runaways, to cause in the ripeness of time

secession and the founding of the Confederate States. But there was

another nationalization, older, of much deeper root and wider scope--what

we have already mentioned as the continental or Pan-American. Its origin

was in an involuntary concretion of all the colonies--both the northern

and the southern--antedating the commencement of the southern concretion

mentioned a moment ago. While southern nationalization was the guardian of

the social fabric, the property, the occupations, the means of subsistence

of the southern people, the greater nationalization was not only the

guardian of the same interests of the northern people, but it had a higher

office. This was in due time to give the whole continent everlasting

immunity from war and all its prospective, direct, and consequential

evils, by federating its different States under one democratic

government--this higher office was to perpetuate the American union. This

continental nationalization had probably ripened into at least the

inchoate American nation by 1776. It was this nation, as I am confident

the historical evidence rightly read shows, that made the declaration of

independence and the articles of confederation, carried the Revolutionary

war on to the grandest success ever achieved for real democracy, and then

drafted and adopted the federal constitution. The constitution was not the

creator of this nation, as lawyers and lawyer-bred statesmen hold, but the

union and the constitution are both its creatures. This nation is

constantly evolving, and as it does it modifies and unmakes the

constitution and system of government of the United States, and the same

of each State, as best suits itself. Why do we not trace our history from

the first colonial settlements down to the present, and learn that the

nation develops in both substance and form, in territory, in aims and

purposes, not under the leading hand of conventions, congress, president,

State authority, of even the fully decisive conquest of seceding States by

the armies of the rest, but by the guidance of powers in the unseen, which

we generally think of as the laws of evolution? To illustrate: For some

time after I had got home from Appomattox I was disheartened, as many

others were, at the menace of centralization. A vision of Caleb Cushing's

man on horseback--the coming American Caesar--seared my eyeballs for a few

years. But after the south had been actually reconstructed I was cheered

to note that the evolutionary forces maintaining and developing local

self-government were holding their own with those maintaining and

developing union. To-day, you see the people of different localities all

over the north--in many cities, in a few States--driven forward by a power

which they do not understand, in a struggle which will never end till they

have rescued their liberties from the party machine wielded everywhere by

the public-service corporations.

To resume what we were saying just before this short excursion. Of course

when the drifting of the south toward secession became decided and strong,

Pan-American nationalization set all of its forces in opposing array. As

soon as the southern confederacy was a fact, the brothers' war began. I

emphasize it specially here that this war was mortal rencounter between

two different nations.

The successive stages by which her nationalization impelled the south to

secession are roughly these:

1. The concretion mentioned above probably passes into the beginning of

nationalization when the south was aroused by the resistance of the

free-labor States to the admission of Missouri as a slave State. With a

most rude shock of surprise she was made to contemplate secession.

Although there was much angry discussion and the crisis was grave, you

ought to note that the root-and-branch abolitionist and fire-eater had not

come. That crisis over, which ended the first stage, there was apparently

profound peace between the free-labor communities and the slave-labor

communities for some while.

2. The south rises against the tariff which taxes, as she believes, her

slave-grown staples for the profit of free-labor manufacturers. Here the

next stage begins. Perhaps the advent of nullification, proposed and

advocated by Calhoun as a union weapon with which a State might defend

itself against federal aggression, signalizes this stage more than

anything else.

3. The second gives place to the third stage, when the congressional

debate over anti-slavery petitions opens. It is in this stage that the

root-and-branch abolitionist and the fire-eater begin their really

effective careers. Opposition to the restoration of fugitive slaves was

spreading through the north and steadily strengthening. It ought to be

realized by one who would understand these times that this actual

encouragement of the slaves to escape was a direct attack upon slavery in

the southern States, becoming stronger and more formidable as the

root-and-branch abolitionists became more zealous and influential, and

increased in numbers, and the slaveholder was bound to recognize what it

all portended to him. It was natural that when he had these

root-and-branch abolitionists before himself in mind, he should say of

them:

"The lands of the Territories suiting slave labor are much less in

area than the due of the south therein. She will soon need all these

lands, as the slaves are multiplying rapidly, and the virgin soil of

her older States is going fast. With an excess of slaves and a lack of

fit land soon to come, if we are barred from the Territories our

property must depreciate until it is utterly worthless. But these

abolitionists attempt a further injury. They instigate our slaves to

fly into the north, and then encourage the north not to give them up

when we reclaim them. They deny our property the expansion into what

is really our part of the Territories which it ought to have in order

to maintain its value; and further they try to steal as many of our

slaves from us in the States as they can."

This was the double peril, as it were, which gathered in full view against

the south.

I cannot emphasize it enough that the hot indignation of such as Garrison

against slavery as a hideous wrong was not excited before the competition

between north and south over the public lands had become eager and

all-absorbing. It is nearly always the case that such excitement does not

appear until long after an actual menace by a rival to the personal or

selfish interest of another has shown itself. It is not until the menace

becomes serious that the latter wakes up to discover that the former is

violating some capital article of the decalogue. This was true of the

root-and-branch abolitionist. And his high-flown morality was made still

more Quixotic by his conscientiously assuming that the negro slave was in

all respects just such a human being as his white master.

This third stage extends from about January, 1836, until the country was

alarmed as never before by the controversy of 1849-50 over the admission

of California, in southern latitude, with an anti-slavery constitution. At

its end the southern leadership of Calhoun standing upon nullification, a

remedy that contemplated remaining in the union, is displaced by that of

Toombs, who begins to feel strongly, if not to see clearly, that the south

cannot preserve slavery in the union.

4. The fourth stage begins with the compromise of 1850. Afterwards during

the same year was an occurrence which cannot be overrated in importance by

the student of these times. That was the consideration of the pending

question in Georgia, and action upon it by a convention of delegates

elected for that special purpose. The Georgia Platform, promulgated by

that convention, is as follows:

"To the end that the position of this State may be clearly apprehended

by her confederates of the south and of the north, and that she may be

blameless of all future consequences, _Be it resolved by the people

of Georgia in convention assembled_, _First_, that we hold the

American union secondary in importance only to the rights and

principles it was designed to perpetuate. That past associations,

present fruition, and future prospects, will bind us to it so long as

it continues to be the safeguard of these rights and principles.

_Second._ That if the thirteen original parties to the compact,

bordering the Atlantic in a narrow belt, while their separate

interests were in embryo, their peculiar tendencies scarcely

developed, their Revolutionary trials and triumphs still green in

memory, found union impossible without compromise, the thirty-one of

this day may well yield somewhat in the conflict of opinion and

policy, to preserve that union which has extended the sway of

republican government over a vast wilderness to another ocean, and

proportionally advanced their civilization and national greatness.

_Third._ That in this spirit the State of Georgia has considered the

action of congress, embracing a series of measures for the admission

of California into the union, the organization of territorial

governments for Utah and New Mexico, the establishment of a boundary

between the latter and the State of Texas, the suppression of the

slave-trade in the District of Columbia, and the extradition of

fugitive slaves, and (connected with them) the rejection of

propositions to exclude slavery from the Mexican Territories, and to

abolish it in the District of Columbia; and, whilst she does not

wholly approve, will abide by it as a permanent adjustment of this

sectional controversy.

_Fourth._ That the State of Georgia, in the judgment of this

convention, will and ought to resist, even--as a last resort--to a

disruption of every tie which binds her to the union, any future act

of congress abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, without

the consent and petition of the slaveholders thereof, or any act

abolishing slavery in places within the slaveholding States, purchased

by the United States for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals,

dockyards, and other like purposes; or any act suppressing the

slave-trade between slaveholding States; or any refusal to admit as a

State any Territory applying, because of the existence of slavery

therein; or any act prohibiting the introduction of slaves into the

Territories of Utah and New Mexico; or any act repealing or materially

modifying the laws now in force for the recovery of fugitive slaves.

_Fifth._ That it is the deliberate opinion of this convention, that

upon the faithful execution of the fugitive slave bill by the proper

authorities depends the preservation of our much loved union."

This platform was the work of statesmen who had added to the wisdom of the

fathers, making the declaration of independence, articles of

confederation, and the great constitution, worthy wisdom of their own from

a far more varied experience and better training in government. These

statesmen came indiscriminately from all parties. The people in the State,

from the highest in authority through every intermediate circle down to

the humblest citizen, deliberately, without excitement or passion,

endorsed this platform with practical unanimity. And all parties stood

upon it to the end. This was not an ignorant, debased, corrupt,

unrighteous people; but it was even better in everything that makes a

people great and good than the former generation which had given the

country Washington and Jefferson.

Especially should the student meditate what this solemn declaration shows

was the sentiment of the people of the State at that time towards the

American union. Every one of the five planks contains its own most

convincing proof of deepest devotion. Think of the child who at last

resolves to fly from the home which had been inexpressibly sweet until the

stepmother came; of the father whose conscience commands him to save the

mother's life by killing the assailing son; of what the true Othello felt

when he had to execute the precious Desdemona for what he believed to be

her falseness--think of these examples, if you would realize the agony of

the better classes of the southern people when they at last discovered

that the union had changed from being their best friend into their most

fell enemy.

The Georgia Platform was actually drafted, I believe, by A. H. Stephens,

then a whig. It was probably moulded in its substance--especially in the

fourth and fifth planks--more by Toombs, also a whig, than any other.

Howell Cobb, a democrat, approved, and was elected governor upon it the

next year, receiving the ardent support of Toombs and Stephens. Toombs was

just forty, Stephens a year or two, and Cobb some six or seven years, less

than forty. These three were the leading authors. Note how much younger

they were than Calhoun, who had a few months before died in his

sixty-ninth year. The platform indicates the new sentiment, not only of

Georgia but of the entire south. When its contents are compared with the

doctrine of nullification, it clearly shows as the production of a new era

in the history of southern nationalization; for it marks what we may

somewhat metaphorically distinguish as the close of the pro-union and

opening of the anti-union defence of slavery. The proclivity to secession

uninterruptedly increases from this point on.

I would have it noted that the tactics of this fourth stage are

unaggressive. The Georgia Platform was no more than most grave and serious

warning against being driven to the wall. It did not bully nor hector. The

threat of what must be done in case certain menaced blows to slavery were

struck was so calmly, deprecatingly, and decorously made, that one wonders

it was not heeded. He ceases to wonder only when history reveals to him

that fate had become adverse to the good cause of this noble people.

5. A change of tactics characterizes the fifth stage. The faster growing

population of the north, furnishing settlers in far greater number than

that of the south, was sweeping away all chance of new slave States. The

situation commanded that the defence of the south change to the

aggressive, just as Stoessel was constrained the other day to take the

offensive against 203 Meter Hill. In the first sortie the south got the

Missouri compromise repealed. Then she tried to make a slave State of

Kansas. She failed. When she had lost Kansas--like California in southern

latitude--she could not help recognizing that the outlook for slavery in

the union had become desperate. My northern countrymen, if you were as

free from the surviving influence of the old intersectional quarrel as we

all ought to be, you would applaud the ability and valor with which the

south had fought this losing fight for the welfare and comfort of her

people; and especially would you admire her supreme effort in behalf both

of that people, and also of the union which she loved next to the cause of

her people. Not quailing before odds incalculable, she was as brave and

self-sustained as Miltiades, coming forth with his little ten thousand to

fight the host of Mardonius hand-to-hand. The only thing for her now was

new aggression, to make a demand never seriously urged before. That was

that congress protect the master's property in every Territory until it

became a State. If this were done, she could, perhaps, keep slavery in

some of the Territories long enough for it to strike root permanently. If

it could not be done she must choose between her own cause and the union.

Her persistence in the demand mentioned--and she was obliged to

persist--split the democratic party, which had until this time been her

main upholder in the union. The north refused her demand by electing

Lincoln. This was the end of the fifth stage. Her nationality had become

fully ripe. She seceded into the Confederate States, her only opportunity

of conserving the property and occupation interests of her people. Of

course she expected to get her part of the public domain, and to enforce

extradition of her fugitive slaves.

The foregoing is the barest outline of the rise and conflict between the

two nationalizations. The subject has been neglected too long. There

begins to be some faint understanding of the greater nationalization, but

that understanding is far short of completeness. There is hardly a

suspicion of the other. And yet as to our own special subject it is really

the more important, for in it is the initiative of the brothers' war.

There has been made by nobody any investigation at all of the main parts

of that train of events which I designate as southern nationalization. Not

Wilson's "The Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in the United States," nor

any book by a partisan of either side in the struggle, gives any help

towards this investigation. The historical sources have never been studied

at all; such as the colonial records now publishing, the records and

papers of the probate court in some of the older and more important

counties of the south--especially the returns of administrators,

executors, and guardians, and files of newspapers advertising their

citations. Here can be found the prevailing prices of slaves, their rate

of multiplication, all details of their management, from the very

beginning. The trial and equity courts contain records of litigation about

slaves; of advice of chancellors to trustees seeking to make or change

investment; of wills manumitting slaves; and a thousand other relevant

matters. The course of legislation as to slaves from the first to the end

is also important. From these, from local literature such as "Georgia

Scenes," "Simon Suggs," biography, and various pamphlets, and other

original sources,--far better historical evidence than any which is now

generally invoked,--can be learned the real facts as to the growth of

slavery; and especially how in its economic potency consequent upon the

invention of the gin it supplanted or made dependent upon itself all other

property, and became the solitary foundation of every kind of production

and mode of making a living; so that even by 1820 to abolish slavery would

have been almost to beggar the southern people for two or three

generations. It is to be hoped that Professor Brown, finding the

opportunity which he desires, may yet exhaust not only the sources I have

mentioned, but also important ones that I have not even thought of, and

give the true ante-bellum history of the lower south. Some such work is

necessary to explain the active principle, the _raison d'etre_ of southern

nationalization.

How north and south were sundered by the different nationalizations is yet

to be told in full detail without any censure of the people of either.

Practically every American was born into an occupation or way of life

connected with or founded upon either slave or free labor interests, and

so was born into one or the other of these two nationalizations, and his

conscience coerced him to stay with it. These nationalizations made two

different publics and two different countries in the United States. After

the slavery agitation had become active the masses in either public knew

but little of the other, and cared for it less; and when war broke out

between the two countries every man, woman, and child was ready to die, if

there was need, for his own. When the history of the times has been

impartially and adequately written the world will recognize that the

patriotism and moral worth of neither side excels that of the other, and

it will crown both.

The evolution indicated above produced not only the two hostile peoples,

but also their leaders and representatives of every class. I have taken

pains in a relevant chapter to show how the fire-eaters and the

root-and-branch abolitionists were at last brought upon the stage. Every

fierce controversy in history has had their like on each side. Their

coming is late. The antagonists have become excited. The intelligence

guiding evolution deceives them as to the parts they must play. They

believe that their mission is to arouse the public conscience in order to

right some alleged moral wrong. Their real mission is to excite to angry

action. Cicero condemns the Peripatetics for asserting that proneness to

anger has been usefully given by nature.[2] He overlooked the fact that

the outbreak of the passion is intended to spur us into doing something

important for our own protection; and that it is therefore an

indispensable weapon in our self-defensive armory. These fanatics, as we

often call them, instigated north and south to quarrel more and more

fiercely, and finally to fight. The purpose of the powers in the unseen in

causing the fight has already been stated.

What especially concerns us here is that we avoid adhering to the mistakes

of these partisans which still have injurious effect upon opinion. Thus

the fire-eater could see no good whatever in the yankees, as he called

them, denying them honesty, trustworthiness, and other elementary virtues;

accusing them of robbing us by the tariff and other measures, and hating

us for the prosperity and comfort which the slavery system had blessed us

with. Other of his false charges are still lodged in the memory of some

influential southerners. But the fire-eater's predictions were all

completely falsified by the result of the war; and he has become so much

discredited as an authority, there is no very great need for consuming

much time and effort in correcting his misstatements. On the other hand

the decisive success of their side has kept thousands at the north fully

believing the wildest fabrications of the root-and-branch abolitionists.

The latter believed that the African slave of the south was just such a

human being, ready for liberty and self-government in all particulars, as

civilized and enlightened whites. They believed that the condition of his

immediate ancestors in West Africa was one of high physical, mental,

moral, and social development, and that if there was in him now any

inferiority to his master it was entirely due to the sinister influence of

American slavery. They also believed that the system was fraught with such

cruelties as frequent separation of man and wife and of mother and young

children, under- feeding and clothing, and grinding overwork,--that, in

short, the average slave was daily exposed to something like the torture

of the Inquisition. All this was invention. American slavery found the

negro gabbling inarticulately and gave him English; it found him a

cannibal and fetishist and gave him the Christian religion; it found him a

slave to whom his savage master allowed no rights at all, and it gave him

an enlightened master bound by law to accord him the most precious human

rights; it found him an inveterate idler and gave him the work habit; it

found him promiscuous in the horde and gave him the benign beginning of

the monogamic family,--in short, as now appears very strongly probable,

American slavery gave him his sole opportunity to rise above the barbarism

of West Africa.

These tremendous mistakes of fact, after knitting the north in solid

phalanx against dividing the Territories with the south and restoring

fugitive slaves and thus hasting forward the war, prompted that folly of

follies the fifteenth amendment, and have ever since kept the north from

understanding the race question.

I am sure that it is high time that we of each section should school

ourselves into impartially appreciating the civil leaders of the other

side. The south has made more progress towards this than the north.

Certain causes have operated to help her onward. One of these is that

practically all of us recognize it is far better for the section that the

union side won. Another is that the great mass have learned that slavery

both effeminated and paralyzed the whites and was a smothering incubus

upon our due social and material development. It is natural that although

we give our pro-slavery political leaders and the confederate soldiers

increasing love, we should more and more commend the pro-union and

anti-slavery activity of the northern statesmen. Nothing like this has led

the north to revise the reprobation which in the heat and passion of the

conflict it bestowed upon the public men of the south. If I ever read a

good word from a northern writer as to them, it is for something in their

careers disconnected with the southern cause. Even Mr. Rhodes, the ablest

and most impartial of northern historians of the times, finds in Calhoun

only a closet spinner of utterly impractical theories. Further, I could

hardly believe it when I read it--and it is hard for me to believe it

yet--that, citing some flippant words of Parton in which a slander of

contemporary politics is toothsomely repeated as his voucher, he flatly

charges the lion-hearted knight of the south with playing the coward in

the most heroic episode of his grand career. My faith is strong that this

mode of treating the good and great southern leaders will soon go out of

fashion.

I am greatly in earnest to vindicate these leaders--especially Calhoun,

Toombs, and Davis. Much of the public life of each one was concerned with

matters of national interest. To this I give special attention, for I want

my northern readers to know what true Americans they all were. Without

this they cannot have their full glory. And their justification is that of

their people. Such effective leaders are always representative. It is a

misnomer to call them leaders. They were really followers of their

constituents who were struggling for the subsistence of themselves and

their dear ones. During this time Calhoun, Toombs, and Davis, had they not

labored in every way to protect this great cause--the cause of their own

country--as they did, would have been as recreant as the confederate

soldier, skulking away from the line defending home and fireside. When our

country is in peril the unseen lords of its destiny do not take any one of

us, from the greatest to the humblest, into their confidence as to the

event. Every man of us must support in politics and on the field the cause

of our people. If that must go down it will make defeat glorious to go

down with it, as contentedly and bravely as did Demosthenes, Cicero, and

Davis.

Whoever diligently studies the facts will be convinced that southern

nationalization, with a power superior to human resistance, carried the

southern people into secession, and that their so-called leaders were

carried with them. He will discern that the parts of the latter were

merely to serve as floats to mark the course of the current beneath.

Therefore be just to these leaders for justice' sake. Further, you

brothers and sisters of the north ought to bethink yourselves and keep in

mind how we regard them. The reputation of these our civil champions and

their graves are as dear to us as those of our mothers. If you adopted an

orphan, you would feel it to be unpardonable to speak slightingly to him

of his parents. Cleopatra, her conqueror sending her word to study on what

fair demands she would have, answered:

"That majesty to keep decorum, must

No less beg than a kingdom."

Let those who wore the blue and their descendants think over it long

enough to realize how unspeakably low and treacherous it would be in us to

abet any condemnation whatever of these men for their anti-union

acts--these men whom we or our fathers voted for and supported because of

these acts. If you deny justification to them, how can we keep decorum in

accepting it ourselves?

I would say one more word, where perhaps I am a little over-earnest. These

southern leaders have contributed richly to the treasures of American

history. Their moral worth,--nay, moral grandeur,--their great natural

parts, their statesmanly ability, their eloquence, their heroic fidelity

to their people,--by these each has won indefeasible title to the best of

renown. Whenever the north has made real study of them, she will give them

as generous admiration as she now does to the charge of Pickett. I have

done my utmost to present Calhoun, Toombs, and Davis faithfully, using, as

I believe, all the main facts which are relevant and incontrovertible. I

am sure that every northerner who reads them, after he has laid aside all

prejudice, will admit that I did not claim too much when I was recounting

their merits a moment ago.

I invite close consideration of all that I say of Webster. The purpose of

providence, bestowing birthplace, early environment, training, and career

as preparation for a paramount mission, shows more conspicuously in him

than in any other of America's great, with the solitary exception of

Washington. How the names of detracting agitators and mere politicians

written over his in the temple of fame are now fading off, and how the

invincible and lovable champion of the brother's union looms larger upon

us every year!

I am painfully conscious of how certain omissions, unavoidable in my

limited space, mar the symmetry of my ground-plan. The average reader will

probably think that I ought to have sketched Lincoln, Grant, and Lee. I

was convinced that the public had already become reasonably instructed as

to them.

John Q. Adams is one of the most conspicuous men of his day. Standing

aloof from parties, completely self-reliant, opulently endowed with every

high power of moderation, insight, and effective presentation, his good

genius gave him the championship in congress of the free-labor cause

during the critical years that it was preparing for the decisive meeting

with the slave-labor cause. In this time it seems to me that single-handed

he achieved more for the latter than all its other champions. A pleasant

parallel between him and Lee occurs to me. Each had filled the proudest

place in the chosen avocation of his life. Adams had been the chief

magistrate of the great republic, elected by the votes of a continent. Lee

had been the foremost general of the bravest and most puissant nation that

ever lost its existence by war. Each one of the two passed from power down

into what is usually a condition of inaction and accumulating rust till

the end of life, and to each was most kindly granted the achievement of

new fame and glory. In the national house of representatives, Adams,

during the last twelve years of his life,--1836-48,--did the great deeds

which we have just lauded. In the last years of his life Lee, as the head

of an humble institution of learning, showed not only the youth in his

charge, but all of his stricken people, how to conquer direst adversity

with such grand success in an example of unmurmuring endurance that every

future generation of men will give it more loving appreciation.

John Q. Adams, as I have tried to explain, is almost an American epoch of

himself; but I could not give him the chapter that is his due.

I felt that it would have been well to pair Stephen A. Douglas of the

north with Alexander H. Stephens of the south. They are in nearly exact

antithetical contrast. The former clung to the south, the other to the

union, until the clock struck the dread hour of separation. How they loved

each other and each other's people! They most strikingly exemplify the

adamantine grip which each one of the two nationalizations kept upon its

greatest and best.

Wendell Phillips and William L. Yancey should be contrasted. Each one was

the very prince of sectional agitators, helping with great efficiency to

make the public opinion that carried forward Seward and Lincoln, the

actual leaders of the north, and Toombs, the actual leader of the south.

It is my strong conviction that Phillips and Yancey were the most gifted,

eloquent, and influential stump speakers in America since Patrick Henry.

Chase steadily rises in my estimate. His solid parts, his consistent,

conscientious, and able anti-slavery career, and especially that decisive

speech in the Peace Congress,--these, and other relevancies that can be

mentioned, drew me powerfully. The firm candor with which he avowed in

that memorable speech that the north had decided against the expansion of

slavery, demonstrates the clearness of his vision. The part of it which

recurs to me most frequently is that in which he impressively recounts the

intersectional dissension over the fugitive slave law,--the south

believing slavery right, the north believing it wrong,--and proposes that

in place of the remedy given by that law the master be paid the value of

his slave. "Instead of judgment for rendition," he said, "let there be

judgment for compensation determined by the true value of the services,

and let the same judgment assure freedom to the fugitive. The cost to the

national treasury would be as nothing in comparison with the evils of

discord and strife. All parties would be gainers."

Calhoun devised to restrain the sections from mutual aggression by

endowing each with an absolute veto against the other. Webster fondly

believed that if he could be president he would bring back the wrangling

brothers to love one another again as much as he loved them all. Chase

also had his pet impracticable project. Each one of the three recoiled and

racked all of his invention to save his country from the huge fraternal

slaughter that his divining soul whispered to him was near.

The south will cherish the memory of Chase more and more fondly as she

learns better how he firmly stood for civil law against military rule, and

that he was heart and soul for universal amnesty.

It was all I could do to deny a chapter to William H. Seward. He seems to

me to have been the only northern man whose foresight of the coming

convulsion equalled that of Calhoun. He did not become a Jeremiah as the

other did, for his section was not, after it had just emerged from a gulf

of blood, to be plunged and held for years in a gulf of poverty and

disorder. He was far less serious and much more optimistic in his nature

than Calhoun. Affectionate, sympathetic, rarely agreeable in his

manners--how well Mrs. Davis depicts him in what is to me one of the

pleasantest passages of her book.[3] He was spoils politician, able

popular leader, and great statesman in rare combination. While his heart

was extremely warm, his head was never turned by his feelings. Lincoln

ardently believed in his soul what Choate calls "the glittering

generalities" of the declaration of independence. But to Seward current

illusions were the same as they were to Napoleon Bonaparte--he was to lead

the masses with them just as far as possible, but not to deceive himself.

Read in your closet his two epochal speeches, the "higher law" one of

March 11, 1850, and that proclaiming the irrepressible conflict at

Rochester, October 25, 1858, then read that of Chase at the Peace

Congress, and you cannot avoid feeling that while Chase opposes slavery

mainly because he conceives it to be a gross moral wrong, the other

opposes because it is the belonging of an inferior civilization. In my

opinion no man of that time had such a clear conception as Seward of the

utter economical incompatibility of the free-labor system and the

slave-labor system, and of the doom of the latter in their conflict then

on. While he had this superior insight and wisdom it was the better way

for him to follow the tide of morbid moral sentiment and unreasoning zeal

carrying the country on to his goal. Following thus he proved a leader

unsurpassed. The longer I contemplate Seward the stronger becomes my

conviction that he is the most entertaining subject and the most

delightful in variety of parts and traits of all American statesmen for

the essayist portrait painter. To give a picture true to life demands the

very best and highest art.

In my last two chapters I do all I can to clear up the race question,

which is now densely beclouded with northern misunderstanding and southern

prejudice. The negro has a nature that in some material particulars

differs so widely from that of the Caucasian that it ought to be duly

allowed for; and yet as people are so prone to think all others just like

themselves, this is hardly ever done. Now, forty years after emancipation,

we see that the promptings and consequences of his nature just emphasized

in combination with the social forces operating upon him have caused

changes in the situation, of the gravest import to him. His native

idleness, coming back stronger and stronger the further he gets in time

from the steady work of slavery, his lack of forecast, his vice,

inveterate pauperism, increasing disease and insanity, on one side; the

hostility excited against him by the inexpressibly unwise grant to him of

equal political rights, and the rapid invasion by white labor since the

early nineties of the province which he appropriated during the years when

the whites had not recovered from the paralyzing shock and surprise of

emancipation, on the other side, example these changes. There has evolved

a division of the southern negroes into two classes. One class, which I

most roughly distinguish as the upper, contains all those who are not

compelled by their circumstances to be unskilled laborers in country and

town. It hardly amounts to one-twentieth of the whole. The millions are

all in the other class, which I again most roughly distinguish as the

lower. Ponder what I tell you of them, their helplessness, their

accelerating degradation, their mounting death rate, their gloomy

prospects. I try hard also to have the upper class well understood. To a

southerner it is amazing how many outside people of education,

intelligence, and fair-mindedness assume that the multitude in the lower

class are the same in every material detail of character and ability as

those few who by various favors of fortune have found place in the upper

class. To stress here, in the beginning, a fact as its very great

importance demands, nearly all the negroes who get high station are part

white. Dumas, the father, was at least half white. The son Dumas was

probably three-quarters white. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Anglo-African

composer, is half white. Such as these are the samples by which nearly all

the continent and England, and many northerners, estimate the capacity of

the pure negroes of the south, grovelling in depths out of which one

climbs only now and then by a miracle. The men just mentioned are not real

negroes. It is the same with nearly all the so-called negroes of America,

from Douglass to Dr. Washington, who have become famous. They are but

examples of what whites can do against adversity. The coal-black equalling

these in achievement would be as rare among his fellows as Hans, the

Berlin thinker, is among horses. This palpable distinction between men who

are largely, if not nearly all, Caucasian, and men who are purely West

African in descent, is utterly overlooked by many most conscientious and

earnest ones of the north, like Mr. Louis F. Post, who is always telling

us of the south what the negro is--not, and how we should treat him,

magisterially reading us lessons in A B C democracy.

There will be fewer and fewer part-white negroes in the south by reason of

the steadily increasing hostility of each race to mixed procreation. This

upper class has long shown a drift northward. Under the expulsion of many

of its members from certain occupations by white competition, lately

commenced and fast increasing, this drift now gathers strength. From what

I see every day it seems to me that the destiny of much the greater part

of this upper class is disappearance partly by absorption and partly by

euthanasy.

It is the millions of the lower class that should be our deepest concern.

If they be left where their utopian emancipators and enfranchisers have

placed them, it is almost certain that nearly the whole will go into the

jaws of destruction, now opening wide before them and sucking them in.

Such a result of the three amendments--that is, to have annihilated hosts

upon hosts of pure negroes in order to make just a few part-whites

all-white--would be a fit monument to the statesmanship of the maddest

visionaries in all history. We must come resolutely and lovingly to the

help of these wretched creatures. I tell you at large how it is our duty

to give the black man his own State in our union, and supervise him in it

even better than we are now doing for the Philippine.

I believe that the foregoing, re-enforced by a glance over the

chapter-titles, will give a reader the preconception which he ought to get

from an introduction to a book which he is about to begin. In dealing with

the causes and some of the more important consequences of the brothers'

war my method is rationale rather than narrative. My first purpose is to

indicate how everything happened according to laws that with cosmic force

reared two great economic powers, divided the whole land into a vast host

standing up for one of the two in the south, and a still larger host

standing up for the other in the north, and how these same laws were most

faithfully served by all the actors on each side. I try to set out and

explain what are the principles of evolution and the ways of human action,

and especially the commanding view-points, which must be rightly attended

to in their supreme importance before the greater one of the two critical

American eras can have its fit history. The man who writes it will be

entirely free from the monomania and orgiastic fury of both fire-eater and

root-and-branch abolitionist, from their excessively emotional

assumptions, their explosive and exclamatory argumentation; he will have

the industry, the undisturbed vision, and the perfect fairness of the

foremost sociologists of our time; he will show how each side was right

from first to last in upholding its own separate country,--all belonging

to it, statesmen, agitators, demagogues, fanatical fire-eaters and

abolitionists, generals and soldiers. He will show that such things which

in expedience ought not to have been done were unavoidable, and therefore

to be excused. He will show what erroneous judgments of each section

should now be challenged and kept from working injury. Especially do I

emphasize it, he will convince every average reader that north and south

were equally conscientious, honest, heroic, and lovable from beginning to

end. Such a history will be even greater than that by which Thucydides

realized his soaring ambition to give the world an everlasting possession;

and it will become the bible of America, treasured and loved alike by the

people both north and south.

This bible is coming, as many signs show. I will illustrate by examples

from three northern authors, given not exactly in the order of time, but

in that of their approximation to full attainment. After a circumstantial

description of each one of the three days' fighting at Gettysburg, fair

and impartial in the extreme, Mr. Vanderslice eulogizes both sides,

without invidious distinction, for "their fidelity and gallantry, their

fortitude and valor," and because there was nothing done by either "to

tarnish their record as soldiers," and most becomingly emphasizes the

"martial fame and glory" thereby won "for the American soldier." But just

here he sounds a most unpleasantly discordant note by saying, "One was

right and the other wrong."[4] He forgot that brothers who fight as those

did at Gettysburg are all right, and that whenever one falls on either

side flights of angels sing him to his rest.

In June, 1902, Mr. Charles F. Adams, making an academic address at

Chicago, startled many of his auditors with this outspoken vindication of

the south:

"Legally and technically,--_not morally_,-- ... and wholly

irrespective of humanitarian considerations,--to which side did the

weight of argument incline during the great debate which culminated in

our civil war?... If we accept the judgment of some of the more modern

students and investigators of history,--either wholly unprejudiced or

with a distinct union bias,--it would seem as if the weight of

argument falls into what I will term the confederate scale."[5]

Mr. Adams, having made further inquiry of his own, December 22 of the same

year, announced a still more advanced conclusion. He had said at Chicago

that the confederate scale preponderated; but now his vision having become

more certain he said the scales hung even.[6] Note that in the passage

just quoted from him I have italicized the two words "not morally." I do

not understand that in the Charleston speech he meant to revoke the

italicized words, and to say anything more than that each side was right

in its own view of the nature of the government. Even with this

reservation, the utterances of Mr. Adams evince a grateful improvement

upon the dogmatism which characterizes nearly every other northerner or

southerner who has treated the subject.

Professor Wendell sees clearly that both sides were morally right, and he

is impartially just and equally loving to both. I feel that the quotations

from a late work of his which I now make are the chief merits of this

chapter. Considering the controversy between the sections, he says, with

the truest insight, "The constitution of the United States was presenting

itself more and more in the light of an agreement between two incompatible

sets of economic institutions, assuming to each the right freely to exist

within its own limits."[7]

In this next passage as to the same subject, rising above Mr. Adams to the

high frankness which the facts demand, he says, "The truth is that an

irrepressible social conflict was at hand, and that both sides were as

honorable as were both sides during the American Revolution, or during the

civil wars of England."[8]

How just to north and south each, and how fraternally compassionate

towards the south is this: "Solemn enough to the uninvaded north, the war

meant more than northern imagination has yet realized to those southern

States into whose heart its horrors were slowly, surely carried. Such a

time was too intense for much expression; it was a moment rather for

heroic action; and in south and north alike it found armies of heroes. Of

these there are few more stirring records than a simple ballad made by Dr.

Ticknor, of Georgia, concerning a confederate soldier."[9] And then he

quotes "Little Giffen" in full.

Professor Wendell reaches a still greater height when he decorates the

Tyrtaeus of the Confederate States and the supereminent anti-slavery

lyricist of the north with equal homage and admiration. He says:

"The civil war brought forth no lines more fervent [than the

concluding thirty-six of Timrod's 'The Cotton Boll,' which are set

out], and few whose fervor rises to such lyric height. In the days of

conflict, north regarded south, and south north, as the incarnation of

evil. Time, however, has begun its healing work; at last our country

begins to understand itself better than ever before; and as our new

patriotism strengthens, we cannot prize too highly such verses as

Whittier's, honestly phrasing noble northern sentiment, or as

Timrod's, who with equal honesty phrased the noble sentiment of the

south. A literature which in the same years could produce work so

utterly antagonistic in superficial sentiment, and yet so harmonious

in their common sincerity and loftiness of feeling, is a literature

from which riches may come."[10]

These words are more golden than I can tell. They parallel the elevation

of Webster, showing the same love for South Carolina and Massachusetts, in

the pertinent parts of the reply to Hayne, which since my boyhood I have

cherished as a nonpareil. It is cheering to a faithful southerner to

receive such sure proof that the day must soon come when all obloquy will

be lifted from the fame of Calhoun, Toombs, and Davis. What a grand

triumph of contrast, almost surpassing the best achievement of Shakspeare,

it will be when some honest Griffith, having shown Webster, Lincoln, and

Grant in all the worth which merited their unspeakably happy lot, each

radiant with the victor's glory, places opposite the great civic heroes of

the southern nation, their due renown at last fitly blazoned. That renown

will be that they devoted the very greatest human powers and virtues all

their lives, with never remitted effort and spotless fidelity, to save a

doomed country,--the imperishable renown of grand failure in a cause which

adverse fate cannot keep from being ever dear to all humanity.

My last word as to what I have just quoted from the three northern authors

is that all of us--and especially the fast widening public of

readers--ought to be forever in earnest to applaud such sentiments and

chide every manifestation of excessive sectional bias or prejudice from

either northerner or southerner. This has been my incessantly kept faith

for years. As proof I refer to my article, "The Old and New South," nearly

all of it written in the early part of 1875--thirty years ago--and which I

published the next year. I give an exact copy of it in the Appendix. As

you go through it remember these things of the author: The election of

Lincoln made me believe, as it did thousands of other southerners, that

secession was the only patriotic course. I therefore voted for secession

delegates to the State convention. I served in the confederate army all

the war, taking part in the First Manassas and many other battles; and

when I had been surrendered and paroled at Appomattox I walked back to my

home in Georgia. Ten years after this I had found full solace and comfort

for the direful event to the south of the brothers' war; and I had learned

that the brothers on each side had complete justification in conscience

for their contrary parts as statesmen, public leaders, voters, and at the

end as soldiers. I want my readers of each section to see that I have long

practised what I am now preaching.

I beg attention to the article on another score. It shows that the

opinions expressed in this book have not been formed in haste. Nearly all

of the more important will be found therein, in embryo, at least; and the

present book will show, I hope, that they have prosperously grown. There

are passages in the article, such as those touching the relations of the

races, the future of the negro, the maintenance by the decentralizing

forces of the union of their balance with the counter ones, and also

others, which I might now justly claim to have proved prophetic; and I do

not believe that a serious misprediction can be found in the entire

article. This is, I hope, such corroboration by after occurrences as

indicates that even my early studies of the transcendently important

theme were not unfruitful.

Further, the article serves in some sort to mark a definite stage in

evolution. To give but one illustration: Although my close attention to

planting interests at the time and for the seven or eight preceding years

had kept me closely watching the negro, I had not then discovered even the

beginning of that division of the race into two classes which is now so

plain to me.

Possibly some readers may shy away from my book, deeming that its subject

is hackneyed and worn out. They will exclaim, What can this author say

that has not been said in the vast library of books already written upon

the civil war? This will be asked, I am sure, only by the unobservant and

unreflecting. If one but turn away from the assumptions, dogmas, and

philippics, with which north and south cannonaded each other's morality

with increasing fury from 1831 to 1861, to the _rerum causae_, the play of

resistless social forces, and the other actualities and great things

indicated above, their huge stores of varied novelty, interest, romance,

and wisdom will greatly embarass him--as has been my painful

experience--both in making the best selection and in his felt inability to

give what he does at last select its fit presentation.

As illustration I will say that every thoroughly impartial northern reader

who meditates what I narrate as to Toombs will, I believe, be astonished

to learn that one so prodigally gifted with supreme virtue and supreme

genius, and who was of unexampled success in doing all the common and all

the extraordinary duties of high place, has become worse than forgotten in

almost his own day; and such a reader will suspect, as I do myself, that

there is much more of value in his career that I have overlooked.

Perhaps this chapter is too long already. But I pray my reader to allow me

to say a little more. We are upon the threshold of a new American era.

Evidently because of our western coast we are to dominate the Pacific

ocean commerce and to develop it into proportions so enormous as to be now

almost inconceivable. That coast will soon outstrip the Atlantic in

population and great cities. Our people, safe against wars on the

continent, maintaining armies only of workers, taught better methods every

year by practice and science, will soon be far in advance of their present

enviable prosperity and comfort. Cheering as is the promise of their

material progress, that of their progress in virtue and good government is

still more cheering. Everywhere in the north--which was not impoverished,

deprived of familiar modes of production, and paralyzed with a race

question by the event of the brothers' war--the State electorates are

rebelling successfully against the party machine, cashiering the boss, and

subverting the corporation oligarchy. That in the last election the voters

most intelligently split their tickets assures the early expulsion of

spoilsmen, grafters, and public-service franchise-grabbers from the

control of our politics, legislation, and administration of government,

and the real and permanent elevation of the people to being their own

absolute governors. In several States--one of these a southern--the vote

was for the most democratic and anti-plutocratic president since Lincoln,

while at the same time the anti-plutocratic State candidates, either of

the other party or independent, were elected. Our population will soon

outstrip all the world in average riches, comfort, virtue, and education.

The special note to be made of this new American era now beginning is that

we are to lead the nations into a war-abolishing United States of the

world, which in the end will make and keep them our equals in solid

welfare and happiness. With this prospect in view, the brighter and more

enrapturing as I cannot keep from contrasting it with the black and

hopeless future which settled around me at Appomattox, I would do all that

I can to bring about that better understanding between north and south

which befits the good time near at hand.