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THE HISTORY OF THE CONFEDERATE WAR
ITS CAUSES AND ITS CONDUCT
A Narrative and Critical History
by
GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON
VOLUME I
New York
Sturgis & Walton Company
1910
All rights reserved
Copyright, 1910
By Sturgis & Walton Company
Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1910
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PART I.--THE CAUSES OF THE WAR
Introduction 3
I. A Public, Not a Civil War 13
II. The Growth of the National Idea 19
III. The "Irrepressible Conflict" 37
IV. The Annexation of Texas 58
V. The Compromise of 1850 71
VI. Uncle Tom's Cabin 107
VII. The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise, The
Kansas-Nebraska Bill and Squatter Sovereignty 112
VIII. The Kansas War--The Dred Scott Decision--John Brown's
Exploit at Harper's Ferry 122
IX. The Election of 1860 138
X. The Birth of War 147
PART II.--THE CONDUCT OF THE WAR
XI. The Reduction of Fort Sumter 177
XII. The Attitude of the Border States 194
XIII. "Pepper Box" Strategy 203
XIV. Manassas 215
XV. The Paralysis of Victory 233
XVI. The European Menace 249
XVII. Border Operations 256
XVIII. The Blockade--The Conquest of the Coast and the Neglect
to Follow up the Advantage thus Gained 261
XIX. The Era of Incapacity 268
XX. The First Appearance of Grant 273
XXI. The Situation Before Shiloh 282
XXII. Between Manassas and Shiloh--The Situation in Virginia 293
XXIII. Shiloh 302
XXIV. New Madrid and Island Number 10 328
XXV. Farragut at New Orleans 332
XXVI. McClellan's Peninsular Advance 352
XXVII. Jackson's Valley Campaign 363
XXVIII. The Seven Days' Battles 397
XXIX. The Second Manassas Campaign 414
XXX. Lee's First Invasion of Maryland 423
PART I
THE CAUSES OF THE WAR
INTRODUCTION
THE MAGNITUDE OF THE CONFEDERATE WAR
During the years from 1861 to 1865, one of the greatest wars in all
history was fought in this country.
There were in all three million three hundred and seventy-eight
thousand men engaged in the fighting of it.
There are not that many men in all the regular standing armies of
Europe combined, even if we include the unpaid hordes of Turkey and the
military myriads of the armed camp known to geography as Russia.
The actual fighting field of this war of ours was larger than the whole
of western Europe, and all of it was trampled over and fought over by
great armies.
The men killed or mortally wounded in our war numbered on the Northern
side alone 110,000. The total number of deaths resulting from military
operations on the Northern side alone was 350,000. The figures for the
Southern side are not accessible, owing to the loss of records. But
as the fighting was equally determined on both sides, and as other
conditions were substantially equal, it is certain that the losses of
life were relatively about the same on both sides. It is well within
the facts, therefore, to say that this war of ours directly caused the
death of more than half a million men. No other war in modern history
has cost so many lives or half so many.
We hear much of our recent war with Spain. Let us take it as a basis
of comparison. The total number of men even nominally called into the
field in that war was less by nearly two to one than the deaths alone
during the Confederate war. The number of men who were actually engaged
in the Spanish war numbered only about one tenth as many as those who
were buried as victims of the Confederate war's battle fields.
Again, the total number of men killed and wounded during the Spanish
war--including every man who was touched by a bullet or scratched by
a sword or bayonet thrust or hurt by a splinter at sea--was only two
hundred sixty-eight. That is fewer than the number who were stricken in
each of many before-breakfast skirmishes of the Confederate war, some
of which were deemed too insignificant to be reported to headquarters
with precision.
Looking for higher standards of comparison, we find that 43,449 men
fell killed or wounded at Gettysburg alone. That is almost double the
loss of the allied forces at Waterloo and probably equal to the total
losses on both sides at that greatest and most decisive of European
battles.
There were more than a dozen other battles of the Confederate war
which in slaughter fairly deserved comparison with Waterloo. These
included the Seven Days' battle before Richmond, and the battles of
Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Antietam, Shiloh, Chickamauga, the
Wilderness, Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor, the Second Manassas (or Bull
Run), Stone River, Petersburg, Franklin, Lookout Mountain, Nashville
and several others.
Still another measure of the magnitude of a war is its duration. It is
duration indeed that chiefly determines the amount of human suffering
caused by a war, especially to the women and children who are war's
chief victims.
Measured by this test of duration the Confederate war exceeded all
other recent conflicts in the magnitude of the suffering it inflicted.
Its first gun was fired at Fort Sumter in April, 1861: its last armed
conflict did not occur until May, 1865. Thus for four years and a month
the war endured. The Crimean war--one of the longest of nineteenth
century conflicts--endured for less than half that length of time and
the actual fighting of it lasted less than one fourth as long. The
duration of the Confederate war was seven times as great as that of
the stupendous Franco-Prussian conflict of 1870, which overthrew the
second Napoleonic empire, consolidated Germany and made the republic an
enduring fact in France. It was twenty-four times as long as that of
the French-Austrian war, which set Italy free, or as the War of 1866
between Austria and Prussia which laid the foundations of the present
German empire.
Measured by its enduring consequences the superior magnitude of our
war in its influence upon national and human destinies is still more
conspicuous.
It made an end of human slavery in the last civilized country on earth
in which slavery was permitted.
It freed the nation from a reproach that sorely afflicted its citizens.
It ended a political conflict which had threatened the very foundations
of the Republic from the hour of its institution.
It freed the Southern States of the Union from an incubus that their
statesmen and their best citizens had for generations desired to be rid
of, an incubus that had restricted their development and retarded their
growth in wealth and population as no other evil influence had ever
done in any part of our country.
Still more important so far as human history is concerned, this war of
ours settled at once and forever, the vexed and vexatious questions of
constitutional interpretation that had beset the Republic from the hour
of its formation.
It revised the constitution upon new lines and reconstructed the
Republic in ways that promise permanence.
As an exhibition of national military capacity and a revelation of our
prodigious possibilities of armed resistance, it taught the world the
advisability and indeed the absolute necessity of letting the United
States alone, as the one unassailable and defensively irresistible
nation on earth.
Finally it gave to the American people a realizing sense of their
own limitless power, which has both strengthened and sobered the
popular mind, revealing to it the nation's limitless ability to work
iniquity, and awakening it to the Republic's nobler capacity--to work
righteousness instead.
The conflict so far exalted and emphasized the power of the Republic as
to inspire us with a new generosity of forbearance in our dealings with
all other nations. It made it easy for us to follow General Grant's
rule of right to "deal with other nations as enlightened law requires
individuals to deal with each other."
Incidentally this war exhausted and impoverished the South as no other
war ever exhausted and impoverished any fruitful land. It utterly
destroyed the labor system of those states. It put out the light of
their prosperity for a time and left their people blindly groping
for sustenance. It destroyed a social fabric of exquisite poise and
picturesqueness which had endured from the beginning of American
colonization. It set society upon its head in the South and replaced
historic order with inexpressible chaos. For a time it substituted
for a traditional government by the best, an actual and very lawless
government by the worst elements of society, exalting ignorance above
culture, vice over virtue, and setting a horde of half-savage and
suddenly emancipated slaves to direct the destinies of a region to
which the country had always reverently looked for exalted patriotism
and the wisest statesmanship--the region which had produced Washington
and Jefferson and Madison and Monroe; the region that had given to the
Republic that greatest and wisest of the jurists of the modern world,
John Marshall; the birthplace of Patrick Henry, and George Wythe and
George Mason and Henry Clay.
Anarchy and chaos and an era of unspeakable disorder succeeded the war
as its inevitable consequence and when at last a new order was wrought
out of these disturbed conditions, all that was characteristic of the
old South had completely passed away. A new era had dawned, coming as a
posthumous birth of the conflict of arms.
A revolution had been wrought in the social, industrial and economic
conditions of a fair land. It brought with it a new material prosperity
greater than any that had ever been dreamed of in that region before.
It led to the development of resources that had lain dormant for
generations. In agriculture alone, the South produces now many times
the wealth each year that had been dug out of her fields under the old
system. The very greatest cotton crop that was ever grown before the
war amounted to 4,669,770 bales; since 1877 no crop so small has been
grown in any year, while in recent years the crops have reached the
stupendous total of more than 12,000,000 bales in each year.
Thus the old staple industry has doubled and trebled its productiveness
under the influence of the new industrial conditions created by the war
and by the social and economic revolution which the war wrought.
But this is a small part of the matter. Greatly as the yield of cotton
has been multiplied under the new conditions, cotton has ceased to be
king even in the land over which it once exercised undisputed sway.
Other and humbler agricultural products--never thought of in the old
planting days as money crops--have come, in their value to rival cotton
itself as a source of enrichment to Southern agriculture.
More important still, the new conditions that were created in the
South as a result of the war have led to the development there of
resources of inestimable value which were wholly neglected under the
old system. The little, local, loitering railroad lines of the older
time have been combined and extended and upbuilt into great arteries
of travel and traffic. Prairies that were scratched over for the sake
of meager cotton crops of half a bale to the acre have been delved
under for coal and iron. Industrial cities of importance have arisen
where cabins remotely stood. Blast furnaces have replaced the breezes
that once alone disturbed the broom-straw grass. Iron foundries, steel
mills, machine shops, coke ovens, rolling mills and the like employ men
by tens of thousands where before only a few hundreds compelled the
reluctant soil to yield them a precarious living. The still unsubdued
pine lands are dotted all over with cotton mills which give work and
wages to a multitude and the magnitude of their dividends strongly
tempts capital to a like investment elsewhere in the country that was
once abundantly content to produce a raw material and to buy back the
finished products of it from factories hundreds or thousands of miles
away.
The harbors of the South, once mere ports of call or refuge for a
shipping that belonged elsewhere, have become the seats of great
shipbuilding and ship-owning enterprises the productiveness of which is
loosely reckoned by imperfectly counted millions.
Still again, under the new conditions resulting from the war, great
industries have sprung up in the South which find both their profit
and their reason for being in the utilization of things that were sheer
waste under the old system. The manufacture of cotton seed oil and its
rich by-products is the best illustrative example of this. It employs
thousands of well paid workmen and millions of well remunerated capital
in converting into very valuable products the cotton seed that was once
utilized only as a fertilizer for half-exhausted soils.
In brief, the political and social revolution wrought by the war
is matched and over-matched by the stupendous economic revolution
produced, a revolution whose rewards to industry, to capital and to
enterprise are such as the wildest visionary would have laughed at as
a futile dream when the South lay stripped and stricken and staggering
under its burden of perplexities at the end of a struggle which had
taxed its material resources to the point of exhaustion and which had
well-nigh exterminated its vigorous young manhood.
It is to tell the story of a war thus stupendous in its causes, its
events and its consequences that this book is written. There is nowhere
in history a story more dramatic, more heroic or more intimately
inspired by those emotions that control human conduct and work out the
events of human life. The endeavor in these volumes will be to relate
that story with absolute loyalty to truth.
The writer of these pages is persuaded that the time has fully come
when this may be acceptably done; that the time has passed away
when any American of well ordered mind desires the perversion or
the suppression of truth with respect to our war history. There is
certainly nothing in that history of which any part of the American
people need be ashamed.
The great actors in the drama have all passed away. The passions of the
war are completely gone. Even in politics, war prejudices no longer
play a part worth considering. The time seems fully come when one may
write truth with regard to the war with the certainty of a waiting
welcome for his words. The time has come which General Grant foresaw
in 1865, when he predicted that the superb strategy and unconquerable
endurance of Lee and the brilliant military play of Sherman, the
splendid prowess of Stonewall Jackson and the picturesque achievements
of Phil Sheridan, the extraordinary dash and enterprise of J. E.
B. Stuart on the one side and of Custer on the other, would all be
reckoned a common possession in the storehouse of American memory, a
subject of pride and satisfaction wherever there might be an American
to glory in the deeds of his countrymen.
The time has come when the prowess of the American soldier, equally
on the one side and upon the other, his measureless courage, his
exhaustless endurance, his all-defiant devotion to duty, his
extraordinary steadiness under a fire such as few soldiers on earth
have ever been called upon to face, his patience under long marchings,
starvation and every circumstance of suffering, are subjects of justly
indiscriminate admiration on both sides of a geographical line long
since obliterated.
The story of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg may now be told to Northern
ears as surely sympathetic with the heroism shown in that world-famous
action as are any ears at the South. The heroic tale of the Federal
assaults upon Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg where brave men,
knowing the futility of their endeavors, obeyed orders and went to
their deaths by thousands because it was their duty to do so may now be
told to listening Southern ears with as absolute certainty of applause
as if the story were related only to veterans of the Army of the
Potomac.
"East is East, and West is West" writes Kipling in one of his finest
ballads in celebration of generous personal courage. Paraphrasing, we
may say: "North is North and South is South," but courage, heroism,
devotion and a generous chivalry belong to no time and no country
exclusively. They are the common possessions of all worthy manhood.
Like the gold beneath the guinea's stamp they pass current wherever
coined because their value is inherent.
CHAPTER I
A PUBLIC, NOT A CIVIL, WAR
The war of 1861-65 was in fact a revolution. Had the South succeeded in
the purposes with which that war was undertaken it would have divided
the American Republic into two separate and independent confederations
of states, the Union and the Southern Confederacy. The North having
succeeded, no such division was accomplished, but none the less was a
revolution wrought as has been suggested in the introductory chapter of
this work.
Familiarly, and by way of convenience, we are accustomed to call this
"The Civil war," in contra-distinction from those other wars in which
the American power has been arrayed against that of foreign nations.
But the term "Civil war," as thus applied, is neither accurate nor
justly descriptive. In all that is essential to definition this was a
public and not a civil war and it is necessary to a just understanding
of the struggle and its outcome to bear this fact in mind. Otherwise
the entire attitude and conduct of the Federal government toward its
antagonist must be inexplicable, inconsistent and wanting in dignity.
The Southern States asserted and undertook to maintain by a resolute
appeal to arms, their right to an independent place among the nations
of the earth. In the end they failed in that endeavor. But while the
conflict lasted they so far maintained their contention as to win from
their adversary a sufficient recognition of their attitude to serve all
the purposes of public rather than civil war.
They instituted and maintained a government, with a legislature, an
executive, a judiciary, a department of state, an army, a navy, a
treasury, and all the rest of the things that independent nations set
up as the official equipment of their national housekeeping.
Not only did foreign powers recognize their right to make war, not as
rebels but as legitimate belligerents entitled to all the consideration
that the laws of civilized war guarantee to nations, but the United
States government itself made similar recognition of the South's status
as a power possessed of the right to make war.
At the outset there was quibbling of course, and a deal of playing for
position. But in view of the obvious facts all this quickly gave way
to a perfectly frank recognition on both sides of the truth that there
was legitimate public war between the North in the name of the Union
and the South organized as the Southern Confederacy; that the struggle
involved the question of the independence of the South on the one hand
and the indissolubility of the Federal Union on the other; that the
conflict was the result of an entirely legitimate appeal to arms for
the decision of questions which no other arbitrament could decide;
and that the contest must be fought out not as a struggle between
constituted authority on the one hand and insurrection on the other but
as a controversy between two powers, each of which was legitimately
entitled to assert its contentions and to maintain its attitude by
every means known to civilized war.
All this was reflected, while the war lasted, in the treatment of men
captured on either side as prisoners of war; in negotiations for the
exchange of prisoners with full recognition of military rank on either
side; in the issue, the observance and the enforcement of paroles; in
safe conducts frequently granted and always honorably respected; in
agreements for the immunity from arrest of medical officers and other
non-combatants; in the humane and civilized arrangements made between
opposing generals for the equal care of the wounded of either army by
the surgeons of both, and in a score or a hundred other ways.
And when the war was over both sides fully recognized and emphasized
its character as a legitimate public war and not in any respect as an
insurrection. When the broken fragments of the organized armies of the
South surrendered, there was an end of the controversy. The Southern
people made no effort to prolong the struggle in irregular ways, as
they easily might have done. They set their faces against all attempts
to inaugurate a guerilla warfare, a thing which would have been easy to
them. Under the advice of General Lee and their other great leaders the
soldiers of the Confederacy accepted the surrender of the Confederate
armies as a sovereign act that made an end not only of the war but of
their right to make war. By their immediate return to ways of peace
and by their sincere acceptance of the terms offered in Mr. Lincoln's
promptly issued amnesty proclamation they marked and emphasized their
view that they had been engaged, not in a disorderly insurrection, but
in a legitimate, public war, the military end of which marked the end
of their right to carry on hostilities of any kind or character.
Equally on the other side, the public character of the war was
recognized by every act of the government. There was not even one
prosecution for treason. Congress imposed upon the Southern States
definite legislative duties as a condition precedent to the readmission
of those states to the Union, thus emphatically recognizing the fact
that during the progress of the war they had actually been out of
the Union, and could be readmitted to it only upon terms prescribed
by a congress representing those states which had remained in it. In
these and a hundred other ways--and especially by means of that long
military occupation of the South which ended only under the Hayes
administration--the national government recognized the fact that there
had been a legitimate public war between the two sections and not
merely an insurrection with the military operations necessary to its
suppression.
A failure to recognize these things would have been absurd and
ridiculous in an extreme degree. It would have been to ignore the most
obvious facts in modern history and to substitute a lot of lawyers'
quibbling prevarications for the modern world's greatest wonder story
of war. It would have been to regard a dozen or twenty of the greatest
battles ever fought on earth as the conflicts of a sheriff's posse
with turbulent gangs of rioters. It would have been to treat as
merely disorderly outbreaks and operations for their suppression, the
great military campaigns which have passed into history as superbly
illustrative, on the one side and upon the other, of all that is most
brilliant in strategy and all that is most heroic in endeavor and in
endurance. It would have been to discredit the national defense by
belittling the occasion for it. It would have been to rub off the
tablets of human memory equally the achievements of Grant and Meade
and Sherman and Thomas and Farragut and the rest, and the record of
what Lee and Jackson and Beauregard and the two Johnstons and Stuart
and Early and Longstreet had done. It would have been to rob the
nation of the credit it had won in the most strenuous conflict in
which it had ever been engaged and of the glory of the genius and the
heroism manifested by Americans upon either side. It would have been a
perversion of history, a degradation of great deeds, a reckless wasting
of the Nation's accumulated store of cherished memories of heroism.
We must bear these truths in mind if we are rightly to understand
the great struggle which for convenience and quite incorrectly we
call the Civil war. We must remember that it was a struggle of
giants; that it was a conflict between two powers, each of which was
possessed of a tremendous fighting capacity; that it called forth
the most brilliant strategy of modern times; that it was inspired
on both sides by a heroism worthy of celebration in song by the
most gifted of ballad-makers; that it involved the very vitals of
republican self-government among men; that it wrought a revolution
more stupendous, more far-reaching and more lasting in its effects
than any other in recorded history; that it overthrew old institutions
and created new ones in their stead; that it reversed the history of a
hundred years; that it wrote anew the fundamental law of the greatest
nation of all time; that it created a new epoch and made a new national
power the dominant force and influence in the ordering of human affairs.
Only by such appreciation of the nature, the magnitude and the
significance of our war, shall we justly estimate its place in the
record of human affairs or properly understand the meaning it is
destined to carry with it into history.
It is with an abiding conviction that the story of this war is the most
precious memory of all the American people, the record of their highest
achievements, the supreme demonstration of their right to a foremost
place among the peoples of the earth that this telling of that story is
undertaken.
CHAPTER II
THE GROWTH OF THE NATIONAL IDEA
The causes of the war of 1861-65 were deeply imbedded in the history of
the country, in the peculiar manner of its development, in the complex
interests of men, and in those primary instincts of human nature which
account for everything but which are themselves often unaccountable.
It is difficult, indeed it is impossible to trace and unravel to the
full the influences which in 1861 brought the North and South into
armed conflict and created a war of stupendous proportions between men
who had for generations rejoiced in a common heritage of liberty; men
who had cherished alike the memory of Bunker Hill and Yorktown; men
who had worshiped the same household gods and honored the same heroes
as their national demigods; men to whom the history of the Republic
was, to all alike on both sides, the story of their fathers' and
grandfathers' heroic deeds.
Yet if the historical event of 1861 is to be at all adequately
understood or interpreted, the historian must in some degree at least
discover the conditions, near and remote, that gave occasion for the
strange catastrophe.
There is a short and easy method of dealing with the matter as there
always is a short and easy method of solving historical puzzles by
referring them to some complex cause and treating that cause as a
matter of the utmost simplicity. It is easy to say that the war of
1861-65 grew out of slavery; that slavery existed and was defended at
the South while it was antagonized at the North, and that the conflict
arose out of that. But no reader of intelligence is satisfied with such
a reference as a substitute for explanation. Every such reader knows
not only that the great and overwhelming majority of Northern people
in 1861 would have angrily rejected a proposal that the nation should
wage a war for the extermination of slavery in the states in which it
legally existed. Every reader who is in the least instructed in the
history of that time knows that Mr. Lincoln himself was at the utmost
pains to avoid even the appearance of such a purpose and that during
nearly half the period of the war's duration he resolutely refused
to commit the government to that cause by issuing a proclamation of
emancipation, even as a measure helpful to the national arms.
Instead of this short and easy catechism of causes which has satisfied
so many, especially those foreigners who have more or less ignorantly
written as historians or critics of our war, it is necessary to go back
to the early history of the country, to study there the conditions
that laid the foundations of discord, to find in the fundamental
characteristics of human nature and in the varying self-interests of
men the explanation of events that are otherwise inexplicable.
The American colonies were separately founded. Their settlers were
persons of very diverse mind and often of hostile interest but they
were all inspired by an abiding sense of the main chance. The minutely
studious historians who have written in our later time have differed
in many things but they are all agreed that the early settlers upon
these shores, whether in Virginia first or in New York a little later
or in New England still later, were not heroes of romance blown
hither by adverse winds of fate or by the buffeting of the gods, but
plain, ordinary and very commonplace men, ignorant for the most part,
narrow-mindedly selfish, and altogether intent upon the bettering
of their own fortunes as the chief end of human life. The higher
inspirations which we are accustomed to attribute to them in our
American Aeneid did not exist. Those things were born later of admiring
imagination as higher aspirations usually are in the discussion of
national beginnings.
The colonies were far more remote from each other than we can easily
conceive. From Boston to Williamsburg in the seventeenth century
was a journey more difficult, more toilsome and more dangerous than
a circling of the globe is in our time. And even in the eighteenth
century Charleston in South Carolina was farther removed from
Charlestown in Massachusetts than either is to-day from Yokahama or
Hong Kong.
This element of remoteness cannot be too much insisted upon as a cause
of estrangement between the widely separated colonies. The means of
communication between the several settlements of English-speaking
people were few and meager and painfully uncertain. There were no
railroads, no steamships, no telegraphs, and in effect no mails.
For not until Franklin near the revolutionary epoch laid the rude
foundations of our postal system, was there any tolerably trustworthy
post in this land. We find in old letters Abigail Adams in Boston
apologizing to her statesman husband in Philadelphia for having allowed
three weeks to elapse without a letter and offering as a sufficient
excuse the fact that during those weeks she had "found no opportunity"
to send a letter, no "trustworthy hand going from these parts to
yours." And she and other correspondents of that time whose letters
have been preserved as precious historical material, refer frequently
to the public post as a means of communication to which no rational
person would think of entrusting letters of any consequence.
In the same way Eliza Lucas, afterwards Eliza Pinckney and the mother
of distinguished revolutionary personages, excuses her neglect
to send letters from James island to her intimates on the Cooper
river--twenty-five miles away--on the plea that she had no trustworthy
opportunity and that the post was not to be thought of.
In still further illustration is the fact recorded by Franklin in
his autobiography, that when his rival in the business of newspaper
publishing had control of the posts, he seriously embarrassed Franklin
by refusing to deliver his newspaper to its subscribers. And it was a
source of pride to Franklin that when he, himself, became Postmaster
General he generously refused to retaliate upon his rival by denying
him in his turn the privileges of the mails.
In these conditions it is not difficult to understand that even as the
revolutionary times approached, the interchange of thought, opinion
and sentiment among the people of the several colonies was infrequent
and very meager and that during the previous, formative century it had
scarcely at all existed.
It is true that the immigrants who founded the several colonies were
mainly Englishmen. But during a century and a half of remotely separate
development, they had had ample time for estrangement of mind and for
the breeding of very radical differences of interest, aspirations and
opinions. The really astonishing thing about their history is that
after a hundred and fifty years or more of this diversely conditioned
development there was left enough community of thought and interest
among the colonists to make possible their alliance for revolutionary
purposes.
That alliance was of the loosest possible character, marked in every
detail of its terms by a jealousy almost phenomenal. The first
agreement of the colonies to act together for the common defense was as
loose as the hurrah of a mob bound together only by a temporary purpose
in common. It was not until the Revolutionary war was well advanced
that even the articles of confederation were agreed upon, and they were
about the flimsiest, most inadequate and most inefficient bond of union
that ever served to ally states for a common purpose. Those articles of
confederation set out with a formal and emphatic reservation to each
state of its absolute, individual sovereignty and independence--that
being at the time the one thing which each of the revolted states
cherished with the most sleepless jealousy. They left to each of the
states the unrestricted right to do as it pleased in all matters of
sovereign concern.
The avowed purpose of the confederation was to create a national
government but the articles of confederation distinctly denied to
the central power every right and function necessary to governmental
activity and independence. The so-called general government could not
levy any tax, enforce any impost, or in any other way provide for the
raising of money, the payment of national debts, the organization of
armies, the enforcement of treaties or even the uniform validity of
statutory enactments.
Even in the act of creating a central power for the sake of the
common safety, the several states were so jealous of their separate
independence that they resolutely refused to give to their general
government any power whatever to control the individual states or the
people thereof, even to the meager extent of enforcing the national
agreements with other powers.
The Congress--there being no executive possessed of any power--was
authorized to call upon the several states for contributions of men
and money for the common defense. But it was a case parallel with Owen
Glendower's ability to "call spirits from the vasty deep." The question
remained "will they come?" And that question each state decided for
itself.
If we would at all understand the history of our country we must bear
in mind this intense, this resolute, this utterly uncompromising
insistence of the several states at the beginning upon their separate
sovereignty.
It was in this spirit that independence was achieved and the
independence thus won was not the independence of a federated republic,
but that of thirteen individual and widely separated states, no one of
which owed any sort of allegiance to any other or to all the others
combined; no one of which was ready upon any consideration to yield one
jot or tittle of its independent sovereignty to the will of any other
or of all the others.
The states, indeed, were as jealous of trespass by each other as of
trespass by Great Britain herself.
We are accustomed to think of them as closely united commonwealths,
engaged in a long and painful struggle for the independence of the
American Federal Republic. They were nothing of the kind. They were
separate and diversely interested states each fighting for its own
emancipation from a foreign yoke. They were allied in a common cause,
but their alliance had no bond more obligatory upon themselves than
is that which unites a mass meeting whose constituent members are
possessed temporarily of a common purpose.
When the states had achieved their independence, they undertook to live
together in the loosely formed union thus provided. They quickly found
it impossible to do so. Not only was their central government powerless
to fulfil its obligations to other countries, or to pay its debts at
home, or to enforce its authority, or to levy and collect taxes, or to
provide securely and properly for the maintenance of an army, a navy,
a postal service or anything else of a national character or to do with
certainty and authority any other of the things which a nation that
expects respect may and must do, but it could not in any effective way
regulate trade either with foreign countries or between the states.
Each state had the reserved right to interfere with the transit of
goods across its borders in ways that threatened presently to render
trade among the states impossible.
It was in view of these distressing conditions that the statesmen of
Virginia appealed to those of the other states for a conference looking
to the devising of a better way, "a more perfect Union." The conference
thus called at Annapolis was attended by representatives from only
five of the states. But it led to the calling of that Philadelphia
Convention which, under Washington's presidency, and with the united
wisdom of the most sagacious statesman in all the commonwealths, framed
the Federal Constitution.
The task was one of extraordinary difficulty. The old jealousies of the
states remained in scarcely abated force. Each feared to surrender any
part of its sovereignty. Each dreaded the possible interference of the
others with its domestic concerns. Each feared and dreaded a national
power that might some day control a state's actions and coerce it into
an obedience derogatory to its sovereignty. The less populous states
feared the possible dominance of the more populous, and all of them
alike feared the possibly oppressive power of a national executive.
After months of such labor as statesmen have rarely given to the
framing of a fundamental law, all these differences were adjusted
and in a considerable degree, though not wholly, the individual
apprehensions of the several states were allayed.
The equal representation of states as such, without reference to
the numbers of their population, was provided for in the peculiar
constitution of the Senate, in the organization of the electoral
college which chooses the president and still again in the provision
of the Constitution that in case of no election to the presidency the
choice shall be left to the popular house of Congress, but with the
express condition that each state's representatives in that body,
however numerous or however few, shall have one and only one vote.
Again the Constitution reflected the jealousy of the several states
for their sovereignty by providing specifically that all powers not
delegated by the states to the general government by the terms of that
instrument should be reserved to the states or to the people thereof.
Notwithstanding all these precautionary measures and notwithstanding
all the reservations made, two of the states withheld their assent to
the Constitution for a year or two after it was accepted by the rest,
and in other states the vote by which it was ratified showed a very
narrow margin in its favor. Even in Virginia, the state which had
originally suggested the union under the Constitution, whose Washington
had presided over the convention that framed it, whose Jefferson and
Madison and other statesmen had strenuously advocated it, the influence
of the most potential statesmen of that period was barely sufficient
to secure an affirmative vote by a slender majority in favor of the
adoption of that Constitution which made the United States a nation and
gave to their government a recognized place among world powers.
In brief the people of the original thirteen states very reluctantly
surrendered a narrowly restricted part of the functions of sovereignty
to the Federal Government. They very jealously reserved to themselves
as individual states all the other functions of sovereignty and
independence. And even with such restrictions and such reservations
they gravely hesitated before making a grant of power which threatened
the possible use of the Federal Authority in control of a state's
action or in restraint of a state's sovereign independence.
This was the spirit in which the National Government was formed. It was
intended to be a government for external and communal purposes only. By
every provision which the ingenuity of statesmanship could devise the
General Government was restrained from trespassing upon the sovereign
right of each state to regulate in its own way and by its own devices
all matters not distinctly delegated to the General Government by the
express terms of the Constitution.
For half a century after the adoption of the Constitution, this view
everywhere prevailed and was everywhere recognized as authoritative.
When, during the War of 1812-15, New England found that the course
of the General Government antagonized the local interests of that
region, the states in that quarter of the country opposed the
national policy even to the extent of threatening a withdrawal from
the Union--secession in other words, and nullification. It was Daniel
Webster--afterwards the apostle of "Liberty and Union, now and forever,
one and inseparable"--who drew and championed the Rockingham Memorial
in 1812, in which his New England constituency formally protested
against the war then existing with England and by unmistakable
implication threatened secession and a separate peace with England
on the part of the maritime states in the northeastern part of the
country. And immediately afterwards Webster was elected to Congress
where, with the approval of that part of the country, he opposed all
measures designed to encourage enlistments at a time when the country
was engaged in foreign war. He even went so far as to vote against the
appropriations for the national military defense against the country's
ancient foe, at that time engaged in an effort to undo and reverse the
results of the Revolutionary war itself.
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, writing of this incident, expresses the
opinion that it was an extreme stretch of the liberty of legislative
opposition to the administration in a time of war and public danger and
that it carried the right of opposition to the utmost limit to which it
could go without treason.
Yet at the time nothing very serious was thought of the matter for the
reason that at that time the individual state and not the National
Government was regarded as the primary and ultimate object of men's
allegiance.
The states felt themselves to be still only conditionally and
tentatively members of the Union. They were still intensely jealous of
their individual sovereignty, and they were still indisposed to make
serious sacrifice of their own interests in behalf of the common weal
of a union which they regarded doubtfully as an experiment. They still
felt themselves entitled to reject the experiment and withdraw from the
Union if at any time they should see fit to do so.
It would be easy to multiply historical illustrations of this attitude
of mind, extending, though with diminishing frequency and force, to
that time just before the outbreak of the Confederate war when N. P.
Banks's cry of "Let the Union slide" was accepted as the slogan of the
anti-slavery party. But the multiplication of such illustrations is
unnecessary. Every instructed mind is aware of the fact that at the
first the Union was regarded as a doubtful experiment into which the
states had entered with misgiving and from which each state felt itself
at liberty to withdraw whenever it should find the yoke of the Union a
galling one.
Writing of Webster's replies to Hayne, Senator Lodge frankly admits
that the historical argument was all against Webster; that there is no
room for doubt that at the first the Union was held to be an experiment
and withdrawal from it was everywhere regarded as a reserved right of
the states.
And even the right of a state while remaining in the Union to nullify a
national statute obnoxious to its prosperity or to its moral sense was
as directly asserted in the personal liberty bills with which, just
before the war, many states sought to render the National Fugitive
Slave Law inoperative, as it had been asserted by South Carolina in
that state's attempt a generation earlier to annul and resist a law
imposing tariff restrictions upon trade.
But there are some other historical facts that must be borne in mind if
we would justly understand the war catastrophe of 1861.
It must be remembered that before the beginning of that year twenty
new states had been created out of territories that at the time
of the Union's formation were wildernesses. These new states had
none of that jealousy of their sovereignty which gave pause to the
original thirteen. They had entered the Union not reluctantly, as
states hesitatingly surrendering a previously cherished independence,
but eagerly as communities upon which the dignity of statehood and
all the sovereignty that statehood implies had been conferred by
gracious gift of the Union. Those communities had been suppliants for
the favor of admission to the Union and not, as the original states
were, the creators of the Union, surrendering to it with more or less
reluctance some share of an absolute sovereignty previously enjoyed by
themselves. These new states were not benefactors of the Union but its
beneficiaries. They had surrendered no rights of self-government to it,
but on the contrary had received from it as a gracious gift all the
rights and dignities of states, where before they had had no rights and
dignities whatsoever.
These new states had grown populous and prosperous under that Union to
which they had surrendered nothing of independence and from which they
had received all they had of statehood and sovereignty. Very naturally,
then, their attitude toward the Union was quite different from that of
the older states. That Union which the older states had always regarded
as their creature, owing its very existence to their grace, the new
states looked upon as their creator to whom they owed all that they
enjoyed of liberty-giving autonomy.
In the newer states particularly, but in the older states also,
there had grown up a new conception of the dignity and permanence
of the National Union. That which had been originally regarded as a
doubtful venture had little by little come to be looked upon as a
thing established and glorious. The national idea had taken a new and
deeper hold upon men's minds and affections. Vast material and moral
interests had grown into sturdy self-consciousness under its beneficent
rule. That Union which had been entered upon with so much doubt and
hesitation and with so many precautionary stipulations had become
one of the great nations of the earth, strong at home and everywhere
respected abroad. It had a history in war and peace which was a
precious possession of all the people alike.
Proud, loving memories clustered about the story of its career. The
victories of New Orleans, and Buena Vista, and Chapultepec, the sea
conquests of Porter and Perry and the rest, had been added to the
stories of Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill, Trenton, Camden and
Yorktown, as fireside tales with which the grandfathers made the
eyes of a younger generation of Americans glisten with patriotism.
And achievements of peace equally notable--stories of what Morse,
Henry, Fulton, Peter Cooper, Daniel Boone, Bowie, Kit Carson,
Fremont, Sam Houston, General Gaines and a multitude of others had
accomplished--were equally stimulating to the pride and patriotism of
the youth of the thirty-three states.
And there were heroic tales told of Indian wars in which Andrew Jackson
and William Henry Harrison, Sam Dale, the Mississippi Yagers, Col. Dick
Johnson, and other veritable heroes of romantic daring had figured. All
these and scores and hundreds of other tales of patriotic heroism were
then familiars of the fireside as illustrations of American pluck and
American achievement.
There was the country's expansion, too, to glory in. The Louisiana
purchase had added an empire of vast extent and of inestimable
productive possibilities to the national domain, the development of
which, even before 1861, was a romantic wonder story of history. The
Mexican war had brought with it another accession of incalculably rich
territory such as no nation in all history except our own had ever
added at a single stroke to its domain.
Where the Spanish gold-seekers had galloped for centuries in search of
the precious metal, finding it not, an American had quickly discovered
a new Golconda, an Ophir, an Eldorado so rich in its productiveness as
for a time to threaten the stability of gold as an accepted measure of
values among men. Vast regions that had remained for generations the
haunt of savages and wild beasts, with only here and there a mission
station of adobe huts to offer hope of better things in some far
distant future time, became, within a brief while populous territories
ready to take their place in the Union as important American states.
Better still, a new and matchless fruitfulness had been discovered
in vast valleys and upon far-reaching mountain sides that had been
previously typical of hopeless sterility and desolation.
All these things had mightily stimulated the American imagination
and all of them had contributed incalculably to the strengthening of
the national spirit and to the upbuilding of a new and controlling
sentiment of loyalty to the Union under which all this actual greatness
had been achieved and all this potential greatness was confidently
promised.
In still other ways the sentiment of nationality had been strengthened.
The orators of the land had for generations mightily exalted the horn
of the Nation in eloquent speeches which all the schoolboys in all
the states grew enthusiastic in declaiming. All the literary men of
the land had celebrated the country's glories in prose and verse that
filled the school books and set juvenile patriotism aflame with ardor.
All this patriotic awakening had for its object of worship the glories
of the Nation, and not at all the narrower achievements of particular
states or sections. All of it referred itself to the Union as the
commonwealth. Neither literature, nor eloquence, nor familiar household
narrative concerned itself in the least with any of those jealousies
which had prompted the original states to hesitate to enter the Union.
None of them recognized even in the remotest way, those questions of
conflicting powers and dignities, those anticipations of encroachment
on the part of the central power, or those jealous guardings of the
rights of individual states which had played so large a part in the
settlement of the original problem of a Federal Union.
In brief, the people had outgrown and forgotten the doubts and fears
of the earlier formative time. In the main they knew nothing about
such things and cared nothing for them. They knew only that they were
citizens of the greatest, freest and strongest nation on earth, and
that its history was a heritage of glory to all of them alike.
Lawyers' quibblings, logic chopping, and all arguments drawn from
history meant nothing to the great majority of a people who had been
born and bred under the Union and had imbibed with their mothers' milk
a sentiment of undying loyalty, not to any state or any doctrine or any
theory, but to the Nation in whose history they regarded themselves as
entitled to feel personal and ancestral pride and affection.
Thus while the historical argument was clearly with those who
maintained the right of the states to assert their authority as
superior to that of the Union, that argument was addressed in large
part to ears that had been rendered deaf to it by the echoes of
the national glory. While the Union had indeed been at the first
a hesitating experiment, it had become by time and by national
achievement a nationality for the maintenance of which vast populations
were ready and willing and even eager to risk their lives.
If we would understand the war and the conditions in which it came
about, we must first clearly realize the change that had occurred in
popular sentiment, and especially the growth of that national feeling
which had slowly but surely replaced the old hesitation and jealousy
of the states. Only the circumstance that slavery existed and was
defended in one part of the Union and that it was antagonized in the
other part on grounds of policy, conviction, and morality, kept alive
the old sentiment of state sovereignty and made the war possible. That
sentiment of the dominant right of the states was strongly asserted
on both sides and insisted upon both in behalf of slavery and in
antagonism to it until war resulted. The history of that controversy
must be the subject of a separate chapter, in which its irritating
character as well as the difficulties that statesmanship encountered in
dealing with it, may be set forth without undue elaboration but with
sufficient detail to render the result easily enough understood.
CHAPTER III
THE "IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT"
There is no possibility of doubt that, but for the slavery controversy,
that growth of an intense national feeling which has been mentioned
would have rendered the war of 1861-65 impossible.
That intensely patriotic feeling of nationality was all pervasive,
except in so far as the slavery controversy impaired it as it did, both
North and South. If that one cause of disagreement had not existed,
if there had been no negro slaves in the United States, the sentiment
of union and nationality which had grown with the Nation's growth and
strengthened with its strength, would unquestionably have overborne
all the quibbles and all the logical refinements of the earlier time.
The decisions of the Supreme Court, especially those of John Marshall,
which in effect rewrote the Constitution and successfully claimed
for the courts the right to annul any and all acts of Congress that
were not in accordance with the Constitution, had created a new and
effective barrier against possible aggression by the Federal power
upon the autonomy of the states and had at the same time established
the Federal authority securely. When Marshall decided in Marbury vs.
Madison, that an act of Congress assuming to do by national authority
anything reserved to the states in the constitutional grant of power
to the General Government, is no law at all but an act null and void,
which the courts will on no account enforce, there was an end of all
danger of wanton Federal encroachment upon the reserved rights of the
states. And, as we have seen, that fear died out of men's minds, except
in so far as questions relating to slavery from time to time revived
it. But for those questions it need never again have arisen to vex the
Republic and set its people by the ears.
But slavery involved questions of prejudice, questions of passion,
questions of morality, questions of labor, questions of principle,
and questions of pride, of sentiment, of conscience, of religion, of
conviction. It stirred the passions of men, excited their prejudices,
and appealed to their interests as no other question of policy has done
in our modern times. Incidentally it revived, as no other issue could
have done, all the old jealousies between the Union and the several
states which the progress of the Republic had so strongly tended to
allay. It set the history of the formation of the Union against the
history of the Union itself as implacably antagonistic historical
arguments in behalf of conflicting contentions.
Let us see how all this came about.
When the colonies achieved their independence, slavery existed, in
greater or less degree, in all of them. The negro was then nowhere
regarded as a man, so far at least as the generalizations of the
Declaration of Independence and other formal settings forth of human
rights were concerned. There was a strong desire to be rid of slavery,
a deep seated conviction of the impolity of that institution, but,
except among the Quakers and a very few others, there seems to have
been no thought anywhere that the holding of negroes in bondage was a
violation of that fundamental doctrine of human rights upon which the
Republic had been established.
Indeed the desire to be rid of slavery seems at that time, and for a
long time afterwards, to have been stronger at the South, where the
institution was general, than at the North where it existed only in
a scant and inconsequent way. As early as 1760, the South Carolina
colony had sought to limit the extension of the system by passing an
act forbidding the further importation of slaves, but the British
Government had vetoed the measure. Twelve years later Virginia sought
to protect her people against the black danger of slavery by imposing a
prohibitory tariff duty upon imported slaves. Again the home government
in London forbade the act to have any force or effect.
When Thomas Jefferson, a Virginian, wrote the first draft of the
Declaration of Independence, one of the strongest counts in his
splendid indictment of the British King was the charge that in these
and other cases he had forbidden the people of the colonies to put any
legal check upon the growth of this stupendous evil.
But when the Declaration was adopted by Congress and signed as the
young Republic's explanation of its revolutionary action, rendered
in obedience to "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind," the
great Virginian's arraignment of the King for having thus fostered
slavery in colonies that desired to be rid of it, did not appear in
that supreme document of state. We have Jefferson's own testimony that
it had been stricken out in deference to the will of those New England
merchants and capitalists whose ships and money found astonishingly
profitable employment in the slave trade between the coast of Africa
and the southern part of our country.
Thus while the holding of slaves in the more northerly colonies had
proved to be unprofitable and had to a great extent ceased at the time
of the Revolution, the traffic in slaves from Africa to the southern
parts of this country was so profitable an industry that even the
Declaration of Independence must be emasculated of one of its most
virile features in deference to the greed of gain.
And this dominance of interest over principle continued for long years
afterward. When the great convention that framed the Constitution was
in session, it was at first proposed to put an end to the slave trade
from Africa in the year 1800. An amendment was offered, extending
the license of that infamous traffic to the year 1808, and this
eight years' extension was adopted by a vote which included in the
affirmative every New England state represented in the convention,
Virginia voting steadfastly against it.
Those votes for the extension of the slave trade were given undoubtedly
in behalf of the mercantile interest of the maritime states of the
northeast, and they reflected no moral conviction whatsoever. For there
was at that time no moral conviction of the wrongfulness of slavery
anywhere in the country. The thought that the negro was a man, endowed
by his Creator with an unalienable right to "life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness," had not yet been born in America.
And even after thirty odd years, and a dozen years after the
constitutional prohibition of the African slave trade had gone into
effect, that unlawful traffic in human beings was still so gainful an
occupation to merchants and shipmasters, that Mr. Justice Joseph Story,
himself a New Englander and a judge of the Supreme Court of the United
States, was bitterly denounced by the New England press and public as
a judge who deserved to be "hurled from the bench," because he had
instructed grand juries that it was their sworn duty to indict the
men who were still engaged in the nefarious business of transporting
slaves, under conditions of unspeakable cruelty, from Africa to these
shores. The offense of that great jurist lay in the fact that he
regarded the demands of the constitution and the law as more binding
upon his character and conscience than the demands of the New England
slave traders whose very profitable business his insistence upon the
rigid enforcement of the law threatened to embarrass and destroy.
As there are now no advocates of slavery in our free land; as all of
us, North and South alike, are agreed that the institution was a curse
the maledictions of which endure to the present day in vexatious "race
problems;" it is possible and proper now to record all facts respecting
it with impartiality and without controversial intent. It is of supreme
importance to any clear understanding of this matter to bear in mind
the fact that our modern conceptions of human rights did not exist in
the earlier times; that the recognition of the negro as "a man and
a brother" is the birth of comparatively recent thought; that the
traffic in black human beings, captured in Africa and brought hither
for sale as laborers, excited no impulse of antagonism, offended no
moral sentiment, and seemed to nobody in the earlier times a violation
of those fundamental doctrines of human right upon which this Republic
is based. All that has been a glorious after-thought, and it is solely
with an expository purpose and not at all as a _tu quoque_ that these
facts of history are here set forth.
Surely the time is fully ripe in which men of the North and men of the
South may sit together in an impartial study of the causes of a quarrel
that brought them into armed conflict more than a generation ago and
may calmly consider without offense the sins of their forefathers
on either side, making due allowance for the lack of modern light
and leading as a guide to those forefathers. We must do this in this
spirit, if we would be fair. Still more imperatively must we do it if
history is ever to be written.
The period of controversy is past. The time of reckoning has come.
The time has come when the advocate holding a brief for the one or
the other party to the controversy should give place to the historian
intent only upon the task of discovering and recording fact. The
circumstance that there was grievous wrong on both sides does not rob
either of the credit due for the right that it supported.
After the revolution the great statesmen of our land manifested a
determined eagerness to free the country from slavery. John Adams and
Alexander Hamilton were not more energetic in this cause than were
Jefferson and other Southerners. When Virginia ceded to the Federal
Government all her claims to the territory northwest of the Ohio river,
it was Thomas Jefferson, the Virginian slaveholder, who insisted upon
writing into the deed of cession a provision that slavery should never
be permitted in any part of that fair land which now constitutes the
states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.
George Wythe, under whose tuition Henry Clay studied law, was by all
odds the greatest jurist that Virginia ever produced, with the single
exception of John Marshall. George Wythe was one of those whom Mr.
Carl Schurz has in our own times characterized as "the Revolutionary
abolitionists." They were the men of the South who regarded slavery
as an imposed and hereditary curse to be got rid of by any means that
did not threaten the social fabric with destruction and the country
itself with chaos and black night. George Wythe absolutely impoverished
himself--born to vast wealth as he was--in setting free the negroes
whom he had inherited as slaves and in providing them with the means of
establishing themselves in bread-winning ways. For, as he expressed it,
"I have no right to set these people free to starve."
He gave them their liberty and with it a piece of land for each, on
which with ordinary industry and thrift they could surely make a
living for themselves and their families. Then he set to work, a man
stripped of all his ancestral possessions and impoverished by his own
act of justice, to earn a living as a Virginian lawyer. So far from
having offended his fellow Virginians by his act of emancipation, he
had won their esteem and their reverence. He became their chancellor
and the most honored judge upon their bench.
Thousands of other Virginians of lesser note than George Wythe did
substantially the same thing, though less conspicuously. Under the law
after a time they could not set their slaves free without sending them
beyond the borders of the state. Many of them found this condition a
paralyzing one. They must pay off the hereditary debts of their estates
and they must buy in the West little but sufficient farms for their
inherited negro slaves to live upon if they would set those slaves
free. These things many of them did at cost of personal impoverishment,
while many others, like-minded, found conditions beyond their control.
If the whole story of that Virginian effort to be rid of slavery by
individual and grandly self-sacrificing effort could be told here or
elsewhere, the angels of justice and mercy would rejoice to read the
page on which the wonder tale was written. But the heroes who did these
deeds of self-sacrifice for principle were mainly obscure men of whose
names there remains no record. Only here and there a great name like
that of George Wythe appears. Among these is the name of John Randolph
of Roanoke,--most insistently cantankerous of Southerners--who left
a will freeing all his slaves on grounds of human right. And though
that will was defeated of its purpose by a legal technicality, it is
immeasurably valuable as a fact in history which reflects the sentiment
of that time among those who had inherited and who held slaves and even
among those who, like Randolph, are commonly regarded as the special
champions of slavery.
And this desire of Southern men to be rid of slavery did not cease
until the very end. Very many Southerners whose consciences dominated
their lives, deliberately and painstakingly educated their negroes
for freedom in the hope and assurance that sooner or later, by one
means or by another, freedom would come to them. There were planters
not a few who used their authority as the masters of slaves to compel
their negroes to cultivate little fields of their own and to put aside
the proceeds thereof, as a fund with which to meet the surely coming
freedom face to face, with no fear of starvation as a circumstance of
embarrassment.
Henry Clay studied law under Virginia's great chancellor, George Wythe.
From his distinguished Virginian teacher he learned the lesson that
slavery--forced upon an unwilling people in the Southern part of this
country by kingly and corporate greed, and still further forced upon
those regions by the greed of merchants and shipmasters, even after
the traffic that fed it had been prohibited by the Constitution and
by the law--was an evil and a curse, a wrong to the black man and a
demoralizing influence to the white. He saw clearly that it was the
task of all good men to exterminate that evil root and branch, by such
means as might be found available, without the destruction of society
as a necessary incident or consequence. In the young state of Kentucky
Henry Clay began his political career as an advocate of rational and
gradual emancipation, and to his dying day--involved as he was in all
the strenuous controversies to which the slavery issue gave rise in
national politics--he never lost his interest in this behalf or abated
his efforts to secure its accomplishment. A plea for the extermination
of slavery was the first plea he ever presented to the people whom he
asked to support him for public office. A plea for the extirpation of
slavery was well-nigh the last that he ever urged upon the people of
his state after all that was possible of honor had been conferred upon
him by their approving will.
So enduring was this sentiment at the South that John Letcher, the
Democratic war governor of Virginia, the man who set Lee to organize
the state's forces for the Confederate war, the man who created
the Army of Northern Virginia and made possible all its splendid
achievements, was in fact elected governor because of his abolitionist
sentiments.
Mr. Letcher was strongly imbued with that conviction which had
dominated the best minds of Virginia from colonial days, that slavery
was a curse to be got rid of and not at all an institution to be
defended upon its merits. He had publicly urged the necessity of
getting rid of it. He had explained to his fellow Virginians, in public
utterances, its demoralizing influence upon the young white men of
that commonwealth. Finally, so eager was he to rid his native state of
the incubus that he deliberately proposed the one thing most offensive
to the Virginian mind, namely, the division of the "Old Dominion" into
two states in order that the western half of it at least might be free
from slavery. When he stood as a candidate for governor in the last
election before the war, all these facts were used against him to the
utmost by the advocates of slavery and they undoubtedly deprived him
of many thousands of votes east of the Alleghenies. The first returns
indicated the election of his adversary, William L. Goggin, by an
overwhelming majority. But when the figures came in from the western
part of the state, where slavery scarcely at all survived, John Letcher
was elected. Thus the anti-slavery sentiment gave to the foremost state
of the Southern Confederacy its singularly earnest and efficient war
governor.
But side by side with this anti-slavery sentiment in the South, there
grew up a pro-slavery sentiment which was buttressed by every impulse
of gain that it is possible for the human mind to conceive.
Near the end of the eighteenth century, Eli Whitney made slavery
enormously profitable by his invention of the cotton-gin. Before that
time slavery had been of more than doubtful profit to the people of the
states that permitted it. It was not at all an economical labor system.
It required the master to give to the laborer, in lieu of wages, such
food, habitation, clothing, nursing in illness and care in infancy and
old age, as no laboring population in the world has ever before or
since received in return for its labor. It involved pension as well as
payment. It imposed upon the employer obligations such as no employer
in all the world, before or since, has been willing to assume.
But Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton-gin made the payment of such
wages possible and profitable. It made it possible for a plantation
owner to grow rich while feeding, housing, clothing and caring for his
negroes as no other employer has fed, housed, clothed and cared for his
working people since the foundations of the world were laid.
Eli Whitney's invention made illimitable cotton a substitute for costly
and narrowly limited linen and in a great degree for good. It made it
possible for every man in all the world to put a shirt on his back,
a pair of sheets on his bed, a case on his pillow, and to clothe his
wife in calico and his children in cottonade where before all these
luxuries were denied to him and his by inexorable laws of economics.
But incidentally that invention made slavery enormously profitable,
where before it had been doubtfully profitable. Eliza Lucas of South
Carolina, afterwards Eliza Pinckney, had sought to find profitable
employment for her slaves by cultivating indigo. Other enterprising
experimenters had explored other avenues of earning, but not one of
them had found a way of making profitable the ownership of slaves until
Eli Whitney devised a machine by the use of which any ignorant negro
could remove the seed from three thousand pounds of cotton in a single
day, where before one negro man or woman could remove the seed from
only one pound or at the most a few pounds. From that hour forward,
negro slavery became profitable in the South, and from that hour forth
it stood as a "vested interest" with its influence as such in politics.
Let us not misunderstand. The cultivation of cotton by free labor
has exceeded in its productiveness by more than two to one, that
cultivation under the slave system. As has already been set forth in
these pages, the greatest cotton crop ever grown before the war with
which we here have to deal amounted only to 4,669,770 bales, while
under free labor the annual production rose to an average of more than
11,000,000 bales in the closing years of the century which saw the
extinction of slavery.
Yet there is no doubt or possibility of doubt that Eli Whitney's
invention of the cotton-gin near the end of the eighteenth century made
negro slavery profitable as it had never been before in this country.
It enabled the planter to grow rich upon the proceeds of the labor of
negro slaves whose industry had before produced scarcely more than
enough to support themselves. It created a new era. It inaugurated a
new epoch. It instigated a new sentiment in favor of slavery, where
before the sentiment had been tending the other way.
In considering human affairs historically it is very necessary to
bear in mind that men ordinarily have no opinions. If by "opinions"
we mean well considered judgments, founded upon an orderly reasoning
from accepted premises, then opinions are the very rarest of human
possessions. If we are told that a particular person was born and
bred in Spain, we know without further inquiry what his religious
convictions are. If we learn that he is a Turk we perfectly know his
so-called opinions upon the subject of matrimony. We take for granted
the views of the Puritans' sons and daughters concerning religion. We
know, without asking, what the "opinions" of any American are with
respect to the Declaration of Independence. We know that, with the
exception of a very few men, all the people of the South were firmly
convinced that the cause of the South in the Confederate war was a
just one; that the National Government had no conceivable right to
coerce recalcitrant states; that secession was an absolute right of
the states, and all the rest of it. On the other hand we know that
the Northern boy who had declaimed Webster's reply to Hayne was fully
imbued with the conviction that "Liberty and Union" were "now and
forever, one and inseparable."
In other words, with here and there an exception, men's opinions are
determined by geography, tradition, circumstance, self-interest and the
like.
Thus when New England's chief interest was maritime and commercial,
Daniel Webster was the most radical of free-traders. He held up to
ridicule and contumely Henry Clay's protective "American system" and
showed conclusively that nothing in the world could be more utterly
un-American. But a few years later, when New England's interests were
centered in manufactures, Daniel Webster's opinions became those of
an extreme protectionist. In the same way he opposed a national bank
so long as New England disliked that institution and favored it the
moment New England desired its continuance. In like manner John C.
Calhoun began by clamoring for the tariff protection of Southern
industries and developed into the chief apostle of nullification as a
means of escaping protective tariffs. Similarly Clay began by making so
absolutely conclusive an argument against a national bank that Andrew
Jackson afterwards quoted it as the best possible plea he could offer
in support of his warfare upon that institution after Clay had become
its chief apostle.
Men ordinarily have no opinions except so far as self-interest,
geography, and circumstance determine them and in considering matters
of history it is of the utmost importance to recognize that truth.
In the last analysis, therefore, Southern opinion was determined in
behalf of slavery by the cotton-gin. And yet the greater number of
Southern men were not slaveholders and so had no personal interest
in the institution. Their opinions were merely a reflection of
the sentiment that surrounded them. That sentiment was born of
self-interest on the part of a small but dominant class and it drew to
itself the sentiment of that much more numerous class--the white man
who owned no negroes. Of the white men in the Confederate army, who
made so unmatched a fight for Southern independence, not one in five
had ever owned a slave or expected to own one.
And there was another influence at work all this while to create a
sentiment at the South in favor of slavery as an institution right
in itself, where before it had been almost uniformly regarded as an
entail of evil. The circumstances of the national life forced this
question into politics and made of it an incalculably exasperating
issue.
The Nation having acquired the vast Louisiana territory, invitingly
fruitful as it was, the question arose "What shall we do with it?"
Men from all quarters of the country wanted to go in and "possess the
land." Those of them who came from the South very naturally desired
to take their negro servants with them into the new territories, and
at first they did so without let or hindrance. Even the Indians of
Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Alabama, when
removed, practically by compulsion, to the Indian Territory west
of the Mississippi years later were freely permitted to take their
negro slaves with them, nobody gainsaying their right. In like manner
Southern men emigrating to Missouri took their slaves with them without
so much as a question of their right to do so. And when Missouri,
in 1819, became sufficiently populous to justify an application for
statehood, a majority of the settlers in that region desired that
African slavery should be permitted there.
In the meantime, the Northern states, now completely emancipated from
slavery within their own borders, had more and more learned to detest
the system. There had grown up in the North an intense moral sentiment
in antagonism to the further extension of slavery. There had grown up
also an intense economic opposition to the system. It was felt that the
very existence of slavery in any region tended to degrade free labor
and to make of the laborer an inferior person not entitled to respect,
a person not quite a slave but still not quite a freeman.
It was, nevertheless, not deemed reputable to advocate the abolition
of slavery. The term "Abolitionist" was then, and for a generation
afterwards continued to be, the most opprobrious epithet that one man
could apply to another.
Nevertheless when Missouri sought admission to the Union as a slave
state, the opposition was intense, determined, angry.
Then came Henry Clay with a compromise. Earnestly desiring the
extinction of the slave system, it was that statesman's fate to do
more than any other man of his era in behalf of the perpetuation and
extension of the institution which he regarded as a curse and an
incubus. There was one other thing for which he cared far more than
he did for the extinction of slavery. In common with Webster and most
others of the statesmen of that time he was more deeply concerned for
the preservation and perpetuation of the Union than for any other
matter that appealed to his mind. His attitude was identical with that
of Mr. Lincoln while the war was on, when he declared his sole purpose
to be the restoration of the Union and proclaimed his conviction that
the question of slavery and all other questions were in his mind
subordinate to that.
Clay saw grave danger to the Union in this Missouri controversy. In
order to avert that danger, and regardless of everything else, he
brought forward his compromise and succeeded in securing its enactment
into law.
Under that compromise Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave
state; but it was stipulated that no other slave state should be carved
out of territory north of 36° 80´ north latitude, that being the
southern boundary line of Missouri.
In practical effect this compromise excluded slavery from all future
states to be created out of the vast region embraced in the Louisiana
Purchase, except the territory of Arkansas. Louisiana was already a
state. Missouri was permitted by the compromise itself to become a
state. The Indian Territory was forever set apart for a special purpose
and, it was then held, could never become a state. There was no other
acre of the Louisiana Purchase lying south of the line fixed by the
compromise as the extreme northern limit to which the institution might
extend. Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, California, Nevada, Colorado
and the rest were still Mexican possessions which the great Republic
had not then the remotest thought of acquiring. On the other hand
there were all the vast, fruitful regions now known as Iowa, Kansas,
Nebraska, Minnesota, the Dakotas and the states lying to the west of
them into which by this agreement slavery might never go, from which
it was supposedly as effectually excluded as it had been from Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin by that clause which Thomas
Jefferson--in his eagerness to make an end of the system--had written
into the deed of cession by which the Northwest Territory became a
national possession.
Clay fondly believed that this Missouri Compromise of his devising
had finally laid to rest the entire controversy with regard to
slavery. Thirty odd years later he was still laboring to induce his
own state, Kentucky, to adopt a system of gradual emancipation, but in
the meanwhile history had written itself in another way and in direct
antagonism to his views.
There had grown up at the North an intolerance of slavery which freely
expressed itself in denunciation of those who supported or countenanced
the institution. There had grown up at the South a sentiment in
advocacy of slavery such as did not exist in that region in the
earlier years of the Republic. Men whose fathers and grandfathers had
diligently sought means by which to free their native land of a curse,
had little by little come to regard that curse as a blessing. Men whose
forefathers had regarded slavery as an inherited misfortune, came to
regard the institution as right in itself and to defend it as the best,
most generous, and most humane labor system in the world. In support of
this contention they could point to the factory system of old England,
and New England and argue with some truth that nowhere in the world was
labor so generously rewarded as at the South.
Moreover, the antagonism to the system which had developed at the
North had its very natural reflex effect. The offensive terms in which
slave owners were habitually spoken of in Northern prints were well
calculated to impel Southern men to the angry and intemperate defense
of their system. Still more effective in breeding a "thick and thin"
pro-slavery sentiment at the South were the aggressive measures taken
at the North for the annoyance of those who held slaves.
The laws for the rendition of fugitive slaves--not at that time so
strict as they were afterwards made--were habitually set at naught.
There existed a fairly well organized system called "the underground
railroad" by which slaves were induced to run away and by means of
which their flight was facilitated. All this was dictated by a profound
conviction on the part of those who engaged in it that slavery was an
institution so utterly wrong that any means by which its hold could be
impaired were right in morals, no matter what the law might say.
All this was done in defiance of law, in violation of the statutes
and in flagrant disregard of that compact of reciprocity upon which
the Union was founded. We are not concerned in the twentieth century
to discuss the question of the right or wrong of men's conduct in
the first half of the nineteenth. But if we would understand the
irritations that bred the war between the North and the South, we must
recognize not only all the facts but equally all the refinements by
which they were judged in their time.
For a time at least the Missouri Compromise took the sting out of the
slavery issue as a cause of controversy between the North and the
South. By that compromise the South had given up all claim further to
extend its institutions into any part of the vast and immeasurably
rich territory included in the Louisiana Purchase, with the single
exception of Arkansas. All the region that now constitutes Iowa,
Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, the two Dakotas--and all the vast
territories west of those states,--were foreordained by that agreement
to be erected into free states. South of the dead line established by
the agreement there remained the territory of Arkansas and nothing
else. Arkansas was admitted to the Union as a slave state in 1836 and
in the next year the balance of power in the Senate and the electoral
college was restored by the admission of Michigan as a free state.
There remained within the limits of our national domain no other acre
of territory except in Florida, into which under the terms of the
Missouri Compromise the southern emigrant could take his slave property
with him, while to the northern emigrant there was opened a possession
rivaling the greatest empires of earth in area and in prospective
productiveness.
But for twenty-five years the compromise served in a great degree to
allay the asperities of the slavery controversy. The anti-slavery
sentiment at the North was for the time satisfied with the assurance
that with the exceptions of Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas, all
the great domain embraced in the Louisiana Purchase was by that
compromise forever devoted to the system of free labor; that perhaps a
dozen prospective free states of inestimable wealth and incalculable
population were destined in the near future to be added to the Union,
while with the exceptions of Florida and Arkansas, no further slave
states could be created. The South in its turn was satisfied with the
recognition which the compromise gave to slave property as entitled to
equal protection in national law at least with other property.
CHAPTER IV
THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS
If matters had remained as they were, there is little room for doubt
that the settlement reached in the Missouri Compromise would have
endured for another generation at the least. It is true that, once
raised, the issue between free labor and slavery was, as Mr. Seward
afterwards said, "an irrepressible conflict." It is morally certain
that sooner or later, in one way or in another, it was bound to lead
to a decisive struggle either of war or of diplomacy between the
North and the South. But we are dealing now with facts and not with
probabilities; with events and not with conjectures; and the facts and
events strongly suggest that if no new condition had intervened to
disturb the settlement made by the Missouri Compromise, that adjustment
of the vexed and vexing slavery question would have endured for at
least a generation longer than in fact it did.
The new circumstance that intervened was the annexation of Texas. Texas
was a vast territory, undefined as to its limits at that time, but
covering an area eight or ten times greater than that of the largest
state then in the Union. It included the present state of Texas, New
Mexico, and a large area besides. It had been a part of Mexico, peopled
chiefly by emigrants from the United States under whose inspiration it
had revolted and achieved its independence as a republic.
Its desire for annexation to the Union was quite natural and inevitable
and but for slavery that desire would have been reciprocated throughout
the United States. It was easily foreseen, however, that the annexation
of this vast territory, lying as it did south of the line that set the
limit to slavery, would open to that institution an opportunity of
expansion scarcely less than that opened to free labor by the Missouri
Compromise.
The policy of annexation was bitterly opposed on this ground and
additionally because of the practical certainty that annexation would
involve a war with Mexico.
Years before that time, Henry Clay had severely criticized the
administration for having failed to insist upon our right to Texas as
a part of the Louisiana Purchase, but now, in his anxiety to keep the
slavery question out of politics because of the danger it involved to
the Union, he was strongly opposed to the annexation policy.
When, in 1844, it was deemed certain that Clay and Van Buren would be
the rival candidates for president, those statesmen, being personal
friends, met at Clay's residence at Ashland, and together planned to
keep the Texan question out of the coming campaign. Their agreement was
that each should publish a letter--at about the same time--opposing the
annexation of Texas and the ratification of the treaty, which was then
pending, to accomplish that purpose.
The letters were published, but their effect was precisely the reverse
of that which was intended. The Whigs nominated Clay by acclamation,
but the Democrats of the South took offense at Van Buren's letter and
nominated in his stead James K. Polk, an uncompromising advocate of
annexation. Thus the painstaking effort that had been made by Clay and
Van Buren to eliminate this annexation question from the presidential
campaign had for its actual effect the making of that question the
paramount issue of the contest.
Thus the slavery question became again dominant in national politics
with a greater disturbing force than ever. For the agitation in
politics of a question concerning which men's consciences or
self-interests are strongly enlisted--and this question involved
both--must always and everywhere intensify feeling, arouse passion and
consolidate partisan activity.
The result in this case was to intensify the sentiment of hostility
to slavery at the North and to break down the sentiment in behalf of
emancipation which had previously been strong though decreasing at the
South. The agitation of those years continued to the end, and in its
course it slowly but surely changed the conditions of the problem. At
the North it made anti-slavery endeavor respectable, where before it
had been looked upon with frowning as an activity which threatened
that Union which was the chief object of American adoration. At the
South, by putting men on the defensive and filling them with a feeling
that they were menaced in their homes, it slowly but surely broke down
the old conviction that slavery was an evil to be cured and ultimate
emancipation a national good to be sought by every safe means that
human ingenuity could devise.
At the North it gave birth to a party willing to sacrifice the Union
itself, in behalf of the cause of anti-slavery. At the South it gave
birth to a new party ready to defend and perpetuate slavery at all
hazards and at the cost of a dissolution of the Union if that should
become necessary.
In addition to this, as the years went on this new agitation of the
slavery question revived with added intensity the old jealousy which
the states had felt toward the national power. Of that we shall speak
later. Let us first outline the course of events.
Texas was annexed. The Mexican war followed, ending in the additional
annexation of an imperial domain including all that we now know as
California, Utah, Colorado, Nevada and the neighboring states and
territories. The question at once arose, What shall we do with these
new lands? A large part of them lay south of the slavery dead line.
Should that part be open to slavery? Texas, itself a slave state, was
authorized by the terms of the contract of annexation to form itself
into four states with eight senators and at least twelve electoral
votes which a rapid immigration might increase to twenty or forty
within a brief while. Arizona and New Mexico, claimed by Texas as a
part of its domain, seemed practically certain to become independent
states. California,--even now extending from the latitude of Boston to
the latitude of Savannah and reaching inland half as far as from the
Atlantic to the Mississippi--had at least one-half its area and the
better half, lying south of the Missouri Compromise line. Moreover the
terms of the compromise did not forbid the extension of slavery even
into the whole of the California country, a region that might easily
be carved into ten or a dozen states, for the restrictions of the
compromise applied only to territory acquired by the Louisiana Purchase.
Here surely was cause enough for controversy. And a new reason had
arisen for intense obstinacy in controversy. Let us consider this a
little carefully. The anti-slavery agitation at the North was growing
more and more aggressively hostile. In common with the pro-slavery
sentiment at the South it had begun to appeal to the old and dying
sentiment of states' rights for the justification of its attitude,
thus reviving a controversy between the national sovereignty and the
independence of the states, which had been largely allayed by the
progress of time.
Northern states refused to make themselves parties to slavery even at
command of the Federal Government. They refused to lend their courts
and jails and sheriffs to the work of returning to slavery negroes who
had run away from bondage at the South. They enacted laws in assertion
of their State sovereignty which in effect nullified the laws of the
Nation and effectually obstructed their execution. We are writing now
of the period from 1845 to 1860, and not of a particular year.
Here was that revival of the old states' rights controversy with the
Federal authority, of which mention has been made before.
It was met on the other side by an equally determined assertion of
states' rights. There was nowhere any question that every state in the
Union--except as forbidden by the cession of the Northwest Territory or
by the Missouri Compromise--had full authority to sanction or forbid
the institution of slavery within its own borders at its own free will.
But there was a party at the North which contended that slavery was a
wrong so enormous that it ought to be exterminated by the high hand of
Federal force; that the disruption of the Union as an incident to such
extermination of the system would be a small price to pay for an end so
beneficent. The abolitionists denounced the Constitution itself as "a
covenant with hell," because it permitted the several states to decide
for themselves whether or not they would permit African slavery within
their borders, and because it authorized laws compelling the rendition
of fugitive slaves.
On the other hand there was growing up at the South a party that
preferred the disruption of the Union to a longer continuance of
existing conditions, a party weary of struggling for what it held to be
the rights of the states under the Constitution and disposed instead
to resort to the ultimate right of withdrawal from the Union which the
South claimed then, as New England had claimed it during the war of
1812, as a reserved privilege of the states.
The slavery question had not only entered again into national politics,
but had become well-nigh the only question of politics, state and
national.
Congress was flooded with daily petitions for the abolition of slavery
in the District of Columbia and for the prohibition of the sale of
slaves from one state to another. Southern and some Northern members
opposed the reception of these petitions and endeavored to secure rules
to lay them on the table without debate and without reference to any
committee. This policy was stoutly opposed on the ground that it was
in derogation of that "right to petition" which in all free lands is
held to be inherent in the citizen. Debate ran high on this and like
questions, and became intensely acrimonious.
When the peace settlement with Mexico was pending, a bill to authorize
the rectification of boundaries by the purchase of a large territory
from Mexico was presented in Congress. Mr. Wilmot of Pennsylvania, in
1846, moved as an amendment a proviso--known in history as "The Wilmot
Proviso"--stipulating that slavery should never be permitted in any of
the territory to be thus acquired.
This additionally intensified the controversy, and while the Wilmot
Proviso, though adopted by the House of Representatives, was rejected
by the Senate and never became law, its suggestion and the House's
adoption of it were accepted by the South as an additional evidence
of the uncompromising hostility of the anti-slavery party, and of a
determination at the North to use the Federal power for the limitation,
the restriction and the ultimate extermination of slavery.
In the meantime a sentiment against abolitionism had grown up at the
North which was implacably intolerant of opinion. Owen Lovejoy was
put to death by an Illinois mob for his offense in publishing an
aggressively abolitionist newspaper. Other men suffered persecution
upon similar account. Newspaper offices were wrecked and their
proprietors sorely dealt with by mobs in states which by their organic
law forbade slavery and the people of which had no interest in the
institution. They regarded all abolitionist movements as agitations
seriously threatening the Union and recklessly risking the public
peace. They were ready to resort to mob violence by way of repressing
activities which they regarded as destructive of public order and
seriously menacing to the Union, which had come to be an object of
adoration to the great majority of Americans.
Thus the controversy involved violence and lawlessness at the North
even more than at the South.
Again the anti-slavery propagandists at the North were men of shrewd
intelligence as well as men of profound convictions as to the absolute
righteousness of their cause. They believed without doubt or question
that anything which might help to destroy slavery was right. To
that end they were ready to violate law, to commit acts which the
law--improperly as they thought--denounced as criminal, and even to
destroy the American Republic if by that means they could extirpate the
system of human bondage. They were devotees of a cause that admitted
of no compromise or qualification. They were crusaders at war who
regarded all means as righteous that might lead to what they believed
to be a righteous end. This is not the place in which to question the
correctness of their belief or to criticize their conduct. Our concern
is merely to record the facts and trace the consequences of them.
The mails offered an easy and convenient means by which these
propagandists could address themselves to other minds than their own,
or those in known sympathy with them. Accordingly they freely used the
mails as a means of impressing their anti-slavery convictions upon
black men or white at the South.
To them the literature which they sought thus to circulate in the South
was nothing more than an appeal to reason and the sense of right. But
to the Southerner, whose family was at the mercy of a multitude of
slaves, it seemed a very different thing and one immeasurably more
menacing. To him it seemed an incitement to servile insurrection
in a region where such an insurrection could not fail to result in
unspeakable horrors and calamities.
It is a fact imperfectly understood outside of the South that the
average negro there was not at all such as the planter usually carried
about with him in the capacity of body servant to himself or maid to
his wife or daughter; not at all the "intelligent contraband" so dear
to the newsgatherers of the war time; not at all a Booker T. Washington
or a Frederick Douglass, or a Blanche K. Bruce or a Montgomery, but a
hopelessly ignorant, passion-impregnated, half-savage, held to good
behavior only by fear of the white man's superior power. On the coast
of South Carolina and in other regions the negro was in many cases even
a whole savage--recently imported, clad in breech clout and ebonized
nakedness and unable to speak or understand any language except the
Congo gibberish to which he had been born.
Of course literature made no direct appeal to creatures of such sort.
But there were many educated or at least literate negroes at the
South--some of them slaves and some of them "free men of color" as the
law phrase at that time ran. If incited thereto, these intelligent
blacks might very easily have organized the physical force of the
multitude of more ignorant negroes for an insurrection which would
have involved the wholesale slaughter of white women and children and
a servile war more horrible in its incidents and consequences than any
that the world has known since time itself began.
It was altogether natural that the anti-slavery agitators who had made
up their minds to destroy slavery at all hazards and at all costs and
who held all other considerations to be but as dust in the balance in
comparison with that one supreme desire of their souls, should seek
by means of the mails to propagate their ideas in the South and among
the slaves themselves. But it was equally natural that the white men
of the South, whose wives and children as well as themselves and their
property were menaced by such a possibility, should seek to avert it
by any means within their grasp. Their impulse was dictated by the
primal human instinct of self-preservation--an instinct that listens
to no argument and stops at no act which may be necessary to avert the
impending danger.
These people saw their hearthstones menaced by this use of the mails.
They saw in the mails a certain socialistic use of the people's power
for a common purpose. They paid taxes for the maintenance of those
mails, and they could not see why a mail system which represented
and was supported by all the people of all the states should be used
for the destruction and desecration of the homes of a part of those
people--for the instigation of a servile revolt which could not fail
to result in horrors so unspeakable that we may not even suggest them,
except vaguely, in this place.
Since that time it has become a commonplace of law to forbid the use
of the mails to those who would use them for any purpose inimical to
the public welfare; but at that time this thought had gained no place
in postal administration, and the desire of the Southerners to purge
the mails of incendiary literature which threatened to create a servile
insurrection with all its necessarily horrible accompaniments, was put
aside as an effort to "tamper with the mail." Contrary to all modern
conceptions as to the mails it was held that they were sacred alike to
good and to evil purposes and that any matter deposited in them must be
delivered to the person to whom it was addressed in utter disregard of
any question of public polity and in absolute indifference to the use
which the person addressed might be disposed to make of the printed or
written matter sent to him.
In our time, where the post office refuses even to rent a box to
any man who cannot demonstrate to the postmaster his need of it for
legitimate business purposes, and when the delivery of men's mail
is deliberately and quite unquestioningly stopped by the postal
authorities upon the mere suspicion that their business may be in
some way detrimental to the public welfare, we find it difficult
to understand why the Southern objection to the distribution of
dangerously incendiary matter through the mails--matter which
threatened those American citizens with massacre for themselves and
something immeasurably worse than massacre for their womankind--should
not have received respectful attention.
In the light of our modern postal practice it is difficult to
understand the anger and resentment with which the demand of the
Southerners was received for the exclusion from the mails of matter
the circulation of which threatened themselves, their homes and
their families with calamities too horrible to be contemplated with
complacency.
But it must be remembered that on the other hand the extirpation of
slavery was confidently believed to be an end so righteous as to
justify any means that might be employed for its accomplishment; that
the holding of men in bondage, whether willingly or unwillingly,
whether by virtue of an inheritance that carried other and controlling
obligations with it, or by the speculative purchase of men's labor,
was a crime deserving of any calamity that might fall upon those who
participated in it in the process of its extinction.
In other words there was intolerance on both sides; misunderstanding on
both; an utter failure on each side to grasp the considerations that
controlled the acts of men on the other side; a fanatical dogmatism
on the one side and upon the other that was open to no argument, no
consideration of fact or circumstance, no reasoning of any kind.
Thus came about the "irrepressible conflict." These were the influences
that created it and forced it to an issue of politics. How it resulted
in the most stupendous war of modern times must be related in other
chapters.
CHAPTER V
THE COMPROMISE OF 1850
The Mexican war and the subsequent negotiations added a vast territory
to the national domain. Much of it lay south of the Missouri Compromise
line, and into that part of it at least the advocates of slavery
confidently expected to extend their labor system.
The introduction of the Wilmot Proviso and its passage by the House did
not indeed result in the exclusion of slavery from those territories,
for the reason that the proviso, failing in the Senate, did not become
law.
But it alarmed the South. By the Southerners of the more radical
pro-slavery school it was accepted as a notice to quit; a notification
that so far as Northern anti-slavery sentiment could control the
matter, there was to be no further addition of a single acre to the
slave territory of the Union; that so far as that sentiment could
influence national politics, the power of the Federal Government was
thenceforth and forever to be exercised to prevent the extension of
slavery into any new territory acquired or to be acquired by the Union
north or south of the Missouri Compromise line, and in the end to
abolish the system altogether.
Let us clearly understand this situation. The Wilmot Proviso and all
the attempted legislation, by which it was sought to confine slavery
within the boundaries prescribed for it by existing conditions, seemed
to the opponents of slavery merely a legitimate effort to emphasize
the fact that free labor was national, while slavery was a permitted
evil within prescribed limits permitted solely because within those
limits the national power was not authorized to exert itself for the
extermination of the system. On the other hand, all these things seemed
to the Southern mind to be an utterly unjust discrimination against
a part of the people. The territories involved in the controversy
had become national possessions, they contended, largely through the
activities of Southern men and Southern statesmanship. It was felt to
be a grievous wrong that Southern men should be forbidden to emigrate
to those territories on equal terms with other citizens of the Union or
that thus emigrating they should be forbidden to take with them their
slave property, which represented in part their industrial system but
in far greater part their domestic life.
The very proposal thus to exclude them from an equal participation in
the opportunities and the privileges opened to other citizens of the
Republic by the acquisition of these new territories seemed to them
a threat, a notification that henceforth they were to be treated not
as citizens of the Union entitled to the same protection and the same
privileges that were extended to other citizens, but as inferior and
offending persons, persons graciously permitted to exist, but persons
to be excluded, because of their offenses, from an equal participation
in the conquests and land purchases of the Nation and from the
enjoyment of a share of the benefits resulting from the addition of a
great and immeasurably rich territory to the national domain.
It is true that the proposal of their exclusion had failed to become
law. But it had failed by a margin so narrow that its success might
easily be anticipated as an event of the near future. It is true that
neither the Wilmot Proviso nor any other legislation suggested at that
time sought to forbid Southerners to migrate into the new territories.
But it was proposed that they should be forbidden by law to take with
them into those territories the slaves upon whose services they relied
not only for agricultural work, but even more for that domestic service
to which they had been accustomed all their lives to look for comfort.
To tell them that they might remove their households into the new
territories, but at the same time to say to them that they must leave
behind all that had before contributed to their prosperity and to the
comfort of their domestic arrangements, seemed to them something worse
than a mockery.
Out of the agitation of these questions arose very important events.
The old sentiment at the South in favor of a gradual emancipation of
the slaves, though it survived in some degree to the end, gave place,
in large measure, to a new sentiment in behalf of slavery as a thing
right in itself, a sentiment born of the instinct of self-preservation.
The manifest disposition to exclude slavery from the newly acquired
Southern possessions prompted the men of the South to question the
Missouri Compromise itself. The spirit of that compromise had been that
slave property might be taken into territories south of 36° 30´ north
latitude, with the assurance that such territories might become slave
states, in return for the stipulation of the South that all territory
lying north of that line should be forever exempted from slavery. When
the new territory was acquired from Mexico, a large part of it lying
south of that line, it was naturally expected that in those regions
the people of the slave states were to find an outlet for emigration
as freely as those of the Northern states found a like outlet north of
that line. When a determined effort was made, with every prospect of
success, to deny even this to them, they began seriously to question
a compromise by which they had surrendered so much and seemed now
destined to gain so little. They had secured Arkansas and Missouri as
outlets for their superfluous, discontented, unfortunate or specially
enterprising population; they had surrendered all claim to an equal
opportunity in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, the Dakotas and
all the rest of the rich regions embraced in the Louisiana Purchase.
Obviously, it seemed to them, they had made a bad bargain, and now that
they were threatened with a denial of their share in the benefits of
it, so far as the territory acquired from Mexico was concerned, they
were disposed to repent them of it or at the very least to question the
extent to which its terms were binding on themselves.
The compromise, they reflected, was merely a matter of statutory law.
It had no constitutional obligation back of it. It had been enacted
by one congress. It could be repealed by another. In answer to the
threat to disregard its spirit in dealing with the new territories, the
Southerners made the counter-threat to repeal the compromise itself.
It was all very natural, very human, but to the Republic it was very
dangerous.
The lands that lay north of the dead line were still territories and
still for the most part unoccupied. Nothing more binding than an
easily repealable statute forbade Southerners to migrate into those
territories with their negroes and in due time, by out-voting Northern
immigrants, to make slave states of them. The essence of the compromise
they held to be, that in return for the prohibition of slavery north
of 36° 30´ north latitude, slavery should be freely permitted in all
regions lying south of that line if the people settling there should
so decide. If the contract was to be repudiated on the one hand, why,
they asked, should it not be equally repudiated on the other? If the
Missouri Compromise was to carry with it none of the benefits it
conferred on the South why should it be held binding upon the South for
the benefit of the North?
This seems to have been the thought and attitude of the South at that
time, and it soon found expression in legislation and in attempted
legislation.
The discovery of gold in California quickly resulted in such a
peopling of that region as made its admission to the Union as a state
a necessity. The settlers there were mainly from the North and they
naturally had no desire to make a slave state out of the territory.
Without waiting for an enabling act they adopted a constitution in 1849
and knocked at the doors of the Union for admission as a free state.
Instantly the South took alarm. Quite half of California lay south
of 36° 30´ north latitude. Apart from its gold, the region promised
harvests of grain and fruit of incalculably greater value even than
all the output of all its mines. There was nothing in the Missouri
Compromise or in any other legislation to forbid the whole of
California to become a slave state. There was only the decision of the
people in that part of the country that they wanted the state to be
free and that decision was not by any means unanimous. On the contrary
it was believed to be at least possible that if the territory were
divided into two substantially equal parts the southern half of it
would elect to become a slave state.
This added enormously to the acrimony of the slavery controversy. There
had from the beginning been accepted in the country a half formulated
theory of the necessity of maintaining a "balance of power" between
the opposing systems of slavery and free labor so far at least as the
Senate, representing the states as such without regard to population,
was concerned. From the beginning slave and free states had been
admitted to the Union in effect in couples. Thus Vermont, admitted in
1791, was balanced by Kentucky, admitted in 1792. Tennessee came in
in 1796 with no free state comrade till 1803, when Ohio was admitted.
Louisiana, admitted in 1812, was offset by Indiana which became a
state in 1816. Mississippi was admitted in 1817 and Illinois in the
following year. Alabama, admitted in 1819, was balanced by Maine in
1820. Missouri came in in 1821 by a compromise that more than offset
the omission to create a corresponding and compensatory free state. But
when Arkansas was admitted in 1836, Michigan was thrown into the other
scale in 1837. Florida and Texas, annexed in 1845, were balanced by
Iowa in 1846 and Wisconsin in 1848. But for California as a free state
there was no peopled region that could be carved into a compensatory
slave state and for that reason, as well as because of the rise of the
anti-slavery agitation to fever heat, the controversy about 1850 took
on an angrier tone than ever, and one more seriously threatening to the
Union.
The people of the country at that time might justly have been divided
into three classes, viz:
1. Those extreme opponents of slavery who were ready and eager to
sacrifice the Union itself and the Constitution to the accomplishment
of their emancipating purpose;
2. Those extreme pro-slavery men who were equally ready to wreck the
Union in order to perpetuate and extend the system of slave labor;
3. Those intense lovers of the Union, North and South, who were ready
to put aside and sacrifice their convictions for or against slavery
in order to save the Nation from disruption with all its horrible
consequences of civil war.
This last class was at that time a dominant majority and for long
afterwards it exercised a controlling and restraining influence over
all the rest. It included men at the South who earnestly desired the
extinction of slavery, and other men at the South who were sincerely
convinced that the slave system was absolutely necessary to the
cultivation of Southern fields and that its perpetuation was justified
by the incurable inferiority of the black race, and the hopeless
incapacity of the negro for freedom and self-government. At the North
the class of those who cared more for the perpetuity of the Union than
for either the extinction or the perpetuation of slavery included men
of every shade of belief as regarded slavery itself, except the extreme
opponents of the system. It included such men as Abraham Lincoln who,
even after the war was on, persisted in holding to his heart as his
supreme desire the perpetuity of the Union in order, as he splendidly
phrased it in his Gettysburg speech, that "Government of the people by
the people and for the people might not perish from the earth."
It was a magnificent conflict of human forces. Incidentally it brought
into play passion, prejudice, malice, groveling self-interest and
brutal disregard of others' rights and feelings. But in large part
it was dominated, on the one side and upon the other, by a love of
liberty, an instinct of justice and an exalted patriotism that did
honor to those who were so inspired.
All these sentiments and aspirations were variously directed, giving
rise sometimes to contradictory courses of action. But he who
would understand and interpret the events of that time must fully
conceive the fact that the inspiring impulses of the great majority
were essentially and fundamentally the same on both sides, however
variously they may have been interpreted into conduct. Only thus shall
we understand how it was that men on opposite sides of a geographical
line, men equally loving liberty and equally holding in reverence the
traditions of the American Union, fell a-fighting in 1861 and for four
years waged the bloodiest and most devastating war of which modern
history anywhere makes record.
The controversy with respect to California and the territories was only
a part of the disturbing influences of the middle of the nineteenth
century.
The Constitution of the United States, in Section 3 of Article IV,
distinctly imposed upon the states and upon the people thereof the duty
of returning to their masters all fugitive slaves who might escape from
one state to another. That provision of the Constitution was resented,
even to the point of violence by the antagonists of slavery; it was
insisted upon by the advocates of slavery--in the North as well as in
the South--to the border-land of crime. It was defeated of its purpose,
not only by the acts of individuals banded together with express intent
to nullify it in practice, but still more by laws enacted in many
states at the North to facilitate its nullifications. The law officers
of many states either refused to exercise their authority for the
enforcement of this law or going further, employed their authority to
prevent its enforcement.
Let us frankly recognize the fact that these men were in effect
disunionists, and the further fact that they were such upon
conscientious conviction. All this was done in full faith that it
was right and in response to the requirements of conscience. But
it was done in flagrant violation of the constitutional compact. We
may sympathize with the impulses of the sheriff or other officer who
refused to aid in the return of an escaping negro to slavery, and still
more easily we may sympathize with those unofficial persons who fed and
housed and expedited escaping slaves, in their refusal to aid a system
of human bondage of which they were conscientiously intolerant, but on
the other hand we may not justly blink the fact that all this was in
disobedience of the fundamental law of the land, in violation of that
compact on which alone the Union rested, and in derogation of property
rights which the compact of union pledged all the states to enforce and
all the people to respect.
The whole trouble lay in the fact that there was an "irrepressible
conflict" between the ideas that were dominant North and South and that
laws and constitutions, and compacts, and agreements were powerless
to enforce themselves or to get themselves enforced in opposition to
intense conviction and strongly felt sentiment.
The feeling on both sides ran high and was intensely intolerant. It was
heedless of reason or argument. It scoffed at compacts and agreements.
It made of legal obligations a mockery and of constitutional
requirements a laughing stock.
It entered also into every relation of life and mischievously disturbed
every such relation. It divided families. It disrupted churches,
producing divisions in them, some of which--most of which indeed--have
not been healed even in our present time when the war and slavery and
all things pertaining to them are matters of history.
Along the line of the Ohio river, where one brother had gone across
the narrow stream to Indiana in search of fortune while another had
remained behind in Kentucky, the specter of this implacable controversy
wrought an estrangement that was at once cruel and unnatural. Skiffs
lined the opposing shores. Intercourse was easy and the waterway
between was of trifling width; but the skiffs were not used, and the
intervening waterway was left uncrossed, because between those who
dwelt upon the one side of the stream and those who lived upon the
other there arose the black shadow of the irrepressible conflict. They
were friends and near relatives. Their homes confronted each other
with only a placid stream between. Their shores were far less than
a mile apart, and their old loves for each other were uncooled, so
far as they realized. But they gradually ceased to visit each other.
Those courtships and marriages which had been the frequent occasions
of rejoicing among them became of the very rarest occurrence and
finally ceased to occur at all. And all this in spite of the fact that
in northern Kentucky slavery was scarcely more than a name while the
people on the other side of the river had, for the major part, been
emigrants from Kentucky, accustomed in their childhood to such mild
mannered slavery as still survived beyond the stream.
Here was the line of cleavage. Here was the barrier between men's minds
and hearts and lives. On the one side slavery was permitted and, in
self-preservation chiefly, was defended. On the other side there were
softening memories of slavery as an institution that had surrounded the
childhood of those concerned with the loving care and the affectionate
coddling of negro mammies and negro uncles. But the issue between
slavery and antagonism to it had become so sharply accentuated that
even family affection and memories of childhood and the influences of
near neighborhood and the ties of close kinship could not break down
the barrier.
Still further, there had begun to grow up at the North a political
party whose sole bond of union was antipathy to slavery. It was not at
all respectable, for even yet it was not deemed respectable in many
parts of the North to be an Abolitionist, and this was distinctly
an Abolitionist party. Its sole reason for being was its purpose to
abolish slavery in the United States. It was still a feeble party, so
far as the number of votes it could command was concerned, but it was
prepared to ally itself with any others whose purposes might tend even
in the smallest degree in the direction in which it wished the Republic
to go. It was ready to join in any effort that might help toward the
extirpation of slavery, but its avowed purpose was not to assail
slavery where that institution legally existed, but to prevent its
extension to any new lands.
In that purpose many thousands sympathized who would scornfully have
resented the imputation that they were Abolitionists.
This new "Free-soil" party had no less a personage than Ex-president
Martin Van Buren as its candidate for the presidency in 1848 and while
its following and its poll of votes were small its menace seemed
to men of the South very great, a seeming that was destined to be
confirmed ere long. In 1840 the Anti-slavery candidate, Birney, had
received only 7,059 votes in the whole country, scarcely enough to be
recorded in the election returns. In 1844 the same candidate received
62,300 votes--a great increase, but still not enough to be reckoned
seriously. In 1848 Martin Van Buren, as the candidate of this Free-soil
party, received 291,263 votes, thus greatly more than quadrupling the
highest directly Anti-slavery vote previously polled. In 1856 the
Free-soil party under the name of the Republican party, was in effect
the only serious antagonist of the Democracy, the only party that
seriously disputed with it the control of the National Government. In
that election the new party polled 1,341,264 votes, against 1,838,169
for the Democratic candidate. It carried no less than 114 electoral
votes out of a total of 296, its successful antagonist carrying 174.
All this occurred after the time which we are now considering, but
the facts are presented here because their coming was anticipated in
1850 and because they serve to illustrate the rapidity with which the
"irrepressible conflict" grew in intensity and fervor.
In 1850 the country was on the verge of a revolution.
The Southerners were exasperated to the point of armed revolt by the
proposal to deny to them what they deemed their fair participation in
the fruits of the Mexican War; by the increasingly active antagonism
of the North; by the aggressive opposition there to the enforcement
of property rights in fugitive slaves; by the condemnatory tone of the
Northern press, pulpit and platform; by the insistent use of the mails
for the circulation of literature which the South deemed dangerously
incendiary; by the continual inflow of petitions to Congress for the
abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia; and by a score of
other annoyances which were ceaseless in their aggression.
The feeling grew in the South that there was no longer any place in
the Union for those states that permitted slavery; that there was no
longer any tolerance for their people; that a war upon them had begun
which would stop at nothing short of the forcible abolition of their
institutions, with all of chaos and insurrection and servile revolt
which they believed to be the necessary sequences of such abolition.
They were affronted, offended and alarmed. States' rights had been
freely invoked against them as a means of evading and defeating such
laws as then existed for the rendition of fugitive slaves. They, in
their turn, looked to states' rights as perhaps affording to them a way
of escape from their difficulties and tribulations.
"If the Union can no longer protect us," they asked themselves, "why
should we remain parties to that compact? If we are to have no share in
its benefits or even in its territorial conquests and purchases, why
should we go on bearing our share of its burdens and obligations? If it
cannot or will not fulfil those duties which it has assumed towards us,
why should we not repudiate those obligations which we have assumed in
return for its pledges of protection? If we cannot be members of the
Union upon equal terms with other members of the Union, why should we
continue to be members of the Union at all?"
There was nowhere in the South the slightest doubt of the right of
any state in the Union to withdraw from the compact and resume those
attributes of sovereignty which, in creating the Federal Government,
the several states had delegated to it. Indeed up to that time there
had been scarcely any doubt anywhere, North or South, of the existence
of this right of the states, as a right reserved in the formation of
the Federal Union.
Accordingly there grew up in the South a distinctly "disunion"
party, a party which favored the withdrawal of the slave states from
a confederacy which, they contended, had failed to render them the
protection or secure to them the equality of rights and privileges
which it had been instituted to render and secure.
This impulse of withdrawal was very strong, but like the radical
impulse of disunion at the North for the sake of abolition at all costs
or hazards, it was for a long time overborne by the dominant sentiment
of devotion to the Union and loyalty to the traditions of the Republic.
The majority at the South were unwilling to give up the memory of
Bunker Hill, Lexington, Concord, Saratoga and Trenton, as a national
heritage of glory and likewise the majority at the North were reluctant
to forget the victories of Marion and Sumter, or to relinquish the
glorious memory of Yorktown.
Thus in 1850 there was a party at the North eager to sacrifice
everything, including the Republic itself with all its traditions,
in order to secure the extinction of slavery; and there was also a
similarly radical party at the South ready and willing to destroy the
Union in order to be rid of what it regarded as the unreasonable and
intemperate hostility to the South within the Union.
Both these radical parties were in an apparently hopeless minority each
in its own section, but each manifested a tendency to growth which
boded ill for the future. Nevertheless the overwhelming majority of
men on the one side and upon the other intensely detested and bitterly
resented every suggestion to sacrifice the Union for any imaginable
cause or upon any conceivable occasion.
It was to this great majority, North and South, that Henry Clay at that
critical time appealed. The dominant passion of that statesman's soul
was his love of the Union and his desire that it might endure during
all time. To that one god of his adoration he had made sacrifices from
the beginning. In its behalf he had put aside his lifelong desire for
the gradual emancipation of the slaves. In its behalf he had sacrificed
the supreme ambition of his life--the ambition to be president. In
behalf of the Union he had made himself _anathema maranatha_--at the
North as a slaveholder and at the South as an abolitionist. He was in
fact both at once. He held slaves under a system of which he could not
rid himself without arming them, in Jefferson's phrase, "with freedom
and a dagger." He wanted them emancipated and was ready to make
sacrifice in that behalf, but on the other hand he desired beyond all
other things the preservation of that Union, to the perpetuity of which
his whole life had been devoted, and to the perpetuity of which he
looked for the enduring memory of whatever was worthy of remembrance in
American history.
In an extraordinary degree Clay rose above the passions of the hour, as
did Webster and certain other statesmen of that time,--though certain
other statesmen of the time did not.
He saw the situation clearly. The Union had been formed in candid
recognition of the fact that slavery existed in full force and effect
in certain of the states, while in certain other states, chiefly by
reason of its unprofitableness, it was slowly passing away at the
time of the Constitution's framing. He perfectly understood that the
Constitution was a compact between states that could ratify or reject
it at will, and that but for concessions made on the one side and on
the other, the Constitution could never have become the fundamental
law of the Republic. He clearly understood that the dealings of the
Constitution with this question of slavery constituted a compromise to
which the moral sentiments and the material interests of both sides
were parties.
But as has been explained, there had grown up at the North and at
the South two parties of extremists who cared little or nothing for
the Union and everything for their opposing purposes: the Northern
party for the abolition of slavery at all costs, even at cost of the
destruction of the Union itself; and the Southern party organized for
the perpetuation and extension of slavery regardless of everything
else, regardless of the Union and of all that it signified of
human liberty and of the practical realization of the doctrine of
self-government among men.
Neither party represented the people in whose behalf it professed to
speak. The abolitionists, whose petition for the dissolution of the
Union we shall hereafter present, certainly did not represent the
thought or desire of the great majority of the Northern people. In
the same way the Southern disunionists who sought the disruption of
the Union in order that slavery might "have free course to run and be
glorified," did not represent the great body of Southern citizens,
many of whom deprecated slavery and longed for its extinction by some
safe process of gradual emancipation. But in both cases the extremists
were accepted on the opposing side as representatives of the general
thought; the extravagant opinions and demands of fanatical persons on
the one side or the other were interpreted as the settled convictions
of the great body of the people on the side thus misrepresented to its
hurt.
Among the extremists on both sides the disruption of the Union was
jauntily contemplated as a ready remedy for ills complained of.
As early as 1844 the Legislature of Massachusetts had resolved "That
the project of the annexation of Texas, unless arrested on the
threshold, _may tend to drive these states into a dissolution of the
Union_." Again, in 1845, the Legislature of Massachusetts passed
and the governor of that state approved, a resolution asserting a
right of nullification and declaring that the admission of Texas as
a state in the Union "would have no binding force whatever on the
people of Massachusetts." That resolution could mean nothing less
than that Massachusetts would withdraw from the Union in the event of
the admission of Texas, for otherwise laws enacted by virtue of the
vote of Texas senators must have "binding force" upon the people of
Massachusetts as upon those of all the other states.
There were other resolutions of similar purport adopted by the
Legislature of Massachusetts that it is not necessary to set forth in
a history which is not an indictment but merely an expository setting
forth of facts by way of accounting for events.
On both sides disunion was constantly and freely threatened if either
side could not have its way. A convention of Southerners held at
Nashville, Tennessee, distinctly recommended the secession of the
South and called for a Southern congress to consider and adopt that
policy. About the same time Mr. Hale of New Hampshire introduced in the
Senate (Feb. 1, 1850) a petition deliberately calling upon the national
legislative body to adopt measures for the dissolution of the Union.
The petitioners were citizens of Pennsylvania and Delaware, but they
constituted only a small fraction of the people of those states and
unquestionably their proposal, if put to a vote in Pennsylvania and
Delaware, would have been buried under a mountainous majority of
adverse ballots. Yet the petitioners deliberately assumed to be and
to speak for "the inhabitants" of those states, and their petition
was undoubtedly accepted at the South as representing popular opinion
in the region whence it came, if not indeed in the entire North. It
was the mischief of such things that, while they were the work of
a fanatical few, they managed to pass themselves off as utterances
representative of public sentiment in the quarter from which they
emanated.
The petition was as follows:
We, the undersigned, inhabitants of Pennsylvania and Delaware,
believing that the Federal Constitution, in pledging the strength
of the whole nation to support slavery, violates the Divine Law,
makes war upon human rights, and is grossly inconsistent with
republican principles; that its attempt to unite freedom and
slavery in our body politic has brought upon the country great and
manifold evils, and has fully proved that no such union can exist
but by the sacrifice of freedom and the supremacy of slavery,
respectfully ask you to _devise and propose, without delay, some
plan for the immediate, peaceful dissolution of the American Union_.
Daniel Webster fitly exposed the character and significance of this
petition by moving that it be prefaced with a preamble as follows:
Whereas, at the commencement of the session, you and each of you
took your solemn oaths, in the presence of God and on the Holy
Evangelists, that you would support the Constitution of the United
States; now, therefore, we pray you to take immediate steps to
break up the Union, and overthrow the Constitution of the United
States as soon as you can.
So repulsive was this proposal of disunion that only three senators
voted even to receive the petition embodying it and in the House a like
refusal was made. But those three senators were Mr. Seward, of New
York, Mr. Chase of Ohio, and Mr. Hale of New Hampshire--three great
leaders of Northern thought who were destined soon to become three men
of dominant influence in the new party of Free-soil and leaders in
antagonism to the Southern claim to a share in the new territories.
There might have been a score of other votes for the petition which
would have had far less significance. The votes of these three senators
meant clearly that the Free-soil party looked upon disunion just as the
extreme pro-slavery men of the South did, as a legitimate and always
available remedy for existing ills or a prophylactic against evils
anticipated.
As early as 1847 Mr. Calhoun had set forth the Southern contention with
regard to the territories in a series of carefully worded resolutions
which read as follows:
Resolved, that the territories of the United States belong to the
several States composing this Union, and are held by them as their
joint and common property.
Resolved, that Congress, as the joint agent and representative of
the States of this Union, has no right to make any law, or do any
act whatever, that shall directly, or by its effects, make any
discrimination between the States of this Union, by which any of
them shall be deprived of its full and equal right in any territory
of the United States, acquired or to be acquired.
Resolved, that the enactment of any law which should, directly
or by its effects, deprive the citizens of any of the States of
this Union from emigrating, with their property, into any of the
territories of the United States, would make such discrimination,
and would, therefore, be a violation of the Constitution and the
rights of the States from which such citizens emigrated, and in
derogation of that perfect equality which belongs to them as
members of this Union, and would tend directly to subvert the Union
itself.
Resolved, that it is a fundamental principle of our political
creed, that a people, in forming a Constitution, have the
unconditional right to form and adopt the government which they
may think best calculated to secure their liberty, prosperity, and
happiness; and that, in conformity thereto, no other condition
is imposed by the Federal Constitution on a State, in order to
be admitted into this Union, except that its constitution shall
be republican; and that the imposition of any other by Congress
would be not only in violation of the Constitution, but in direct
conflict with the principle on which our political system rests.
Here we have from the South a threat of disunion, a trifle more
disguised, perhaps, than the threats that had come from the North, but
not less positive. The resolutions were intended especially to cover
the new territories which the country was then acquiring from Mexico
by conquest and treaty, but they covered with equal effect all of that
territory which had been added to the Union by the Louisiana Purchase,
and the greater part of which had been set apart by the Missouri
Compromise to be formed into free states. They were a challenge to the
Missouri Compromise, and the assertion of a doctrine which afterwards
greatly vexed the country and contributed in an important way to the
bringing about of war. They constituted a plea for that repeal of the
Missouri Compromise which was to come a very few years later.
This was the condition of things which Congress had to confront on its
assembling in December, 1849. Disunion was everywhere in the air and
on each side there was a party openly advocating it as the only remedy
for existing and threatened ills. Both in the North and the South this
party of disunion was in a hopeless minority, but by reason of its
ceaseless and aggressive activity it had managed to make itself seem
the authorized exponent of public opinion for each side.
The questions before the country were many, but they all related,
directly or indirectly, to slavery. Should California be admitted
to the Union as a free state? If so with what boundaries? for
California then included Utah, Nevada and adjacent territory. Or
should California, limited to the present boundaries of that state,
be divided into two commonwealths, so that the Southern half might
come in as a slave state to offset the Northern half in the Senate
and the electoral college? Texas had already been admitted as a slave
state, but its boundaries were still vague and undefined. It claimed
jurisdiction over all that we now know as New Mexico and Arizona.
Should that vast region--the sterility of which was at that time wholly
unappreciated--be added to the domain of slavery, or should it be set
apart in the hope that it might be erected presently into two or three
or possibly half a dozen free states?
There were also two complaints of arrogant aggression from the opposing
sides. At the North there was complaint that the "slave power," as
it was called, sought and threatened to make itself dominant and
supreme in the Union by its demands for the rendition of fugitive
slaves. At the South there was complaint that the homes and firesides
of the Southern people were menaced with servile insurrection by the
activities of those who sought to breed discontent among the negroes
and spread among them sentiments dangerous to public peace and order.
There was complaint at the North that the constitutional and statutory
provisions for the rendition of fugitive slaves exacted of Northern
people an obligation which many of them could not conscientiously
fulfil, making them unwilling parties to a system which their
consciences abhorred, or, if they refused obedience, condemning them
to the condition of lawbreakers and denouncing them as criminals
because of their refusal to do that against which their very souls
revolted. On the other hand the people of the South complained that
their Northern brethren, or many of them, not only assisted runaway
slaves to escape but deliberately incited them to that course and that
the constitutional compact upon that subject was not enforced by any
adequate statutory law.
On both sides discontent was rampant and threatening. On both sides
dissatisfaction had begun to look to the dissolution of the Republic as
the readiest remedy available.
There were statesmen like Senator Benton who laughed to scorn the
idea that any considerable part of the people could ever seriously
contemplate an assault upon the integrity of the Federal Union, but
that the Union was truly and very gravely in danger subsequent events
conclusively demonstrated.
It was to save the Union from disruption at the hands of Northern or
Southern fanatics--all of whom were threatening that disaster--that
Clay framed, Webster supported, Congress adopted, and the President
approved the compromise measures of 1850.
Those measures covered substantially all the points in controversy. The
bills were five in number.
The first provided for the separation of New Mexico from Texas, with
compensation to Texas, and for the admission of that territory to the
Union as a state when it should become populous enough, with or without
slavery as its own people should at such time determine.
The second set off Utah from California and provided in a precisely
similar manner for its ultimate admission to the Union as a state.
Neither of these two measures ever resulted in anything practical.
Even unto this day New Mexico has remained too sparsely populated for
statehood and Utah was not admitted to the Union until long after the
Constitution of the United States had been so amended as to prohibit
slavery in any part of the Republic.
The third of Clay's compromise bills provided for the admission of
California to the Union as a state under the Constitution which it had
adopted, which made no provision for the existence of slavery within
its borders.
The fourth of the bills was a new and more strenuous fugitive slave law
than any that had ever before existed. It was intended to carry out
the provision of the Constitution of the United States on that subject
and it was supposed to be offset to Northern sentiment by the fifth
of the compromise measures which forbade the slave trade within the
strictly national domain of the District of Columbia.
It had long been a grievance to Northern minds that this peculiarly
national territory, governed as it was exclusively by a Congress
representative of all the states in the Senate and of all their people
in the House, and wholly without any expression of the will of its
inhabitants, was made a slave mart, into which the slave-trader from
Maryland or Virginia could take his chattels for sale on the auction
block to other slave-traders who were there to buy speculatively that
they might sell again to the owners of cotton and rice fields at the
South.
In the North and South there had always been a radical distinction
in men's minds and consciences, between slavery and the slave-trade;
between the holding of men in hereditary bondage under a system
essentially patriarchal and kindly, and the deliberate traffic in human
beings for purposes of speculative profit.
There were two distinct questions with respect to slavery in the
District of Columbia. To have abolished the institution there root and
branch, as multitudes of petitioners prayed, would have been to menace
the two states, Virginia and Maryland, which had given the District
to the Union.[1] It would have been to establish within their borders
and by national authority a little Canada into which fugitive slaves
from either of those states might escape with the certainty of thereby
achieving freedom; for in the temper of that time no fugitive slave law
could by any possibility have been enforced there after once Congress
had decreed the abolition of slavery within the District.
[1] Virginia's portion had been receded to that State in 1846.
But the abolition of the _slave-trade_ within this peculiarly national
domain was quite another matter. It left to all Southerners summoned
thither on one or other sort of governmental business, or removing
thither to reside, the right freely to bring then domestic servants
with them without fear of molestation; but it made an end of that
traffic in negroes as mere merchandise which was even more offensive to
the better people of the South than to those of the North--which was
socially as severely frowned upon in the one part of the country as in
the other and concern with which made the slave-trader as completely a
social outcast in Virginia as it might have done in Massachusetts.
Mr. Clay's five bills were framed and introduced in pursuit of his
dominant purpose to preserve the American Union at whatever sacrifice
of principle or of interest, and in like spirit they were enacted by
both houses of Congress. They had the strong support of Daniel Webster
in one of the ablest orations he ever delivered in behalf of the Union;
a speech made, as Webster's biographers contend, in full knowledge
of the fact that its delivery must cost him his very last hope of
election to the presidency; a speech which brought upon him the odious
accusation of having "sold out to the slave power."[2] They had the
support also of men on both sides of the danger line of cleavage who
strongly disapproved of some of them but who voted for all in the firm
conviction that together they constituted a compromise necessary to the
preservation of the Union.
[2] Unhappily for his reputation Mr. Webster gave color to this
charge by accepting a large sum of money from Mr. Corcoran as
a scarcely disguised reward for the speech.
That object was still supreme in the minds of the great majority,
North and South alike. It was felt on both sides--in spite of personal
convictions, personal interests, and the irritating friction of
political agitation--that after all, the cause of human liberty, human
progress, and the system of self-government among men was dependent
upon the perpetuity of the union of these states. It was felt that
the enslavement of the negro, now that the Constitution, the statute
law, and the public sentiment of the country had robbed it of its most
repugnant feature--the African slave-trade--was a matter of minor
consequence in comparison with the perpetuity of the only government
on God's earth which had ever rested its right to be upon the twin
theories of unalienable rights and the consent of the governed.
To the two disunion parties, the one aggressively active at the North
in behalf of abolition and the other equally aggressive at the South in
behalf of slavery, these compromise measures were intensely offensive.
But to the great majority of the American people their passage seemed
imperatively necessary to the preservation of the Republic, and this
sentiment found expression in the action of both houses of Congress
upon them.
All of them were enacted by decisive majorities and all by the votes of
statesmen from North and South, acting together and putting aside their
sectional prejudices in behalf of the Union.
The bill for the admission of California as a free state, against which
the strongest opposition was made from the South, had thirty-four
senators in its favor against only eighteen in opposition, four of the
votes in behalf of it being cast by the four great Southern leaders,
Bell of Tennessee, Houston of Texas, Benton of Missouri, and Underwood
of Kentucky--a list to which Mr. Clay, as the author and sponsor of
the bill must be added as a king of men. In the House,--more directly
representative of popular sentiment--the vote in favor of the bill was
no less than one hundred and fifty, with only fifty-six against it.
This was the bill most offensive to the South and so the vote upon it
reflected the strength of the Southern desire for the perpetuity of the
Union.
On the other hand the Northern desire for the accomplishment of that
end was reflected in the vote upon the Fugitive Slave Law which
constituted a part of Clay's compromise scheme,--a part of it intended
to offset to the South the admission of the whole of the present state
of California as a free state.
This Fugitive Slave Act was passed by a vote of twenty-seven to twelve
in the Senate, and by a vote of one hundred nine to seventy-six in
the House. Three Northern senators voted for it and one other, Mr.
Dickinson of New York--who wished to vote for it, was paired with his
colleague Mr. Seward. In the House thirty-two members from Northern
states voted in favor of the Fugitive Slave Law.
But the discussion of these compromise measures lasted for eight
months, and it was by no means confined to the halls of Congress. There
was the fourth estate--the newspaper press--to be reckoned with, and
behind that were the people. The people themselves and the newspaper
representatives of popular opinion took a free part in the discussion,
and both were unrestrained by parliamentary etiquette or by any of
those considerations of polity and statecraft to which members of
either house of Congress made obeisance. There was a great devotion
to the Union it is true among press and people, but it did not take
statesmanlike form or consider those nice questions that statesmen were
bound to take into account.
On either side the popular desire for the preservation of the Union
was complicated with the conviction that only the iniquities and
injustices of the other side imperiled the Republic. On each side there
was a profound conviction that if the other side would behave itself
as it should, there would be no shadow of danger to the Union. Again
on either side there was an intemperate press, representing an utterly
intolerant party of extremists, and, shut their eyes as they might to
facts, the statesmen of that time were aware that these extremists on
the one side and upon the other, were daily adding to their numbers
and daily becoming more and more nearly representative of popular
sentiment.
The matter was complicated with partisanship, also, and with personal
ambitions. There was the question of supremacy in the Nation, between
the Whigs, who were then in power by virtue of Taylor's election in
1848, and the Democrats who, with one other brief interval, had been
dominant in national affairs during the entire preceding half century.
At the South the two parties, laying aside the questions of polity that
had previously separated them, vied with each other in such support
of slavery as should win the good will of the extreme pro-slavery
party. At the North they were rivals as suitors for the favor of the
new Free-soil faction--for at that time it was only a faction which
Know-Nothingism was destined presently to relegate temporarily to the
background.
But at the North the new Free-soil party drew more heavily on the Whigs
than on the Democrats for its support, although its early leaders
and presidential candidates, John P. Hale and Martin Van Buren, were
distinguished Democratic statesmen.
Accordingly there arose in the country a contest between the two
old parties for the favor of the two new ones. It became in fact a
scrambling auction, in which each party in each section and each state
and each district bid its convictions and its principles, without
scruple, for votes. Each party sought to be more intensely pro-slavery
than the other in those states and districts in which the pro-slavery
sentiment was strong, while in those states and districts in which the
anti-slavery sentiment was manifestly dominant, each party rivaled the
other in its courtship of the prevailing dogma and its representative
voters.
Quite naturally, men ambitious of political preferment trimmed
their sails to catch these varying winds, and for the first time in
the history of the country political conviction and principle very
generally gave way to questions of self-interest. If the politician of
that time was not quite "all things to all men," he was at any rate all
things to the men who could cast the larger number of votes for his
elevation to office.
The accusation of such selfish sacrifice of principle and conviction
for the sake of personal aggrandizement was openly made against the
foremost statesmen of the time, including Clay and Webster, and the
President himself. Whatever any one of these did that was displeasing
to one part of the country, was freely attributed to a desire to "curry
favor," as the phrase went, with "the slave power" in the one case, or
with "the abolitionist sentiment," in the other.
Without questioning the motives of the greater men, who offered their
dominant devotion to the Union as the only and amply sufficient
explanation of their actions and their votes, it is safe to say that
the attitude and course and eloquence of a multitude of minor men
possessed of ambition for political preferment were determined, on the
one side or the other, chiefly by a consideration of votes.
Mr. Clay, Mr. Webster and the statesmen who aided them in adopting
the Compromise of 1850, confidently believed that by their action in
that matter they had laid the slavery question to rest for at least a
generation to come. They had in fact, as the event proved, succeeded
only in opening it anew and adding virulence to its discussion. Their
very debates, preparatory to the passage of the compromise bills, had
stirred the country to a discussion of the question, angrier than
any other that had been known since the Constitution was framed. The
measures themselves, so far from allaying excitement and controversy,
intensified both. The South felt that it had been cheated in a
bargain which gave one free state certainly and two, three or four
prospectively, to the North, with absolutely no certainty and little
probability of the admission of any slave state in compensation--for
from the first the people of Texas resented and resisted the proposal
to divide their great domain into the four states provided for at the
beginning. On the other hand the Northern States felt that the new
Fugitive Slave Law was an enactment with which they could not comply
without such a sacrifice of conscience and conviction as could in no
wise be made by honest and sincere men.
From the very first many of the Northern States set their legislative
machinery at work to defeat the operation of this Fugitive Slave
Law by the most effective counter legislation that legal ingenuity
could devise. In so far as these devices succeeded in preventing the
execution of that law they in effect nullified a national statute which
the National Government was entirely competent to enact.
More important still from the point of view of history, is the
fact that the compromise which was intended to allay all sectional
feeling and work a pacification in behalf of the Union, directly and
immediately wrought an opposite result. It additionally inflamed
passion in all parts of the country. It strongly accentuated those
differences of opinion which alone threatened the Union with
dissolution and the country with devastating war.
The North set itself to nullify the Fugitive Slave Law. The South set
itself to undo the Missouri Compromise.
On the one hand it was contended that the Fugitive Slave Law made
slavery a national instead of a state institution--a thing to which
Northern sentiment and Northern conscience could in no wise consent.
On the other hand it was stoutly insisted that the equality of the
states under the Constitution was openly violated, not only by the
personal liberty laws enacted by Northern States in order to nullify
the national statute on the subject of fugitive slaves, but still
more aggressively by the practical exclusion of slaveholders from the
territories, so far at least as their slave property was concerned; and
further by the decree of the Missouri Compromise that, whatever the
will of the settlers in new regions might be, there should be no new
slave states carved out of that portion of the Louisiana Purchase which
lay north of the southern line of Missouri. This prohibition--taken in
connection with the admission of California as a free state--amounted
in effect to a provision that there should be no more slave states
created anywhere; for, as Mr. Webster had clearly pointed out, there
was no other part of the territory conquered or purchased from Mexico,
into which slavery could be practically or profitably extended.
The attempts made to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law at the North,
whether successful or baffled, served only to inflame passion on both
sides and to intensify the very controversy which it had been the
purpose of the act--as a part of a compromise--to allay. On the other
hand the Southern conviction grew that by the two compromises the South
had been cheated of its equal rights in the public domain, and out of
that contention was destined almost immediately to grow a bloody war in
Kansas and a still more acrimonious state of feeling between the North
and the South.
The story of that matter is reserved for another chapter of this
history. In the meanwhile, if the facts have been adequately set
forth, it must be clear to the reader that the Compromise of 1850 not
only failed of its purpose of pacification, but resulted immediately
in the very marked increase of hostility between the sections, the
intensifying of the irritation and the accentuation of the acrimony
that pervaded and inspired the dispute.
The fundamental trouble was that the statesmen who fondly thought to
settle the matter by a compromise, did not grasp the truth of the
situation with which they were called upon to deal. They did not
appreciate the fact that there was indeed an "irrepressible conflict,"
between the two systems, a conflict which no compromise could end, no
arrangement could mollify, no agreement could by any possibility adjust.
War was already on between abolitionism and slavery. It was idle to
seek for grounds of reconciliation between convictions so utterly
antagonistic and so necessarily irreconcilable. The compromisers
were men crying "Peace" where there was no peace and no possibility
of peace. They were visionaries seeking to reconcile sentiments that
were as opposite as the poles. In opinion and sentiment as well as in
physics, there are affinities that may not be resisted and antagonisms
that no power can overcome. There was no flux of political agreement
that could fuse Northern and Southern sentiment on the subject of
slavery into one homogeneous whole--no _vehiculum_ in which the two
antagonistic principles could mingle in harmony.
The key to the situation, as every sincere historian must recognize, if
he would interpret the events of that time aright, was the fact that
this conflict was indeed "irrepressible," and that it could end only
with the extinction of slavery on the one hand, or with the universal
and constitutional recognition of slavery as a national institution on
the other.
The Compromise of 1850 was futile and a failure because it was founded
upon the ignoring of this fundamental truth.
CHAPTER VI
UNCLE TOM'S CABIN
The failure of the Compromise of 1850 to accomplish its purpose did
not at first appear in the national election returns. In fact the new
Free-soil party polled fewer votes in 1852 than it had cast four years
before, but in the elections of the several states of the North it was
steadily gaining ground precisely as in the South the extreme disunion
pro-slavery party was likewise doing.
Little by little the more conservative men on either side were being
drawn into the radical propaganda.
In 1852 there appeared in print a novel which was destined to affect
the history of the Union as no other novel ever did before or since.
Every historian of that epoch must reckon with "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as
one of the vital forces affecting the history of the time.
The novel was written by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who personally
knew very little about slavery except by hearsay. Of necessity it
abounded in inconsistencies, mistakes of facts, and impossibilities
so far as its social depictions were concerned. All these things have
been pointed out by criticism and need not now be recapitulated, the
more because they have no historical importance whatever. But the novel
made a tremendous appeal to the sentiment of humanity in antagonism to
slavery. It argued no question, it offered no statistics, it presented
no thesis. It simply appealed to the sentiments of men, and women, and
children, for the abolition of slavery and its influence was immediate
and well-nigh limitless.
As there are no fixed canons of criticism by which to determine the
artistic merit or the dramatic value of any work of the imagination it
is of course open to those who choose to contend, as many have done,
that Mrs. Stowe's work was not at all great as a creation in fiction
but that its immediate and stupendous success and influence were due
solely to the adventitious circumstances of its publication. But
those adventitious circumstances did not exist in the remote European
countries into whose languages the novel was presently translated and
among whose people it continues to be a classic to this day. These
people knew nothing whatever of American slavery and cared little if
at all about it. They were in no degree influenced in their judgment
of Mrs. Stowe's romance by any of the considerations that vexed the
politics of this Republic. They read the novel because of its intrinsic
and intensely human interest and because of nothing else whatever.
The better judgment would seem to be that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was a
work of extraordinary dramatic power and phenomenal fitness to appeal
to the sympathies of men. It had for its subject one of the most
picturesque states of society that has ever been known among men and
one so unusual among modern nations that its very rarity added to its
charm as a theme for the romance writer.
There is another important fact which must be taken into consideration
in estimating the influence of that work of fiction. At that time
all the churches frowned upon novel-reading as a sin. A few of T. S.
Arthur's temperance tales were cautiously permitted to the elect,
but as a rule the reading of novels was rigidly forbidden to those
who constituted the congregations of the churches. Even Dickens, who
was then in the midst of his extraordinary popularity, was read only
secretly and with shamefacedness by those who submitted themselves
to the instruction of the clergy. The Methodists in particular--and
Methodism was, as it still is, a very great power in the land--frowned
upon all works of fiction as the devil's agencies for the perversion
of the human mind and the destruction of the human soul. Novel-reading
was classed by all the pulpits of the time with such sins as
Sabbath-breaking, whiskey-drinking, dancing, and other devices of
Satan. The great majority of men and women of that generation were
effectually forbidden to read even the great masterpieces of their
mother tongue, from Shakespeare onward. But here in Mrs. Stowe's work
was a novel approved of all the clergy, a novel which anybody might
virtuously read, and a generation hungry for creative literature
of a date later than the "Pilgrim's Progress" eagerly welcomed the
opportunity to read a novel, full of flesh-and-blood interest, that
appealed strongly to the kindlier and better sentiments of human
nature. The preachers read the book and recommended it to their
parishioners and as a consequence everybody read it--men, women and
children.
Very naturally this universal reading of such a romance greatly
inflamed the sentiment of antagonism to slavery and incidentally
aroused something like hatred of the slaveholder though Mrs. Stowe had
probably not intended that to be the effect of her written words.
There were a dozen or a score of more or less inane novels put forward
in answer to "Uncle Tom's Cabin" but their only effect was to intensify
the interest in that work.
Coming as it did upon the heels of the new and peculiarly offensive
Fugitive Slave Law Mrs. Stowe's romance converted pretty nearly all the
people of the North to the anti-slavery cause and hastened the growth
of the anti-slavery party into formidable proportions. It awakened
sentiment, and sentiment is always an immeasurably more potent factor
in human affairs than mere intellectual conviction is. It enlisted in
the anti-slavery cause every gentle and every rampant impulse of the
people of the North. It rubbed out of multitudes of men's minds every
consideration of constitutional restriction, every thought of states'
rights, every dogma of the law and every decree of the courts. It
quickly bred a new crusade against slavery. It everywhere stimulated
the thought that slavery was a wrong for which the whole Nation was
responsible and the extermination of which, at all costs, the Union was
bound to accomplish as its first and highest duty. In brief, this novel
bred a spirit of abolitionism such as the country had never before
known.
The time had not yet come when any political party could plant
itself, with the smallest hope of success, upon a platform of openly
avowed abolitionism. Those who were ready to advocate an aggressive
political warfare upon the system of slavery where it legally existed
and to insist upon its abolition by force of Federal enactment in
contravention of the Constitution were still in a hopeless minority.
They were opportunists in politics, however, and they saw and seized
their opportunity. If they could not gain all that they desired they
were ready to accept whatever might be accomplished in the direction
of the end they sought. The Free-soil party presented itself to their
minds as an easily available instrumentality. It is true that that
party had expressly and with extreme circumspection disclaimed all
purpose and all constitutional right to interfere with slavery in the
states in which it legally existed. But the avowed antagonism of the
party to the system of slavery rendered it a conveniently available
agency for the execution of the will of those who desired that slavery
should cease to be at all costs. All the abolitionists joined the party
at once, in spite of its voluntary and to them offensive limitation
of its activity to the purpose of preventing the extension of the
slave system into new territories. On the other hand men by scores and
hundreds of thousands throughout the North who would have bitterly
resented the still opprobrious epithet of "abolitionists" eagerly
joined the new party in the undefined but warmly cherished hope that it
might somehow find means of ridding the Republic of the curse and the
scandal of slavery.
CHAPTER VII
THE REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE, THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA BILL AND
SQUATTER SOVEREIGNTY
The Missouri Compromise was in effect repealed by the compromise
measures of 1850 but there was as yet no formal repeal. The effect of
the compromise measures of 1850 was presently to stir up a greater
strife than ever on the subject of slavery and even to raise new
questions with regard to it. The ultra Southern men began to see that
the Compromise of 1850 had given them practically nothing whatever in
the way of territory out of which to create future slave states.
It had admitted California as a free state. It had opened Utah, which
lay mostly to the north of the dead line, to the possible introduction
of slavery if its future settlers should so decree upon coming into the
Union, as no sane man in any quarter of the country imagined that they
ever would. It had also separated New Mexico which lay mostly south of
the dead line, from the slave state of Texas with a like license to
its future settlers if there should ever be any such, to choose for
themselves whether or not they would permit slavery in their domain.
Neither of these territories promised, at that time, to become a state
within the life of the generation then in being, and in point of fact
neither did. Utah was not admitted to the Union until 1896, long after
the utter abolition of slavery had been accomplished by constitutional
amendment, and New Mexico, at the beginning of the twentieth century is
still a territory of vast area and very small population.
The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law was in fact the only return the
Compromise of 1850 had made to the South for what the South regarded
as a practical surrender of territory that might otherwise have been
molded into slave states. At the North this compensatory enactment
was everywhere regarded as an excessive return for such concessions
as had been made. The great body of the Northern people would not and
could not lend themselves to the execution of a law which offended
their consciences as no other law had ever done. They could not make
themselves, as that law required them to do, participants in a system
which they held to be utterly wrong and iniquitous.
Thus the South felt itself wronged and cheated in the compromise and
the North felt that its conscience had been outraged and its integrity
of mind assailed.
It was altogether inevitable that the calmer consideration and the
discussion of this matter should bring up new questions and create new
situations. The Missouri Compromise had not yet been formally repealed.
That Compromise forbade the creation of slave states out of any part of
the Louisiana territory lying north of the southern line of Missouri,
and by implication it forbade the carrying of slaves into any such
territory prior to its admission as a state. Under the Compromise
Missouri and Arkansas had been admitted to the Union as slave states
and for thirty years the Compromise had stood as a bulwark against
disunion.
But now there appeared a tendency on the part of the territories lying
north of the Missouri Compromise line to become populous. Emigration
seemed to be setting in that direction and the fertility of the region
promised presently to tempt great multitudes of men to settle there.
That part of the territory which now constitutes Kansas was especially
tempting to emigration. The eastern half of Kansas was a part of
the Louisiana Purchase. Its western half was a part of the region
acquired from Mexico. The eastern half of it, therefore, was subject
to the Missouri Compromise's prohibition of slavery while the western
half by virtue of the compromise measures of 1850 was free from that
restriction.
Out of all the conditions here briefly noted there arose at the South
a clamor for the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Men argued that as
it was only a statute repealable at any session of Congress, and as, in
their contention, it robbed and wronged the slave-holding half of the
Union, it ought to be repealed. At the North it was felt that repeal
would in effect make of slavery a national institution, and rob the
anti-slavery sentiment of the benefit it had secured by consenting to
the admission of Missouri and Arkansas as slave states.
There was a very strong man in the Senate at that time, Stephen A.
Douglas of Illinois. He was a born leader of men, a man of great
ability and courage, and he had ambition to become president of the
United States. He was a master of statecraft and an opportunist in
politics. He had sought some years before to settle the question with
regard to the new territories once for all by enacting a law to extend
the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific, thus excluding slavery
north of that line from all the new as well as from all the older
possessions of the Republic and by implication permitting it south of
that line.
As his proposal was rejected it is not worth while now to speculate
upon what effect its acceptance might have had. In lieu of it the
compromise measures of 1850 were enacted. Their effect was almost
immediately to increase and intensify an inflammation of the popular
mind which it is difficult in our time even to conceive. Senator
Douglas voted for these measures and advocated them strongly in the
Senate. When he returned to his own state at the end of the session
he found himself an object of public hatred and condemnation. The
City Council of Chicago greeted his coming with a set of resolutions
in denunciation of him. The resolutions declared him to be a traitor
and pronounced the compromise measures a violation of the law of God.
The City Council instructed the police, and advised all citizens to
disregard the new laws. A mass meeting was called and by resolution it
declared it to be the duty of all good citizens "to defy death, the
dungeon and the grave" in resisting the Fugitive Slave Law, but so
uncertain was the popular mind, even in its fury, that Douglas promptly
challenged it and met it in a great mass meeting before which he
delivered an impassioned speech explaining his views. By this single
speech he secured an immediate and well-nigh unanimous rescinding of
the resolutions of censure and a little later he was again elected to
represent the state in the Senate.
Three years later, in 1853, on his return from Washington to Illinois
and after he had made himself sponsor for that Kansas-Nebraska Bill of
which an account will presently be given, he picturesquely said that
he had traveled all the way from Washington to Chicago "by the light
of his own burning effigies." Nevertheless when his term expired a few
years later he was again elected to the Senate after a conspicuous
canvass of the state in which his reëlection was practically the only
question at issue and in which Abraham Lincoln was his opponent on the
stump.
It must not be supposed that Northern sentiment on the questions then
dividing the country was uniform. It was on the contrary as sharply
divided as ever, with a distinct preponderance of it in favor of
letting the slavery question rest, so far as legislation was concerned,
where it had been placed by the compromise measures of 1850. But the
sentiment in antagonism to slavery was everywhere growing even among
those who deprecated the agitation of the subject.
The extreme opponents of slavery had taken more advanced ground than
ever before. They denounced the Fugitive Slave Law as a statute which
Congress had no right to enact and which no citizen should obey. They
pointed out that it was in violation of that very doctrine of state
sovereignty to which the advocates of slavery had appealed. The ultra
ones among them planted themselves upon the doctrine first enunciated
by Mr. Seward of New York, that there is a "higher law" than the
statutes or the Constitution, and that men of enlightened consciences
were bound to obey that higher law even to the extent of violating the
statutes, and setting the Constitution at naught.
The time had obviously come when there was no longer any use in
the adoption of compromises or the passage of conciliatory laws by
statesmen whose first concern was for the preservation of the Union.
Compromises were no longer binding upon men's consciences or conduct.
Political parties refused to regard them and even states in their
organized capacity legislated for their nullification, asserting their
right of sovereignty to that extent.
It is obvious that peace could not long continue in a country thus
violently divided against itself in opinion and sentiment. Sooner or
later by one means or another, but with the same certainty that governs
the rising and the setting of the sun, such a condition meant _war_.
In this case it meant that within the Union so afflicted there was
an "irrepressible conflict" of opinion, a conflict that would yield
to no argument, submit itself to no law, accommodate itself to no
circumstance and would stoutly insist upon irreconcilable contentions
on the one side and the other until the matter should be decided by
that last brutal arbitrament of man, a conflict of cannon, musketry,
and mortars.
Precisely that condition of affairs had been reached in the United
States when the compromise measures of 1850 were repudiated, defied
and nullified by both popular and legislative authority. Logically the
war between North and South should have occurred then, and undoubtedly
it would have occurred at that time but for the persistence of that
sentiment of devotion to the Union which still dominated the minds of a
majority of men both at the North and at the South.
It was in obedience to that sentiment that statesmen refused to see the
hopelessness of the situation and went on endeavoring to find some way
out of the difficulty that should bring peace where there was no peace,
and save the Union from disruption.
The trouble with all such efforts was that everything proposed by way
of placating those on one side of the controversy additionally inflamed
those on the other.
The most notable legislative outcome of this vexed situation was the
Kansas-Nebraska Bill, for which Senator Douglas made himself sponsor.
That bill provided for the erection of the two territories, Kansas and
Nebraska, leaving it to those who should settle within that domain to
permit or exclude slavery as they might please when the time should
come for them to apply for admission to the Union as states. By
direct implication at least slaves might freely be taken into those
territories during the period of their territorial existence if the
settlers there so desired.
In justice to the memory of a patriotic statesman who served his
country to the best of his ability, it is only fair that his doctrine
and his opinions shall be presented in his own words.
In the speech by which, in 1850, he placated the animosity that had
greeted him at Chicago, he set forth his thought as follows:
These measures [the compromise measures of 1850] are predicated
upon the great fundamental principle that every people ought to
possess the right of framing and regulating their own internal
concerns and domestic institutions in their own way.... These
things are all confided by the constitution to each state to decide
for itself, and I know of no reason why the same principle should
not be extended to the territories.
Three years later Mr. Douglas carefully set forth his doctrine again in
the Kansas-Nebraska Bill itself. Referring to the Missouri Compromise,
with its prohibition of slavery in the states to be erected out of
Louisiana territory north of 36° 30´, the bill said:
Which being inconsistent with the principle of non-intervention by
Congress with slavery in the states and territories, as recognized
by the legislation of 1850 ... is hereby declared inoperative and
void; it being the true intent and meaning of this act not to
legislate slavery into any territory or state, nor to exclude it
therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form
and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject
only to the Constitution of the United States.
Mr. Douglas's doctrine, popularly known as "Squatter Sovereignty," was
open to criticism on very obvious constitutional and historical grounds.
The original conception of the Union had undoubtedly been that it
was a confederacy of states, each sovereign within itself except in
so far as it had surrendered to the National Government a part of its
sovereignty by accepting the Federal Constitution and entering the
Union. It was deemed an axiom that each state was free by the will
of its own citizens to regulate its domestic affairs in its own way,
permitting or forbidding slavery at its own free will. After the great
slavery controversy arose the South contended still for this doctrine
of states' rights, and by the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, this sovereignty of
the states was extended to the territories also.
The student of history must observe however that that doctrine had been
very greatly impaired if not indeed set aside by the act of Virginia
in ceding her claims in the Northwest Territory and the acceptance
of that cession by the general government. In that cession it had
been stipulated that slavery should never be permitted in any of the
territory thus made a part of the national domain. The cession was
made with the direct intent that the region concerned should presently
be divided and admitted into the Union as a number of states. But
those states were thus forbidden in advance to permit the existence of
slavery within their borders. So far as they were concerned, therefore,
the supposed right of a state to legislate at will on that subject was
taken away from them even before their birth.
Here it would seem there was an abrogation or at least an important
modification of the doctrine of the right of each state to determine
this question for itself, and that modification had been made by
Virginia and everywhere accepted.
The Missouri Compromise in precisely the same manner had taken away
that right of determination from all the states that might be formed
out of the Louisiana territory lying north of the southern line of
Missouri. If the prohibition thus laid upon yet unborn states was
permissible as regards the cession of the Northwest Territory it would
seem to have been equally so with regard to the new domain west of the
Mississippi.
Further than this the sovereign right of a state to determine this
question for itself did not extend at any time to the territories.
Under the Constitution as uniformly interpreted by the Supreme Court of
the United States, Congress is supreme in the territories and may make
any law that it pleases for their governance. In other words the people
of the territories have absolutely no rights of self-government except
such as Congress may from time to time see fit to confer upon them.
This statement is not made speculatively or as an opinion of the
historian. It is a well settled doctrine of constitutional law,
affirmed by every court to which the question has at any time been
submitted.
Senator Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Bill was based upon an assumption
precisely the reverse of this. It extended to the territories a
sovereignty which under the Constitution belonged only to states, and
which, as has been suggested, the states themselves had in a large
degree surrendered by the acceptance of the cession of the Northwest
Territory.
CHAPTER VIII
THE KANSAS WAR--THE DRED SCOTT DECISION--JOHN BROWN'S EXPLOIT AT
HARPER'S FERRY
With the aid of a considerable Northern vote in Congress the South
succeeded in passing the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, repealing the Missouri
Compromise, and under the doctrine of "Squatter Sovereignty" throwing
all the territories open to slavery at least as a possibility.
The North at once took alarm and the Free-soil party, newly named the
Republican party, grew in numbers and enthusiasm as no other party had
ever done before.
Events mightily aided this growth, driving into the Free-soil or
Republican party many thousands of men who had before held aloof from
a movement which they thought to be dangerous to the perpetuity of the
Union and to peace within its borders.
First of these events was the outbreak of civil war in Kansas. The
repeal of the Missouri Compromise opened that territory at once to
settlement by men from both sections and at the same time opened the
question whether it should become a free or a slave state. Incidentally
a contest of factions began which raged hotly to the end.
Whether Kansas should be a slave state or a free state depended upon
the will of the settlers alone. The land was in many respects a
tempting one to emigrants in spite of the aridity of its western part,
so that even without any incentive of politics its speedy settlement
was quite a matter of course. But politics North and South enormously
aided in that behalf. There was a rush from both sections to fill up
and occupy the land in order to control it. From the Missouri border
and from farther south slaveholders and the representatives of slavery
poured into the territory in great numbers with the purpose of voting
it into the Union as a slave state. In the slang of the period these
were called "border ruffians." On the other hand there was an "assisted
emigration" from the North, the emigration of men whose way was paid in
consideration of their votes and their rifle practice against slavery
in Kansas. These called themselves "Free State Men" but they were
called by their adversaries "Jayhawkers."
In order to promote the emigration of these men to Kansas societies
were formed in Massachusetts and other states which not only paid
their way but furnished them with rifles of an improved pattern and
ammunition in plenty, with the distinct understanding that it was their
duty to ply both the bullet and the ballot in aid of the cause they
represented.
These two groups of men quickly fell by the ears, as it was intended
that they should, and civil war in the strictest sense of that term
ensued.
John Brown--an able, adventurous, and fanatical man--took command of
the free state forces and between him and his adversaries there was
a contest for supremacy which involved every outrage to which civil
war, waged by uncivilized man, can give birth. Small battles were
fought. Men on either side were shot or hanged without mercy. Homes
were desolated. Women and children were driven forth to suffer all the
agonies of starvation, of cold, and of homelessness--all in aid of the
voting one way or the other.
In our time such a situation in a territory subject to national control
would be instantly ended by the sending of troops to the disturbed
region with instructions to preserve order, to suppress all manner
of lawlessness, and to protect all citizens equally in the enjoyment
of the peaceful possession of the land. But in the fifties the
government of the United States was still unused to such exercise of
its authority--parties were too evenly divided, political feeling was
too hot and voters were far too sensitive, to admit of such a treatment
of the situation as would in our time seem quite a matter of course.
Troops were sent to Kansas, it is true, but in quite insufficient
numbers and under inadequate instructions. So the war in Kansas went on
and otherwise peaceful citizens of the Union actively aided it upon the
one side or the other quite as if it had not been a civil war within
the Union and in a territory in which the authority of Congress was
supreme beyond even the possibility of question.
At the South companies of armed men were organized, equipped, and sent
into Kansas nominally to settle there and vote to make a slave state of
the territory, but really, if possible, to drive out every "Free State"
man or to overawe or overcome them all, so that the voting might be
all one way. At the North similar companies of men were organized and
armed and aided to emigrate for the purpose of doing very much the same
thing to the representatives of slavery and achieving a contrary result
at the ballot box.
Many of the men on both sides were not genuine settlers at all
but merely armed bandits engaged in a mission of violence. Yet on
both sides they were supported, encouraged, and defended in their
lawlessness by the pulpit, the press, and every other agency of
civilization.
Elections were held in the territory in which both sides voted
their men without question as to their age, the length of their
residence within the territory or any other qualification for voting
which the loose laws of the time provided. Every devilish device
of fraud and swindling that had up to that time been invented by
ingeniously unscrupulous politicians was employed on the one side or
the other without so much as a qualm of conscience or a scruple of
conventionality.
It was _war_ that these men were engaged in and elections were a mere
pretense. War habitually has no scruples as to the means it uses
for the overcoming of an adversary. On each side men voted who had
arrived within the territory just in time for the election, cheerfully
perjuring themselves in order to do so, an incident which nobody seemed
to regard as a serious matter. Each side voted its men as often as it
could under the loose election laws of the time and in some cases that
was very often. Ballot boxes were stuffed with fraudulent votes by one
side and were seized and destroyed by the other.
Conventions fraudulently chosen by such practices as these framed
constitutions which were one after another rejected by Congress.
The story need not be told here in further detail. The struggle
continued until the end of the decade and it was not until after the
Confederate War had begun that the territory was admitted to the Union
as a state. In the meanwhile the eyes and minds of all the people in
the country were concentrated upon that center of disturbance and the
situation there enormously increased the intensity of that acrimony
which already characterized the relations of men North and South.
Another event which tended to increase the acrimony between the two
sections of the country and ultimately to bring about war was the
rendering of the "Dred Scott" decision, which alarmed and intensely
angered the North.
Dred Scott was a negro slave in Missouri, owned by an army surgeon who,
about twenty years before, had taken him as a servant to an army post
in Illinois. Under the laws of Illinois any slave taken by his master
into that state was by that act set free.
Dred Scott remained however in the position of a slave and after a time
he was taken back to Missouri. There he was sold to a new master whom
he presently sued for assault on the ground that his former master had
in effect set him free by voluntarily taking him into a free state, and
that therefore he was not liable to sale or to a chastisement at the
hands of a master.
The negro won in the lower courts but was defeated upon appeal. Later,
circumstances enabled him to bring suit in the United States Court,
and finally the case went on appeal to the Supreme Court of the United
States. The questions directly and indirectly involved in it were of
so great national and political interest that four of the greatest
constitutional lawyers in all the land volunteered to argue it--two
of them on the one side and two upon the other. The argument was a
contest of intellectual giants with the whole country looking on and
listening. At the end of it the judgment of the court was rendered by
Chief Justice Taney in March, 1857. The decision negatived all of Dred
Scott's contentions and it affirmed principles that were even more
offensive to Northern sentiment than its negations were. It amounted in
fact to a judgment that state laws setting free such slaves as might
be brought into the states concerned by voluntary act of their masters
were null and void. It expressly declared unconstitutional that part of
the Missouri Compromise which forbade slavery in territories north of
36° 30´ north latitude.
So completely did the court decide upon the slavery side of the
question that Thomas H. Benton, the great Democratic senator from
Missouri, characterized this deliberate and very carefully considered
judgment of the Supreme Court as one which made slavery the organic law
of the land with freedom as a casual exception.
The victory of the pro-slavery radicals was here complete. The decision
gave them the definite judgment of that Supreme Court whose decisions
rise above congressional enactment and set aside statutes,--that court
from whose judgments there is nowhere any appeal to any other authority
on earth--in behalf of their most extreme contentions.
If that decision had been accepted by the people, as the decisions of
the Supreme Court usually are, it would indeed have made slavery a
national institution subject only to such limitations as the individual
states might impose upon it within their own borders and without
interference with slaveholders who might choose to take their slaves
into free states and hold them there.
But the victory of the slave advocates--complete as it was--gave
them no practical advantage. Such a doctrine as that laid down by
the court simply could not find acceptance in the minds of men at
the North. Logically it ought not to have found acceptance with the
ultra pro-slavery men of the South for the reason that it distinctly
negatived that contention for states' rights and state sovereignty upon
which they relied in their contest with their adversaries.
Unfortunately for them, in the course of his decision Chief Justice
Taney used one unhappy phrase which gave even greater offense perhaps
than the decision itself did. That phrase was in fact no part of the
decision but was what the lawyers call an _obiter dictum_--a saying
apart. It was a mere statement of what the Chief Justice believed to
be a fact of history. It was not at all a ruling of the court. As an
illustration of his meaning he made the perfectly true statement that
before the time of the American Revolution--and he might have included
a much later date--the negroes "_had been regarded_ as beings of an
inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race
either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they
had _no rights which the white man was bound to respect_; and that the
negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit."
This statement of fact as to the attitude of the public mind toward the
negro before the Revolution was entirely correct, as every educated
reader knows, and as the history of the African slave-trade--carried
on not only before the adoption of the Constitution but for a dozen
years after 1808 when the constitutional prohibition of that nefarious
traffic went into effect--perfectly and completely shows.
But Chief Justice Taney's simple statement of this historical fact was
everywhere interpreted to be a part of his legal decision. This was
natural enough under the circumstances for the reason that slavery
itself, in behalf of which the decision seemed to have been rendered,
rested solely upon the doctrine that a negro has no rights which the
white man is bound to respect.
Even if this unfortunate phrase had not been used and even if it
had not been misinterpreted as it was, the decision itself must of
necessity have wrought something like a revolution in the thought of
the Northern people. The most conservative among them had reconciled
themselves to the existence of slavery in certain of the states upon
the ground that each state had a right to legislate for itself upon
that question and therefore that each state was alone responsible
for its own legislation. They were startled now by the challenge of
a Supreme Court decision which denied to them even this relief of
conscience and even this liberty of individual state action. They were
asked to accept the doctrine that slavery was a national institution
against which state laws were futile except in a very limited way.
This extreme decision in favor of slavery, coming as it did at the
very time when civil war was on in Kansas, not only inflamed public
sentiment at the North but alarmed it. Already the political party
opposed to the extension of slavery had mightily grown in numbers and
in enthusiasm. In 1852 it had cast less than 157,000 votes. In 1856 its
vote amounted to 1,341,264, carrying with it 114 electoral votes as
against 174 secured by its chief antagonist and eight thrown away on a
third candidate.
During that four years the Anti-slavery party had drawn to itself
through force of circumstance all of the Free-soil Democracy and the
greater part of the Northern Whigs.
In 1856 for the first time in the Republic's history the election
of a president was contested by a party strictly sectional in its
composition and the fact was alarming not only at the South but almost
equally so at the North. The conviction was general that such a contest
meant mischief for the country. It was the first sure foreboding of
that war which was destined to come a little later between the sections.
The Republican party existed exclusively at the North. It made no
pretense of existing in the Southern half of the Republic. It did not
even go through the empty form of nominating electors in the Southern
states either in 1856 or four years later in 1860. It did not hope in
either of those years for a single electoral vote from any state lying
south of the Potomac or the Ohio. Its purpose was to carry the election
and to control the country by a strictly sectional and geographical
vote--a thing that had never before been attempted or thought of by
any party, and a thing the very suggestion of which caused great alarm
throughout the country. For, men anxiously asked, if one section
of the Union is thus to dominate the other how shall we be able to
maintain the Union in its present disturbed and distracted condition?
Hitherto, they reflected, majorities have been drawn from all the
states in contests that were purely national in their inspiration
and in their significance, and all men have held themselves bound to
submit to the will of such majorities, as representing the ultimate
judgment of all the states and all the people; but, they anxiously
asked themselves, how long will the states or the people of one part
of the country consent to be governed by the elected candidates of a
party which exists solely in the other part of the country; a party
which does not even ask for votes except in that other part, in support
of its candidates; a party whose platform is one of avowed hostility
to the industrial, social and domestic labor system of the southern
half of the Republic; a party which has no existence or recognition
or representation in that part of the Union, and which includes among
its most active and aggressive members those who openly declare their
purpose to overthrow the domestic institutions of the South, in
defiance of all constitutional guarantees, and by any means that may
be available, even including servile war in states where the negroes
outnumber the whites by two or three to one?
Considerations of this kind undoubtedly restrained many voters at the
North in the election of 1856, and for a time after that election there
seemed to be a promise of peace in the influence of conservatism on the
one side and on the other in spite of what was going on in Kansas.
At the same time the state of feeling throughout the country was
well-nigh indistinguishable from that which prevails during the
existence of actual civil war. Only the old devotion to the Union which
existed in both the Northern and Southern mind prevented men from
flying at each other's throats.
Then, as if to emphasize the inevitableness of war and to hasten its
coming, there occurred the raid of John Brown at Harper's Ferry,
Virginia, in the autumn of 1859--only a year before a presidential
election must occur.
John Brown had been the chief leader of the Free State men in the
warlike operations in Kansas. He was a man of extraordinary fanaticism,
limitless daring, large capacity, and relentless determination. His
hostility to slavery knew absolutely no bounds. With a courage which
had no balance wheel of discretion to regulate it, he had no hesitation
in undertaking great enterprises with ridiculously inadequate means,
and in the end he showed that he had no flinching from the personal
consequences of his acts.
In June, 1859, he went secretly to the neighborhood of Harper's
Ferry, with a band so small that even after its reinforcement it was
manifestly inadequate to be trusted by any but a madman to accomplish
the work that Brown had laid out for it to do. He was both morally and
materially supported by men of wealth and influence at the North who
blindly entrusted him with arms, ammunition, and money, not knowing or
inquiring whither he was going or what his purposes might be.
By the end of June, 1859, he had established himself near Harper's
Ferry with a band of devoted followers about him. One by one the men
who had enlisted in his service joined him until the company numbered
twenty-two. Still his purpose was wholly unsuspected by his Virginian
neighbors.
In the meanwhile the two hundred rifles contributed by George L.
Stearns of Medford, Mass., in aid of the Kansas controversy, were
delivered to John Brown who had, besides, a war chest of five hundred
dollars in gold given to him by Boston enthusiasts in aid of an
enterprise concerning which they had no definite information whatsoever.
His purpose was to establish in the mountain fastnesses near Harper's
Ferry a fugitive slave camp which a few men could easily defend while
the rest of those coming into it could be run off to Canada and
freedom with ease and certainty. In effect he contemplated a general
insurrection of the slaves, their concentration in easily defensible
mountain camps and their removal to Canada from these military posts as
rapidly as that end could be accomplished.
This program if successful could have resulted in nothing less than a
slave insurrection and a bloody servile war.
But John Brown's program failed of its accomplishment for two reasons.
There was far less of active discontent among the negroes of northern
Virginia than John Brown had supposed. Most of those negroes in fact
were entirely satisfied with their condition and treatment and so they
refused to flee to him for rescue from an oppression which they did not
feel.
It is noteworthy that Frederick Douglass, the ablest representative
of the negro race and by all odds the ablest negro representative of
abolitionism, disapproved and discouraged John Brown's enterprise.
Especially Frederick Douglass advised against John Brown's policy
of making war upon the United States. That was the second and the
controlling cause of his failure. It seems to have been his thought
that with the country in the tempestuous condition it was then in he
might hopefully assail the National Government itself and that in such
an assault he would have behind him the entire Northern people. How
badly he misunderstood the signs of the times the events clearly show.
On the 16th of October, 1859, he marched with eighteen men upon the
undefended United States arsenal at Harper's Ferry, broke down its
doors and took forcible possession of the premises.
This in itself was an easy thing to do for the reason that the
Government, seeing no occasion to apprehend violence of such sort, had
made no adequate provision for the defense of its arsenal. But John
Brown's act was a direct, open, and flagrant levying of war against the
United States and it was promptly treated as such by the Government at
Washington. A force of marines was sent to Harper's Ferry to eject the
intruder and to repossess the national arsenal.
There was a little skirmish. Many of John Brown's men were killed and
he and his surviving companions were promptly made prisoners, tried for
treason, convicted and hanged.
In the number of men engaged, in the amount of damage done, and in
its immediate consequences this raid of John Brown's was a matter
of no moment whatever. It was conspicuously a failure so far as its
ulterior purpose of inducing slaves to flee from bondage and engage in
insurrection was concerned. It was still more conspicuously a failure
in so far as it meant war upon the United States. A single company of
marines brought it to an end without the necessity of calling in any
larger force. But the raid had a very important influence nevertheless,
upon the future history of the country.
It illustrated and emphasized as no previous event had done, the
implacability of the sentiment hostile to slavery. It demonstrated,
as the fact had never been demonstrated before, the hopelessly
irrepressible character of the controversy concerning slavery. It
alarmed and angered the South as it had never been alarmed and angered
before. It indicated to the Southern people the fact that there were
agencies active at the North which would stop at nothing that might
help to the abolition of slavery; that even a servile war, with all
the brutality and bloodthirstiness that servile war must mean to the
South, was lightly contemplated by a certain and rapidly growing
Northern opinion, as a legitimate means for the accomplishment of
abolition. It indicated an implacability of sentiment against which
there seemed to be no defense except in that dissolution of the
Union which the extremists on both sides had so long and so freely
invoked as a remedy for the hopeless division of the Republic into two
antagonistic camps.
John Brown's invasion would have counted for little if it had stood
alone. But the rifles that he had in possession, with which to arm
fugitive slaves, had been contributed by a citizen of Massachusetts
under urgency of conspicuous representatives of the political party
that sought the abolition of slavery. The five hundred dollars that
Brown carried with him as a part of the equipment with which he hoped
to create a servile war, was contributed by Boston citizens and
represented a hostility as unkind as it was unlawful. The sanction
given to John Brown's insane and treasonable raid by many newspapers
and a certain part of the public at the North served to convince even
the most moderate and conservative men at the South that there was no
longer any hope or prospect of reconciliation between the two sections
upon any basis of reasonable and mutual concession.
It was in this mood that the country approached the presidential
election of 1860. On either side there was a strongly surviving love
for the Federal Union, an abiding conviction that it alone could
guarantee the perpetuity of the American idea of local self-government
and personal liberty. But on either side there was an aggressive party
of disunion which must be reckoned with in politics. On the side of the
North the disunionist party desired and insisted upon the utter and
immediate and unconditional abolition of slavery as the sole condition
of the Union's further existence. On the Southern side the extremists
demanded that slavery should be recognized and protected as a national
institution, with local and state freedom from it as a casual incident
which should in no way be permitted to interfere with the right of the
slaveholder to hold his slaves in bondage even when his convenience
led him to carry them into any free state; and still further that the
people of every territory should be free to decide for themselves
whether or not slavery should be permitted within the domain controlled
by them. Between these two opposing parties stood the overwhelming but
rapidly weakening majority of the people, insisting that the perpetuity
of the Union was of greater importance to liberty than either the
maintenance or the extinction of slavery.
How these forces fought the matter out must be the subject of another
chapter.
CHAPTER IX
THE ELECTION OF 1860
When the time came to nominate candidates for the presidential election
of 1860, something akin to despair had seized upon the minds of men--a
despair that discouraged hopeful conservatism and prompted many to
courses that could promise nothing other than disaster to the Union.
In the event, the election of that year showed that there was a
majority of nearly a million votes against the Republican party, in
a total vote of about four and a half millions. There was still an
overwhelming majority of the people, therefore, who regarded the
preservation and perpetuity of the Republic as the paramount concern.
There is every reason to believe that if circumstances had so shaped
themselves as to put that matter immediately in issue, and if the
contest could have been fairly fought out between the two opposing
sentiments the majority of nearly a million votes cast against what
was regarded as a sectional party, representing a purely geographical
sentiment, would have been swelled to two millions or more. For in all
parts of the country the Union was still an object of adoration and the
Constitution remained a text-book of patriotic study.
But the battle was not destined to be fought out on those lines. Those
whose supreme concern was for the preservation of the Republic, with
all that it signified of self-government among men, were divided in
council and were in consequence defeated. It sounds like a paradox,
but it is a simple statement of fact to say that the disruption of the
Union was brought about by the disunion of the Union forces.
The story is an interesting bit of history and a most significant one.
But in order to understand it clearly the reader should bear in mind
the excessively strained state of feeling in the country which has
already been set forth in these pages. In aid of that let us briefly
recapitulate.
The events of the recently preceding years had gone far to unseat
conservatism, to breed a hopeless discouragement, and to induce a very
general despair. The civil war in Kansas had been lawless, criminal and
murderous on both sides.
It is impossible for any honest mind to approve the doings of the men
on either side in that struggle, or to regard them otherwise than as
criminal attempts to substitute force for law and fraud for freedom of
the ballot.
Yet on each side the _tu quoque_ argument was freely and justly used;
on either side the criminal doings of the partisans of that side were
regarded as a necessary offset to the criminal doings of the partisans
of the other side. At the North the "free state men" were encouraged
and supported by a large part of the press and pulpit. Great preachers
pleaded from their sacred desks for contributions of money with which
to arm the Northern men for this conflict. Great leaders of radical
opinion employed the press and platform in the like behalf.
On the other hand, at the South, with a far less orderly organization
of the forces that control popular opinion and action, there was
an equally strong disposition manifested to support and encourage
those Southern youths who had gone into Kansas to struggle for the
establishment of slavery there. And on each side there was a manifest
willingness to shut eyes to such lawlessness and such crime as the
partisans of that side might find it necessary and convenient to commit
in behalf of the "cause" they were set to serve.
Then had followed John Brown's attempt at Harper's Ferry to bring about
that most terrible of all catastrophes, a slave insurrection. The
attempt itself was so absurd in its lack of means conceivably adequate
to the end proposed, and so clearly the work of a madman in that it
involved a direct assault upon a national arsenal, making itself thus
the insane challenge of a mere handful of men to the whole power of the
United States, that it might have been dismissed from men's minds as
men are accustomed to dismiss the vagaries of demented persons, but for
one fact. The John Brown raid was seriously and earnestly approved by
so many persons and pulpits and prints at the North, as was shown by
funeral services and otherwise, that it was regarded at the South as
a preliminary, typical, and threateningly suggestive manifestation of
what Northern sentiment intended to do to the South whenever it should
have the necessary power. How largely it was thus sanctioned was
later shown by the fact that during the succeeding war the song that
celebrated John Brown's raid made itself a national anthem declaring
that in the advance of the national armies his "soul was marching on."
To the Southern people John Brown's attempt to stir up servile
insurrection meant all of horror, all of slaughter, all of outrage to
women and children that it is possible to conceive. It meant to them
the overturning of society. It meant the dominance of a subject and
inferior race outnumbering the whites in many states, a race ignorant
and passionate in Virginia and Kentucky, and well-nigh savage in the
cotton states. It meant rapine and murder--rape, outrage and burning.
There were still many at the South who desired and earnestly advocated
the extirpation of slavery by any means that could be adopted with
tolerable safety to Southern homes, but John Brown's program of
abolition by servile war--a program which seemed to them to be accepted
by Northern public sentiment--offered them a threat of desolation
against which, if they were men, they were bound to revolt with all
the force they could command. It called into instant and aggressive
activity that fundamental impulse of humanity, the all-controlling
instinct of self-preservation.
On the other side the increasingly insistent demand of the Southern
extremists for the nationalization of slavery and their apparent
ability to force such nationalization, through fugitive slave laws
against which the consciences even of the most devoted lovers of
the Union at the North revolted, and through the decisions of the
Supreme Court, bred in that quarter a similar despair of lasting
union. Hundreds of thousands who did not sympathize with the purpose
to stir up servile war despairingly felt that the time had come when
the demands of what was called "the slave power" must be resisted at
any and all risks, and resigned themselves to the employment of any
means that might be found necessary to that end. They felt that all
compromises had failed, that all efforts to enable this Nation, as Mr.
Lincoln phrased it, "permanently to endure half slave and half free,"
had been defeated and shown to be futile.
In brief, on both sides of the line of cleavage, a spirit of despairing
readiness for any remedy, however drastic it might be, had been created
by the inexorable circumstances of the "irrepressible conflict."
There is no doubt whatever that if the situation had been clearly
understood, nine in ten of all Northern people would have shrunk with
horror from such a program of destruction as that which John Brown's
raid implied and intended--namely the overthrow of the United States
Government and the inauguration of a servile insurrection at the South.
But the conditions were not clearly understood upon either side. Upon
neither side did the people really know precisely how the facts of
the situation presented themselves to the people on the other side.
On neither side was there enough of calm, impartial deliberation to
distinguish between the excesses of sentiment and conduct and provoking
self-assertion on the part of extremists on the other side and the
settled purposes of the great majority. Still worse, on neither side
was there enough resolute calmness to relegate the small body of
extremists to their proper place as a minority, and to take matters out
of their hands.
The thought of secession rapidly gained ground at the South. The
"slangy" slogan of N. P. Banks--"Let the Union slide"--was accepted as
a policy by increasing multitudes at the North.
It was in such conditions that political parties made their
preparations for the presidential campaign of 1860.
The Democratic party represented the only opposition to Republicanism
which had any hope or possibility of success. It was in a clear and
commanding majority in the Nation. The old Whig party had dwindled to
a remnant, and the greater part of that remnant would have voted for
the Democratic candidate in an election directly presenting the issue
of Democracy and nationalism against Republicanism and a geographical
division of the people into parties.
But the Democratic party was itself hopelessly divided. The radical
pro-slavery men at the South had made up their minds to disunion as
a thing desirable and necessary. They did not want the Democratic or
any other national party to win unless they could themselves dominate
and control it. The extreme men among them wanted the Republicans to
succeed in the election in order that there might be an excuse for
secession.
The Democratic nominating convention met at Charleston, S. C., on April
23, 1860. Senator Stephen A. Douglas from the beginning was the first
choice of a majority of the delegates as the party's candidate, but
he could not command that two-thirds' vote which the party had always
insisted upon as a condition precedent to nomination. In his Illinois
campaign against Lincoln in 1858, Douglas had been logically forced to
make certain admissions as to the right of the people in a territory
to exclude slavery from it before it became a state, which deeply
offended the extremists of the South. There was also in effective play
the active desire of these extremists to disrupt the party and secure
its defeat as a pretext for secession. To have nominated Douglas at
that time would have been to elect him with absolute certainty, and to
have elected him in 1860 would have been to postpone the program of
secession for at least four years.
So from the beginning to the end the radical pro-slavery men held
out against Douglas's nomination. They in the end seceded from the
convention and after ten days of fruitless wrangling that body
adjourned without making a nomination or adopting a platform, to meet
again at Baltimore on the eighteenth of June.
This second meeting of the convention was the signal for still further
and bitterer wrangling. The Southerners again withdrew and in the end
two candidates were nominated--Douglas by that part of the convention
which claimed to be national and Breckinridge by the Southern wing.
This was a direct invitation to defeat. It not only compelled such a
division of the Democratic vote as to render the success of either
Democratic candidate impossible, but it was accompanied by the still
further division of the forces opposed to the strictly sectional and
geographical Republican party. The old Whigs and those in sympathy with
their desire to preserve the Union if possible, had met in convention
in Baltimore on the ninth of May, adopted, as their platform,
resolutions pledging devotion to "the Union, the Constitution and the
enforcement of the laws," and under the name of "the Constitutional
Union party" nominated John Bell of Tennessee for president and Edward
Everett of Massachusetts for vice-president.
Their purpose was to bring to bear for the preservation of the
Union the votes of a large body of men who would not vote for the
Republican candidate on the one hand or for either of the Democratic
candidates--presently to be nominated--on the other. Their hope was
that among four candidates there would be no election, and that in an
election by states in the House of Representatives their candidate
might be chosen as one upon whom lovers of the Union could unite
without regard to party.
When the election came they polled no less than 589,581 votes and
carried thirty-nine electoral votes against Douglas's twelve and
Breckinridge's seventy-two. But their hope of throwing the election
into the House of Representatives was doomed to disappointment.
The Republican convention met at Chicago on May 16, and after some
contest nominated Mr. Lincoln. When all the nominations were made,
presenting three candidates in opposition to him, Mr. Lincoln's
election was practically certain, with only the remote chance that the
choice might be thrown into the House of Representatives, as a possible
doubt of that result. In fact he was elected, though the majority
against him on the popular vote was nearly a million.
In the meantime the canvass had mightily tended to additional
embitterment. It had drawn the line more sharply than ever between the
sections. It had completely disrupted and scattered into three warring
groups all those forces that stood out against a party which had no
being except in one section of the Union. It had familiarized men's
minds with the idea of disunion. It had been a campaign of threats and
defiances. It had well-nigh made an end of conservatism as a sentiment
influential on either side. It had intensified distrust, accentuated
hatred, embittered the relations of men, and prepared the minds of the
people North and South for disunion and war.
The time had come which statesmen had so long foreboded when threats of
disunion--oft repeated on both sides and usually received scoffingly as
mere vaporings--took on a seriously menacing character. The time had
come when the warring sectional interests, prejudices and principles
were ready to make final appeal to the brutal arbitrament of steel
and gunpowder. The situation had been strained to the breaking point,
and the fact that it did not break at once was due to conditions and
inspirations which need another chapter for their explanation.
CHAPTER X
THE BIRTH OF WAR
The election of Mr. Lincoln filled the whole country with alarmed
apprehension. At the North no less than at the South men anxiously
asked of themselves and of their neighbors "What is going to happen?"
What had already happened was something unprecedented in the history of
the country. On its face it was merely the election of a president by
a majority of the electoral college vote, against whose election there
had been a heavy popular majority.
The like had happened several times before and the occurrence had never
before excited the least apprehension or created the least alarm or
suggested the smallest protest. It had been accepted in every case
as a natural result of our complex electoral system, which combines
representation of population with representation of the states as such
without regard to population, and which gives to each state the right
to cast the whole of its electoral vote in accordance with the will
of a majority of its people. It was a recognized fact that under this
system a president might easily be chosen by a minority vote of the
people, provided that minority vote was so distributed among the states
as to secure an electoral majority in his behalf. There was no ground
of complaint, therefore, and in fact no complaint was anywhere made,
that Mr. Lincoln was elected in the face of an adverse majority of
about 950,000 popular votes.
But there was a much more significant, and, as it seemed to many minds,
a much more alarming fact behind his election. That election was
purely and exclusively sectional. Of the one hundred eighty electoral
votes cast for him, not one had come from any state lying south of the
Potomac or the Ohio nor had his candidacy been supported in the popular
vote by even a handful in that half of the country. Both on the popular
and on the electoral vote his support had been purely geographical, and
even on geographical lines it had been little more than a majority. In
the slave states he had had no support at all, while in the free states
taken by themselves his popular majority was only 186,964, the vote of
the free states standing 1,731,182 for him and 1,544,218 against him.
In other words, Mr. Lincoln was elected in face of an adverse popular
majority of about 950,000 in the whole country, by a narrow popular
majority of less than 200,000 in one section of the country. He was the
candidate of a party which had absolutely no existence in the southern
part of the Republic, and which existed avowedly only in antagonism to
the institutions of that part of the country.
For the first time in the history of the Republic there had occurred
a purely geographical election. For the first time, as the South
interpreted the matter, one section of the country had assumed the
right to govern another. For the first time a party dominating one
section by a narrow majority and having no shadow of existence in the
other section had come into power with authority to rule both, so far
at least as executive and administrative power was concerned. For the
first time that geographical division of the country had occurred in
fear and dread of which as a possibility so many of the original states
had hesitated to ratify the Constitution itself.
Worse still, so far as the future of the Republic was concerned,
this purely geographical election had been sought and secured upon a
purely geographical and sectional question. Refine the matter as the
platform-makers might, and qualify and explain policies as the party
did, the fact was as apparent then as it is now that the sole reason
for the Republican party's existence was hostility to slavery and an
earnest desire to abolish that institution in this land by whatever
means there might be available to that end. That purpose alone held
together in political union the otherwise discordant elements of which
the party was composed. In other words a party founded exclusively
upon hostility to the domestic institutions of the Southern States had
elected a president by means of a purely sectional and geographical
vote, against the expressed will of the people as reflected in a
popular majority of nearly a million ballots.
These facts of history are here set forth not by way of condemnation
and not at all with any intent to criticise them or the authors of
them adversely, but solely in aid of understanding. They are set
forth in order that the reader who was not born early enough in the
nineteenth century to remember them may understand the conditions and
circumstances that gave birth to the war.
The election of Mr. Lincoln under these circumstances and in this way
was accepted by the extreme pro-slavery men at the South as a challenge
to them to dissolve the Union if they dared. They proceeded to accept
the challenge, but their influence was not dominant in Virginia or
in those states which looked to Virginia for guidance in this crisis
and the lack of such dominance was an embarrassment to them. South
Carolina, in which state the extremists were most influential, adopted
an ordinance of secession on the twentieth of December, 1860. The other
cotton states followed South Carolina's lead until seven of them were
counted as seceding states. But Virginia resolutely held aloof, and
North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri awaited
Virginia's leadership, while Maryland and Delaware stood firmly by the
Union.
Without these states the attempt to disrupt the Union would of course
have been an absurdity from the beginning. But unless Virginia could
be drawn into the movement the other border states were resolute to
withhold themselves from it, for the double reason that Virginia's
influence as the mother of the states concerned was paramount, and that
Virginia's geographical position, the numbers of her population, her
importance in American history and her productiveness of those supplies
upon which military operations must depend, rendered that state an
absolutely indispensable member of the new Confederacy if its war of
independence was to be in the least degree hopeful of success.
The seceding states sent delegates to a convention at Montgomery,
Alabama, in early February, 1861, and there set themselves up as a new
and independent republic under the name of "The Confederate States
of America." But neither Virginia nor the other border states were
represented in that convention.
Virginia, on the fourth of February, elected a constitutional
convention to consider the question of secession. The result of that
election was altogether hostile to the purposes of the secessionists.
An overwhelming majority of the convention elected on that date
consisted of men resolutely opposed to the policy of secession.
Here a nice distinction must be made. The Virginians generally, and
their accredited representatives in the constitutional convention,
believed absolutely and without a shadow of questioning in the
constitutional right of any state to secede from the Union at will.
They agreed also in the conviction that the National Government had
no constitutional right or power to use force of any kind in order to
prevent the secession of any state or in order to compel its return to
the Union.
But while they held these doctrines to be absolutely indisputable,
the Virginians resolutely rejected secession as a policy. They saw
nothing in Mr. Lincoln's election to justify a resort to so extreme
a remedy, and they refused their assent to that method of procedure.
It is important to bear in mind the distinction between the Virginian
conception of states' rights and the Virginian conception of policy
in the conditions created by Mr. Lincoln's election, because upon
that distinction hung the issue of peace or war in the Republic. For
nothing could be more certain than that without Virginia's pith and
substance, and without the assistance of the states that waited for
Virginia's decision before rendering their own, the cotton states would
not have undertaken, seriously, a war of independence, or if they had
done so, would not have been able to maintain their struggle against
the Federal power for any considerable time.
Everything hinged upon Virginia's course and Virginia resolutely
repudiated the policy of secession, denying that Mr. Lincoln's election
afforded any just occasion or any sufficient excuse for a resort to
that extreme remedy.
Accordingly all the forces of secession were brought to bear upon
Virginia. All the hotheads in the state and many from other states,
were set to make speeches. Most of the newspapers were purchased and
placed in control of intemperate radicals who could be depended upon
to make life not worth living for any man who hesitated to precipitate
war. John M. Daniel, a gifted man of extreme views and highly
intemperate prejudices, came home from his consular mission abroad
and resumed control of his newspaper, the Richmond _Examiner_, only
to make of its columns a daily terror to every man in the convention
or out of it who ventured to hope for peace and the perpetuity of the
Union, through the efforts of John J. Crittenden's peace conference or
through any other conceivable agency of compromise or reconciliation.
Commodore, and afterwards Admiral, Farragut--himself a Southerner, and
a resident at that time of Virginia,--said that Virginia was "dragooned
out of the Union." The phrase is not quite accurately descriptive of
what happened, but at any rate it correctly describes the attempts
made to compel Virginia's secession and to secure with it the addition
of all the strength of all the border states to the newly formed
Confederacy.
The dragooning was attempted, but Virginia refused to yield. Her
convention, undoubtedly representing with accuracy the will of her
people, held out in opposition to every suggestion of the state's
withdrawal from the Union.
Virginia stood thus as a bulwark against civil war for more than two
moons, and there is little doubt that her influence and her attitude
would have been effectual in preventing the war if only a technicality
had been put aside in order that Virginia might not be forced to array
herself against that Union of which she was largely the author and to
which she still clung with loyal allegiance.
When in the middle of April, 1861, after the bombardment of Fort
Sumter, Mr. Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 men to form an army with
which to coerce the seceding states into submission, and included
Virginia in that call, the Virginians felt themselves bound to choose
between a secession for which they saw no possible occasion, on the one
hand, and the lending of Virginia's power on the other to a program of
coercion for which they recognized no constitutional warrant and no
moral right. In making such a choice they saw but one honorable course
open to them. A convention which had stood out against secession in
face of vituperation, contumely and every other force that could be
brought to bear in that behalf, voted for secession at the last as an
alternative to injustice and dishonor.
This act--which the wisely diplomatic omission of Virginia from the
call for troops would have averted--made the war not only possible but
a fact.
But this is getting well ahead of the story. Let us go back.
Mr. Lincoln was elected on the sixth of November, 1860. He could not
take his seat until the fourth of March, 1861. In the meantime the
Government must remain in the hands of the peculiarly irresolute
administration of James Buchanan, whose sole concern seemed to be to
postpone the outbreak of actual hostilities until the expiration of his
own term of office.
Commissioners were sent to him from the seceding states to arrange for
the peaceful dissolution of the Union. He had no constitutional power
to negotiate with them and he very properly refused to receive them
in their official capacity. But on the other hand he did absolutely
nothing to prevent or to check or in any way to interfere with the
organization of the seceding states as a power in open resistance to
the Union. It is a fact now apparent to all students of history that
but for Virginia's refusal to join the secession movement, carrying
with it as it did the refusal of the other border states, there would
have been an organized power ready, upon Mr. Lincoln's accession to
office, to assert and maintain the independence of the Southern states
against any force that the North could have brought to bear against
them.
The regular United States army at that time was ridiculously inadequate
in numbers to undertake any enterprise of consequence. Its feeble
forces were scattered from Maine to Texas, from Florida to Oregon.
Its hands were more than full with the task of holding the Indians in
subjection and protecting the borders against the ravages of savage
war. The Buchanan administration called no volunteers into the field,
while in every Southern state there were musterings at every county
seat and military organizations of a formidable character.
In the meantime the newly elected president and those who supported him
had no opportunity to make preparation for meeting these conditions.
They were not even privileged to advise.
The administration that still remained in power was rapidly
disintegrating. Four of the cabinet officers resigned their places,
thus still further paralyzing the hands of the President. At the
North there was a fixed conviction that secession was merely a bit of
political play which would never be pushed to the point of actual war
and consequently there was very little of military preparation, while
all the able-bodied young men of the South, and even of Virginia, which
so emphatically refused to secede, were organizing and drilling and
holding themselves in readiness for whatever might happen.
But everywhere there was apprehension. From the hour of the election
returns in November until the incoming of Mr. Lincoln's administration
on the fourth of March, conservative men at the North and at the South
anxiously busied themselves in an endeavor to find a way out of the
difficulty, to save the Union from disruption and the country from
civil war.
On the second day of December the Albany _Evening Journal_, a newspaper
edited by Thurlow Weed and the personal organ of Mr. Seward, appealed
strongly and even passionately to patriotism throughout the country
for "such moderation, and forbearance as will draw out, combine and
strengthen the Union sentiment of the whole country."
But this and like appeals made by Union-loving, patriotic men North
and South fell, not so much upon deaf ears as upon the ears of those
who had lost control of their respective parties. Had the conservative
men of the Nation been able to act together, they must undoubtedly
have prevailed for peace in virtue of their majority of a million, but
on both sides the radicals had seized upon the reins. At the South
the secessionists were rejoicing in Mr. Lincoln's election under
circumstances that gave excuse for the dissolution of the Union. At
the North the radical abolitionists saw and welcomed in that event an
opportunity to use the whole power of the Federal Government for the
final extirpation of African slavery. At the North and at the South the
extremists were in control, chiefly by virtue of their intensity and
their clamor.
On neither side did the radicals desire the preservation of the
Union; on neither side did they seek any amicable adjustment of the
controversy. On the contrary they invoked controversy, invited disunion
and courted war.
In Congress many efforts were made to find a plan and a basis of
adjustment. By a vote of 145 to 38 the House of Representatives created
a committee of one member from each state to consider the state of
the Union and to report measures of pacification. The Senate adopted
measures of like purport.
In that body Andrew Johnson of Tennessee--afterwards
president--deliberately proposed a constitutional amendment to the
effect that thereafter the president and vice-president should be
chosen the one from the North and the other from the South and that the
two sections should alternately enjoy the advantage of furnishing the
incumbent of the higher office.
Even at that excited and unreasoning time there was probably no more
insane proposal made than this. It would have put sectionalism into the
Constitution itself. It would have limited both parties in their choice
of candidates to men resident in one section or in the other; it would
have made of the so-called Mason and Dixon's line a divisional boundary
over which no political power, no popular preference, no vote, however
overwhelming, could step; it would have changed the United States from
the condition of a single, federal republic in which all the states and
all citizens were possessed of equal rights into a bifurcated alliance
between two antagonistic groups of states, the chief bond of union
between which would have been an agreement that they should alternately
govern each other.
Surely nothing more senseless, more absurd or more impracticable than
this was ever proposed in any country by anybody pretending to be a
statesman. But the fact that it was seriously proposed and earnestly
urged by a senator who at the next election was nominated and elected
vice-president and who became president by virtue of Mr. Lincoln's
assassination, is suggestive at least and illustrative of the intensity
with which the country and its statesmen were at that time longing for
a way out of the difficulty and endeavoring to find it.
In the meanwhile the radicals and extremists on both sides laughed and
jeered at all such endeavors to save a Union which they had doomed to
destruction by their common fiat, though in nothing else were they
agreed. They found means of thwarting every effort of conservatism,
and, by intemperate and incessant vituperation, they succeeded in
driving many thousands out of the ranks of patriotic conservatism
on the one side or the other, and into support of their demand for
disunion, chaos and black night.
It was frankly recognized by many leaders of public opinion at the
North, that the Southerners were somewhat justified in their attitude
by their misconception of the Republican party's purposes and views,
a misconception to which the intemperate utterances of extreme
anti-slavery men, very naturally ministered. It was in recognition of
this natural misunderstanding that Senator Benjamin F. Wade, himself an
earnest and even extreme anti-slavery man, said in the Senate, two days
before South Carolina seceded:
"I do not so much blame the people of the South, because I think they
have been led to believe that we, to-day the dominant party, who are
about to take the reins of government, are their mortal foes, and stand
ready to trample their institutions under foot."
That was precisely what the Southern people believed. They were firmly
convinced that the success of the Republican party meant a merciless,
relentless, implacable war upon their labor and social system and upon
themselves as the supporters and beneficiaries of that system.
Nevertheless they clung to the Union and labored for its preservation.
Virginia supported by the other border states made every effort to
secure a pacification.
Chief among these efforts was that made in Congress by John J.
Crittenden of Kentucky. On the nineteenth of December, the day before
South Carolina's adoption of the ordinance of secession, Mr. Crittenden
offered a series of resolutions in the Senate which were designed to
compose the troubles of the time and to furnish a basis of peaceful
settlement.
Mr. Crittenden proposed amendments to the Constitution providing:
1. That slavery should be prohibited in all territories north of the
Missouri Compromise line while they remained territories and freely
permitted in all territories south of that line, but with the provision
that every state to be formed out of such territory, whether lying
north or south of that line, should be free to decide for itself
whether or not as a state it would permit slavery.
2. That Congress should have no power to abolish slavery in any place
subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States--meaning,
of course, the District of Columbia, the public reservations and the
territories. It was especially provided that Congress should at no time
abolish slavery in the District of Columbia without the consent of the
state of Maryland and of the owners of slaves within the District.
3. That Congress should not in any way forbid the traffic in slaves
from one slave state to another.
4. That the United States should be liable for the value of any
fugitive slave whose recapture should be prevented by force or by
intimidation and that the county in which the force or intimidation had
been used should be liable to the United States for the mulct.
There were other details which need not here be considered in view of
the general absurdity of the proposal. Not even Andrew Johnson's plan,
already set forth, embodied more conspicuous elements of impossibility.
The Northern States would never have consented to these constitutional
provisions. The Southern States would never have been satisfied with
them, because they carried with them no effectual provision for their
own enforcement. It was folly and futility, from beginning to end, but
at any rate it was patriotic folly and country-loving futility. It
represented the dominant desire of the people to find some basis of
reconciliation upon which the crumbling foundations of the Union might
be rebuilt and securely buttressed.
The proposal--absurd and impossible as it was--was strongly supported
both in Congress and in the country. Mr. Pugh of Ohio expressed in
the Senate the opinion that it would command the support of nearly
every state in the Union, and he pointed out the fact that no other
proposal ever submitted to Congress had been supported by the petitions
of so great a multitude of citizens. The conservative newspaper press
passionately urged its adoption, declaring it to be a measure which
would completely disarm the disunion sentiment on both sides, and
suggesting to Mr. Seward that one word from him in its behalf would
make a final end of the fearful threat of war which overshadowed the
country.
But all these urgings were founded upon neglect to consider the
all-controlling fact that the conflict between slavery and anti-slavery
had become actually irrepressible, with the added element of what
Charles Sumner called a "sacred animosity."
There was an active, aggressive, anti-slavery minority at the North
whose members cared not one pin-point's worth for the Union except in
so far as they hoped to use its power for the abolition of slavery in
any way and upon any terms that might be available. They had already
declared their hostility to the Constitution, and the insertion of Mr.
Crittenden's amendments into that document would have served only to
intensify their hatred of it and to stimulate their purpose to be rid
of it. On the other hand there was an active and ceaselessly aggressive
pro-slavery party at the South whose members were resolutely bent upon
the destruction of the Union in order that a new Republic might be
founded with African slavery as its corner stone.
Between these two radical parties there could be no peace and no
neutral ground upon which to negotiate a peace. Each held the Union
in contempt--the one because the Constitution protected slavery, the
other because it did not adequately protect that institution. Each was
ready to sacrifice the Union if by such sacrifice it might achieve its
cherished purposes. The one had decried the Union and its Constitution
as "a league with death and a covenant with hell" but now clung to it
as a power that might be conveniently used for the accomplishment of
cherished purposes. The other had despaired of its hope of using the
Federal power further for its own ends. The Southern extremists wished
to destroy the Union in order that its power might not be used for
the extirpation of slavery; the Northern extremists, who had formerly
been equally willing to "let the Union slide," were now eager for its
preservation in order that its tremendous potentialities of force and
compulsion might be employed in behalf of that extirpation of slavery
for which alone they cared.
Neither of these extreme parties in the least degree sympathized
with any effort to preserve the Union for its own sake by measures
of compromise and reconciliation. The Northern radicals wanted the
South to secede in order that military force might be employed for the
compulsory abolition of slavery. The Southern radicals wanted the Union
dissolved in order that slavery might be no further interfered with.
Neither at the North nor at the South were the radicals even yet in a
majority. But in both sections they held a sort of balance of power
and in both they were in effect dominant.
Under such conditions, with a conflict so truly and hopelessly
irrepressible confronting the country, what conceivable hope was there
of a peaceful adjustment by means of Mr. Crittenden's resolutions, or
by any other means that patriotic ingenuity might devise?
The first gun had not yet been fired, but there was war on,
nevertheless, and no paper resolutions however plausibly phrased could
stop its progress to the cannon and musket stage.
Mr. Crittenden's proposal of Amendments to the Constitution did not
and could not command the two-thirds majority in Congress necessary to
their submission to the several states for ratification. The cry of
the Northern extremists was "No backing down! No inch of concession
to the slave power! No surrender of the fruits of the victory we have
won!" The cry of the Southern radicals was: "There is no use in paper
guarantees! We cannot trust them! Our enemies have not kept faith in
the past and will not keep faith in the future. Let us abandon the
hopeless effort for compromises that cannot be enforced! Let us secede
and set up a new republic of our own!"
Then came Virginia into the breach, as she had so often come before.
Standing as she did for conservatism and for that Union which her
legislature had been the first to suggest and which her statesmen
had done so much to bring into beneficent being, she appealed to the
sentiment of Union and patriotism throughout the land. Her legislature
asked that all the states should appoint delegates to a great peace
conference at Washington, whose statesmanlike duty it should be to
devise and agree upon some plan of adjustment by which the danger that
overshadowed the Republic might be averted. This appeal for peace was
made on the nineteenth day of January, 1861,--more than a fortnight
before the date appointed for the election of a constitutional
convention in Virginia to consider the crisis.
It is idle to speculate upon the "might have been." What actually
happened was that many of the states appointed to that peace conference
delegates of radical views and intemperate minds, whose endeavors from
first to last were ceaselessly devoted not to the task of finding a way
out, but to the preconceived purpose of defeating the objects of the
peace conference.
In the end a committee of that body did indeed recommend a policy
practically identical with that outlined in Mr. Crittenden's proposed
amendments to the Constitution. But the extremists on both sides and
especially the politicians on both sides who sniffed preferment in the
air of radicalism, were by that time so far dominant that the proposal
came to nothing. It failed of acceptance in either house of Congress
when put to a vote within a brief time before the end of the session.
Nevertheless Virginia still resolutely held out against secession and
five other border states stood by her in that patriotic attitude for a
month and a half more.
Mr. Lincoln was inaugurated on the fourth of March, and straightway
there set in a rivalry among the Republican leaders for the control
of his administration. Even those who had most actively aided in
his election gravely misunderstood and seriously underestimated the
character of the man they had chosen to be president. They assumed
from the beginning that somebody, other than himself, must direct his
administration, and there was eager rivalry among them to usurp that
function.
They did not know Abraham Lincoln or realize his intellectual or
moral power. The extreme abolitionists beset him with plans to make
war upon the seceding states with the avowed purpose of abolishing
slavery in all the states by the high hand and without regard to that
Constitution which they had declared to be a "league with death and
a covenant with hell." To these Mr. Lincoln replied that while they
were free to advocate any policy they pleased, he at least, was bound
by his official oath to support and maintain the Constitution of the
United States. In the end, of course, and when strenuous war was on
he did indeed take a different view. As a "war measure" he in the end
proclaimed emancipation, without even a pretense of constitutional
authority to do so, and indeed in direct defiance of the Constitution.
But at least he hesitated to do this, and waited before doing it until
the exigencies of an uncertain war seemed to force that extreme measure
upon him as one of national self-defense.
At the first he decided as his fixed policy to assert the authority
of the National Government in the seceding states, to insist upon the
enforcement of the laws there, to recover such government property as
those states had seized upon and to use such force as might be required
for these ends. He clearly understood that there were men by hundreds
of thousands in the North who would stand by him in an endeavor thus
to restore and maintain the Union, but who would instantly and angrily
desert him should he proclaim a war for the extirpation of slavery
within the states in which that institution constitutionally existed.
Accordingly he addressed all his endeavors solely to the task of
asserting and maintaining the national authority in the seceding states.
Had all the Southern states seceded before he assumed office his
problem would have been an easy one. He would simply have had to call
upon the Northern states for military forces sufficient to carry out
this program of law enforcement. But Virginia had not seceded, and
five other Southern states had submitted their course to Virginia's
decision. Virginia was anxiously busying herself to find some ground of
reconciliation, some means of accomplishing that preservation of the
Union which Mr. Lincoln had declared to be his own and only object of
endeavor.
But if Mr. Lincoln was to enforce the laws in the seceding states, and
thus to maintain the Union, he must have troops. The little regular
army could not furnish them. Either the militia must be called out or
volunteers must be summoned for the purpose.
Mr. Lincoln called upon all the states that had not yet seceded for
their several quotas required to make up an army of 75,000 men, with
which in effect to coerce the seceding states into submission. He
demanded that Virginia should furnish her quota of troops for this
purpose, and Virginia, deeming the purpose to be an unlawful and
iniquitous one, decided to secede--as she had thitherto resolutely
refused to do--rather than aid in a coercion which all her Union-loving
and peace-loving people regarded as a wrong, an injustice, an
unconstitutional and unlawful aggression upon the rights of sovereign
states.
Virginia seceded unwillingly and not at all because her people regarded
Mr. Lincoln's election as affording any just ground for the withdrawal
of any state from the Union, but solely because the mother state was
forced to choose between secession on the one hand and the lending
of active assistance on the other to what all Virginians regarded as
a wicked and wanton warfare by the Federal Government upon sovereign
states for having exercised what all Virginians held--as most Americans
had previously and sometimes aggressively held--to be their reserved
rights under the Constitution.
It was on the fifteenth day of April, 1861, that Mr. Lincoln called
upon Virginia for her quota of troops with which to coerce the
seceding states into submission. It was on the sixteenth day of April
that Virginia's constitutional convention, bravely resolute in its
love for the Union and in its antagonism to the policy of secession,
was confronted with the choice of furnishing troops to aid in what
its members almost unanimously regarded as a political crime or the
alternative of joining that secession movement from which the sober and
conservative thought of Virginia had so long and so courageously held
aloof in defiance of criticism and in face of contempt and contumely.
To men of high minds, holding these views, there could be but one
choice in such a case. They decreed that Virginia should prefer a
secession which that state overwhelmingly disapproved, to a dishonor
which no Virginian could contemplate with a satisfied mind. Accordingly
Virginia's strongly pro-Union convention reluctantly adopted an
ordinance of secession, on the seventeenth day of April, 1861, not of
choice but upon a conviction of necessity. The other border states that
had waited for Virginia's decision to determine their own, became at
once members of the new Southern Confederacy and the question of war
or peace was finally decided in behalf of war--war to the limit of
possibility, war to the utmost end of endurance, war to the point of
exhaustion on the one side or the other.
A wise prophet, basing his prophecies upon the patent facts of the
situation, could not have failed to foretell the outcome of such a war
with precision and certainty. The utmost that the South could do--even
by "robbing the cradle and the grave" as was wittily and sadly said
at the time, was to put 600,000 men into the field, first and last.
The North was able to enlist an aggregate of 2,778,304, or, if we
reduce this to a basis of three years' service for each man, the Union
enlistments for three full years numbered no less than 2,326,168--or
nearly four times the total enlistments in the Confederate army from
beginning to end of the war. Yet the Confederate armies included
practically every white man in the South who was able to bear arms.
There was in effect a levy _en masse_, including the entire white male
population from early boyhood to extreme old age.
Again the Federal Government had a navy and the Confederates none.
It was certain from the beginning that the Federal authorities would
completely shut the South in by blockading and closely sealing every
southern port. Thus the Federals--as was apparent in advance--were
destined to have the whole world to draw upon for soldiers, for
supplies, for ammunition, for improved arms and for everything else
that contributes to military strength, while the South must rely
absolutely upon itself--ill armed, and unequipped with anything except
courage, devotion and heroic fortitude.
There were no facilities at the South for the manufacture of arms.
There was not an armory in all that land that could turn out a musket
of the pattern then in use, not a machine shop that could convert a
muzzle-loading rifle into a breech-loader or give to any gun so much
as a choke bore. There were foundries that could cast iron cannon of
an antique pattern, but not one that could make a modern gun. There
were machine shops--a very few--in which the Northern-made locomotives
then in use on Southern railroads could be repaired in a small way,
but there was not in all the South a shop in which a useful locomotive
could be built. Nor were there any car builders who had had experience
in the making of rolling stock fit for service.
In brief the South was an agricultural region accustomed to depend
upon the North and upon Europe for its mechanical devices and the
outbreak of war was clearly destined to be the signal for the shutting
off of both Northern and European supplies. Even in the matter of
medicines--and greatly more soldiers die of disease than of wounds--the
South had no adequate supply and no assured means of creating one
for itself. Quinine, calomel and opium were scarcely less necessary
than gunpowder and bullets to the conduct of military operations.
Yet there was nowhere in the South a "plant" that could produce any
one of those drugs. Nor was there anywhere a mercury supply from
which calomel might be made. Early in the war it became impossible to
procure so much as a Seidlitz powder in the South. There was nowhere a
factory that could make a scalpel, to say nothing of more ingeniously
contrived surgical implements. The materials for making gunpowder
were so wanting that citizens were urged a little later to dig up the
earthen floors of their smoke-houses and their tobacco barns and were
instructed in the art of extracting the niter from them. In the towns
women were officially solicited to save their chamber lye and deliver
it to the authorities in order that its chemicals might be utilized
in the creation of explosives. Farmers were by law forbidden to burn
corn cobs in their fire places and required to turn them over instead
to the authorities in order that their sodas and potashes might be
utilized in the manufacture of gunpowder. Women were urged to grow
poppies and instructed in the art of so scarring the plants as to
secure the precious gum from which opium could be made for the relief
of suffering in the hospitals. They were taught also how to harvest and
stew dog-fennel in order to secure a substitute for quinine. The negro
boys were set at work to dig up the roots of the dogwood, and women
were taught to extract from the bark of such roots a bitters which
served as a substitute for the unobtainable quinine.
In short, at every point the South was lamentably lacking in supplies,
and the blockade, established early in the war, forbade the incoming
of such things as were needed except at serious risk of capture and
confiscation.
Even food supplies were from the first to the last meager. The South
produced very little corn, pork, wheat, and the like, in comparison
with the production of the great northwestern states or in comparison
with the need that was created by the enlistment of all the able-bodied
white men of that region in the Confederate army.
Thus the South was at a fearful disadvantage from the first; the wiser
men of the South knew the fact in advance. They had courage and they
had little else. Their achievement in maintaining a strenuous war for
four years in face of such disparities of force and resources, must
always be accounted to their credit as brave and resourceful men.
It was certain from the first that the South must be beaten in its
struggle--unless by dash and daring it should win at once, or unless,
by some remote chance, assistance should come from without. The chance
of that was very small but it existed as a factor in the problem. The
chief hope the Southern people had of winning the war upon which they
entered with courage and enthusiasm was born of the delusive belief
that the god of battles awards victory, not to the strong but to the
righteous. They devoutly believed that their cause was righteous,
and, in spite of all the teachings of history, they expected God to
interpose in some fashion to give them the victory. They believed
themselves to be battling for the same right of self-government among
men that their revolutionary ancestors had fought for, and they refused
to recognize any disparity of resources between the contending forces
as a sufficient reason for their failure under the rule of a just God
in whose reign over human affairs they devoutly believed.
They were sentimentalists. They believed that ideas rather than facts
ruled the world and its affairs. They had been nurtured upon the Bible
and Scott's novels, and they believed in both.
Had any prophet arisen among them who should have measured their
resources against those of their adversary, they would have refused to
listen to his prophesyings. They would have gone on believing that they
were entirely certain of success and victory by reason of what seemed
to them the indisputable righteousness of their cause.
There were men among them who rightly recognized the enormous disparity
between the resources of the North and those that the South could
command. But such men were few and their counsel counted for nothing.
As for the extremists, they anticipated military commissions and
political preferment for themselves, and they cared for little else
than to occupy a conspicuous place in public attention for a little
while. They were in spirit gamblers, ready to stake everything upon
uncertain chance. They wanted war for the sake of what war might bring
to them of advantage, and they were ready to stake everything upon the
hazard of their own fortune.
It was in Virginia mainly that there were men of soberer minds, as had
been demonstrated in the Virginians' choice of men to represent them
in their constitutional convention. But even in Virginia there were
hotheads and fools a plenty, who believed that a war was to be won by
hurrahs, and that enthusiasm was an effective substitute for ammunition.
The secession of Virginia made the war a fact and a necessity. So long
as that had been delayed there had remained a hope of reconciliation
and adjustment by peaceful devices. When that event occurred it was
certain that the question at issue must be fought out upon bloody
battlefields.
The final stage of the controversy had been reached. The case had
been appealed to the arbitrament of steel and gunpowder. Argument was
at an end and brute force had come in as umpire. It was a melancholy
spectacle over which the gods might well have wept. But men on both
sides greeted it joyously as if it had been a holiday occasion.
BOOK II
THE CONDUCT OF THE WAR