[An Oration delivered before the City Authorities of Boston, on the 4th
of July, 1863.]
It is our first impulse, upon this returning day of our nation's birth,
to recall whatever is happiest and noblest in our past history, and to
join our voices in celebrating the statesmen and the heroes, the men of
thought and the men of action, to whom that history owes its existence.
In other years this pleasing office may have been all that was required
of the holiday speaker. But to-day, when the very life of the nation
is threatened, when clouds are thick about us, and men's hearts are
throbbing with passion, or failing with fear, it is the living question
of the hour, and not the dead story of the past, which forces itself
into all minds, and will find unrebuked debate in all assemblies.
In periods of disturbance like the present, many persons who sincerely
love their country and mean to do their duty to her disappoint the hopes
and expectations of those who are actively working in her cause. They
seem to have lost whatever moral force they may have once possessed,
and to go drifting about from one profitless discontent to another, at
a time when every citizen is called upon for cheerful, ready service.
It is because their minds are bewildered, and they are no longer truly
themselves. Show them the path of duty, inspire them with hope for
the future, lead them upwards from the turbid stream of events to the
bright, translucent springs of eternal principles, strengthen their
trust in humanity and their faith in God, and you may yet restore them
to their manhood and their country.
At all times, and especially on this anniversary of glorious
recollections and kindly enthusiasms, we should try to judge the weak
and wavering souls of our brothers fairly and generously. The conditions
in which our vast community of peace-loving citizens find themselves
are new and unprovided for. Our quiet burghers and farmers are in the
position of river-boats blown from their moorings out upon a vast ocean,
where such a typhoon is raging as no mariner who sails its waters ever
before looked upon. If their beliefs change with the veering of the
blast, if their trust in their fellow-men, and in the course of Divine
Providence, seems well-nigh shipwrecked, we must remember that they
were taken unawares, and without the preparation which could fit them to
struggle with these tempestuous elements. In times like these the faith
is the man; and they to whom it is given in larger measure owe a special
duty to those who for want of it are faint at heart, uncertain in
speech, feeble in effort, and purposeless in aim.
Assuming without argument a few simple propositions,--that
self-government is the natural condition of an adult society,
as distinguished from the immature state, in which the temporary
arrangements of monarchy and oligarchy are tolerated as conveniences;
that the end of all social compacts is, or ought to be, to give every
child born into the world the fairest chance to make the most and the
best of itself that laws can give it; that Liberty, the one of the two
claimants who swears that her babe shall not be split in halves and
divided between them, is the true mother of this blessed Union; that
the contest in which we are engaged is one of principles overlaid by
circumstances; that the longer we fight, and the more we study the
movements of events and ideas, the more clearly we find the moral nature
of the cause at issue emerging in the field and in the study; that
all honest persons with average natural sensibility, with respectable
understanding, educated in the school of northern teaching, will have
eventually to range themselves in the armed or unarmed host which fights
or pleads for freedom, as against every form of tyranny; if not in
the front rank now, then in the rear rank by and by;--assuming these
propositions, as many, perhaps most of us, are ready to do, and
believing that the more they are debated before the public the more they
will gain converts, we owe it to the timid and the doubting to keep the
great questions of the time in unceasing and untiring agitation. They
must be discussed, in all ways consistent with the public welfare, by
different classes of thinkers; by priests and laymen; by statesmen
and simple voters; by moralists and lawyers; by men of science and
uneducated hand-laborers; by men of facts and figures, and by men of
theories and aspirations; in the abstract and in the concrete; discussed
and rediscussed every month, every week, every day, and almost every
hour, as the telegraph tells us of some new upheaval or subsidence of
the rocky base of our political order.
Such discussions may not be necessary to strengthen the convictions of
the great body of loyal citizens. They may do nothing toward changing
the views of those, if such there be, as some profess to believe, who
follow politics as a trade. They may have no hold upon that class of
persons who are defective in moral sensibility, just as other persons
are wanting in an ear for music. But for the honest, vacillating minds,
the tender consciences supported by the tremulous knees of an infirm
intelligence, the timid compromisers who are always trying to curve the
straight lines and round the sharp angles of eternal law, the continual
debate of these living questions is the one offered means of grace and
hope of earthly redemption. And thus a true, unhesitating patriot may be
willing to listen with patience to arguments which he does not need,
to appeals which have no special significance for him, in the hope that
some less clear in mind or less courageous in temper may profit by them.
As we look at the condition in which we find ourselves on this fourth
day of July, 1863, at the beginning of the Eighty-eighth Year of
American Independence, we may well ask ourselves what right we have to
indulge in public rejoicings. If the war in which we are engaged is an
accidental one, which might have been avoided but for our fault; if it
is for any ambitious or unworthy purpose on our part; if it is hopeless,
and we are madly persisting in it; if it is our duty and in our power
to make a safe and honorable peace, and we refuse to do it; if our free
institutions are in danger of becoming subverted, and giving place to an
irresponsible tyranny; if we are moving in the narrow circles which are
to ingulf us in national ruin,--then we had better sing a dirge,
and leave this idle assemblage, and hush the noisy cannon which are
reverberating through the air, and tear down the scaffolds which are
soon to blaze with fiery symbols; for it is mourning and not joy that
should cover the land; there should be silence, and not the echo of
noisy gladness, in our streets; and the emblems with which we tell our
nation's story and prefigure its future should be traced, not in fire,
but in ashes.
If, on the other hand, this war is no accident, but an inevitable result
of long incubating causes; inevitable as the cataclysms that swept away
the monstrous births of primeval nature; if it is for no mean, unworthy
end, but for national life, for liberty everywhere, for humanity, for
the kingdom of God on earth; if it is not hopeless, but only growing to
such dimensions that the world shall remember the final triumph of right
throughout all time; if there is no safe and honorable peace for us but
a peace proclaimed from the capital of every revolted province in
the name of the sacred, inviolable Union; if the fear of tyranny is a
phantasm, conjured up by the imagination of the weak, acted on by the
craft of the cunning; if so far from circling inward to the gulf of our
perdition, the movement of past years is reversed, and every revolution
carries us farther and farther from the centre of the vortex, until, by
God's blessing, we shall soon find ourselves freed from the outermost
coil of the accursed spiral; if all these things are true; if we may
hope to make them seem true, or even probable, to the doubting soul,
in an hour's discourse, then we may join without madness in the day's
exultant festivities; the bells may ring, the cannon may roar, the
incense of our harmless saltpetre fill the air, and the children who
are to inherit the fruit of these toiling, agonizing years, go about
unblamed, making day and night vocal with their jubilant patriotism.
The struggle in which we are engaged was inevitable; it might have come
a little sooner, or a little later, but it must have come. The disease
of the nation was organic, and not functional, and the rough chirurgery
of war was its only remedy.
In opposition to this view, there are many languid thinkers who lapse
into a forlorn belief that if this or that man had never lived, or if
this or that other man had not ceased to live, the country might have
gone on in peace and prosperity, until its felicity merged in the
glories of the millennium. If Mr. Calhoun had never proclaimed his
heresies; if Mr. Garrison had never published his paper; if Mr.
Phillips, the Cassandra in masculine shape of our long prosperous Ilium,
had never uttered his melodious prophecies; if the silver tones of Mr.
Clay had still sounded in the senate-chamber to smooth the billows of
contention; if the Olympian brow of Daniel Webster had been lifted from
the dust to fix its awful frown on the darkening scowl of rebellion,--we
might have been spared this dread season of convulsion. All this is but
simple Martha's faith, without the reason she could have given: “If Thou
hadst been here, my brother had not died.”
They little know the tidal movements of national thought and feeling,
who believe that they depend for existence on a few swimmers who ride
their waves. It is not Leviathan that leads the ocean from continent to
continent, but the ocean which bears his mighty bulk as it wafts its
own bubbles. If this is true of all the narrower manifestations of human
progress, how much more must it be true of those broad movements in the
intellectual and spiritual domain which interest all mankind? But in
the more limited ranges referred to, no fact is more familiar than that
there is a simultaneous impulse acting on many individual minds at once,
so that genius comes in clusters, and shines rarely as a single star.
You may trace a common motive and force in the pyramid-builders of the
earliest recorded antiquity, in the evolution of Greek architecture, and
in the sudden springing up of those wondrous cathedrals of the twelfth
and following centuries, growing out of the soil with stem and bud and
blossom, like flowers of stone whose seeds might well have been the
flaming aerolites cast over the battlements of heaven. You may see the
same law showing itself in the brief periods of glory which make the
names of Pericles and Augustus illustrious with reflected splendors; in
the painters, the sculptors, the scholars of “Leo's golden days”; in the
authors of the Elizabethan time; in the poets of the first part of this
century following that dreary period, suffering alike from the silence
of Cowper and the song of Hayley. You may accept the fact as natural,
that Zwingli and Luther, without knowing each other, preached the same
reformed gospel; that Newton, and Hooke, and Halley, and Wren arrived
independently of each other at the great law of the diminution of
gravity with the square of the distance; that Leverrier and Adams felt
their hands meeting, as it were, as they stretched them into the outer
darkness beyond the orbit of Uranus, in search of the dim, unseen
Planet; that Fulton and Bell, that Wheatstone and Morse, that Daguerre
and Niepce, were moving almost simultaneously in parallel paths to the
same end. You see why Patrick Henry, in Richmond, and Samuel Adams,
in Boston, were startling the crown officials with the same accents of
liberty, and why the Mecklenburg Resolutions had the very ring of the
Protest of the Province of Massachusetts. This law of simultaneous
intellectual movement, recognized by all thinkers, expatiated upon
by Lord Macaulay and by Mr. Herbert Spencer among recent writers,
is eminently applicable to that change of thought and feeling which
necessarily led to the present conflict.
The antagonism of the two sections of the Union was not the work of this
or that enthusiast or fanatic. It was the consequence of a movement in
mass of two different forms of civilization in different directions,
and the men to whom it was attributed were only those who represented it
most completely, or who talked longest and loudest about it. Long before
the accents of those famous statesmen referred to ever resounded in the
halls of the Capitol, long before the “Liberator” opened its batteries,
the controversy now working itself out by trial of battle was foreseen
and predicted. Washington warned his countrymen of the danger of
sectional divisions, well knowing the line of cleavage that ran through
the seemingly solid fabric. Jefferson foreshadowed the judgment to fall
upon the land for its sins against a just God. Andrew Jackson announced
a quarter of a century beforehand that the next pretext of revolution
would be slavery. De Tocqueville recognized with that penetrating
insight which analyzed our institutions and conditions so keenly, that
the Union was to be endangered by slavery, not through its interests,
but through the change of character it was bringing about in the people
of the two sections, the same fatal change which George Mason, more than
half a century before, had declared to be the most pernicious effect of
the system, adding the solemn warning, now fearfully justifying itself
in the sight of his descendants, that “by an inevitable chain of causes
and effects, Providence punishes national sins by national calamities.”
The Virginian romancer pictured the far-off scenes of the conflict which
he saw approaching as the prophets of Israel painted the coming woes of
Jerusalem, and the strong iconoclast of Boston announced the very year
when the curtain should rise on the yet unopened drama.
The wise men of the past, and the shrewd men of our own time, who warned
us of the calamities in store for our nation, never doubted what was
the cause which was to produce first alienation and finally rupture. The
descendants of the men “daily exercised in tyranny,” the “petty tyrants”
as their own leading statesmen called them long ago, came at length
to love the institution which their fathers had condemned while they
tolerated. It is the fearful realization of that vision of the poet
where the lost angels snuff up with eager nostrils the sulphurous
emanations of the bottomless abyss,--so have their natures become
changed by long breathing the atmosphere of the realm of darkness.
At last, in the fulness of time, the fruits of sin ripened in a sudden
harvest of crime. Violence stalked into the senate-chamber, theft and
perjury wound their way into the cabinet, and, finally, openly organized
conspiracy, with force and arms, made burglarious entrance into a chief
stronghold of the Union. That the principle which underlay these acts
of fraud and violence should be irrevocably recorded with every needed
sanction, it pleased God to select a chief ruler of the false government
to be its Messiah to the listening world. As with Pharaoh, the Lord
hardened his heart, while he opened his mouth, as of old he opened
that of the unwise animal ridden by cursing Balaam. Then spake Mr.
“Vice-President” Stephens those memorable words which fixed forever the
theory of the new social order. He first lifted a degraded barbarism to
the dignity of a philosophic system. He first proclaimed the gospel of
eternal tyranny as the new revelation which Providence had reserved
for the western Palestine. Hear, O heavens! and give ear, O earth! The
corner-stone of the new-born dispensation is the recognized inequality
of races; not that the strong may protect the weak, as men protect women
and children, but that the strong may claim the authority of Nature and
of God to buy, to sell, to scourge, to hunt, to cheat out of the reward
of his labor, to keep in perpetual ignorance, to blast with hereditary
curses throughout all time, the bronzed foundling of the New World, upon
whose darkness has dawned the star of the occidental Bethlehem!
After two years of war have consolidated the opinion of the Slave
States, we read in the “Richmond Examiner”: “The establishment of the
Confederacy is verily a distinct reaction against the whole course
of the mistaken civilization of the age. For 'Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity,' we have deliberately substituted Slavery, Subordination,
and Government.”
A simple diagram, within the reach of all, shows how idle it is to
look for any other cause than slavery as having any material agency in
dividing the country. Match the two broken pieces of the Union, and you
will find the fissure that separates them zigzagging itself half
across the continent like an isothermal line, shooting its splintery
projections, and opening its reentering angles, not merely according to
the limitations of particular States, but as a county or other limited
section of ground belongs to freedom or to slavery. Add to this the
official statement made in 1862, that “there is not one regiment or
battalion, or even company of men, which was organized in or derived
from the Free States or Territories, anywhere, against the Union”;
throw in gratuitously Mr. Stephens's explicit declaration in the speech
referred to, and we will consider the evidence closed for the present on
this count of the indictment.
In the face of these predictions, these declarations, this line of
fracture, this precise statement, testimony from so many sources,
extending through several generations, as to the necessary effect of
slavery, a priori, and its actual influence as shown by the facts, few
will suppose that anything we could have done would have stayed its
course or prevented it from working out its legitimate effects on the
white subjects of its corrupting dominion. Northern acquiescence or even
sympathy may have sometimes helped to make it sit more easily on the
consciences of its supporters. Many profess to think that Northern
fanaticism, as they call it, acted like a mordant in fixing the
black dye of slavery in regions which would but for that have washed
themselves free of its stain in tears of penitence. It is a delusion
and a snare to trust in any such false and flimsy reasons where there is
enough and more than enough in the institution itself to account for its
growth. Slavery gratifies at once the love of power, the love of money,
and the love of ease; it finds a victim for anger who cannot smite back
his oppressor; and it offers to all, without measure, the seductive
privileges which the Mormon gospel reserves for the true believers on
earth, and the Bible of Mahomet only dares promise to the saints in
heaven.
Still it is common, common even to vulgarism, to hear the remark that
the same gallows-tree ought to bear as its fruit the arch-traitor and
the leading champion of aggressive liberty. The mob of Jerusalem was not
satisfied with its two crucified thieves; it must have a cross also for
the reforming Galilean, who interfered so rudely with its conservative
traditions! It is asserted that the fault was quite as much on our side
as on the other; that our agitators and abolishers kindled the flame for
which the combustibles were all ready on the other side of the border.
If these men could have been silenced, our brothers had not died.
Who are the persons that use this argument? They are the very ones who
are at the present moment most zealous in maintaining the right of free
discussion. At a time when every power the nation can summon is needed
to ward off the blows aimed at its life, and turn their force upon its
foes,--when a false traitor at home may lose us a battle by a word,
and a lying newspaper may demoralize an army by its daily or weekly
stillicidium of poison, they insist with loud acclaim upon the
liberty of speech and of the press; liberty, nay license, to deal with
government, with leaders, with every measure, however urgent, in any
terms they choose, to traduce the officer before his own soldiers, and
assail the only men who have any claim at all to rule over the country,
as the very ones who are least worthy to be obeyed. If these opposition
members of society are to have their way now, they cannot find fault
with those persons who spoke their minds freely in the past on that
great question which, as we have agreed, underlies all our present
dissensions.
It is easy to understand the bitterness which is often shown towards
reformers. They are never general favorites. They are apt to interfere
with vested rights and time-hallowed interests. They often wear an
unlovely, forbidding aspect. Their office corresponds to that of
Nature's sanitary commission for the removal of material nuisances. It
is not the butterfly, but the beetle, which she employs for this duty.
It is not the bird of paradise and the nightingale, but the fowl of dark
plumage and unmelodious voice, to which is entrusted the sacred duty of
eliminating the substances that infect the air. And the force of obvious
analogy teaches us not to expect all the qualities which please the
general taste in those whose instincts lead them to attack the moral
nuisances which poison the atmosphere of society. But whether they
please us in all their aspects or not, is not the question. Like them or
not, they must and will perform their office, and we cannot stop them.
They may be unwise, violent, abusive, extravagant, impracticable, but
they are alive, at any rate, and it is their business to remove abuses
as soon as they are dead, and often to help them to die. To quarrel with
them because they are beetles, and not butterflies, is natural, but far
from profitable. They grow none the less vigorously for being trodden
upon, like those tough weeds that love to nestle between the stones
of court-yard pavements. If you strike at one of their heads with the
bludgeon of the law, or of violence, it flies open like the seedcapsule
of a snap-weed, and fills the whole region with seminal thoughts which
will spring up in a crop just like the original martyr. They chased one
of these enthusiasts, who attacked slavery, from St. Louis, and shot him
at Alton in 1837; and on the 23d of June just passed, the Governor of
Missouri, chairman of the Committee on Emancipation, introduced to the
Convention an Ordinance for the final extinction of Slavery! They hunted
another through the streets of a great Northern city in 1835; and within
a few weeks a regiment of colored soldiers, many of them bearing the
marks of the slave-driver's whip on their backs, marched out before
a vast multitude tremulous with newly-stirred sympathies, through the
streets of the same city, to fight our battles in the name of God and
Liberty!
The same persons who abuse the reformers, and lay all our troubles
at their door, are apt to be severe also on what they contemptuously
emphasize as “sentiments” considered as motives of action. It is
charitable to believe that they do not seriously contemplate or truly
understand the meaning of the words they use, but rather play with
them, as certain so-called “learned” quadrupeds play with the printed
characters set before them. In all questions involving duty, we act
from sentiments. Religion springs from them, the family order rests upon
them, and in every community each act involving a relation between any
two of its members implies the recognition or the denial of a sentiment.
It is true that men often forget them or act against their bidding in
the keen competition of business and politics. But God has not left
the hard intellect of man to work out its devices without the constant
presence of beings with gentler and purer instincts. The breast of woman
is the ever-rocking cradle of the pure and holy sentiments which will
sooner or later steal their way into the mind of her sterner companion;
which will by and by emerge in the thoughts of the world's teachers, and
at last thunder forth in the edicts of its law-givers and masters.
Woman herself borrows half her tenderness from the sweet influences of
maternity; and childhood, that weeps at the story of suffering, that
shudders at the picture of wrong, brings down its inspiration “from
God, who is our home.” To quarrel, then, with the class of minds that
instinctively attack abuses, is not only profitless but senseless; to
sneer at the sentiments which are the springs of all just and virtuous
actions, is merely a display of unthinking levity, or of want of the
natural sensibilities.
With the hereditary character of the Southern people moving in one
direction, and the awakened conscience of the North stirring in
the other, the open conflict of opinion was inevitable, and equally
inevitable its appearance in the field of national politics. For what
is meant by self-government is, that a man shall make his convictions
of what is right and expedient regulate the community so far as his
fractional share of the government extends. If one has come to the
conclusion, be it right or wrong, that any particular institution or
statute is a violation of the sovereign law of God, it is to be expected
that he will choose to be represented by those who share his belief, and
who will in their wider sphere do all they legitimately can to get
rid of the wrong in which they find themselves and their constituents
involved. To prevent opinion from organizing itself under political
forms may be very desirable, but it is not according to the theory or
practice of self-government. And if at last organized opinions become
arrayed in hostile shape against each other, we shall find that a just
war is only the last inevitable link in a chain of closely connected
impulses of which the original source is in Him who gave to tender and
humble and uncorrupted souls the sense of right and wrong, which, after
passing through various forms, has found its final expression in the use
of material force. Behind the bayonet is the law-giver's statute, behind
the statute the thinker's argument, behind the argument is the tender
conscientiousness of woman, woman, the wife, the mother,--who looks upon
the face of God himself reflected in the unsullied soul of infancy.
“Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength,
because of thine enemies.”
The simplest course for the malcontent is to find fault with the order
of Nature and the Being who established it. Unless the law of moral
progress were changed, or the Governor of the Universe were dethroned,
it would be impossible to prevent a great uprising of the human
conscience against a system, the legislation relating to which, in the
words of so calm an observer as De Tocqueville, the Montesquieu of our
laws, presents “such unparalleled atrocities as to show that the laws of
humanity have been totally perverted.” Until the infinite selfishness
of the powers that hate and fear the principles of free government
swallowed up their convenient virtues, that system was hissed at by all
the old-world civilization. While in one section of our land the attempt
has been going on to lift it out of the category of tolerated wrongs
into the sphere of the world's beneficent agencies, it was to be
expected that the protest of Northern manhood and womanhood would grow
louder and stronger until the conflict of principles led to the conflict
of forces. The moral uprising of the North came with the logical
precision of destiny; the rage of the “petty tyrants” was inevitable;
the plot to erect a slave empire followed with fated certainty; and the
only question left for us of the North was, whether we should suffer the
cause of the Nation to go by default, or maintain its existence by the
argument of cannon and musket, of bayonet and sabre.
The war in which we are engaged is for no meanly ambitious or unworthy
purpose. It was primarily, and is to this moment, for the preservation
of our national existence. The first direct movement towards it was a
civil request on the part of certain Southern persons, that the Nation
would commit suicide, without making any unnecessary trouble about it.
It was answered, with sentiments of the highest consideration, that
there were constitutional and other objections to the Nation's laying
violent hands upon itself. It was then requested, in a somewhat
peremptory tone, that the Nation would be so obliging as to abstain from
food until the natural consequences of that proceeding should manifest
themselves. All this was done as between a single State and an isolated
fortress; but it was not South Carolina and Fort Sumter that were
talking; it was a vast conspiracy uttering its menace to a mighty
nation; the whole menagerie of treason was pacing its cages, ready to
spring as soon as the doors were opened; and all that the tigers of
rebellion wanted to kindle their wild natures to frenzy, was the sight
of flowing blood.
As if to show how coldly and calmly all this had been calculated
beforehand by the conspirators, to make sure that no absence of malice
aforethought should degrade the grand malignity of settled purpose into
the trivial effervescence of transient passion, the torch which was
literally to launch the first missile, figuratively, to “fire the
southern heart” and light the flame of civil war, was given into the
trembling hand of an old white-headed man, the wretched incendiary
whom history will handcuff in eternal infamy with the temple-burner of
ancient Ephesus. The first gun that spat its iron insult at Fort Sumter,
smote every loyal American full in the face. As when the foul witch used
to torture her miniature image, the person it represented suffered all
that she inflicted on his waxen counterpart, so every buffet that fell
on the smoking fortress was felt by the sovereign nation of which that
was the representative. Robbery could go no farther, for every loyal man
of the North was despoiled in that single act as much as if a footpad
had laid hands upon him to take from him his father's staff and his
mother's Bible. Insult could go no farther, for over those battered
walls waved the precious symbol of all we most value in the past and
most hope for in the future,--the banner under which we became a nation,
and which, next to the cross of the Redeemer, is the dearest object of
love and honor to all who toil or march or sail beneath its waving folds
of glory.
Let us pause for a moment to consider what might have been the course
of events if under the influence of fear, or of what some would name
humanity, or of conscientious scruples to enter upon what a few please
themselves and their rebel friends by calling a “wicked war”; if under
any or all these influences we had taken the insult and the violence
of South Carolina without accepting it as the first blow of a mortal
combat, in which we must either die or give the last and finishing
stroke.
By the same title which South Carolina asserted to Fort Sumter, Florida
would have challenged as her own the Gibraltar of the Gulf, and Virginia
the Ehrenbreitstein of the Chesapeake. Half our navy would have anchored
under the guns of these suddenly alienated fortresses, with the flag of
the rebellion flying at their peaks. “Old Ironsides” herself would have
perhaps sailed out of Annapolis harbor to have a wooden Jefferson Davis
shaped for her figure-head at Norfolk,--for Andrew Jackson was a hater
of secession, and his was no fitting effigy for the battle-ship of the
red-handed conspiracy. With all the great fortresses, with half the
ships and warlike material, in addition to all that was already stolen,
in the traitors' hands, what chance would the loyal men in the Border
States have stood against the rush of the desperate fanatics of the
now triumphant faction? Where would Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri,
Tennessee,--saved, or looking to be saved, even as it is, as by
fire,--have been in the day of trial? Into whose hands would the
Capital, the archives, the glory, the name, the very life of the nation
as a nation, have fallen, endangered as all of them were, in spite of
the volcanic outburst of the startled North which answered the roar of
the first gun at Sumter? Worse than all, are we permitted to doubt that
in the very bosom of the North itself there was a serpent, coiled but
not sleeping, which only listened for the first word that made it safe
to strike, to bury its fangs in the heart of Freedom, and blend
its golden scales in close embrace with the deadly reptile of the
cotton-fields. Who would not wish that he were wrong in such a
suspicion? yet who can forget the mysterious warnings that the allies
of the rebels were to be found far north of the fatal boundary line; and
that it was in their own streets, against their own brothers, that the
champions of liberty were to defend her sacred heritage?
Not to have fought, then, after the supreme indignity and outrage we had
suffered, would have been to provoke every further wrong, and to furnish
the means for its commission. It would have been to placard ourselves
on the walls of the shattered fort, as the spiritless race the proud
labor-thieves called us. It would have been to die as a nation of
freemen, and to have given all we had left of our rights into the hands
of alien tyrants in league with home-bred traitors.
Not to have fought would have been to be false to liberty everywhere,
and to humanity. You have only to see who are our friends and who are
our enemies in this struggle, to decide for what principles we are
combating. We know too well that the British aristocracy is not with
us. We know what the West End of London wishes may be result of this
controversy. The two halves of this Union are the two blades of the
shears, threatening as those of Atropos herself, which will sooner or
later cut into shreds the old charters of tyranny. How they would exult
if they could but break the rivet that makes of the two blades one
resistless weapon! The man who of all living Americans had the best
opportunity of knowing how the fact stood, wrote these words in March,
1862: “That Great Britain did, in the most terrible moment of our
domestic trial in struggling with a monstrous social evil she had
earnestly professed to abhor, coldly and at once assume our inability to
master it, and then become the only foreign nation steadily contributing
in every indirect way possible to verify its pre-judgment, will probably
be the verdict made up against her by posterity, on a calm comparison of
the evidence.”
So speaks the wise, tranquil statesman who represents the nation at the
Court of St. James, in the midst of embarrassments perhaps not less than
those which vexed his illustrious grandfather, when he occupied the same
position as the Envoy of the hated, newborn Republic.
“It cannot be denied,”--says another observer, placed on one of our
national watch-towers in a foreign capital,--“it cannot be denied that
the tendency of European public opinion, as delivered from high places,
is more and more unfriendly to our cause”; “but the people,” he adds,
“everywhere sympathize with us, for they know that our cause is that of
free institutions,--that our struggle is that of the people against
an oligarchy.” These are the words of the Minister to Austria, whose
generous sympathies with popular liberty no homage paid to his genius by
the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars has ever
spoiled; our fellow-citizen, the historian of a great Republic which
infused a portion of its life into our own,--John Lothrop Motley.
It is a bitter commentary on the effects of European, and especially of
British institutions, that such men should have to speak in such terms
of the manner in which our struggle has been regarded. We had, no doubt,
very generally reckoned on the sympathy of England, at least, in a
strife which, whatever pretexts were alleged as its cause, arrayed upon
one side the supporters of an institution she was supposed to hate in
earnest, and on the other its assailants. We had forgotten what her
own poet, one of the truest and purest of her children, had said of his
countrymen, in words which might well have been spoken by the British
Premier to the American Ambassador asking for some evidence of kind
feeling on the part of his government:
“Alas I expect it not. We found no bait
To tempt us in thy country. Doing good,
Disinterested good, is not our trade.”
We know full well by this time what truth there is in these honest
lines. We have found out, too, who our European enemies are, and why
they are our enemies. Three bending statues bear up that gilded seat,
which, in spite of the time-hallowed usurpations and consecrated wrongs
so long associated with its history, is still venerated as the throne.
One of these supports is the pensioned church; the second is the
purchased army; the third is the long-suffering people. Whenever the
third caryatid comes to life and walks from beneath its burden, the
capitals of Europe will be filled with the broken furniture of palaces.
No wonder that our ministers find the privileged orders willing to see
the ominous republic split into two antagonistic forces, each paralyzing
the other, and standing in their mighty impotence a spectacle to courts
and kings; to be pointed at as helots who drank themselves blind and
giddy out of that broken chalice which held the poisonous draught of
liberty!
We know our enemies, and they are the enemies of popular rights. We know
our friends, and they are the foremost champions of political and social
progress. The eloquent voice and the busy pen of John Bright have both
been ours, heartily, nobly, from the first; the man of the people has
been true to the cause of the people. That deep and generous thinker,
who, more than any of her philosophical writers, represents the higher
thought of England, John Stuart Mill, has spoken for us in tones to
which none but her sordid hucksters and her selfish land-graspers can
refuse to listen. Count Gasparin and Laboulaye have sent us back the
echo from liberal France; France, the country of ideas, whose earlier
inspirations embodied themselves for us in the person of the youthful
Lafayette. Italy,--would you know on which side the rights of the people
and the hopes of the future are to be found in this momentous conflict,
what surer test, what ampler demonstration can you ask--than the eager
sympathy of the Italian patriot whose name is the hope of the toiling
many, and the dread of their oppressors, wherever it is spoken, the
heroic Garibaldi?
But even when it is granted that the war was inevitable; when it is
granted that it is for no base end, but first for the life of the
nation, and more and more, as the quarrel deepens, for the welfare of
mankind, for knowledge as against enforced ignorance, for justice as
against oppression, for that kingdom of God on earth which neither the
unrighteous man nor the extortioner can hope to inherit, it may still be
that the strife is hopeless, and must therefore be abandoned. Is it
too much to say that whether the war is hopeless or not for the North
depends chiefly on the answer to the question, whether the North has
virtue and manhood enough to persevere in the contest so long as its
resources hold out? But how much virtue and manhood it has can never
be told until they are tried, and those who are first to doubt the
prevailing existence of these qualities are not commonly themselves
patterns of either. We have a right to trust that this people is
virtuous and brave enough not to give up a just and necessary contest
before its end is attained, or shown to be unattainable for want of
material agencies. What was the end to be attained by accepting the gage
of battle? It was to get the better of our assailants, and, having done
so, to take exactly those steps which we should then consider necessary
to our present and future safety. The more obstinate the resistance, the
more completely must it be subdued. It may not even have been desirable,
as Mr. Mill suggested long since, that the victory over the rebellion
should have been easily and speedily won, and so have failed to develop
the true meaning of the conflict, to bring out the full strength of the
revolted section, and to exhaust the means which would have served it
for a still more desperate future effort. We cannot complain that
our task has proved too easy. We give our Southern army,--for we must
remember that it is our army, after all, only in a state of mutiny,--we
give our Southern army credit for excellent spirit and perseverance in
the face of many disadvantages. But we have a few plain facts which show
the probable course of events; the gradual but sure operation of the
blockade; the steady pushing back of the boundary of rebellion, in spite
of resistance at many points, or even of such aggressive inroads as that
which our armies are now meeting with their long lines of bayonets,--may
God grant them victory!--the progress of our arms down the Mississippi;
the relative value of gold and currency at Richmond and Washington. If
the index-hands of force and credit continue to move in the ratio of the
past two years, where will the Confederacy be in twice or thrice that
time?
Either all our statements of the relative numbers, power, and wealth of
the two sections of the country signify nothing, or the resources of our
opponents in men and means must be much nearer exhaustion than our own.
The running sand of the hour-glass gives no warning, but runs as freely
as ever when its last grains are about to fall. The merchant wears as
bold a face the day before he is proclaimed a bankrupt, as he wore at
the height of his fortunes. If Colonel Grierson found the Confederacy “a
mere shell,” so far as his equestrian excursion carried him, how can we
say how soon the shell will collapse? It seems impossible that our own
dissensions can produce anything more than local disturbances, like the
Morristown revolt, which Washington put down at once by the aid of his
faithful Massachusetts soldiers. But in a rebellious state dissension is
ruin, and the violence of an explosion in a strict ratio to the pressure
on every inch of the containing surface. Now we know the tremendous
force which has compelled the “unanimity” of the Southern people. There
are men in the ranks of the Southern army, if we can trust the evidence
which reaches us, who have been recruited with packs of blood-hounds,
and drilled, as it were, with halters around their necks. We know what
is the bitterness of those who have escaped this bloody harvest of the
remorseless conspirators; and from that we can judge of the elements of
destruction incorporated with many of the seemingly solid portions of
the fabric of the rebellion. The facts are necessarily few, but we can
reason from the laws of human nature as to what must be the feelings of
the people of the South to their Northern neighbors. It is impossible
that the love of the life which they have had in common, their glorious
recollections, their blended histories, their sympathies as Americans,
their mingled blood, their birthright as born under the same flag and
protected by it the world over, their worship of the same God, under the
same outward form, at least, and in the folds of the same ecclesiastical
organizations, should all be forgotten, and leave nothing but hatred and
eternal alienation. Men do not change in this way, and we may be quite
sure that the pretended unanimity of the South will some day or other
prove to have been a part of the machinery of deception which the
plotters have managed with such consummate skill. It is hardly to
be doubted that in every part of the South, as in New Orleans, in
Charleston, in Richmond, there are multitudes who wait for the day of
deliverance, and for whom the coming of “our good friends, the enemies,”
as Beranger has it, will be like the advent of the angels to the
prison-cells of Paul and Silas. But there is no need of depending on the
aid of our white Southern friends, be they many or be they few; there is
material power enough in the North, if there be the will to use it,
to overrun and by degrees to recolonize the South, and it is far from
impossible that some such process may be a part of the mechanism of its
new birth, spreading from various centres of organization, on the plan
which Nature follows when she would fill a half-finished tissue with
blood-vessels or change a temporary cartilage into bone.
Suppose, however, that the prospects of the war were, we need not say
absolutely hopeless,--because that is the unfounded hypothesis of those
whose wish is father to their thought,--but full of discouragement. Can
we make a safe and honorable peace as the quarrel now stands? As honor
comes before safety, let us look at that first. We have undertaken
to resent a supreme insult, and have had to bear new insults and
aggressions, even to the direct menace of our national capital. The
blood which our best and bravest have shed will never sink into the
ground until our wrongs are righted, or the power to right them is
shown to be insufficient. If we stop now, all the loss of life has been
butchery; if we carry out the intention with which we first resented the
outrage, the earth drinks up the blood of our martyrs, and the rose of
honor blooms forever where it was shed. To accept less than indemnity
for the past, so far as the wretched kingdom of the conspirators can
afford it, and security for the future, would discredit us in our own
eyes and in the eyes of those who hate and long to be able to despise
us. But to reward the insults and the robberies we have suffered, by the
surrender of our fortresses along the coast, in the national gulf, and
on the banks of the national river,--and this and much more would surely
be demanded of us,--would place the United Fraction of America on a
level with the Peruvian guano-islands, whose ignoble but coveted soil is
open to be plundered by all comers!
If we could make a peace without dishonor, could we make one that would
be safe and lasting? We could have an armistice, no doubt, long enough
for the flesh of our wounded men to heal and their broken bones to knit
together. But could we expect a solid, substantial, enduring peace,
in which the grass would have time to grow in the war-paths, and the
bruised arms to rust, as the old G. R. cannon rusted in our State
arsenal, sleeping with their tompions in their mouths, like so many
sucking lambs? It is not the question whether the same set of soldiers
would be again summoned to the field. Let us take it for granted that we
have seen enough of the miseries of warfare to last us for a while, and
keep us contented with militia musters and sham-fights. The question is
whether we could leave our children and our children's children with any
secure trust that they would not have to go through the very trials we
are enduring, probably on a more extended scale and in a more aggravated
form.
It may be well to look at the prospects before us, if a peace is
established on the basis of Southern independence, the only peace
possible, unless we choose to add ourselves to the four millions
who already call the Southern whites their masters. We know what the
prevailing--we do not mean universal--spirit and temper of those people
have been for generations, and what they are like to be after a long and
bitter warfare. We know what their tone is to the people of the North;
if we do not, De Bow and Governor Hammond are schoolmasters who
will teach us to our heart's content. We see how easily their social
organization adapts itself to a state of warfare. They breed a superior
order of men for leaders, an ignorant commonalty ready to follow them
as the vassals of feudal times followed their lords; and a race of
bondsmen, who, unless this war changes them from chattels to human
beings, will continue to add vastly to their military strength in
raising their food, in building their fortifications, in all the
mechanical work of war, in fact, except, it may be, the handling
of weapons. The institution proclaimed as the corner-stone of their
government does violence not merely to the precepts of religion, but
to many of the best human instincts, yet their fanaticism for it is as
sincere as any tribe of the desert ever manifested for the faith of
the Prophet of Allah. They call themselves by the same name as the
Christians of the North, yet there is as much difference between their
Christianity and that of Wesley or of Channing, as between creeds that
in past times have vowed mutual extermination. Still we must not
call them barbarians because they cherish an institution hostile to
civilization. Their highest culture stands out all the more brilliantly
from the dark background of ignorance against which it is seen; but
it would be injustice to deny that they have always shone in political
science, or that their military capacity makes them most formidable
antagonists, and that, however inferior they may be to their Northern
fellow-countrymen in most branches of literature and science, the
social elegances and personal graces lend their outward show to the best
circles among their dominant class.
Whom have we then for our neighbors, in case of separation,--our
neighbors along a splintered line of fracture extending for thousands
of miles,--but the Saracens of the Nineteenth Century; a fierce,
intolerant, fanatical people, the males of which will be a perpetual
standing army; hating us worse than the Southern Hamilcar taught his
swarthy boy to hate the Romans; a people whose existence as a hostile
nation on our frontier is incompatible with our peaceful development?
Their wealth, the proceeds of enforced labor, multiplied by the
breaking up of new cottonfields, and in due time by the reopening of the
slave-trade, will go to purchase arms, to construct fortresses, to fit
out navies. The old Saracens, fanatics for a religion which professed to
grow by conquest, were a nation of predatory and migrating warriors.
The Southern people, fanatics for a system essentially aggressive,
conquering, wasting, which cannot remain stationary, but must grow by
alternate appropriations of labor and of land, will come to resemble
their earlier prototypes. Already, even, the insolence of their language
to the people of the North is a close imitation of the style which those
proud and arrogant Asiatics affected toward all the nations of Europe.
What the “Christian dogs” were to the followers of Mahomet, the
“accursed Yankees,” the “Northern mud-sills” are to the followers of
the Southern Moloch. The accomplishments which we find in their choicer
circles were prefigured in the court of the chivalric Saladin, and
the long train of Painim knights who rode forth to conquest under the
Crescent. In all branches of culture, their heathen predecessors went
far beyond them. The schools of mediaeval learning were filled with
Arabian teachers. The heavens declare the glory of the Oriental
astronomers, as Algorab and Aldebaran repeat their Arabic names to the
students of the starry firmament. The sumptuous edifice erected by the
Art of the nineteenth century, to hold the treasures of its Industry,
could show nothing fairer than the court which copies the Moorish palace
that crowns the summit of Granada. Yet this was the power which Charles
the Hammer, striking for Christianity and civilization, had to break
like a potter's vessel; these were the people whom Spain had to utterly
extirpate from the land where they had ruled for centuries.
Prepare, then, if you unseal the vase which holds this dangerous Afrit
of Southern nationality, for a power on your borders that will be to you
what the Saracens were to Europe before the son of Pepin shattered their
armies, and flung the shards and shivers of their broken strength upon
the refuse heap of extinguished barbarisms. Prepare for the possible
fate of Christian Spain; for a slave-market in Philadelphia; for the
Alhambra of a Southern caliph on the grounds consecrated by the domestic
virtues of a long line of Presidents and their exemplary families.
Remember the ages of border warfare between England and Scotland, closed
at last by the union of the two kingdoms. Recollect the hunting of the
deer on the Cheviot hills, and all that it led to; then think of the
game which the dogs will follow open-mouthed across our Southern border,
and all that is like to follow which the child may rue that is unborn;
think of these possibilities, or probabilities, if you will, and
say whether you are ready to make a peace which will give you such
a neighbor; which may betray your civilization as that of half the
Peninsula was given up to the Moors; which may leave your fair border
provinces to be crushed under the heel of a tyrant, as Holland was left
to be trodden down by the Duke of Alva!
No! no! fellow-citizens! We must fight in this quarrel until one side or
the other is exhausted. Rather than suffer all that we have poured out
of our blood, all that we have lavished of our substance, to have been
expended in vain, and to bequeath an unsettled question, an unfinished
conflict, an unavenged insult, an unrighted wrong, a stained escutcheon,
a tarnished shield, a dishonored flag, an unheroic memory to the
descendants of those who have always claimed that their fathers were
heroes; rather than do all this, it were hardly an American exaggeration
to say, better that the last man and the last dollar should be followed
by the last woman and the last dime, the last child and the last copper!
There are those who profess to fear that our government is becoming a
mere irresponsible tyranny. If there are any who really believe that
our present Chief Magistrate means to found a dynasty for himself and
family, that a coup d'etat is in preparation by which he is to become
ABRAHAM, DEI GRATIA REX,--they cannot have duly pondered his letter of
June 12th, in which he unbosoms himself with the simplicity of a rustic
lover called upon by an anxious parent to explain his intentions. The
force of his argument is not at all injured by the homeliness of his
illustrations. The American people are not much afraid that their
liberties will be usurped. An army of legislators is not very likely to
throw away its political privileges, and the idea of a despotism resting
on an open ballot-box, is like that of Bunker Hill Monument built on the
waves of Boston Harbor. We know pretty well how much of sincerity there
is in the fears so clamorously expressed, and how far they are found
in company with uncompromising hostility to the armed enemies of the
nation. We have learned to put a true value on the services of the
watch-dog who bays the moon, but does not bite the thief!
The men who are so busy holy-stoning the quarterdeck, while all hands
are wanted to keep the ship afloat, can no doubt show spots upon it
that would be very unsightly in fair weather. No thoroughly loyal man,
however, need suffer from any arbitrary exercise of power, such as
emergencies always give rise to. If any half-loyal man forgets his code
of half-decencies and half-duties so far as to become obnoxious to the
peremptory justice which takes the place of slower forms in all centres
of conflagration, there is no sympathy for him among the soldiers who
are risking their lives for us; perhaps there is even more satisfaction
than when an avowed traitor is caught and punished. For of all men who
are loathed by generous natures, such as fill the ranks of the armies
of the Union, none are so thoroughly loathed as the men who contrive
to keep just within the limits of the law, while their whole conduct
provokes others to break it; whose patriotism consists in stopping
an inch short of treason, and whose political morality has for its
safeguard a just respect for the jailer and the hangman! The simple
preventive against all possible injustice a citizen is like to suffer
at the hands of a government which in its need and haste must of course
commit many errors, is to take care to do nothing that will directly or
indirectly help the enemy, or hinder the government in carrying on the
war. When the clamor against usurpation and tyranny comes from citizens
who can claim this negative merit, it may be listened to. When it comes
from those who have done what they could to serve their country, it
will receive the attention it deserves. Doubtless there may prove to be
wrongs which demand righting, but the pretence of any plan for changing
the essential principle of our self-governing system is a figment
which its contrivers laugh over among themselves. Do the citizens of
Harrisburg or of Philadelphia quarrel to-day about the strict legality
of an executive act meant in good faith for their protection against
the invader? We are all citizens of Harrisburg, all citizens of
Philadelphia, in this hour of their peril, and with the enemy at work
in our own harbors, we begin to understand the difference between a good
and bad citizen; the man that helps and the man that hinders; the man
who, while the pirate is in sight, complains that our anchor is dragging
in his mud, and the man who violates the proprieties, like our brave
Portland brothers, when they jumped on board the first steamer they
could reach, cut her cable, and bore down on the corsair, with a habeas
corpus act that lodged twenty buccaneers in Fort Preble before sunset!
We cannot, then, we cannot be circling inward to be swallowed up in the
whirlpool of national destruction. If our borders are invaded, it is
only as the spur that is driven into the courser's flank to rouse his
slumbering mettle. If our property is taxed, it is only to teach us that
liberty is worth paying for as well as fighting for. We are pouring out
the most generous blood of our youth and manhood; alas! this is always
the price that must be paid for the redemption of a people. What have we
to complain of, whose granaries are choking with plenty, whose streets
are gay with shining robes and glittering equipages, whose industry
is abundant enough to reap all its overflowing harvest, yet sure of
employment and of its just reward, the soil of whose mighty valleys is
an inexhaustible mine of fertility, whose mountains cover up such stores
of heat and power, imprisoned in their coal measures, as would warm all
the inhabitants and work all the machinery of our planet for unnumbered
ages, whose rocks pour out rivers of oil, whose streams run yellow over
beds of golden sand,--what have we to complain of?
Have we degenerated from our English fathers, so that we cannot do and
bear for our national salvation what they have done and borne over and
over again for their form of government? Could England, in her wars with
Napoleon, bear an income-tax of ten per cent., and must we faint under
the burden of an income-tax of three per cent.? Was she content to
negotiate a loan at fifty-three for the hundred, and that paid in
depreciated paper, and can we talk about financial ruin with our
national stocks ranging from one to eight or nine above par, and the
“five-twenty” war loan eagerly taken by our own people to the amount
of nearly two hundred millions, without any check to the flow of the
current pressing inwards against the doors of the Treasury? Except in
those portions of the country which are the immediate seat of war, or
liable to be made so, and which, having the greatest interest not to
become the border states of hostile nations, can best afford to suffer
now, the state of prosperity and comfort is such as to astonish those
who visit us from other countries. What are war taxes to a nation which,
as we are assured on good authority, has more men worth a million
now than it had worth ten thousand dollars at the close of the
Revolution,--whose whole property is a hundred times, and whose
commerce, inland and foreign, is five hundred times, what it was then?
But we need not study Mr. Still's pamphlet and “Thompson's Bank-Note
Reporter” to show us what we know well enough, that, so far from having
occasion to tremble in fear of our impending ruin, we must rather blush
for our material prosperity. For the multitudes who are unfortunate
enough to be taxed for a million or more, of course we must feel deeply,
at the same time suggesting that the more largely they report their
incomes to the tax-gatherer, the more consolation they will find in
the feeling that they have served their country. But,--let us say it
plainly,--it will not hurt our people to be taught that there are other
things to be cared for besides money-making and money-spending; that the
time has come when manhood must assert itself by brave deeds and noble
thoughts; when womanhood must assume its most sacred office, “to warn,
to comfort,” and, if need be, “to command,” those whose services their
country calls for. This Northern section of the land has become a
great variety shop, of which the Atlantic cities are the long-extended
counter. We have grown rich for what? To put gilt bands on coachmen's
hats? To sweep the foul sidewalks with the heaviest silks which the
toiling artisans of France can send us? To look through plate-glass
windows, and pity the brown soldiers,--or sneer at the black ones?
to reduce the speed of trotting horses a second or two below its old
minimum? to color meerschaums? to flaunt in laces, and sparkle in
diamonds? to dredge our maidens' hair with gold-dust? to float through
life, the passive shuttlecocks of fashion, from the avenues to the
beaches, and back again from the beaches to the avenues? Was it for
this that the broad domain of the Western hemisphere was kept so long
unvisited by civilization?--for this, that Time, the father of empires,
unbound the virgin zone of this youngest of his daughters, and gave her,
beautiful in the long veil of her forests, to the rude embrace of the
adventurous Colonist? All this is what we see around us, now, now while
we are actually fighting this great battle, and supporting this great
load of indebtedness. Wait till the diamonds go back to the Jews of
Amsterdam; till the plate-glass window bears the fatal announcement, For
Sale or to Let; till the voice of our Miriam is obeyed, as she sings,
“Weave no more silks, ye Lyons looms!”
till the gold-dust is combed from the golden locks, and hoarded to buy
bread; till the fast-driving youth smokes his clay-pipe on the platform
of the horse-cars; till the music-grinders cease because none will pay
them; till there are no peaches in the windows at twenty-four dollars
a dozen, and no heaps of bananas and pine-apples selling at the
street-corners; till the ten-flounced dress has but three flounces,
and it is felony to drink champagne; wait till these changes show
themselves, the signs of deeper wants, the preludes of exhaustion and
bankruptcy; then let us talk of the Maelstrom;--but till then, let
us not be cowards with our purses, while brave men are emptying their
hearts upon the earth for us; let us not whine over our imaginary ruin,
while the reversed current of circling events is carrying us farther and
farther, every hour, out of the influence of the great failing which
was born of our wealth, and of the deadly sin which was our fatal
inheritance!
Let us take a brief general glance at the wide field of discussion we
are just leaving.
On Friday, the twelfth day of the month of April, in the year of our
Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-one, at half-past four of the clock
in the morning, a cannon was aimed and fired by the authority of South
Carolina at the wall of a fortress belonging to the United States. Its
ball carried with it the hatreds, the rages of thirty years, shaped and
cooled in the mould of malignant deliberation. Its wad was the charter
of our national existence. Its muzzle was pointed at the stone which
bore the symbol of our national sovereignty. As the echoes of its
thunder died away, the telegraph clicked one word through every office
of the land. That word was WAR!
War is a child that devours its nurses one after another, until it is
claimed by its true parents. This war has eaten its way backward through
all the technicalities of lawyers learned in the infinitesimals of
ordinances and statutes; through all the casuistries of divines, experts
in the differential calculus of conscience and duty; until it stands
revealed to all men as the natural and inevitable conflict of two
incompatible forms of civilization, one or the other of which must
dominate the central zone of the continent, and eventually claim the
hemisphere for its development.
We have reached the region of those broad principles and large axioms
which the wise Romans, the world's lawgivers, always recognized as
above all special enactments. We have come to that solid substratum
acknowledged by Grotius in his great Treatise: “Necessity itself which
reduces things to the mere right of Nature.” The old rules which were
enough for our guidance in quiet times, have become as meaningless “as
moonlight on the dial of the day.” We have followed precedents as long
as they could guide us; now we must make precedents for the ages which
are to succeed us.
If we are frightened from our object by the money we have spent,
the current prices of United States stocks show that we value our
nationality at only a small fraction of our wealth. If we feel that we
are paying too dearly for it in the blood of our people, let us recall
those grand words of Samuel Adams:
“I should advise persisting in our struggle for liberty, though it were
revealed from heaven that nine hundred and ninety-nine were to perish,
and only one of a thousand were to survive and retain his liberty!”
What we want now is a strong purpose; the purpose of Luther, when he
said, in repeating his Pater Noster, fiat voluntas MEA,--let my will
be done; though he considerately added, quia Tua,--because my will is
Thine. We want the virile energy of determination which made the oath
of Andrew Jackson sound so like the devotion of an ardent saint that the
recording angel might have entered it unquestioned among the prayers of
the faithful.
War is a grim business. Two years ago our women's fingers were busy
making “Havelocks.” It seemed to us then as if the Havelock made half
the soldier; and now we smile to think of those days of inexperience and
illusion. We know now what War means, and we cannot look its dull, dead
ghastliness in the face unless we feel that there is some great and
noble principle behind it. It makes little difference what we thought
we were fighting for at first; we know what we are fighting for now, and
what we are fighting against.
We are fighting for our existence. We say to those who would take back
their several contributions to that undivided unity which we call the
Nation; the bronze is cast; the statue is on its pedestal; you cannot
reclaim the brass you flung into the crucible! There are rights,
possessions, privileges, policies, relations, duties, acquired,
retained, called into existence in virtue of the principle of absolute
solidarity,--belonging to the United States as an organic whole, which
cannot be divided, which none of its constituent parties can claim as
its own, which perish out of its living frame when the wild forces of
rebellion tear it limb from limb, and which it must defend, or confess
self-government itself a failure.
We are fighting for that Constitution upon which our national existence
reposes, now subjected by those who fired the scroll on which it was
written from the cannon at Fort Sumter, to all those chances which the
necessities of war entail upon every human arrangement, but still the
venerable charter of our wide Republic.
We cannot fight for these objects without attacking the one mother cause
of all the progeny of lesser antagonisms. Whether we know it or not,
whether we mean it or not, we cannot help fighting against the system
that has proved the source of all those miseries which the author of the
Declaration of Independence trembled to anticipate. And this ought to
make us willing to do and to suffer cheerfully. There were Holy Wars of
old, in which it was glory enough to die, wars in which the one aim
was to rescue the sepulchre of Christ from the hands of infidels. The
sepulchre of Christ is not in Palestine! He rose from that burial-place
more than eighteen hundred years ago. He is crucified wherever his
brothers are slain without cause; he lies buried wherever man, made in
his Maker's image, is entombed in ignorance lest he should learn the
rights which his Divine Master gave him! This is our Holy War, and we
must fight it against that great General who will bring to it all the
powers with which he fought against the Almighty before he was cast down
from heaven. He has retained many a cunning advocate to recruit for him;
he has bribed many a smooth-tongued preacher to be his chaplain; he
has engaged the sordid by their avarice, the timid by their fears, the
profligate by their love of adventure, and thousands of nobler natures
by motives which we can all understand; whose delusion we pity as we
ought always to pity the error of those who know not what they do.
Against him or for him we are all called upon to declare ourselves.
There is no neutrality for any single true-born American. If any seek
such a position, the stony finger of Dante's awful muse points them to
their place in the antechamber of the Halls of Despair,--
“--With that ill band
Of angels mixed, who nor rebellious proved,
Nor yet were true to God, but for themselves
Were only.”
“--Fame of them the world hath none
Nor suffers; mercy and justice scorn them both.
Speak not of them, but look, and pass them by.”
We must use all the means which God has put into our hands to serve him
against the enemies of civilization. We must make and keep the great
river free, whatever it costs us; it is strapping up the forefoot of the
wild, untamable rebellion. We must not be too nice in the choice of our
agents. Non eget Mauri jaculis,--no African bayonets wanted,--was well
enough while we did not yet know the might of that desperate giant we
had to deal with; but Tros, Tyriusve,--white or black,--is the safer
motto now; for a good soldier, like a good horse, cannot be of a bad
color. The iron-skins, as well as the iron-clads, have already done us
noble service, and many a mother will clasp the returning boy, many a
wife will welcome back the war-worn husband, whose smile would never
again have gladdened his home, but that, cold in the shallow trench of
the battle-field, lies the half-buried form of the unchained bondsman
whose dusky bosom sheathes the bullet which would else have claimed that
darling as his country's sacrifice.
We shall have success if we truly will success, not otherwise. It may be
long in coming,--Heaven only knows through what trials and humblings we
may have to pass before the full strength of the nation is duly arrayed
and led to victory. We must be patient, as our fathers were patient;
even in our worst calamities, we must remember that defeat itself may be
a gain where it costs our enemy more in relation to his strength than it
costs ourselves. But if, in the inscrutable providence of the Almighty,
this generation is disappointed in its lofty aspirations for the race,
if we have not virtue enough to ennoble our whole people, and make it a
nation of sovereigns, we shall at least hold in undying honor those
who vindicated the insulted majesty of the Republic, and struck at her
assailants so long as a drum-beat summoned them to the field of duty.
Citizens of Boston, sons and daughters of New England, men and women of
the North, brothers and sisters in the bond of the American Union, you
have among you the scarred and wasted soldiers who have shed their blood
for your temporal salvation. They bore your nation's emblems bravely
through the fire and smoke of the battle-field; nay, their own bodies
are starred with bullet-wounds and striped with sabre-cuts, as if to
mark them as belonging to their country until their dust becomes a
portion of the soil which they defended. In every Northern graveyard
slumber the victims of this destroying struggle. Many whom you remember
playing as children amidst the clover-blossoms of our Northern fields,
sleep under nameless mounds with strange Southern wild-flowers blooming
over them. By those wounds of living heroes, by those graves of
fallen martyrs, by the hopes of your children, and the claims of your
children's children yet unborn, in the name of outraged honor, in the
interest of violated sovereignty, for the life of an imperilled nation,
for the sake of men everywhere and of our common humanity, for the glory
of God and the advancement of his kingdom on earth, your country calls
upon you to stand by her through good report and through evil report, in
triumph and in defeat, until she emerges from the great war of Western
civilization, Queen of the broad continent, Arbitress in the councils of
earth's emancipated peoples; until the flag that fell from the wall
of Fort Sumter floats again inviolate, supreme, over all her ancient
inheritance, every fortress, every capital, every ship, and this warring
land is once more a United Nation!