Northern Invasions, when successful, advance the civilization of the
world.
It would not be difficult to present from all history a mass of
illustrations of this thesis wellnigh sufficient in themselves to
establish it. And there is no doubt that the principles of human nature,
which appear in those illustrations, can be set in such order as to
prove the thesis beyond a question. The softness of Southern climates
produces, in the long run, gentleness, effeminacy, and indolence, or
passionate rather than persevering effort. It produces, again, the
palliatives or disguises of these traits which are found in formal
religions, and in institutions of caste or slavery. The rigor of
Northern climates produces, on the other hand, in the long run, hardy
physical constitutions among men, with determined individuality of
character. It produces, therefore, freedom even to democracy in
politics, protestantism even to rationalism in religion, and grim
perseverance even to the bitter end in war. A certain stern morality,
often amounting to asceticism, is imposed on Northern constitutions. So
superficial is it, so much a creature of circumstance, that Norman,
Scandinavian, Goth, or Icelander, deserves no sort of credit for it. All
history shows that it vanishes before the temptations of any Vinland
which the frozen barbarians stumble upon. None the less does it give
them vigor of muscle, and power to endure hardship, which, in the end,
tells, over the accomplishments of the most warlike Romans, Greeks,
Persians, or other Southrons. "Fight us, if you like," said Ariovistus
to Cæsar; "but remember that none of us have slept under a roof for
fourteen years." That sort of people are apt to succeed in the long run.
When they succeed, as we have said, they advance civilization. To begin
with the farthest East, all such strength as the Chinese Empire has
to-day is due to the Tartar cross in its blood; that is, it results from
the conquest of imbecile China by Northern Tartar tribes. One or two
more such invasions, followed by colonization of Northern emigrants,
would have made China a much stronger power this day than she is, and a
nation of higher grade. The history of Indian civilization, again, is a
history of Northern conquests. They tell us, indeed, that the Indian
castes may be resolved into so many beach-marks of the waves of
successive invasions from the North, the highest caste representing the
last innovation. When Abraham crossed from Ur of the Chaldees into
Canaan, when Cambyses broke open the secrets of Egyptian civilization,
when Alexander first opened to the world Egyptian science, these were
illustrations of the same thing,--Canaan, Egypt, and the world were all
improved by those processes. Greece died out, and has never yet
reëstablished herself, because she never had a complete infusion of
Gothic blood in her worn-out system. Italy, on the other hand, had a new
birth, and at this moment has a magnificent future, because Goths and
Lombards did sweep in upon her with their up-country virtues and
wilderness moralities. What the Ostrogoths did for Spain, what the
Franks did for Gaul, what the Northmen did for England, are so many more
illustrations. What Gustavus Adolphus would have done for Germany, if he
had succeeded, would have been another.
What we are to do in the South, when we succeed, will be another. It
makes the subject of this paper.
* * * * *
Nobody pretends, of course, that War itself does anything final in the
advance of civilization. War itself is, what the poets call it, a
terrible piece of ploughing. With us, just now, it is subsoil-ploughing,
very deep at that. Stumps and stones have to be heaved out, which had
on them the moss and lichens and superficial soil of centuries, and
which had fancied, in that heavy semi-consciousness which belongs to
stumps and stones, that they were fixed forever. As the teams and the
ploughshares pass over the ground which has lain fallow so long, they
leave, God knows, and millions of bleeding hearts know, a very desolate
prospect in the upheaved furrows behind them. It is very black, very
rough, very desert to the eye, and in spots it is very bloody. This is
what war does. So desolate the prospect, that we of the Northern States
have certainly a right to thank God that it was not we who called out
the ploughmen.
War, in itself, does nothing but plough,--but immediately on the end of
the war, in any locality, he who succeeds begins on the harrowing and
the planting. And because God is, and directs all such affairs, it is
wonderful to see how short is the June which in His world covers all
such furrows as His ploughmen make with new beauty. It is to the methods
of that new harvest that the President has boldly led our attention in
his admirable Proclamation of Amnesty. It is to the details of it that
each loyal man has to look already. It is but a few weeks since we heard
a sentimental grumbler, at a public meeting, lamenting over the
discomforts of the freed slaves in the Southwest, as he compared them
with their lost paradise. Men of his type, to whom the present is always
worse than the past, succeed in persuading themselves that the
incidental hardships of transition are to be taken as the type of a
whole future. And so this apostle of discontent really believed that the
condition of the fifty thousand freed slaves of the Mississippi, in the
hands of such men as Grant, and Eliot, and Yeatman, and Wheelock, and
Forman, and Fiske, and Howard, was really going to be worse than it was
under the lashes of Legree, or at the auction-block of New Orleans. The
more manly, as the more philosophical way of looking at the transition,
is to discover the shortest path leading to that future, which, without
such a transition, cannot come.
The President, with courage which does him infinite honor, leads the way
to this future. His Proclamation is really a rallying-cry to all true
men and women, whether they are living at the North or at the South, to
take hold and work for its accomplishment. With an army posted in each
of the revolted States, with more than one of them completely under
National control, he considers that the time for planting has come. He
is no such idealist or sentimentalist as to leave these new-made
furrows, so terribly torn up in three years of war, to renew their own
verdure by any mere spontaneous vegetation.
Practical as the President always is, he is sublimely practical in the
Proclamation. "Let us make good out of this evil as quickly as we can,"
he says; "let peace bring in plenty as quickly as she can." To bring
this about, he promises the strong arm of the nation to protect anything
which shall show itself worth protecting, in the way of social
institutions of republican liberty. He does not ask, like a conqueror,
for the keys of a capital. He does not ask, like a Girondist, for the
vote of a majority. He knows, it is true, as all the world knows, that,
if the vote of all the men of the South could ever be obtained, the
majority would utterly overshadow the handful of gentry who have been
lording it over white trash and black slaves together. But the President
has no wish to prolong martial law to that indefinite future when this
handful of gentlemen shall let the majority of their own people
pronounce upon their claims to rule them. Waiving the requisitions of
the theorists, and at the same time relieving himself from the necessity
of employing military power a moment longer than is necessary, he
announces, in advance, what will be his policy in extending protection
to loyal governments formed in Rebel States. If there can be found in
any State enough righteous men willing to take the oath of allegiance
and to sustain the nation in its determination for emancipation,--if
there can be found only enough to be counted up as the tenth part of
those who voted in the election of 1860, though their State should have
sinned like Gomorrah, even though its name should be South Carolina,
they shall be permitted to reconstruct its government, and that
government shall be recognized by the government of the nation.
It is true that this gift is vastly more than any of the Rebel States
has any right to claim. When the King of Oude rebels against England, he
does not find, at the end of the war, that, because he is utterly
defeated, things are to go on upon their old agreeable footing.
Rebellion is not, in its nature, one of those pretty plays of little
children, which can stop when either party is tired, because he asks for
it to stop, so gently that both parties shall walk on hand in hand till
either has got breath enough to begin the game again. If the nation were
contending against real and permanent enemies, in reducing to order the
States of the Confederacy, or if the national feeling towards the people
of those States were the bitter feeling which their leaders profess
towards our people, the nation would, of course, offer no such easy
terms. The nation would say, "When you threw off the Constitution, you
did it for better for worse. It guarantied to you your State
governments. You spurned the guaranty. Let it be so. Let the guaranty be
withdrawn. You cannot sustain them. Let them go, then. You have
destroyed them. And the nation governs you by proconsuls." But the
nation has no such desire to deal harshly with these people. The nation
knows that more than half of them were never regarded as people at
home,--that they had no more to do with the Rebellion than had the oxen
with which they labored. The nation knows that of the rest of the
Southern people literally only a handful professed power in the State.
The nation knows, therefore, that what pretended to be a union of
republics was, really, to take Gouverneur Morris's phrase, a union of
republics with oligarchies,--seventeen republics united to fourteen
oligarchies, when this thing began. The nation knows that the fourteen
will be happier, stronger, more prosperous than ever, when their people
have the rights of which they are partly conscious,--when they also
become republics. The nation means to carry out the constitutional
guaranty, and give them the republican government which under the
Constitution belongs to every State in the Union. The nation looks
forward to prosperous centuries, in which these States, with these
people and the descendants of these people, shall be united in one
nation with the republics which have been true to the nation. For all
these reasons the nation has no thought of insisting on its rights as
against Rebel States. It has no thunders of vengeance except for those
who have led in these iniquities. For the people who have been misled it
has pardon, protection, encouragement, and hope. It can afford to be
generous. And at the President's hands it makes the offer which will be
received.
* * * * *
We say this offer will be received. We know very well the difficulty
with which an opinion long branded with ignominy makes head in countries
where there is no press, where there is no free speech, where there are
no large cities. Excepting Louisiana, the Southern States have none of
these. And the "peculiar institutions" throw the control of what is
called opinion more completely into the hands of a very small class of
men, we might almost say a very small knot of men, than in any other
oligarchy which we remember in modern history. It is in considering this
very difficulty that we recognize the wisdom of the President's
Proclamation. He is conscious of the difficulty, and has placed his
minimum of loyal inhabitants at a very low point, that, even in the
hardest cases, there may be a possibility of meeting his requisition.
It is not true, on the other hand, that he has placed his minimum so
low as to involve the government in any difficulty in sustaining the
State governments which will be framed at his call. It must be
remembered that this "tenth part" of righteous men will have very strong
allies in every Southern State. It is confessed, on all hands, that they
will be supported by all the negroes in every State. Just in proportion
to what was the strength of the planting interest is its weakness in the
new order of things. Given such physical force, given the moral and
physical strength which comes with national protection, and given the
immense power which belongs to the wish for peace, and the "tenth part"
will soon find its fraction becoming larger and more respectable by
accretions at home and by emigration from other States. We shall soon
learn that there is next to nobody who really favored this thing in the
beginning. They will tell us that they all stood for their old State
flag, and that they will be glad to stand for it in its new hands.
It will be only the first step that will cost. Everybody sees this. The
President sees it. Mr. Davis sees it. He hopes nobody will take it. We
hope a good many people will. The merit of the President's plan is that
this step can be promptly taken. And so many are the openings by which
national feeling now addresses the people of the States in revolt, and
national men can call on them to express their real opinions and to act
in their real interest, that we hope to see it taken in many places at
the same time.
When Constantine made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire, he
supposed that one-thirteenth part of his people were Christians. He was
statesman enough to know that a minority of one-thirteenth, united
together because they had one cause, would be omnipotent over a majority
of twelve-thirteenths, without a cause and disunited. So, if any one
asks for an example in our history,--the Territory of Kansas was thrown
open to emigration with every facility given to the Southern emigrant,
and every discouragement offered to the Northerner. But forty men,
organized together by a cause, settled Lawrence, and it was rumored that
there was to be some organization of the other Northern settlers, and at
that word the Northern hive emptied itself into Kansas, and the
Atchisons and Bufords and Stringfellows abandoned their new territory,
badly stung. These are illustrations, one of them on the largest scale,
and the other belonging wholly to our own time and country, of the worth
even of a very small minority, in such an initiative as is demanded now.
What was done in Kansas can be done again in Florida, in Texas, if Texas
do not take care for herself, in either Carolina, in any Southern State
where the "righteous men" do not themselves appear to take this first
step on which the President relies.
Take, for instance, this magnificent Florida, our own Italy,--if one can
conceive of an Italy where till now men have been content to live a
half-civilized life, only because the oranges grew to their hands, and
there was no necessity for toil. The vote of Florida in 1860 was 14,347.
So soon as in Florida one-tenth part of this number, or 1,435 men, take
the oath of allegiance to the National Government, so soon, if they have
the qualifications of electors under Florida law, shall we have a loyal
State in Florida. It will be a Free State, offering the privileges of a
Free State to the eager eyes of the North and of Europe. That valley of
the St. John's, with its wealth of lumber,--the even climate of the
western shore,--the navy-yard to be reëstablished at Pensacola,--the
commerce to be resumed at Jacksonville,--the Nice which we will build up
for our invalids at St. Augustine,--the orange-groves which are wasting
their sweetness at this moment, on the plantations and the
islands,--will all be so many temptations to the emigrant, as soon as
work is honorable in Florida. If the people who gave 5,437 votes for
Bell and 367 for Douglas cannot furnish 1,435 men to establish this new
State government, we here know who can.
"Armies composed of freemen conquer for themselves, not for their
leaders." This is the happy phrase of Robertson, as he describes the
reëstablishment of society in Europe after the great Northern invasions,
which gave new life to Roman effeminacy, and new strength to Roman
corruption. The phrase is perfectly true. It is as true of the armies of
freemen who have been called to the South now to keep the peace as it
was of the armies of freemen who were called South then by the
imbecility of Roman emperors or their mutual contentions. The lumbermen
from Maine and New Hampshire who have seen the virgin riches of the St.
John's, like the Massachusetts volunteers who have picked out their
farms in the valley of the Shenandoah or established in prospect their
forges on the falls of the Potomac, or like the Illinois regiments who
have been introduced to the valleys of Tennessee or of Arkansas, will
furnish men enough, well skilled in political systems, to start the new
republics, in regions which have never known what a true republic was
till now.
To carry out the President's plan, and to give us once more working
State governments in the States which have rebelled,--to give them,
indeed, the first true republican governments they have ever
known,--would require for Virginia about 12,000 voters. They can be
counted, we suppose, at this moment, in the counties under our military
control. Indeed, the loyal State government of Virginia is at this
moment organized. In North Carolina it would require 9,500 voters. The
loyal North Carolina regiments are an evidence that that number of
home-grown men will readily appear. In South Carolina, to give a
generous estimate, we need 5,000 voters. It is the only State which we
never heard my man wish to emigrate to. It is the hardest region,
therefore, of any to redeem. At the worst, till the 5,000 appear, the
new Georgia will be glad to govern all the country south of the Santee,
and the new North Carolina what is north thereof. Georgia will need
10,000 loyal voters. There are more than that number now encamped upon
her soil, willing to stay there. Of Florida we have spoken. Alabama
requires 9,000. They have been hiding away from conscription; they have
been fleeing into Kentucky and Ohio: they will not be unwilling to
reappear when the inevitable "first step" is taken. For Mississippi we
want 7,000. Mr. Reverdy Johnson has told us where they are. For
Louisiana, one tenth is 5,000. More than that number voted in the
elections which returned the sitting members to Congress. For Texas, the
proportion is 6,200; for Arkansas, 5,400. Those States are already
giving account of themselves. In Tennessee the fraction required is
14,500. And as the people of Knoxville said, "They could do that in the
mountains alone."
We have no suspicion of a want of latent Southern loyalty. But we have
brought together these figures to show how inevitable is a
reconstruction on the President's plan, even if Southern loyalty were as
abject and timid as some men try to persuade us. These figures show us,
that, if, of the million Northern men who have "prospected" the Southern
country, in the march of victorious armies, only seventy-three thousand
determine to take up their future lot there, and to establish there free
institutions, they would be enough, without the help of one native, to
establish these republican institutions in all the Rebel States. The
deserted plantations, the farms offered for sale, almost for nothing,
all the attractions of a softer climate, and all the just pride which
makes the American fond of founding empires, are so many incentives to
the undertaking of the great initiative proposed. In the cases of
Virginia and Tennessee, and, as we suppose, of Louisiana, Arkansas, and
Texas, the beginning has already been made at home. In Florida a recent
meeting at Fernandina gave promise for a like beginning. If it do not
begin there, the Emigrant Aid Company must act at once to give the
beginning.[52] There will remain the Carolinas and three of the Gulf
States. The ploughing is not over there, and it is not time therefore to
speak of the harvest. For the rest, we hope we have said enough to
indicate to the ready and active men of the nation where their great
present duty lies.
* * * * *