II

There can be no doubt that the Spanish War has done a great deal to

bring the North and the South together. It has not in any sense created

in the South a feeling of loyalty to the Union, but it has given the

younger generation in the South an opportunity of manifesting that

loyalty to the Union which has been steadily growing for twenty years.

Down to 1880, or thereabouts, the wound left by the Civil War was still

raw, its inflammation envenomed rather than allayed by the measures of

the "reconstruction" period. Since 1880, since the administration of

President Hayes, the wound has been steadily healing, until it has come

to seem no longer a burning sore, but an honourable cicatrice.

Every one admits that the heaviest blow ever dealt to the South was that

which laid Abraham Lincoln in the dust. He, if any one, could have

averted the mistakes which delayed by fifteen years the very beginning

of the process of reconciliation. His wise and kindly influence

removed, the North committed what is now recognised as the fatal blunder

of forcing unrestricted negro suffrage on the South. This measure was

dictated partly, no doubt, by honest idealism, partly by much lower

motives. Then the horde of "carpet-baggers" descended upon the

"reconstructed" States, and there ensued a period of humiliation to the

South which made men look back with longing even to the sharper agonies

of the war. Coloured voters were brought in droves, by their Northern

fuglemen, to polling-places which were guarded by United States troops.

Utterly illiterate negroes crowded the benches of State legislatures. A

Northerner and staunch Union man has assured me that in the Capitol of

one of the reconstructed States he has seen a coloured representative

gravely studying a newspaper which he held upside down. The story goes

that in the legislature of Mississippi a negro majority, which had

opposed a certain bill, was suddenly brought round to it in a body by a

chance allusion to its "provisions," which they understood to mean

something to eat! This anecdote perhaps lacks evidence; but there can be

no doubt that the freedmen of 1865 were, as a body, entirely unfitted to

exercise the suffrage thrust upon them. A degrading and exasperating

struggle was the inevitable result--the whites of the South striving by

intimidation and chicanery to nullify the negro vote, the professional

politicians from the North battling, with the aid of the United States

troops, to render it effectual. Such a state of things was demoralising

to both parties, and in process of time the common sense of the North

revolted against it. United States troops no longer stood round the

ballot-boxes, and the South was suffered, in one way and another, to

throw off the "Dominion of Darkness." Different States modified their

constitutions in different ways. Many offices which had been elective

were made appointive. The general plan adopted of late years has been to

restrict the suffrage by means of a very simple test of intelligence,

the would-be voter being required to read a paragraph of the State

constitution and explain its meaning. The examiner, if one may put it

so, is the election judge, and he can admit or exclude a man at his

discretion. Thus illiterate whites are not necessarily deprived of the

suffrage. They may be quite intelligent men and responsible citizens,

who happened to grow to manhood precisely in the years when the war and

its sequels upset the whole system of public education in the South. At

any rate (it is argued), the illiterate white is a totally different man

from the illiterate negro. How far such modifications of the State

constitutions are consistent with the Constitution of the United States,

is a nice question upon which I shall not attempt to enter. The

arguments used to reconcile this test of intelligence with Amendments

XIV. and XV. of the United States Constitution seem to me more ingenious

than convincing. But, constitutional or not, the compromise is

reasonable; and though people in the South still feel, as one of them

put it to me, that the Republican party "may yet wield the flail of the

negro over them," the flail has been laid aside long enough to permit

the South, in the main, to recover its peace of mind and its

self-respect. The negro problem is still difficult enough, as many

tragic evidences prove; but there is no reason to despair of its

ultimate solution.

Meanwhile material prosperity has been returning to the South;

agriculture has revived, and manufactures have increased. Social

intercourse and intermarriage have done much to promote mutual

comprehension between North and South, and to wipe out rankling

animosities. Each party has made a sincere effort to understand the

other's "case," and the war has come to seem a thing fated and

inevitable, or at any rate not to have been averted save by superhuman

wisdom and moderation on both sides. With mutual comprehension, mutual

admiration has gone hand in hand. The gallantry and tenacity of the

South are warmly appreciated in the North, and it is felt on both sides

that the very qualities which made the tussle so long and terrible are

the qualities which ensure the greatness of the reunited nation. But

changes of sentiment are naturally slow and, from moment to moment,

imperceptible. It needs some outside stimulus or shock to bring them

clearly home to the minds of men. Such a stimulus was provided by the

conflict with Spain. It did not create a new sense of solidarity between

the North and the South, but rather brought prominently to the surface

of the national consciousness a sense of solidarity that had for years

been growing and strengthening, more or less obscurely and

inarticulately, on both sides of Mason and Dixon's line. It consummated

a process of consolidation which had been going on for something like

twenty years.

Furthermore, the Spanish War deposed the Civil War from its position as

the last event of great external picturesqueness in the national

history. However sincere may be our love of peace, war remains

irresistibly fascinating to the imagination; and the imagination of

young America has now a foreign war instead of a civil war to look back

upon. The smoke of battle, in which the South stood shoulder to shoulder

with the North, has done more than many years of peace could do to

soften in retrospect the harsh outlines of the fratricidal struggle.

At the same time, there is another side to the case which ought not to

be overlooked. The South is proud, very proud; and the older generation,

the generation which fought and agonised through the terrible years from

'61 to '65, is more than a little inclined to resent what it regards as

the condescending advances of the North. This feeling is not confined to

those out-of-the-way corners where, as the saying goes, they have not

yet heard that the war--the Civil War--is over. It is not confined to

the old families, ruined by the war, whom the tide of returning

prosperity has not reached, and never will reach. It is strong among

even the most active and progressive of the veterans of '65. They smile

a grim smile in their grizzled beards at the fuss which has been made

over this "picayune war," as they call it. They, who came crushed,

impoverished, heartbroken, out of the duel of the Titans--they, who know

what it really means to sacrifice everything, everything, to a patriotic

ideal--they, to whom their cause seems none the less sacred because they

know it irrevocably lost--how can they be expected to toss up their caps

and help the party which first vanquished, and then, for many bitter

years, oppressed them, to make political capital out of what appears, in

their eyes, a more or less creditable military picnic? It is especially

the small scale of the conflict that excites their derision. "Did you

ever hear of the battle of Dinwiddie Court-House?" one of them said to

me. I confessed that I had not. "No," he said, "nor has any one else

heard of the battle of Dinwiddie Court-House. It was one of the most

insignificant fights in the war. But there were more men killed in half

an hour in that almost forgotten battle, than in all this mighty war we

hear so much about. Ah!" he continued, "they think we are vastly

gratified when they 'fraternise' with us on our battlefields and

decorate the graves of our dead. I don't know but I prefer the 'waving

of the bloody shirt' to this flaunting of the olive-branch. They have

their victory; let them leave us our graves."

An intense loyalty, not only to the political theories of the South, but

to the memory of the men who died for them--"qui bene pro patria cum

patriaque jacent"--still animates the survivors of the war. With a

confessed but none the less pathetic illogicality, they feel as though

Death had not gone to work impartially, but had selected for his prey

the noblest and the best. One of these survivors, in a paper now before

me, quotes from _Das Siegesfest_ the line--

"Ja, der Krieg verschlingt die Besten!"

and then remarks: "Still, when Schiller says:--

'Denn Patroklus liegt begraben,

Und Thersites kommt zurück,'

his illustration is only half right. The Greek Thersites did not return

to claim a pension."

The dash of bitterness in this remark must not be taken too seriously.

The fact remains, however, that among the veterans of the South there

prevails a certain feeling of aloofness from the national jubilation

over the Spanish War. They "don't take much stock in it." The feeling is

widespread, I believe, but not loud-voiced. If I represented it as

surly or undignified, I should misrepresent it grossly. It is simply the

outcome of an ancient and deep-seated sorrow, not to be salved by

phrases or ceremonies--the most tragic emotion, I think, with which I

ever came face to face. But it prevails almost exclusively among the

older generation in the South, the men who "when they saw the issue of

the war, gave up their faith in God, but not their faith in the cause."

To the young, or even the middle-aged, it has little meaning. I met a

scholar-soldier in the South who had given expression to the sentiment

of his race and generation in an essay--one might almost say an

elegy--so chivalrous in spirit and so fine in literary form that it

moved me well-nigh to tears. Reading it at a public library, I found

myself so visibly affected by it that my neighbour at the desk glanced

at me in surprise, and I had to pull myself sharply together. Yet the

writer of this essay told me that when he gave it to his son to read,

the young man handed it back to him, saying, "All this is a sealed book

to me. I can not feel these things as you do."

More important, perhaps than the sentiment of the veterans is the

feeling, which has been pretty generally expressed, that the South was

slighted in the actual conduct of the late war--that Southern regiments

and Southern soldiers (notably General Fitzhugh Lee) were unduly kept in

the background. Still, there is every reason to believe that the general

effect of the war has been one of conciliation and consolidation. From

the ultra-Southern point of view, the North seems merely to have seized

the opportunity of making honourable amends for the "horrors of

reconstruction;" but even those who take this view admit that the North

_has_ seized the opportunity, and that gladly. As a matter of fact the

good-will of the North, and its desire to let bygones be bygones, are

probably very little influenced by any such recondite motive. It is in

most cases quite simple and instinctive. "There are no rebels now," said

the commandant of the Brooklyn Navy Yard when he gave orders to delete

the fourth word of the inscription "Taken from the rebel ram

_Mississippi_" over a trophy of the Civil War displayed outside of his

quarters. Admiral Philips had probably no thought of "reconstruction" or

of "making amends;" he simply obeyed a spontaneous and general

sentiment. The Southern heroes of the Civil War, moreover, are freely

admitted, and enthusiastically welcomed, into the national Pantheon.

When the thirty-fourth anniversary of "Appomattox Day," which brought

the war to an end, was celebrated in Chicago on April 10 last (Governor

Roosevelt being the guest of honour), the memory of Lee was eulogised

along with that of Grant, and the oration in his honour was received

with equal applause. Finally, it is admitted even by those who are most

inclined to make light of the sentiment elicited by the late war, that

all the States of the Atlantic seaboard are instinctively drawing

together to counterpoise the growing predominance of the West. This

substitution of a new line of cleavage for the old one may seem a

questionable matter for rejoicing. But in any great community, conflicts

of interest must always arise. The recognition of the problems which

await the Republic in the near future does not imply any doubt of her

ability to arrive at a wise and just solution of them.