The most loyal of the Southern veterans, I have said, recognise that the
cause of the South is irrevocably lost. By the cause of the South I do
not, of course, mean slavery. There is probably no one in the South who
would advocate the reinstatement of that "peculiar institution," even if
it could be effected by the lifting of a finger. "The cause we fought
for and our brothers died for," says Professor Gildersleeve of
Baltimore, "was the cause of civil liberty, not the cause of human
slavery.... If the secrets of all hearts could have been revealed, our
enemies would have been astounded to see how many thousands and tens of
thousands in the Southern States felt the crushing burden and the awful
responsibility of the institution which we were supposed to be defending
with the melodramatic fury of pirate kings."
What was it, then, that the South fought for? In what sense was its
cause the cause of "civil liberty?" A brief inquiry into this question
may be found to have more than a merely historic interest--to have a
direct bearing, indeed, upon the problems of the future, not only for
America, but for the English-speaking world.
Let me state at once the true inwardness of the matter, as I have been
led to see it. The cause of the South was the cause of small against
large political aggregations; and the world regards the defeat of the
South as righteous and inevitable, because instinct tells it that the
welfare of humanity is to be sought in large political aggregations, and
not in small. Providence, in a word, is on the side of the big (social)
battalions.
From the point of view of pure logic, of academic argument, the case of
the South was enormously strong. Consequently, the latter-day apologists
of the Confederacy devote themselves with pathetic fervour, and often
with great ingenuity, to what the impartial outsider cannot but feel to
be barren discussions of constitutional law. They point out that the
States--that is, the thirteen original States--preceded the Federal
Union, and voluntarily entered into it under clearly-defined conditions;
that the Federal Government actually derived its powers from the
consent of the States, and could have none which they did not confer
upon it; that the maintenance of slavery in the Southern States, and the
right to claim the extradition of fugitive slaves, were formally
safeguarded in the Constitution; that it was in reliance upon these
provisions that the Southern States consented to enter the Union; that
the right of secession had been openly and repeatedly asserted by
leading politicians and influential parties in several Northern States,
and was therefore no novel and treasonable invention of the South; and,
finally, that the right to enter into a compact implied the right to
recede from it when its provisions were broken, or obviously on the
point of being broken, by the other party or parties to the agreement.
All this is logically and historically indisputable. The Southerners
were the conservative party, and had the letter of the Constitution on
their side; the Northerners were the reformers, the innovators.
Entrenched in the theory of State Sovereignty, the South denied the
right of the North, acting through the Central Government, to interfere
with its "peculiar institution;" and even those who deplored the
existence of slavery felt themselves none the less bound to assert and
defend the right of their respective States to manage their own
affairs.[I] It was a conflict as old as the Revolution--and even, in its
germs, of still older date--between centripetal and centrifugal forces,
between national and local patriotism. The makers of the Constitution
had tried to hold the scales justly, but in their natural jealousy of a
strong central power, they had allowed the balance to deflect unduly on
the side of local independence. The North, the national majority, felt,
obscurely and reluctantly, that a revision of the Constitution in the
matter of slavery was essential to the national welfare.[J] The South
maintained that the States were antecedent and superior to the Nation,
and said, "If your Nation, in virtue of its mere majority vote, insists
on encroaching on State rights which we formally reserved as a condition
of entering the Nation, why then, we prefer to withdraw from this Nation
and set up a nation of our own, in which the true principles of the
Constitution shall be preserved." Thereupon the North retorted, "We
deny your right to withdraw," and the battle was joined.
The North said, "You have no right to withdraw," but it meant, I think,
something rather different. It threw overboard the question of abstract,
formal, technical right, and fought primarily, no doubt, for a
humanitarian ideal, but fundamentally to enforce its instinct of the
highest political expediency. The right interpretation of a state-paper,
however venerable, would not have been a question worthy of such
terrible arbitrament. Even the emancipation of the negro, had that been
the sole object of the contest, would have been too dearly paid for in
blood and tears. The question at issue was really this: What is the
ideal political unit? The largest possible? or the smallest convenient?
What mattered abstract argument as to the _right_ to secede? Once grant
the _power_ to secede, once suffer the precedent to be established, and
the greatest democracy the world had ever seen was bound to break up,
not only into two, but ultimately into many petty republics, wrangling
and jangling like those of Spanish America. To this negation of a great
ideal the North refused its consent. National patriotism had outgrown
local patriotism. It had become to all intents and purposes a fiction
that the Federal Government derived its powers from the States; Thirteen
of them, indeed, had sanctioned the Federal Government, but the Federal
Government had sanctioned and admitted to the Union twenty-one more. In
these the sentiment of priority to the Union could not exist, while
State Sovereignty was a doctrine limited by considerations of
expediency, rather than a patriotic dogma. Immigration, and westward
migration from the north-eastern States, had produced a race of men and
women whose patriotism was divorced, so to speak, from any given patch
of soil, but was wedded to the all-embracing idea of the United States,
with the emphasis on the epithet. They thought of themselves first of
all as American citizens, and only in the second place as citizens of
this State or of that. This habit or instinct is still incomprehensible,
and almost contemptible, to the Southerner of the older generation; but
the Time-Spirit was clearly on its side.
Thus, then, I interpret the fundamental feeling which impelled the North
to take up arms: "Better one stout tussle for the idea of Unity, than a
facile acquiescence in the idea, of Multiplicity, with all its sequels
of instability, distrust, rivalry, and rancour. Better for our
children, if not for us, one great expenditure of blood and gold, than
never-ending threats and rumours of war, commercial conflicts, political
complications, frontiers to be safeguarded, bureaucracies to be
financed." Of course I do not put this forward as a new interpretation
of the question at issue. It is old and it is obvious. But though the
national significance of the struggle has long been recognised, I am not
sure that its international, its world-historic significance, has been
sufficiently dwelt upon. We Europeans have been apt to think that,
because the theatre of conflict was so distant, we had only a
spectacular, or at most an abstract-humanitarian, interest in it. There
could not be a greater mistake. The whole world, I believe, will one day
come to hold Vicksburg and Gettysburg names of larger historic import
than Waterloo or Sedan.