Transcriber's Note:
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Small capital text has been replaced with all capitals.
* * * * *
[Illustration: WILLIAM R. DAVIE.]
LIVES
OF
DISTINGUISHED NORTH CAROLINIANS
WITH
ILLUSTRATIONS AND SPEECHES
COLLECTED AND COMPILED BY
W. J. PEELE,
A MEMBER OF THE RALEIGH BAR
DAVIE, MACON, MURPHY, GASTON, BADGER, SWAIN, RUFFIN,
BRAGG, GRAHAM, MOORE, PETTIGREW, PENDER,
RAMSEUR, GRIMES, HILL
Let us pass not through the earth so fair,
Leaving no witness the truth to bear
That we've lived and loved and labored here.
RALEIGH
1898
COPYRIGHTED 1897
BY
W. J. PEELE
PUBLISHED BY
THE NORTH CAROLINA PUBLISHING SOCIETY
THE LORD BALTIMORE PRESS
THE FRIEDENWALD COMPANY
BALTIMORE, MD.
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
TO
THOSE WHO HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO MAKE IT,
TO THE
DESCENDANTS OF THOSE WHO ARE ITS SUBJECTS,
AND TO
ALL NORTH CAROLINIANS WHO SEEK TO EMULATE
THE VIRTUES IT
RECORDS.
CONTENTS.
PREFACE.
INTRODUCTION.
WILLIAM R. DAVIE BY WALTER CLARK.
NATHANIEL MACON BY { THOMAS BENTON.
{ WELDON N. EDWARDS.
Speech on the Missouri Compromise.
ARCHIBALD D. MURPHY BY WILLIAM A. GRAHAM.
Historical Address at the University.
WILLIAM GASTON BY W. H. BATTLE.
Address at the University.
GEORGE E. BADGER BY WILLIAM A. GRAHAM.
Speech on Slavery and the Union.
DAVID L. SWAIN BY Z. B. VANCE.
Address: "Early Times in Raleigh."
THOMAS RUFFIN BY WILLIAM A. GRAHAM.
Opinion in "Ex parte Bradley."
THOMAS BRAGG BY PULASKI COWPER.
Account of a Political Discussion.
WILLIAM A. GRAHAM BY MONTFORD MCGEHEE.
BARTHOLOMEW F. MOORE BY ED. GRAHAM HAYWOOD.
Argument in State _vs._ Will.
J. JOHNSTON PETTIGREW BY MRS. C. P. SPENCER.
The Character of the British;
An Evening at Seville.
WILLIAM D. PENDER BY W. A. MONTGOMERY.
STEPHEN D. RAMSEUR BY W. R. COX.
BRYAN GRIMES BY H. A. LONDON.
Surrender at Appomattox.
DANIEL H. HILL BY A. C. AVERY.
Address: "The Old South."
PORTRAITS.
DAVIE Frontispiece
MACON facing p. 81
MURPHY facing p. 111
GASTON facing p. 150
BADGER facing p. 181
SWAIN facing p. 229
RUFFIN facing p. 284
BRAGG facing p. 306
GRAHAM facing p. 333
MOORE facing p. 378
PETTIGREW facing p. 413
PENDER facing p. 436
RAMSEUR facing p. 456
GRIMES facing p. 495
HILL facing p. 524
PREFACE.
The publication, in a permanent form, of the most valuable sketches
and speeches which have been produced in our State will aid
materially in laying the foundation for a distinctive literature. In
the beginning, character only is essential; art is a development,
and will assume its comely form in due season if it springs from
virtue. The undeserving are the fearful and the unbelieving, and
these are they who are morbidly anxious to graft borrowed ideals of
literary culture upon the native stock.
The people are entitled to the sources of history (the knowledge of
which, in this State, is confined to a very few), because from among
the people must always arise the man who breaks the monopoly which
sequesters the facts of public interest for private interpretation.
Failure in some writers to give the sources of information and of
ideas, and to give credit or quote where these are already well
expressed, has caused much confusion in the historical data of
this State. This practice is fatal to any considerable literary
reputation and an unwitting confession of incapacity.
The educational value of these sketches and speeches, and of such as
may be published at a later period, is probably what will chiefly
recommend this undertaking to the consideration of the public. A
good course of home reading about worthy men close enough to the
reader to stimulate his interest can hardly be overvalued, and it
is the best substitute for the training of the schools as well as a
powerful assistant in such training.
It will be remarked that some of the best sketches of our
distinguished dead have been written to be spoken; but they are none
the less effectual among North Carolinians, who have generally been
hearers rather than readers: those, therefore, who have desired
their attention have cultivated oratory. The style of the effective
writer, however, is more condensed than that of the orator--freer
from passion and local prejudice and fitter to paint for posterity
pictures of the past.
To the ladies of the memorial associations of North Carolina, and to
those who have generously responded to the honor of their calls, our
people are indebted for the collection, in the form of addresses,
and the consequent preservation of some valuable historical matter.
This is especially true of the Ladies' Memorial Association of
Raleigh, as the sketches of Grimes, Ramseur, Pender, and Hill, here
published, will attest.
No less deserving are those who of their own accord, or at the
request of others, have prepared sketches of such as have done deeds
worthy of remembrance. Born of some patriotic North Carolina woman,
a man will arise who will use the stubborn facts so preserved to
bruise the serpent-head of false history.
It will not be understood, of course, that an attempt is made
in this volume to publish the lives of all distinguished North
Carolinians--there are others, perhaps, as worthy as any which here
appear; and should this book be approved and sufficiently sustained
by reading people, another volume may be added at some future time.
My main object will be attained if interest in those who have done
something worthy of remembrance is stimulated.
Much of what is called biography and history is a tiresome chronicle
of the successive advancement in office of some who have advanced
little in better things. Service, not office, is the inspired test
of greatness. He who would be greatest among you must be the servant
of all.
In this materialistic age it is nothing strange that some North
Carolina writers have praised such as have done well mainly for
themselves; and while I do not remember that, in the collection here
published, place and station are set forth as an end rather than a
means to good, yet here, as elsewhere and everywhere, the thoughtful
reader will be on his guard against any squint in favor of false
ideals.
As Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses by the art of counterfeiting
the symbols of Heaven's appointment, a devilish power, so this age
suffers much from spurious greatness, persistently advertised, as
bearing the image and superscription of virtue.
Human limitation is such that a character is sometimes worthy of
study which only effectually illustrates one great virtue growing
among defects; and human nature, unless morbid, instead of being
contaminated, will be encouraged that weakness can deserve fame. The
defects which criticism may discover in any character here portrayed
may be used, under intelligent guidance, to gain the sympathy of the
young rather than mar their ideals--which must be composite pictures
of the virtues of many, or else imaged on the soul by contemplation
of the life and work of One who was the Servant of all.
W. J. P.
INTRODUCTION.
This book is written of North Carolinians by North Carolinians. Many
of the writers are no less distinguished than their subjects, and
these together give it local color, distinctiveness, and personality
which ought to make it interesting to ourselves and valuable to
those who seek to know us through intrinsic evidence.
Wherever practicable the subjects are allowed also to speak for
themselves. "Biography is the only true history," says Carlyle. The
history of North Carolina has not yet been written, and never will
be, until each pioneer investigator confines himself to a short
period--say a decade. Then, eventually, perhaps, some genius for
generalization and condensation will arise and in a single life-time
combine the whole into one work. Meanwhile this generation may bind
up and preserve the material.
There is not sufficient political homogeneity among North
Carolinians at this time to enable us to endorse with unanimity the
true theory of our history for the past seventy years--especially in
our relation to the General Government.
This generation, too, is inundated with cheap and often insidiously
false sectional literature from the North.
Such literature is gradually glozing over and reconciling our people
to the sinister changes which are being subtly wrought in American
institutions.
The innovators can now persuade the misinformed and careless that
just criticism of themselves and their cupidity, and just defense
of the principles and motives which actuated us in the late war
between the States, is rank treason against the United States
Government.
To publish what our sages and warriors have taught and fought for
rises, therefore, to the dignity of a duty, as tending to correct
erroneous impressions common among us and still more common among
others, and as giving a particular account rendered by many
witnesses, of men and times to be remembered by posterity, rightly
or wrongly, forever.
This introduction is intended to present also a bird's-eye view of
the field in which were cast the lives and labors of the subjects
of this book. Incidentally, too, I indicate a theory of Southern
history which, if not obvious enough upon its bare statement, or
from the facts here briefly set forth, will one day be demonstrated
to the satisfaction of the seeker after truth. It involves an
analysis of the character, influence, and interests of the North
acting on the South.
The inoculation of New England semi-foreign views of the Federal
Constitution (for half New England is foreign born) goes on apace.
With conceit, born of provincialism, these people have magnified
their Mayflower scrap of local history into national importance;
they have dinned it with such Codrus-like persistency into our ears
that the average North Carolinian knows their story better than he
does that of the settlement of Roanoke Island. We read their books,
papers, and periodicals, though many reflect upon us, and nearly all
are unfair to us; but they do not read ours. It would be a surprise
to the publishers if one hundred copies of this book should be sold
north of Mason and Dixon's line--a line which still exists against
our literature, our ideas, and our construction of fundamental law.
Most probably not one of their monthlies would publish what I am now
writing.
The most un-American section of the Union is New England. Bounded on
the west and north by British Canada and on the east by the Atlantic
ocean (which may be said now to belong also to Great Britain), it
is the hotbed of British ideas of government and society; and, in
the event of a third war with the "mother country" (as it still
affectionately terms the nation whose government has always been the
enemy of our liberty, growth, and progress) it may be a hotbed for a
hundred times more traitors than it had in the War of 1812. Like our
great cities, this section is a danger-spot in the Union.
Many of its political and social leaders vie with those of New
York in rushing over to England and Germany to get the foreign
construction of our Federal Constitution, and foreign consent to
proposed financial legislation by Congress, and foreign sanction of
the orders, social preferences and privileges, and marriages of our
"corner"-made aristocracy.
These leaders, too, are less and less the owners of the wealth they
handle, and are becoming more and more the mere agents of English
capitalists and the dupes and tools of foreign marriage-brokers.
About three thousand million dollars of British capital is said
to be invested in a section of the Union. This copartnership of
foreign and domestic wealth gives to Great Britain a voice in our
government--a representation in Congress from whole groups of
States. How many Northeastern Senators and Representatives have
differed in late years from British views of what our financial
policy should be? Foreign and domestic monopolists and bondholders
have the same interests, the same social sympathies and affinities,
a common cause, the same victims and enemies, the same want of
confidence in popular government; therefore, what doth hinder them
from forming a treasonable alliance, offensive and defensive,
against the people? They have already formed it: the money-kings
in all nations, in control of all kings and governments, have an
understanding with one another, and, by concentration, they can
easily crush any movement, for amelioration, among the people of any
one nation at a time. There is a brotherhood, too, of incorporated
rate, fare, and tax collectors as well as of bondholders. United
they stand.
The Hamiltonian theory of government has been in adoption, and the
Hamiltonian school of politicians has been in control of the Union
for nearly forty years, and they may now be judged by their fruits:
they have given us a more corruptly administered government than
that our fathers rebelled against in 1775; and they are fulfilling
with startling fidelity and rapidity all the prophecies which Henry,
Jefferson, Macon, and Randolph made about them.
It is a knowledge of these things which has organized a great
rebellion in the United States, especially among those who live
outside the great cities and homes of monopoly--a rebellion
which has begun to control political parties, and which, in the
last general election, mustered nearly six and a half million
voters--voters who were hurled, for once, against the great
international brotherhood of plunderers by legislation. Some,
however, who were in it are not of it; these, when they comprehend
it, will become offended and walk no more with it. A new declaration
of independence is being formulated to voice its spirit, and it
awaits its Jefferson, if, indeed, as some believe, he has not
already come in the person of Bryan, a Western man descended from
Southern ancestors, and seeming to have at heart the interests of
all sections.
It is a significant fact, in this connection, that from two-thirds
to three-fourths of the foreign voters in the Union marched
under the allied leadership of foreign and domestic monopoly and
ill-gotten wealth. Two-thirds, at least, of the native-born white
voters were in this great rebellion, and the life and soul of it.
The negro voted almost solidly with the foreigners and with his new
masters, for he will have masters of some kind yet for many years.
I note the status and attitude of the negro seriously (and let him
that readeth understand), for if this ever-deepening conflict comes
to bullets, those who now tell the old Federal soldier to vote as
he shot, will tell the negro to shoot as he voted; and he will
so shoot. The negro vote, under the easy control of a sectional
faction of political manipulators, is as dangerous a menace to our
institutions as our foreign population indoctrinated with European
medievalism--kingcraft and priestcraft.
Much, if not most, of our foreign immigration now comes from cities,
and pours itself into the already corrupted life of our own great
cities. ("Syrian Orontes pours its filth into The Tiber."--_Juv._)
It does not buy land, it sells votes; it specifically performs the
political contracts of its priests; it buys and sells political
jobs; it officers ward politics. It is one of the arms--and the
negro is the other--by which greed and monopoly, the twin devils
which dance attendance upon national decline, are consolidating our
government.
No great city has ever been fit for self-government and civil
liberty. From Babylon to Nineveh, from Nineveh to Carthage, from
Carthage to Rome, from Rome to Venice, and from Venice to New
York and Chicago (neither of which can elect an honest board of
aldermen), it is the same old story of avarice which finally
overreaches itself. This is the sin which, when finished, brings
forth the death of nations.
In vain did Virgil and Horace sing their deathless melodies of
country homes to a people whose blood was already poisoned with the
lust for gain and fevered with the excitement of artificial life.
The South, the rural South, in spite of many shortcomings, is the
great conservator of our institutions. It is the distinctively
American section of the Union, jealous of all foreign domination or
interference, and stands firm in the patriot's faith that we as a
nation can work out our own salvation without the aid of European
capital or distinctively European ideas of finance, government or
society.
Though contaminated by modern machine politics, and much hampered by
the race question, the South still clings to local self-government
and to the dignity of Statehood as the only sure foundation for
civil liberty and perpetual Union. Long taxed unfairly, by the
subtle operation of the Federal tariff and internal revenue and
currency laws, out of money which has long enriched another section,
in the shape of pensions, internal improvements, and "protection
to home industries," the South is still the section most loyal to
constitutional government, having infinitely more genuine affection
for it than the pension-pampered patriotism of such as make
merchandise out of "saving the Union."
These considerations are sufficient to inspire in us an effort to
write our own histories, expound to our children the principles of
fundamental law, and teach them the safeguards of our institutions.
The collection and arrangement of the following sketches, with a few
crude suggestions of my own, is what I have contributed towards this
end.
Except in so far as "history is philosophy teaching by examples,"
I take little pleasure in it, and should be at no pains to
preserve or popularize it. But seeing, as I think I see, the
drift and tendencies of these times, and believing that a correct
and widespread understanding of the lessons of recent events is
the first postulate in determining the remedy for existing and
prospective evils, I take an abiding interest in every earnest
endeavor to marshal the facts and discover the theories which will
explain them--for facts without theories are dead. The field of
investigation is white unto harvest, but the laborers for love are
few--the hirelings are many.
In order to illustrate the necessity of our reading and writing our
own histories, I will undertake to show the main cause of the war
between the States, indicating as I go along some of the errors
called history, which are circulated and taught to the prejudice of
the South.
Northern historians make the negro and the interest of their people
in his welfare the underlying cause of the agitation which resulted
in the war between the States. Some of them would have us believe
that the Federal soldiers, a generation ago, fired with the love
of liberty and humanity, came South on a great missionary tour to
strike the fetters from the limbs of four million slaves. About
fifty per cent. of these missionaries were foreigners, or foreign
born, having but crude ideas of the nature of our government; many
thousands of them could not even speak our language; some were
Hessians, imported from foreign tyrannies expressly for the purpose
of war. Many tens of thousands came for money, and hundreds of
thousands were compelled to come by law. Not ten per cent. came to
free the negro. Those acquainted with the esteem in which he is held
at the North have never been deceived by this _missionary_ theory
of his emancipation. Listen to the words of De Tocqueville, written
about 1835. This Frenchman certainly cannot be accused of having
been biased against the Northern States. He says: "Whosoever has
inhabited the United States must have perceived, that in those parts
of the Union in which the negroes are no longer slaves, they have in
nowise drawn nearer to the whites. On the contrary, the prejudice of
the race appears to be stronger in the States which have abolished
slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so
intolerant as in those States where servitude has never been known.
* * * *
"The electoral franchise has been conferred upon the negroes in
almost all the States in which slavery has been abolished; but, if
they come forward to vote, their lives are in danger. If oppressed,
they may bring an action at law, but they will find none but whites
amongst their judges; and, although they may legally serve as
jurors, prejudice repulses them from that office. The same schools
do not receive the child of the black and of the European. In the
theatres gold cannot procure a seat for the servile race beside
their former masters; in the hospitals they lie apart; and, although
they are allowed to invoke the same Divinity as the whites, it must
be at a different altar and in their own churches, with their own
clergy. The gates of Heaven are not closed against these unhappy
beings; but their inferiority is continued to the very confines of
the other world; when the negro is defunct his bones are cast aside,
and the distinction of condition prevails even in the equality of
death. The negro is free, but he can share neither the rights, nor
the pleasures, nor the labor, nor the afflictions, nor the tomb of
him whose equal he has been declared to be; and he cannot meet him
upon fair terms in life or in death."--_Democracy in America_, page
339.
The negro's freedom was accidental and merely incidental to the
main purpose of the war. When the alternative was secession or
war, the sentiment of the most rabid abolitionists was voiced by
Horace Greeley, who was willing that the "erring sisters depart in
peace." Many abolitionists were sincere, though fanatical, and they
had too often invoked the doctrine of secession, for the North, to
consistently object when the South invoked it. Abraham Lincoln (a
shrewd, practical Western countryman, put into his high office to
hold the agricultural West against the agricultural South) put the
war exclusively upon the ground of saving the Union. He would save
the Union, he said, whether it enslaved the negro or freed him. In
his inaugural address, March, 1861, he said: "I have no purpose,
directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery
in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right
to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." Eight days before,
Sumner, the abolition leader, had said in Congress: "I take this
occasion to declare most explicitly that I do not think Congress has
any right to interfere with slavery in a State." Neither Lincoln nor
Sumner, if they are to be credited with any sincerity, had stumbled
upon the policy of freeing the negro; and, if they had, it would
have been very impolitic to have then disclosed it, for all the
border States would then have joined the South.
The negro was freed as a means to an end. The emancipation
proclamation was a "war measure," and, as such, a master-stroke,
for it took two hundred and fifty thousand laborers out of the
South and put muskets into the hands of nearly two hundred thousand
colored troops. This was the difference between success and failure,
and was the turning point in the war, as was admitted by Lincoln
in his message to Congress, in which he said: * * * * "and for a
long time it had been hoped that the rebellion could be suppressed
without resorting to it [the policy of emancipation] as a military
measure." The negro incidentally caused the defeat of the South; and
he was also incidentally a cause of the war, but not the causing
cause--_that lies deeper, and must be rightly understood at the
peril of the nation_.
The war was about taxation--the usual cause of revolution. A century
ago it was taxation without representation; a generation ago it
was unequal, discriminating, sectional, and class taxation. Out
of this still grows the political strife whose quadrennial flood
rises higher and higher at each election: income taxes successfully
resisted by the rich; rate, fare, and tariff taxes unsuccessfully
resisted by the poor--these are the fruitful causes of war--fought
with ballots first, and finally, if no remedy can be found, with
bullets.
The truth must be told even if it diminishes the glory of those
who "saved the Union"--and made money by it. The blood of the last
generation was not shed in vain, if we, with the advantages we
enjoy, learn and teach the lessons which all posterity will demand
of us--both for the sake of those who perished and of those who may
perish if we suffer them to believe a lie. Forewarned is forearmed.
Under our Federal revenue laws, those who have produced the export
crops (in quantities sufficient to invite the exploits of political
manufacturing and trade combinations) have long paid far more than
their share of the expenses of government. They were not allowed
to buy in the open market, where they sold their crops, but in the
restricted "home market," at prices not fixed by open competition.
But the said combinations bought these crops in a free market and
sold their own products in a protected market. So they got more
benefit than the government: first, in being relieved from Federal
taxes, which the producers of the export crops paid; second, in
incidental, then in avowed, protection; third, in the system of
internal improvements which they were obliged to invent to dispose
of the surplus revenues raised as an incident to giving them
"protection"; and these "improvements" usually improved one section
and impoverished the other.
So, early in the game, we find one _class_, the political
combinations of manufacturers, growing rich, and another class,
the ill-combined agriculturalists, growing correspondingly poor.
Prior to 1860, even more than now, relatively, cotton was the great
export crop of America, and was also the principal money crop of a
section; so the tax suffered on account of it was sectional. Being
also manufactured in a section, the benefits enjoyed on account
of it were sectional. So we have the _sections_, as well as the
classes, antagonistic, and made so by the operation of a Federal
revenue law--one section growing richer and the other growing
correspondingly poorer in the sight of all men.
Political parties aligned according to "geographical
discriminations" (against which Washington warned but did not
provide), arose and cursed each other, from 1816--the date of the
first distinctively protective tariff (which, as increased in 1828
and 1830, provoked South Carolina's first acts of secession)--to
1861, the date of the Morrill tariff, with sixty per cent.
protection in it, which, passed March 2d, and flaunted in the
face of the seven already seceded States, rendered reconciliation
impossible. The Confederate Constitution declaring in its very
first article against even incidental protection, conveyed no hint
to the wilfully blind revenue-hunters that the most oppressed of
the agricultural States had formed their combination to resist the
plunder of Federal tariff, as well as other sectional aggressions.
Lincoln's policy of reenforcing Federal forts in the South (the
immediate cause of the war) was bottomed on a purpose to collect
this odious tax (the tariff of 1861), a policy which Alexander
H. Stephens says was not determined upon until the "seven war
Governors" (from the seven most protected States) offered to
furnish the troops requisite to subdue the States then seceded. The
border States had decided for the Union before Lincoln's acts of
aggression; and he, therefore, though erroneously, supposed that
they all would either aid him or remain neutral until he could
"strengthen the Government" by the conquest of the cotton States.
By means of the tariff the cotton crop had been made the scapegoat
upon which, in relief of wealth and monopoly, was piled the huge
iniquity of Federal taxes; but more than that, and worse than that,
the tariff was the engine by which the political combination of
spinners and shippers forced down the price of that crop.
As far back as 1791, Hamilton and those in charge of the revenue
department of the General Government (a certain school of
politicians has always had a Judas-like fondness for carrying the
bag), finding the express powers under the Constitution too weak
for the purposes of exploit, began to lay the foundation for a new
government by implied powers under court construction; by means
of which they and "their successors in office" have slowly but
steadily amended the Constitution, consolidated our Federation, and
undermined the rights of the States. While they were experimenting
to discover which States it was most advantageous to form into a
copartnership with the General Government, they invented an unequal
and discriminating tax on carriages, which fell heaviest on New
Jersey, where they were principally manufactured. Seeing the burden
of half a dozen States fall on one, North Carolina and some others
denounced it as infamous and unconstitutional.
After a few more such experiments, in which it was learned
effectually that the purely agricultural States could not be
seduced into taking advantage of their sisters, the manipulators
of the Treasury induced the General Government to coquet with the
States which were more or less under the control of the political
combinations of merchants, manufacturers, bankers, and speculators;
and with more success.
A copartnership was perfected between the General Government
and the protected States by the tariff of 1816; and the mutual
considerations passed were first named "incidental benefit" for one
party to the contract and "liberal construction" of implied powers
for the other. Angry protests and sectional incriminations and
recriminations followed, and awakened Jefferson, like "an alarm-bell
at night," out of the sleep of old age. The "peculiar institution"
of one section gave the other a terrible advantage, which it was
quick to see and to seize; and it was used remorselessly. Greed,
suddenly joining philanthropy, religion, and fanaticism, organized
and led a crusade against _African_ slavery. The agitation about
the negro, as a counter-irritant to distract attention from the
injustice of Federal revenue laws, was more than a success: for
the shallow politicians of both sections forgot the real issue;
but the beneficiaries never lost sight of it. I will use a homely
illustration: A and B are doing business on opposite sides of a
street; B begins to undersell A; A becomes angry, but cannot afford
to tell his customers the cause; he hears that B once cheated a
negro out of a mule; he makes that charge; they fight; the court
record of the trial shows that the fight was about the negro and the
mule; but there is not a business man on the street who does not
know that the record speaks a lie.
The first speech in this book opens with old Nat. Macon lecturing
(in 1820) a Representative from Pennsylvania, the most protected
State, for expressing a desire to see the Union dissolved rather
than that slavery should be extended beyond the Mississippi.
Slavery, itself, while for several generations usually beneficial
to the negro, was, doubtless, in many respects injurious to his
masters. It made us provincial, of necessity, sensitive and
intolerant of criticism, easily susceptible of misrepresentation,
and cut us off from the sympathy of some who else had been our
friends. It cramped thought, invention, progress, poetry, and
literature. It enabled monopoly to divide and conquer the tillers
of the soil. It tended to create caste and it _degraded manual
labor_--as necessary as death after sin and decreed in the same
Divine judgment. Skilled manual labor gutted the Confederacy by
driving war-ships up its rivers: and the felt want of it, in late
years, has established a great industrial institution at our State
capital, the mother of many others, and destined to revolutionize
education among us.
"Protection" and discrimination in the operation of the Federal
revenue laws, though still potent for evil, will probably never
again be the principal, causing cause of another revolution
unto blood; because from three to ten per cent. of our Southern
population will henceforward be directly benefited by such laws, and
their interests will soften the sectional aspect of the tax. But the
unequal and sectional operation of the currency laws, alienating the
West as well as the South; the heaping up of nearly all the wealth
of the country into one section, and most of it in a few great
cities of that section; the plunder of agriculture by legislation
and by the unchecked conspiracy of capital; the monopoly of the
carrying trade by the wealth of the cities; the growing distrust
between the urban and rural populations; the sullen and fickle
temper of our foreign elements--the nucleus, perhaps, of a future
Prætorian Guard; the mutterings against the now "vested right" of
protected labor to be fed or assisted by the government--and capital
hides behind such labor; machine politics and party spirit; the
prostitution of the electoral system by the national nominating mob
system, which treats sovereign States as the provinces of a party;
the fine Italian hand of a certain religio-political corporation
in getting offices and holding the balance of power between the
factions contending for public plunder; the growing intimacy of
sectional wealth with foreign governments and aristocracies--these
are the dangers which together threaten a perpetual Union of the
States and the liberties of the people.
Before 1860, Macaulay prophesied that our government would go to
pieces over a presidential election. In the face of these dangers,
it is well for us to consider and carefully teach our children the
causes which have worked our injury in the past, in order that we
and they may be the better able to recognize and grapple them when
they reappear, under changed names or in the shape of new laws.
But a tariff tax as a causing cause of the late war shall not
rest upon the foregoing testimony alone. "Let the South go,"
exclaimed Abraham Lincoln, in 1861, "where then shall we get our
revenues?" This man was noted for hitting the bull's-eye, and Divine
Inspiration had forestalled him with the prophecy that the love of
revenue was the root of all evil.
Thomas H. Benton is a witness who will be heard. In a speech in the
Senate, in 1828, he shows how the tariff (which, except for about
twelve years, had been mainly levied for revenue) had plundered the
South. He said: "I feel for the sad changes which have taken place
in the South during the last fifty years. Before the Revolution it
was the seat of wealth as well as hospitality. Money, and all it
commanded, abounded there. But how is it now? All this is reversed.
Wealth has fled from the South, and settled in the regions north
of the Potomac; and this in the face of the fact that the South,
in four staples alone, has exported produce since the Revolution
to the value of eight hundred millions of dollars; and the North
has exported comparatively nothing. Such an export would indicate
unparalleled wealth, but what is the fact? In the place of wealth
a universal pressure for money is felt--not enough for current
expenses--the price of property all down--the country drooping and
languishing--towns and cities decaying--and the frugal habits of
the people pushed to the verge of universal self-denial for the
preservation of their family estates. Such a result is a strange and
wonderful phenomenon. It calls upon statesmen to inquire into the
cause.
"Under Federal legislation the exports of the South have been the
basis of the Federal revenue. * * * * Virginia, the two Carolinas,
and Georgia may be said to defray three-fourths of the annual
expense of supporting the Federal Government; and of this great
sum, annually furnished by them, nothing, or next to nothing, is
returned to them in the shape of government expenditure. That
expenditure flows in an opposite direction--it flows northwardly,
in one uniform, uninterrupted, and perennial stream. This is the
reason why wealth disappears from the South and rises up in the
North. Federal legislation does all this. It does it by the simple
process of eternally taking from the South and returning nothing to
it. If it returned to the South the whole or even a good part of
what it exacted the four States south of the Potomac might stand the
action of the system, but the South must be exhausted of its money
and its property by a course of legislation which is forever taking
away and never returning anything. Every new tariff increases the
force of this action. No tariff has ever yet included Virginia, the
two Carolinas, and Georgia, except to increase the burdens imposed
by them."--Benton's _Thirty Years View_, Vol. I, p. 98, quoted by
Raphael Semmes in his _Memoirs of Service Afloat_.
In 1860 we find the South still furnished many millions more than
two-thirds of the export crops, besides fifty millions to the North.
In Colonial and Revolutionary times the South was the richest
section, and so acknowledged to be in the Constitutional Convention
of 1787.
No wonder that the South always insisted that the Federation was
a limited partnership; and no wonder that her rapacious partners
insisted on a government of unlimited powers, when they employed
such powers for unequal taxation, sectional expenditures, and
unlimited "protection." Those who have clamored most persistently
for a "strong government" have never scrupled to sap its strength
for purposes of private emolument. Those who have panted most for
a consolidated republic have now fully disclosed their purpose of
sequestering its assets. They have not consolidated the patriotism
of the republic, but they have drawn a line of division from the
Atlantic to the Great Lakes--a division of interests, division
of sentiment, division of population, division of history, and
a division of churches. Who can measure the hypocrisy of those
writers and politicians who teach the people that the way to make
the government strong is to give to one section "implied powers"
to plunder the other? Having gotten their wealth by the craft of
booming nationalism and centralization, they now perceive that in
order to keep it they must hold themselves ready to "hedge" with the
doctrine of States' rights and reserved powers. So, while college
professors are confusing the mind of youth about "the two opposing
theories of government," the facts of opposing interests are jarring
the foundations of society and wrenching the fetters which bind the
States in a "more perfect Union."
Robert Toombs said, in a speech before the Georgia Legislature, in
November, 1860: "The instant the Government was organized, at the
very first Congress, the Northern States evinced a general desire
and purpose to use it for their own benefit, and to pervert its
powers for sectional advantage, and they have steadily pursued that
policy to this day. They demanded a monopoly of the business of
ship-building, and got a prohibition against the sale of foreign
ships to citizens of the United States, which exists to this day.
They demanded a monopoly of the coasting trade, in order to get
higher freights than they could get in open competition with the
carriers of the world. Congress gave it to them, and they yet hold
this monopoly. * * * These same shipping interests, with cormorant
rapacity, have steadily burrowed their way through your legislative
halls, until they have saddled the agricultural classes with a large
portion of the legitimate expenses of their own business. We pay a
million dollars per annum for the lights which guide them in and
out of your ports. We have built, and keep up, at the cost of at
least another million a year, hospitals for their sick and disabled
seamen, when they wear them out and cast them ashore. We pay half a
million to support and bring home those they cast away in foreign
lands. They demand, and have received, millions of the public
money to increase the safety of harbors and lessen the danger of
navigating our rivers; all of which expenses legitimately fall upon
their business, and should come out of their own pockets, instead of
a common treasury.
"Even the fishermen of Massachusetts and New England demand and
receive from the public treasury about half a million dollars per
annum as a pure bounty in their business of catching codfish. The
North, at the very first Congress, demanded and received bounties,
under the name of protection, for every trade, craft and calling
which its people pursue, and there is not an artisan in brass,
or iron, or wood, or weaver or spinner in wool or cotton, or
calico-maker, or iron-master, or a coal-owner, in all the Northern
or Middle States, who has not received what he calls the protection
of his government on his industry to the extent of from fifteen to
two hundred per cent. from the year 1791 to this day. They will
not strike a blow or stretch a muscle without bounties from the
government. No wonder they cry aloud for the glorious Union. They
have the same reason for praising it that the craftsmen of Ephesus
had for shouting 'Great is Diana of the Ephesians!' By it they get
their wealth, by it they levy tribute on honest labor."
The future historian will devote a long chapter to show how the
slavery agitation "ebbed and flowed with the sinking and the
swelling" in the voices of protest from the much-plundered South;
voices which were keyed to the pitch of secession and revolution
against the tariff of 1828, and which again, in 1861, shouted in
warlike defiance until they were hushed in blood. That chapter will
point also in shame to the dark record which shows that on March 2,
1861, after seven States had seceded and their Representatives in
Congress had withdrawn, and while four other States were preparing
to secede if found necessary, greed thrust its "lewd snout" into the
purity of that chastening hour when many thousand patriots still
prayed that the awful catastrophe might be averted, and got by force
a tariff with sixty per cent. protection in it! Hear the effect of
that measure from the lips of a North Carolinian, General Clingman,
who was lingering in the Senate in the hope of reconciliation: "But,
Mr. President, there is another difficulty in the way, and we might
as well talk of this frankly. I know it is present to the minds of
Senators on the other side, and they must see the difficulty. The
honorable Senator from Rhode Island (Mr. Simmons) particularly, who
engineered the tariff bill through, of course sees the difficulty.
* * * The revenues under that tariff bill cannot be collected
anywhere, I think, if the declarations which gentlemen make are to
be acted out. If they are to hold that all the Confederate States
are in the Union, and that you are to have no custom-houses, on the
line between them and the other States, what will be the result?
Goods will come into New Orleans, Charleston, Mobile, and other
places; they will come in paying a low tariff, and merchants from
Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, and Ohio, if they choose to go down
there and buy goods, will take them home and pay no duties. No man
from the Northwest will go to New York and pay a duty of fifty per
cent. on goods that he can get at a fifteen or twenty per cent.
duty at New Orleans. That will be the course of trade, of course.
Senators must see that you cannot have two tariffs, one high and
one low, in operation in the country at once, with any effect
produced by the high tariff. If you go to a man and say: 'You may
pay me a high price or a low price for an article,' you will never
get the high price. When, therefore, you attempt to carry out the
new tariff, which contains rates, I think, of fifty per cent., and
some of one hundred per cent., and some even above one hundred per
cent., you cannot collect those rates at Boston and New York and
Philadelphia, while the men who want to consume the goods can get
them by paying a duty of one-third as much. That is impossible. I
presume the Senator from Rhode Island, and those who acted with him,
did not intend the tariff, which has lately passed, to be a mere
farce, a mere thing on paper, not to be acted out. Of course they
mean to get duties under it some way or other. If you do not mean to
have your line of custom-houses along the border of the Confederate
States you must expect to stop importations there."--_Speeches
and Writings of T. L. Clingman_, pp. 61, 62: extract from speech
delivered in United States Senate, March 19, 1861.
Yes, and it was the armed attempt to "stop importations there" that
brought on the war!
Why it was that the bombardment, on April 12, 1861, of a Federal
_fort_ about to be reenforced "fired the Northern heart" more
than the bombardment, on January 9, 1861, of a Federal _war-ship_
attempting to carry reinforcements to that fort, the Northern
historians, like the Pharisees, "cannot tell." And they never tell
that between the two bombardments sectional monopoly had brooded,
and on March 2d hatched a cockatrice egg of sectional advantage;
that its beneficiaries had had opportunity to touch noses with the
"seven war Governors" and that the inspiration of such a touch
accounts for the zeal with which they urged the President to war,
when twenty-one States were trying to effect peace; that between the
15th and the 28th of March these Governors had a secret conference
with the President in Washington, in which they pledged their States
to support him in "collecting the revenues of the Government"; and
that, thus assured, he had, to the astonishment of the South and
most of his own constituents, suddenly sent the invading expedition
to reenforce Fort Sumter! Did this same influence persuade Lincoln
to refuse to allow the Supreme Court or even Congress to pass upon
the much-mooted constitutional question of the right to secede?
Of course it was familiar learning to him that all the States,
especially the Northeastern, had from time to time asserted, acted
on, or acquiesced in this right. Did the tariff Governors induce
this man, reputed to be tender-hearted, to decide, on his own
responsibility, a question of law which forced the issue of blood at
a cost of a million lives, and a sinister change in the character
and conduct of our government? Did they seduce him into fitting
out an armament to collect the revenues at Charleston, and, at
the same time, leave open for construction and equivocation his
doubtful and inconsistent expressions about enforcing the Federal
laws and Supreme Court decisions giving protection to Southern
property in slaves? Why was it that, in this awful crisis, he
refused to call Congress together until he had precipitated war by
his invasion and his call for volunteers, unless it was because his
extra-constitutional advisers feared to trust a body which passed
a conciliatory resolution even after battles had been fought and
blood had been shed? Why was it that by the very terms of his war
proclamation he put off the assembling of Congress for two months
and nineteen days after he had declared war, unless it was because
he was willing to forestall its action, and preferred to rely on
the conspiring war Governors and their protected constituents to
sustain him, rather than on his constitutional advisers and the
Representatives of the people? Monopoly could not then trust the
Supreme Court, for the Dred Scott decision showed that it might
again adhere to the original view of the Constitution; and its best
members were zealous to effect compromise and peace. That Lincoln
and his Cabinet were against the policy of coercion, until somebody
influenced them, has been confessed by at least one of its members.