THE SECTIONAL DIVISION
Once more it becomes necessary to recognize the division of our country
into sections, as in the days before the Revolution welded it into one
nation. The time was fast coming when there should be division in good
earnest, when there should be even overt separation; and to understand
the effects and tendencies of this time among the women of America it is
needful that we take into fuller consideration than we have yet done the
differences of custom and thought that existed between the women of the
South and the women of the North. For though these met upon common
ground and blended in a society which saw but little variation in the
types presented to it, there had been constantly growing, since the time
of the first amalgamation of the colonies into one nation, differences
between the Northern and the Southern cultures that were little less
than radical in their ultimate nature and expressions.
The distinctiveness of type had come about gradually; but it had always
existed as a possibility, even in the youngest days of the republic. The
conditions of civilization North and South were in themselves divergent,
and they were sure to produce an ever-increasing effect. The North was
the land of affairs; the South was the home of luxury. The North worked
for itself and won its sustenance by the labor of its own hands or
brain; the South watched its wealth accumulate by the toil of its
slaves, and thus had time and to spare for the cultivation of the graces
which come of leisure. Up to the inception of the Civil War it cannot be
denied that the South was preeminently the fountain of American society.
Even as Virginia was the Mother of Presidents, so was the whole South
the parent of the most charming, the most refined, the most cultured of
the dames and damsels who held society aloft upon their lovely
shoulders. The superiority was not of kind, for in this the North
steadily held its own, as was but natural; it was of numbers. For every
recognized ornament to society sent by the North to grace the circles of
Washington, the South sent two.
When the century passed its meridian and turned to the descending road
there had come about a practical division of the country into two
sections once more. Not only in feeling,--which, however, was subdued
and hardly expressed save by the more bitter partisans, at least among
the women,--but in nature. While the higher ideals of the woman of the
North and her of the South were the same, they differed in nearly
everything that made for progress toward the goal they sought. The
tendency toward aristocratic ideas had taken unwonted shape toward the
end of the first half of the nineteenth century. According to the false
ideal which had come to take the place of the higher one of earlier
days, the Southern woman was par _excellence_ the aristocrat of America.
She was lapped in luxury; she was surrounded by every refinement; she
was waited upon by hosts of servants; she was the representative in many
ways of the feudal chatelaine of olden times in England, with added
refinements of culture and luxury. But all this was bought, though she
did not then see the truth, at a terrible price. The Southern
conditions, brought about by the institution of slavery, bore most
heavily in effect upon the men of that section; but the women also were
in danger of forgetting the strength of their womanhood in the idleness
of untroubled days and in the lack of power that results from the
transfer of all burdens to the shoulders of others.
[Illustration 6: A SOUTHERN WEDDING.
After the painting by E. L. Henry.
Nor with all the social distinction of the southern household was there
a sacrifice of a single charm of home life. Every important domestic
event was attended with becoming ceremony. The arrival of the newborn,
the home gatherings of later years, and the wedding,--these were
occasions to be celebrated by all; occasions when the tenderest family
sentiment was manifested.]
The life of the typical Virginia lady of those luxurious days was an
unending round of social pleasures, and this life in its turn was
typical of that of the Southern woman of refinement in all sections,
though presenting that life in its most enlarged and broadened aspects.
She had her responsibilities, and she recognized them; she was the queen
of a vast estate, on which many souls looked to her for comfort and
help, and, as a rule, she responded to their call with all alacrity. To
her slaves, at least as far as the house servants were concerned, she
was friend rather than mistress, acknowledging them as part of her
family and caring for them almost as for her own children. But the
trouble was that she generally did these things vicariously; she
delegated her powers, seeing to it, indeed, that they were administered
as she would have them, but herself doing little. She was given over,
for her own part, to the demands of society and to the requirements of
hospitality; and Southern hospitality is proverbial, and the courtly
welcome and gracious attentions of the hostess of the plantation mansion
in the ante-bellum days were among the most agreeable and vivid
impressions of her guests. Nor with all the social distinction of the
southern household was there a sacrifice of a single charm of home life.
Every important domestic event was attended with becoming ceremony. The
arrival of the newborn, the home gatherings of later years, and the
wedding,--these were occasions to be celebrated by all; occasions when
the tenderest family sentiment was manifested. At such times, it may be
remarked, the system of domestic slavery appealed rather as a virtue
than as a stain, for the household slaves were interested sharers in the
joys of the family. In this connection, one is reminded of the Georgia
negress who, on being asked if she were the slave of a certain person,
replied: "Yes, I belong to them, and they belong to me."
In her home the typical Virginia lady did little with her own hands; she
directed, but she would have thought it shame to labor even in such a
cause. Her hands were too delicate to work, her feet too dainty to press
the ground; she never walked where she could ride, and carriages were
always at her command. Her winters, if she lived on her plantation, were
passed in a round of pleasures, of balls and minor social functions; her
summers she spent at the famous "Springs," whither she drove in her
cumbrous but comfortable carriage,--in which way, indeed, some of the
more enthusiastic lovers of those "Springs" came even from the
southernmost bournes of the land. A friend of the writer, for instance,
once told him how she had often travelled in this manner from New
Orleans to the Greenbrier White Sulphur Springs in those halcyon days
"before the war."
The Northern dame, she of New York or Boston or of those dwelling in the
rural districts, knew little of such luxuries as these. Between the
Southern lady and the Northern there was one radical point of difference
in those days which was more effective to separate their ideas and
ideals than might be thought: the former was a dweller in the country,
the latter in cities. Type is here spoken of. The typical Southern lady
was found on the plantation, the typical Northern lady in the heart of
the city. This condition was imposed upon the wealthiest and most
cultured of each section by the variant conditions under which they
lived; it was in her own home that the Southern woman found the most
power for her wealth, in the city that the Northern woman alone found
avenues for her money to buy for her the best things of culture,
material or mental. And this severance made for certain results. The
Southern woman held to isolation of rule as the best that she knew; the
Northern woman believed that in segregation and community of interests
alone came hope of the best. These theories were unrecognized; but they
were inherent and dominant.
Moreover, there still existed in the North, especially in the further
removed sections, a strong leaven of the old Puritan spirit; and this
could neither understand nor tolerate the spirit of luxury that reigned
in the South. Each section misunderstood and unjustly contemned the
other. To the Northern woman, she of the South was a pampered aristocrat
of the most ignoble kind, caring for nothing but the gratification of
her luxurious tastes, battening on the sufferings of a humanity which
she bought and sold as cattle, an Augusta in her luxuries and love of
self; to the Southern woman, she of the North was cold, hard,
uncultured, unrefined, plebeian in tastes and existence, and generally
on a lower plane than the daughter of the Cavaliers. The Southern woman
despised her sister of the North; the Northern woman hated her sister of
the South. Where there was meeting and blending on the contiguous limits
of the sections there was more of understanding and therefore of
toleration for the points of severance of ideas; but even here there was
cause of strife in the heated politics which had for some time been
appealing to the passions of our statesmen. With the quick enthusiasm in
such matters that is an attribute of their sex and which blinds women
even more than men to the calmer suggestions of reason, the women of the
country became divided into two bitterly hostile camps because of the
matters which their husbands and brothers discussed in the councils of
the nation. It is true that in this case the main question at issue had
unwonted appeal to the women themselves; for she of the South saw her
wealth and luxury threatened by the Abolitionists, while she of the
North made herself a part of the cause of ill-treated humanity, as she
deemed it. Had the men been able to restrain the passions which at this
time stirred them almost to frenzy, the women would not have permitted
the glowing embers to become extinguished without being fanned into red
flame.
That the women of our country were largely instrumental in bringing
about the fratricidal strife which shook that country to its centre
cannot be denied. Even such firebrands as Phillips and Garrison did not
incite so bitter a spirit as did the many women who espoused their
cause. It was a time of fanaticism in the North and fury in the South;
and both these feelings reached their culmination in the women of the
sections. One of the most powerful influences for the making of discord
was from the hand of a woman, when Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote
_Uncle Tom's Cabin_ and thereby led much of the thought and prejudices
of both sections into utterly false channels. The South, and especially
its women, saw in the book a vile libel upon its culture, a base slander
of its most representative institutions; the North, especially its
women, accepted the book as literal fact and looked upon their brothers
and sisters of the South as slave-drivers and cruel task-mistresses,
building the structure of their wealth and luxury upon the crushed
bodies of their weaker and more degraded fellows and careless of the
bitter moans of the oppressed. The acceptance by the North of the book
as fact embittered the South, conscious of the injustice of the thing,
to the last degree, while the North upon that utterly inadequate
authority reviled the South for the imaginary crimes which were rife in
its midst.
The question of the limitation of slavery had been long before the
country and had produced much bitterness of feeling on both sides; but
the idea of the sudden abolishment of the institution, "peaceably if we
can, forcibly if we must," was of new growth in the decade preceding the
war, at least in any coherent and prominent form. In the South were many
women as well as men who, while they accepted and tried to make the best
of the institution which had been handed down to them by their
ancestors, were at heart as eager Abolitionists as any of the North; but
they knew that such a radical change must be brought about by gradual
steps or it would open the way to yet greater evils, of which the sudden
impoverishment of the section was not the greatest. In the North were
men and women who held themselves aloof from the rabid fanaticism of
their day, and while they heartily desired the eradication of the taint
of slavery from the country which boasted of its freedom, yet were
willing to trust to time and the growth of principle for the result
which they desired. But on both sides these conservatives were
unfortunately in the minority and their influence was of no avail; on
both sides they were looked upon as traitors to the cause which they
loved best and most wisely of all.
There might have been hope of compromise; the fanatics were still in the
minority among the men who governed the destinies of the nation, and
while there was bitterness and even hatred rife among these men, there
was yet stronger dread of open separation, so that there might have been
reached some conclusion which would have been productive of results
satisfactory in the main to both sides, though not in full measure; but
the women would not have it so. They flung themselves into politics with
a fervor that was fatal to all the interests of peace; for those of the
North could not understand any toleration of "the accursed thing," while
they of the South demanded that their husbands and lovers should resent
the insult which had been imposed upon Southern womanhood in the vile
slanders which were freely circulated in Abolitionist circles. That
these slanders were the voice of fanaticism and not of mere hatred was
not understood; that they were reprobated by the better elements of the
North was not believed.
In both sections an appeal to arms was talked of if secession were
adopted and resisted. At first this was but idle menace; but it
gradually grew to the proportions of stern determination at least in one
of the sections, and by none was it so eagerly welcomed and fanned as by
the women. "The peace of them that make peace" was not for the American
woman of that time; all the natural militancy of the feminine nature was
aroused to its highest pitch, and it was more at the instigation of
hatred than as an appeal to justice that the thought of war was dear to
the women of our riven country. Riven it was already in spirit, though
not as yet in fact; the shadow of coming strife lay heavy on the land
long before it took substance. There were still those, chiefly among the
men, who believed that from all this lurid smoke there would result
nothing worse than smouldering embers, which would eventually perish
unharmful; that thus it could not be was owing in greatest part to the
influence of those who in the bitter days to come were to bear the brunt
of the suffering and agony of war, the women of America.
It is grateful to turn for a moment to look upon the last days of
Washington society under the old regime. Buchanan was the last of the
old-time presidents, and under his administration Washington society
went its normal way of gaiety, though disturbed in its enjoyment by the
thickening cloud that hung over the land and gathered most darkly at the
capital. President Buchanan was a bachelor; but his mansion did not lack
female rule, for his niece, Harriet Lane, took upon herself the onerous
duties of mistress of the White House, and never were they more
gracefully fulfilled. Young as she was, she had few rivals and no
superiors in knowledge of the requirements of her position and ability
to meet those requirements; never was the White House ruled in more
dignified and gracious manner than by this young woman. She had had
excellent training for her dignities; when her uncle, in 1852, was sent
as Minister to the Court of Saint James, she accompanied him thither,
and her beauty and accomplishments won instantaneous recognition and
admiration from the most prejudiced of English critics in these matters.
Her character was as admirable and admired as was her beauty, and she
was in all ways fitted to grace a court, hether that court were royal or
republican.
During the four years of her uncle's stormy administration she ruled the
social world of Washington as of right and title, and her rule was on
all sides acknowledged to be worthy of allegiance. It was the last day
of old-time American society, and it died in splendor. No more courteous
and cultured gentleman than James Buchanan ever occupied the White House
as its master, even though as a statesman he was sadly lacking in the
qualities which were demanded by the circumstances of his times; no more
gracious lady than Harriet Lane ever presided over the social destinies
of the presidential mansion, and with her there is no need of limiting
statement in modification of the praise bestowed.
When the time came for Buchanan to surrender into the hands of a
stronger man the reins of government, Miss Lane retired with him to
Wheatland, his country seat, where the pair spent together the stormy
years of the Civil War. In 1866, Miss Lane married Henry Elliott
Johnston, of Baltimore, who died in 1884, his two sons, all that were
born of the marriage, having preceded him to the grave. Thus Mrs.
Johnston was left alone; and thus she still lives on, the sole remaining
link between the White House of the days before the Civil War and the
present time. She alone, of all who ruled as social queen of the country
in the time when this meant far more than now, is left to us; and she
lives in the same quiet dignity with which she once placed the stamp of
her individuality upon the social functions of the presidential mansion
and made them truly noteworthy. Upon the accession of Edward VII. of
England, that king, who had been elaborately entertained by Miss Lane
and her uncle at the White House during his visit to this country in
1860, sent to Mrs. Johnston a personal invitation to be present at his
approaching coronation; and his cordial letter showed in what high
esteem he held the gracious lady whose kindness to him in his youth had
dwelt so long in his memory. It was a deserved recognition of the charm
that had made notable the last lady ruler of the White House in its days
of social eminence, and the act was as graceful as deserved.
So, in Harriet Lane Johnston, we find the last surviving memory of the
court society of the elder days of our country. With her exit from the
White House went also the traditions of the social past, and with her
exit from life will go also the last of a line of acknowledged rulers,
little less than regal in their dignities, of the social world of
America.
It is now necessary to turn again to the subject of the war between the
sections. Darker and darker grew the threatening cloud, until it was
rent by a bolt which fell with fatal effect and set the whole land in a
blaze. This was the famous insurrection of John Brown, which knew its
inception and inglorious end at Harper's Ferry. It is not easy for us at
this time to appreciate the aspects of "John Brown's raid," as it
presented itself to the North and the South, and the aspect which it
especially bore to the women of the latter section has never been given
its full importance at the hands of chroniclers. Brown's acknowledged
and boasted purpose to set free the slaves and arm them against their
masters in insurrection was looked upon by every Southern woman as a
direct threat--of which the carrying out was averted only by the hand
of an over-ruling Providence--against that which her womanhood most
prized. She knew what would have been the effect of the loosing upon the
community of a horde of semi-savages, mad with the lust of blood and
rapine, drunk with the liberty which they would look upon as unbridled
license; for such, as she well knew, would the majority of the slaves
become under conditions which would appeal to their worst side and would
in their novelty lead to all excess. The narrow view which sees in the
burning anger of the South toward this attempt only dread of loss of
property is utterly false; it was the personal aspect of the matter
which appealed to every Southern woman, and, because of this, to every
Southern man. Even the partial success of such an attempt would have
meant ruined and dishonored homes throughout the Southern land; the
honor of its women, that most precious of all possessions, was in peril
in such enterprise, and it was the threat against this that set the
Southland aflame with rage against the would-be perpetrators of such an
atrocity. It was not the menace to property or even to life; it was
"the unutterable shame
That turns the coward's heart to steel, the sluggard's blood to flame."
For the South knew the negro, his bad qualities as well as his good;
and, while the women of the South knew that their elder house-servants
would protect them with their lives, if necessary, they also knew that
the horde of fieldhands, intoxicated by a liberty whose nature they
could not understand, would turn at once to the gratification of the
savage nature which slept chained within them and would make of the land
an offense to heaven.
This was bad enough; but worse yet, since the attempt had miserably
failed, was the fact that the North saw none of these things. It did
not, seemingly could not, understand. Where the woman of the South saw
in John Brown only the brutal assailer of all that womanhood held most
precious, she of the North,--who could she have realized the peril in
which her Southern sister stood, would have stirred the North with her
cry,--saw in him only the martyr to the cause of freedom, the man who
gave his life in the attempt to bring from bondage an oppressed and
ill-treated race; and so completely had prejudice and fanaticism clouded
the conscience that when Wendell Phillips made of this man a certain
blasphemous comparison she was not shocked, but, carried away by her
enthusiasm, hailed the words as true and deserved. This does not apply
to all the daughters of the North; there were some who saw clearly and
were not blinded by the simoom of fanaticism which swept over that
section; but there was a minority which dared not lift its voice against
the clamor of the masses. The most fatal of all causes of strife had
fallen upon the North: it did not understand.
But this in turn the Southern woman could not comprehend. She could not
see that the peril to her honor, so plain to her, was beyond the scope
of Northern vision. Therefore she in her wrath accused her sisters of
the North of carelessness of her honor in their enthusiasm for the cause
of a race which would put that honor in peril; she held them indifferent
to the preservation of the crown of her womanhood, so that a few blacks
might be given a freedom which they would turn to the worst account. She
laid it all to sectional hatred, to the cherished anger of the Puritan
against the Cavalier; she was intolerant--and who can blame her, seeing
as she did?--of the canonization of John Brown, which was chiefly the
work of her Northern sisters, to whose enthusiasm that of the men, even
of such fanatics as Phillips, was as nothing. So, begun and fostered in
mutual misunderstanding, grew the breach between the sections; and of
all the hands that digged the grave of Peace, the most eager and rapid
were those of the women of our land.
Where shall we place the blame? Each side saw the other in utter
distortion, each twisted to its own understanding the acts and
utterances of the other, and each was justly incensed according to its
own view. In her ignorance of the certain results of the attempt whose
failure she deplored, the Northern woman saw in the rejoicing of
Southern womanhood over the failure and fate of John Brown only a savage
and unwomanly exultation over the martyrdom of one who had sacrificed
himself that others might live in freedom, the heritage of every
American, and who, in pursuit of his noble ideal, had of necessity
attacked the wealth of the South, which wealth was ill-gotten and
ill-held. The Southern woman looked upon the attempt to give power over
her honor to a lower race, civilized only in certain aspects and with
all the worst of barbarism sleeping like a tiger within it, and
occasionally displaying itself in aspect of terror, as the expression of
the feeling of the North, the ultimate goal of the fanaticism which was
rising higher and higher as the Abolitionists grew in power. To both,
John Brown represented the dominant spirit of the North; but each
translated his aspect in different ways. Each was bitterly unjust; each
was utterly in the wrong; and each was convinced with a perfect
conviction of the righteousness of her own stand and of her thought of
the other. When such position is taken, peace is doomed.
Society was disrupted. It had maintained a certain cohesion where the
sections mingled; it had been shaken, but not overthrown. But the
hanging of John Brown gave American society, as comprising all parts of
the country and devoid of sectional aspects, its death-blow. Another
society of like aspects was later to arise, perhaps never again to be
overthrown, so that we can again talk of American society in the larger
sense; but this which we know is not that which held its chief fortalice
in Washington before the capital was yielded to the perils of the centre
of strife. The daughters of even such closely contiguous States as
Pennsylvania and Virginia could not meet in social function when each
believed the other to be the representative of the most evil of
civilizations, when every interest which either most cherished was
inimical to every interest most dear to the other. Rapidly the
representatives of Southern society forsook the capital, going to their
own country, where they hoped soon to form another and yet more
brilliant circle than that which had given to the centre of our
republicanism much of the glitter and all the _prestige_ of a royal
court. The result of the presidential campaign would decide the future
of the South; but that there would be separation of the sections, for a
time or permanently, few doubted. The chief question that remained to be
decided was whether the separation would be peaceful or won at the point
of the bayonet.
Perhaps, had they foreseen the consequences of their enthusiasm, the
women of both sides would have been more moderate in their advocacy of
their respective creeds; but women rarely look to the end, and the
feminine enthusiasts of those days were no exception to the rule. With
all their strength, and whether for good or evil, there is none greater
in effect, they urged their husbands and lovers and brothers, the one
side to wipe out in blood, if need and opportunity were, the insult to
their womanhood; the other to free the oppressed from bondage and from
the tyranny shown by Southern women as well as men. The actions and
utterances of each were plain to the other; the standpoints which
dictated those acts and words were hidden by the dense mist of
prejudice. Thus by woman's influence was precipitated the conflict which
had already become almost inevitable.