We are told by Herbert Spencer that the political superstition of the past
having been the divine right of kings, the political superstition of the
present is the divine right of parliaments and he might have said of
peoples. The oil of anointing seems unawares, he thinks, to have dripped
from the head of the one upon the heads of the many, and given sacredness
to them also, and to their decrees.
That the Proletariat, the Bolsheviki, the People are on the way seems plain
enough. How far they will go, and where they will end, is not so clear.
With a kind of education--most men taught to read, very few to think--the
masses are likely to demand yet more and more for themselves. They will
continue strenuously and effectively to resent the startling contrasts
of fortune which aptitude and opportunity have created in a social and
political structure claiming to rest upon the formula "equality for all,
special privilege for none."
The law of force will yield to the rule of numbers. Socialism, disappointed
of its Utopia, may then repeat the familiar lesson and reproduce the
man-on-horseback, or the world may drop into another abyss, and, after the
ensuing "dark ages," like those that swallowed Babylon and Tyre, Greece and
Rome, emerge with a new civilization and religion.
"Man never is, but always to be blessed." We know not whence we came, or
whither we go. Hope that springs eternal in the human breast tells us
nothing. History seems, as Napoleon said, a series of lies agreed upon, yet
not without dispute.
V
I read in an ultra-sectional non-partisan diatribe that "Jefferson Davis
made Aaron Burr respectable," a sentence which clearly indicates that the
writer knew nothing either of Jefferson Davis or Aaron Burr.
Both have been subjected to unmeasured abuse. They are variously
misunderstood. Their chief sin was failure; the one to establish an
impossible confederacy laid in human slavery, the other to achieve certain
vague schemes of empire in Mexico and the far Southwest, which, if not
visionary, were premature.
The final collapse of the Southern Confederacy can be laid at the door of
no man. It was doomed the day of its birth. The wonder is that sane leaders
could invoke such odds against them and that a sane people could be induced
to follow. The single glory of the South is that it was able to stand out
so long against such odds.
Jefferson Davis was a high-minded and well-intentioned man. He was chosen
to lead the South because he was, in addition, an accomplished soldier. As
one who consistently opposed him in his public policies, I can specify no
act to the discredit of his character, his one serious mistake being his
failiure to secure the peace offered by Abraham Lincoln two short months
before Appomattox.
Taking account of their personalities and the lives they led, there is
little to suggest comparison, except that they were soldiers and Senators,
who, each in his day, filled a foremost place in public affairs.
Aaron Burr, though well born and highly educated, was perhaps a
rudely-minded man. But he was no traitor. If the lovely woman, Theodosia
Prevost, whom he married, had lived, there is reason to believe that the
whole course and tenor of his career would have been altered. Her death was
an irreparable blow, as it were, a prelude to the series of mischances
that followed. The death of their daughter, the lovely Theodosia Alston,
completed the tragedy of his checkered life.
Born a gentleman and attaining soldierly distinction and high place, he
fell a victim to the lure of a soaring ambition and the devious experience
of a man about town.
The object of political proscription for all his intellectual and personal
resources, he could not successfully meet and stand against it. There was
nothing in the affair with Hamilton actually to damn and ruin him. Neither
morally nor politically was Hamilton the better man of the two. Nor was
there treason in his Mexican scheme. He meant no more with universal
acclaim than Houston did three decades later. To couple his name with that
of Benedict Arnold is historic sacrilege.
Jefferson pursued him relentlessly. But even Jefferson could not have
destroyed him. When, after an absence of four years abroad, he returned to
America, there was still a future for him had he stood up like a man, but,
instead, like one confessing defeat, he sank down, whilst the wave of
obloquy rolled over him.
His is one of the few pathetic figures in our national history. Mr. Davis
has had plenty of defenders. Poor Burr has had scarcely an apologist. His
offense, whatever it was, has been overpaid. Even the War of Sections
begins to fade into the mist and become dreamlike even to those who bore an
actual part in it.
The years are gliding swiftly by. Only a little while, and there shall not
be one man living who saw service on either side of that great struggle of
systems and ideas. Its passions long ago vanished from manly bosoms. That
has come to pass within a single generation in America which in Europe
required ages to accomplish.
There is no disputing the verdict of events. Let us relate them truly and
interpret them fairly. If the South would have the North do justice to its
heroes, the South must do justice to the heroes of the North. Each must
render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's even as each would render
unto God the things that are God's. As living men, standing erect in the
presence of Heaven and the world, the men of the South have grown gray
without being ashamed; and they need not fear that History will fail to
vindicate their integrity.
When those are gone that fought the battle, and Posterity comes to strike
the balance, it will be shown that the makers of the Constitution left
the relation of the States to the Federal Government and of the Federal
Government to the States open to a double construction. It will be told
how the mistaken notion that slave labor was requisite to the profitable
cultivation of sugar, rice and cotton, raised a paramount property interest
in the Southern section of the Union, whilst in the Northern section,
responding to the trend of modern thought and the outer movements of
mankind, there arose a great moral sentiment against slavery. The conflict
thus established, gradually but surely sectionalizing party lines, was as
inevitable as it was irrepressible. It was fought out to its bitter
and logical conclusion at Appomattox. It found us a huddle of petty
sovereignties, held together by a rope of sand. It made and it left us a
Nation.