Virginia, which began by volunteering as peacemaker in our civil
troubles, seems likely to end by being their battleground; as Mr.
Pickwick, interfering between the belligerent rival editors, only
brought upon his own head the united concussion of their carpet-bags.
And as Dickens declares that the warriors engaged far more eagerly in
that mimic strife, on discovering that all blows were to be received
by deputy, so there is evidently an increased willingness to deal hard
knocks on both sides, in the present case, so long as it is clear that
only Virginia will take them. Maryland, under protection of our army,
adroitly contrives to shift the scene of action farther South. The Gulf
States, with profuse courtesies for the Old Dominion, consent to shift
it farther North. The Southern Confederacy has talked about
paying Richmond the "compliment" of selecting it for the seat of
government;--as if a bully, about to be lynched in his own house by the
crowd, should compliment his next-door neighbor by climbing in at his
window. It is very pleasant to have a hospitable friend; but it is
counting on his hospitality rather too strongly, when you make choice of
his apartments to be tarred and feathered in.
Thus fades the fancy of an "independent neutrality" for the Old
Dominion. It ought to fade;--for neutrality is a crime, where one's
mother's life is at stake; and the Border theory of independence only
reminds one of Pitt's definition of an independent statesman, "a
statesman not to be depended on". How sad has been the decline of
Virginia! How strange, that in 1790, of the ten American post-offices
yielding more than a thousand dollars annually, that stately old
commonwealth held five! Now "a poverty-stricken State", by confession of
her own newspapers,--beleaguered, blockaded,--with no imports but
hungry and moneyless soldiers, and no exports save fugitives of all
colors,--what has she to hope from the present warfare? Elsewhere riches
have wings; in Virginia they are yet more transitory, having legs. Two
hundred million dollars' worth of her property has become unsalable, if
not worthless, within two months. She has but two great staples: tobacco
to send North, and slaves to send South. The slaves at present go only
to the wrong point of the compass, at rates remunerative to themselves
alone; and the tobacco-trade, for this season, will not even end in
smoke.
But that which is now the condition of Virginia must ultimately be
the condition of the other seceding States. The tide of Secession has
already turned, and such tides never turn twice. The conspirators in
Maryland and Missouri had but one opportunity, and it was lost; with it
also went the whole cause of the Secessionists. For one week the North
shuddered, knowing the defenceless condition of Washington. Now no
Northern man shudders, except those whose Southern female cousins have
not yet found a refuge with the household gods of the eminent Senator
from Texas.
The man who ever doubted that the first gun fired by the insurgents
would instantly unite the nation against them knew as little of the
American people as if he were editor of the London "Times." There is no
chemical solvent like gunpowder. Even the Mexican War, utterly opposed
to the moral convictions of the majority of Northern men, swept them
away in such a current that the very party which opposed it could find
no path to the Presidency but for its chief hero. Had the present
outbreak occurred far less favorably than it has, had the discretion of
President Lincoln been much less, or that of Mr. Davis much greater,
still the unanimity would have been merely a question of time, and
the danger of Washington would have reconciled all minor feuds. The
Democratic party would inevitably have embraced the war, when once
declared; Douglas would have made speeches for it, Buchanan subscribed
money for it, and Butler joined in it; Bennett would still have floated
triumphant on the tide of zeal, and Caleb Cushing still have offered to
the Government his cavalry company of one. It is a grace not given to
any American party, to stand out long against the enthusiasm of a war.
No doubt the Secession leaders have treated us very handsomely, as to
amount of provocation. It is rare that any great contest begins by a
blow so unequivocal as the bombardment of Fort Sumter; and rare in
recent days for any set of belligerents to risk the ignominy of
privateering. But, after all, it is the startling social theories
announced by the new "government" which form the chief strength of its
enemies. Either slavery is essential to a community, or it must be fatal
to it,--there is no middle ground; and the Secessionists have taken one
horn of the dilemma with so delightful a frankness as to leave us no
possible escape from taking the other. Never, in modern days, has there
been a conflict in which the contending principles were so clearly
antagonistic. The most bigoted royal house in Europe never dreamed of
throwing down the gauntlet for the actual ownership of man by man. Even
Russia never fought for serfdom, and Austria has only enslaved nations,
not individuals. In civil wars, especially, all historic divergences
have been trivial compared to ours, so far as concerned the avowed
principles of strife. In the French wars of the Fronde, the only
available motto for anybody was the _Tout arrive en France_, "Anything
may happen in France," which gayly recognized the absurd chaos of the
conflict. In the English civil wars, the contending factions first
disagreed upon a shade more or less of royal prerogative, and it took
years to stereotype the hostility into the solid forms with which we now
associate it. Even at the end of that contest, no one had ventured to
claim such a freedom as our Declaration of Independence asserts, on
the one side,--nor to recognize the possibility of such a barbarism
as Jefferson Davis glorifies, on the other. The more strongly the
Secessionists state their cause, the more glaringly it is seen to differ
from any cause for which any sane person has taken up arms since the
Roman servile wars. Their leaders may be exhibiting very sublime
qualities; all we can say is, as Richardson said of Fielding's heroes,
that their virtues are the vices of a decent man.
We are now going through not merely the severest, but the only danger
which has ever seriously clouded our horizon. The perils which harass
other nations are mostly traditional for us. Apart from slavery,
democratic government is long since _un fait accompli_, a fixed fact,
and the Anglo-American race can no more revert in the direction of
monarchy than of the Saurian epoch. Our geographical position frees us
from foreign disturbance, and there is no really formidable internal
trouble, slavery alone excepted. Let us come out of this conflict
victorious in the field, escaping also the more serious danger of
conquering ourselves by compromise, and the case of free government is
settled past cavil. History may put up her spy-glass, like Wellington at
Waterloo, saying, "The field is won. Let the whole line advance."
There has been a foolish suspicion that the North was strong in
diplomacy and weak in war. The contrary is the case. We are proving
ourselves formidable enough in war to cover our shortcomings in
diplomacy. How narrowly we escaped demoralizing ourselves, at the last
moment before Congress adjourned, by some concession which would have
destroyed our consistency without strengthening our position! If we
could even now bind our generals to imitate our Cabinet in its admirable
and novel policy of silence,--to eschew pen and ink as carefully as if
they were in training for the Presidency! The country is safe so long as
they shut their mouths and open their batteries.
The ordeal by battle is a stern test of the solid power of a nation.
There must always be some great quality to produce great military
superiority,--skill, or daring, or endurance, or numbers, or wealth,
or all together. Except the first two, neither of these special
qualifications has been even claimed by the Secessionists; and these two
have been taken for granted with such superfluous boastfulness as to
yield strong internal evidence against the claim. Certainly their
general strategy, up to this moment, has yielded not a single evidence
of far-sighted judgment or conscious power, while it has shown decided
glimpses of weakness and indecision. Indeed, how can an army like theirs
be strong? Its members mostly unaccustomed to steady exertion or precise
organization; without mechanic skill or invention; without cash or
credit; fettered in their movements by the limited rolling stock of
their scanty railways; tethered to their own homes by the fear of
insurrection;--what element of solid strength have they, to set against
these things? In the present state of the world, strong in peace is
strong in war. In modern times an army of heroes is useless without
facilities for arming, transporting, and feeding it, to say nothing of
the more ignoble circumstance of pay. Considerations of simple political
economy render it almost impossible for a slaveholding army to be strong
collectively, nor do the habits of Southern life usually fit its members
to be strong singly.
In remembering the Battle of New Orleans, we forget that the Southwest
was then a region of hardy pioneers, such as are now rather to be sought
for in Kansas and California. The famous Tennessee riflemen of that day
were not necessarily slaveholders, and their legitimate descendants are
yet to be found among the brave men who rally round the nearest approach
to Andrew Jackson whom the State now boasts,--a tolerable fac-simile
both as to character and etymology,--Andrew Johnson. There is no need of
disparaging the personal courage of any man, and the Southern army has
some good officers,--too good, probably, in spite of themselves, to
bring to bear their clearest judgment and their best energies in
striking down the flag they have all sworn to die for. They have
eminent foreign advisers also, or one at least; for Mr. W.H. Russell,
self-appointed plenipotentiary near the Court of St. Jefferson, is
said to have lent the aid of his valuable military experience to that
commanding officer so appropriately named Captain Bragg. But, Bragg or
no brag, it is almost a moral impossibility that a slaveholding army
should be strong.
The Secessionists have suggested to us a fatal argument. "The superior
race must control the inferior." Very well; if they insist on invoking
the ordeal by battle to decide which is the superior, let it be so. It
will be found that they have made the common mistake of confounding
barbarism with strength. Because the Southern masses are as ignorant of
letters and of arts as the Scottish Highlanders, they infer themselves
to be as warlike. But even the brave and hardy Highlanders proved
powerless against the imperfect military resources of England, a century
ago, and it is not easy to see why those who now parody them should
fare better. The absence of the alphabet does not necessarily prove the
presence of strength, nor is the ignorance of all useful arts the best
preparation for the elaborate warfare of modern times. The nation is
grown well weary of this sham "chivalry," that would sell Bayard or Du
Gueselin at auction, if it could be shown that the mother of either had
a drop of marketable blood in her veins. It had always been charitably
fancied that in South Carolina at least there was some remnant of more
knightly honor, until a kind Providence sent Preston S. Brooks to dispel
the illusion. It may be possible that even a brave man, in some moment
of insane inconsistency, may commit some act which is the consummation
of all cowardice; but it is utterly and absolutely impossible that any
brave community should approve it. Time has long since carried the
perpetrator of that dastardly outrage to a higher tribunal, but nothing
can ever redeem the State of his birth from the crowning shame of its
indorsement.
It is not recorded whether the proverbial English army in Flanders lied
as terribly as they swore; the genius of the nation did not take that
direction. But if they did, they have now met their match in audacity of
falsehood. Captain Bobadil in the play, who submitted a plan of killing
off an army of forty thousand men by the prowess of twenty, each man to
do his twenty _per diem_ in successive single combats, might have raised
his proposed score of heroes among any handful of Secessionists. There
seems to be no one to stop these prodigious fellows as a party of
Buford's men were once checked by their commander, in the writer's
hearing, on their way down the Missouri River, in 1856. "Boys," quoth
the contemptuous official, "you had better shut up. Whenever we came in
sight of the enemy, you always took a vote whether to fight or run,
and you always voted to run." Then the astounding tales they have told
respecting our people, down to the last infamous fabrication of "Booty
and Beauty," as the supposed war-cry for the placid Pennsylvanians!
Booty, forsooth! In the words of the "Richmond Whig," "there is more
rich spoil within a square mile of New York and Philadelphia than can be
found in the whole of the poverty-stricken State of Virginia"; and the
imaginary war-cry suggests Wilkes's joke about the immense plunder
carried off by some freebooter from the complete pillage of seven Scotch
isles: he reëmbarked with three-and-sixpence.
It might not be wise to claim that the probable lease of life for our
soldiers is any longer than for the Secessionists, but it certainly
looks as if ours would have the credit of dying more modestly. Indeed,
the men of the Free States, as was the wont of their ancestors, have
made up their minds to this fight with a slow reluctance which would
have been almost provoking but for the astonishing promptness which
marked their action when once begun. It is interesting to notice how
clearly the future is sometimes foreseen by foreigners, while still
veiled from the persons most concerned. Thus, twelve years before the
Battle of Bunker's Hill, the Duc de Choiseul predicted and prepared for
the separation of the American colonies from England. One month after
that, the Continental Congress still clung to the belief that they
should escape a division. And so, some seven years ago, the veteran
French advocate Guépin, in a most able essay suggested by the "Burns
affair" in Boston, prophesied civil war in America within ten years.
"_Une grande lutte s'apprête donc_," he wrote; "A great contest is at
hand."
Thus things looked to foreigners, both in 1775 and in 1854, while in
both cases our people were yielding only step by step to the inevitable
current which swept events along. It is the penalty of caution, that it
sometimes appears, even to itself, like irresolution, or timidity. Not a
foolish charge has been brought against Northern energy in this contest,
that was not urged equally in the time of the Revolution. The royal
troops thought Massachusetts as easy to subdue as the South
Carolinians affect to think, and expressed it in almost the same
language:--"Whenever it comes to blows, he that can run the fastest will
think himself best off." The revolutionists admitted that "the people
abroad have too generally got the idea that the Americans are all
cowards and poltroons." A single regiment, it was generally asserted,
could march triumphant through New England. The people took no pains to
deny it. The guard in Boston captured thirteen thousand cartridges at
a stroke. The people did not prevent it. A citizen was tarred and
feathered in the streets by the royal soldiery, while the band played
"Yankee Doodle." The people did not interfere. "John Adams writes, there
is a great spirit in the Congress, and that we must furnish ourselves
with artillery and arms and ammunition, but avoid war, if possible,--if
possible." At last, one day, these deliberate people finally made up
their minds that it was time to rise,--and when they rose, everything
else fell. In less than a year afterwards, Boston being finally
evacuated, one of General Howe's mortified officers wrote home to
England, in words which might form a Complete Letter-Writer for every
army-officer who has turned traitor, from Beauregard downward,--"Bad
times, my dear friend. The displeasure I feel in the small share I have
in our present insignificancy is so great, that I do not know the thing
so desperate I would not undertake, in order to change our situation."
It is fortunate that the impending general contest has also been
recently preceded by a local one, which, though waged under
circumstances far less favorable to the North, yet afforded important
hints by its results. It was worth all the cost of Kansas to have
the lesson she taught, in passing through her ordeal. It was not the
Emigrant Aid Society which gave peace at last to her borders, nor was it
her shifting panorama of evanescent governors; it was the sheer physical
superiority of her Free-State emigrants, after they took up arms. Kansas
afforded the important discovery, as some Southern officers once naïvely
owned at Lecompton, that "Yankees _would_ fight." Patient to the verge
of humiliation, the settlers rose at last only to achieve a victory so
absurdly rapid that it was almost a new disappointment; the contest was
not so much a series of battles as a succession of steeplechases, of
efforts to get within shot,--Missouri, Virginia, and South Carolina
invariably disappearing over one prairie-swell, precisely as the
Sharp's rifles of the emigrants appeared on the verge of the next. The
slaveholders had immense advantages: many of the settlers were in league
with them to drive out the remainder; they had the General Government
always aiding them, more or less openly, with money, arms, provisions,
horses, men, and leaders; they had always the Missouri border to retreat
upon, and the Missouri River to blockade. Yet they failed so miserably,
that every Kansas boy at last had his story to tell of the company of
ruffians whom he had set scampering by the casual hint that Brown or
Lane was lurking in the bushes. The terror became such a superstition,
that the largest army which ever entered Kansas--three thousand men, by
the admission of both sides--turned back before a redoubt at Lawrence
garrisoned by only two hundred, and retreated over the border without
risking an engagement.
It is idle to say that these wore not fair specimens of Southern
companies. They were composed of precisely the same material as the
flower of the Secession army,--if flower it have. They were members of
the first families, planters' sons and embryo Wigfalls. South Carolina
sent them forth, like the present troops, with toasts and boasts and
everything but money. They had officers of some repute; and they had
enthusiasm with no limit except the supply of whiskey. Slavery was
divine, and Colonel Buford was its prophet. The city of Atchison was
before the dose of 1857 to be made the capital of a Southern republic.
Kansas was to be conquered: "We will make her a Slave State, or form a
chain of locked arms and hearts together, and die in the attempt." Yet
in the end there were no chains, either of flesh or iron,--no chains,
and little dying, but very liberal running away. Thus ended the war in
Kansas. It seems impossible that Slavery should not make in this case a
rather better fight, where all is at stake. But it is well to remember
that no Border Ruffian of Secession can now threaten more loudly, swear
more fiercely, or retreat more rapidly, than his predecessors did then.
One does not hear much lately of that pleasant fiction, so abundant a
year or two ago, that North and South really only needed to visit each
other and become better acquainted. How cordially these endearing words
sounded, to be sure, from the lips of Southern gentlemen, as they sat at
Northern banquets and partook unreluctantly of Northern wine! Can those
be the gay cavaliers who are now uplifting their war-whoops with such a
modest grace at Richmond and Montgomery? Can the privations of the
camp so instantaneously dethrone Bacchus and set up Mars? It is to be
regretted; they appeared more creditably in their cups, and one would
gladly appeal from Philip sober to Philip drunk. Intimate intercourse
has lost its charm. New York merchants more than ever desire an
increased acquaintance with the coffers of their repudiating debtors;
but so far as the knowledge of their peculiar moral traits is concerned,
enough is as good as a feast. No Abolitionist has ever dared to pillory
the slave-propagandists so conspicuously as they are doing it for
themselves every day. Sumner's "Barbarism of Slavery" seemed tolerably
graphic in its time, but how tamely it reads beside the "New Orleans
Delta"!
A Scotchman once asked Dr. Johnson what opinion he would form of
Scotland from what strangers had said of it.
"Sir," said the Doctor, "I should think it a region of the earth to be
avoided, so far as convenient."
"But how," persisted the patriot, "if you listened to what its natives
say of it?"
"Then, Sir," roared Old Obstinacy, "I should avoid it altogether."
Take the seceded States upon their own showing, and it is absurd to
suppose that they can ever resume their former standing in the nation.
Are there any stronger oaths than their generals have broken, any closer
ties to honesty than their financiers have spurned, any deeds more
damning than their legislatures have voted thanks for? No one supposes
that the individual traitors can be restored to confidence, that Twiggs
can re-dye his reputation, or any deep-sea-soundings fish up Maury's
drowned honor. But the influence of the States is gone with that of
their representatives. They may worship the graven image of President
Lincoln in Mobile; they may do homage to the ample stuffed regimentals
of General Butler in Charleston; but it will not make the nation forget.
Could their whole delegation resume its seat in Congress to-morrow, with
the three-fifths representation intact, it would not help them. Can we
ever trust them to build a ship or construct a rifle again? No time,
no formal act can restore the past relations, so long as slavery shall
live. It is easy for the Executive to pardon some convict from the
penitentiary; but who can pardon him out of that sterner prison of
public distrust which closes its disembodied walls around him, moves
with his motions, and never suffers him to walk unconscious of it
again? Henceforth he dwells as under the shadow of swords, and holds
intercourse with men only by courtesy, not confidence. And so will they.
Not that the United States Government is yet prepared to avow itself
anti-slavery, in the sense in which the South is pro-slavery. We
conscientiously strain at gnats of Constitutional clauses, while they
gulp down whole camels of treason. We still look after their legal
safeguards long after they have hoisted them with their own petards. But
both sides have trusted themselves to the logic of events, and there is
no mistaking the direction in which that tends. In times like these, men
care more for facts than for phrases, and reason quite as rapidly as
they act. It is impossible to blink the fact that Slavery is the root
of the rebellion; and so War is proving itself an Abolitionist, whoever
else is. Practically speaking, the verdict is already entered, and the
doom of the destructive institution pronounced, in the popular mind.
Either the Secessionists will show fight handsomely, or they will fail
to do so. If they fail to do it, they are the derision of the world
forever,--since no one ever spares a beaten bully,--and thenceforward
their social system must go down of itself. If, on the other hand, they
make a resistance which proves formidable and costly, then the adoption
of the John-Quincy-Adams policy of military emancipation is an ultimate
necessity, and there is nobody more likely to put it in effective
operation than a certain gentleman who lately wrote an eloquent
letter to his Governor on the horrors of slave-insurrection. No doubt
insurrection is a terrible thing, but so is all war, and every man of
humanity approaches either with a shudder. But if the truth were told,
it would be that the Anglo-Saxon habitually despises the negro because
he is _not_ an insurgent, for the Anglo-Saxon would certainly be one in
his place. Our race does not take naturally to non-resistance, and has
far more spontaneous sympathy with Nat Turner than with Uncle Tom. But
be it as it may with our desires, the rising of the slaves, in case of
continued war, is a mere destiny. We must take facts as they are.
Insurrection is one of the risks voluntarily assumed by Slavery,--and
the greatest of them. The slaves know it, and so do the masters. When
they seriously assert that they feel safe on this point, there is really
no answer to be made but that by which Traddles in "David Copperfield"
puts down Uriah Heep's wild hypothesis of believing himself an innocent
man. "But you don't, you know," quoth the straightforward Traddles;
"therefore, if you please, we won't suppose any such thing." They cannot
deceive us, for they do not deceive themselves. Every traveller who has
seen the faces of a household suddenly grow pale, in a Southern
city, when some street tumult struck to their hearts the fear of
insurrection,--every one who has seen the heavy negro face brighten
unguardedly at the name of John Brown, though a thousand miles away
from Harper's Ferry,--has penetrated the final secret of the military
weakness which saved Washington for us and lost the war for them.
It is time to expose this mad inconsistency which paralyzes common sense
on all Southern tongues, so soon as Slavery becomes the topic. These
same negroes, whom we hear claimed, at one moment, as petted darlings
whom no allurements can seduce, are denounced, next instant, as fiends
whom a whisper can madden. Northern sympathizers are first ridiculed
as imbecile, then lynched as destructive. Either position is in itself
intelligible, but the combination is an absurdity. We can understand
why the proprietor of a powder-house trembles at the sight of flint
and steel; and we can also understand why some new journeyman, being
inexperienced, may regard the peril without due concern. But we should
decide either to be a lunatic, if he in one breath proclaimed his
gunpowder to be incombustible, and at the next moment assassinated a
visitor for lighting a cigar on the premises. A slave population is
either contented and safe, or discontented and unsafe; it cannot at the
same time be friendly and hostile, blissful and desperate.
The result described is inevitable, should the Secessionists dare to
tempt the ordeal by battle long enough. If it stop short of this, it
will be because the prestige of Southern military power is so easily
broken down that there is no temptation to declare the Adams policy.
But even this consummation must have the most momentous results, and
entirely modify the whole anti-slavery movement of the nation. Should
the war cease to-morrow, it has inaugurated a new era in our nation's
history. The folly of the Gulf States, in throwing away a political
condition where the conservative sentiment stood by them only too well,
must inevitably recoil on their own heads, whether the strife last a day
or a generation. No man can estimate the new measures and combinations
to which it is destined to give rise. There stands the Constitution,
with all its severe conditions,--severe or weak, however, according to
its interpretations;--which interpretations, again, will always prove
plastic before the popular will. The popular will is plainly destined
to a change; and who dare predict the results of its changing? The
scrupulous may still hold by the letter of the bond; but since the
South has confessedly prized all legal guaranties only for the sake of
Slavery, the North, once free to act, will long to construe them, up to
the very verge of faith, in the interest of Liberty. Was the original
compromise, a Shylock bond?--the war has been our Portia. Slavery long
ruled the nation politically. The nation rose and conquered it with
votes. With desperate disloyalty, Slavery struck down all political
safeguards, and appealed to arms. The nation has risen again, ready to
meet it with any weapons, sure to conquer with any Twice conquered, what
further claim will this defeated desperado have? If it was a disturbing
element before, and so put under restriction, shall it be spared when it
has openly proclaimed itself a destroying element also? Is this to be
the last of American civil wars, or only the first one? These are the
questions which will haunt men's minds, when the cannon are all bushed,
and the bells are pealing peace, and the sons of our hearth-stones come
home. The watchword "Irrepressible Conflict" only gave the key, but War
has flung the door wide open, and four million slaves stand ready to
file through. It is merely a question of time, circumstance, and method.
There is not a statesman so wise but this war has given him new light,
nor an Abolitionist so self-confident but must own its promise better
than his foresight. Henceforth, the first duty of an American legislator
must be, by the use of all legitimate means, to weaken Slavery. _Delenda
est Servitudo_. What the peace which the South has broken was not doing,
the war which she has instituted must secure.
* * * * *