FOUR YEARS OF WAR
The bitter fruits of anti-slavery agitation were secession and four
years of bloody war. The Federal Government waged war to coerce the
seceding States to remain in the Union. With the North it was a war for
the Union; the South was fighting for independence--denominated by
Northern writers as "the Civil War." It was in reality a war between the
eleven States which had seceded, as autonomous States, and were fighting
for independence, as the Confederate States of America, against the
other twenty-two States, which, as the United States of America, fought
against secession and for the Union of all the States. It is true the
States remaining in the Union had with them the army and the navy and
the old government, but that government could not, and did not, exercise
its functions within the borders of the seceded States until by force of
arms in the war that was now waged it had conquered a control. It was a
war between the States for such control; for independence on the one
hand, and for the Union on the other. It was not, save in exceptional
cases, a war between neighbor and neighbor; it was a war between States
as entities, and therefore not properly a civil war. The result of the
war did not change the principles upon which it was fought, though it
did decide finally the issues that were involved, the right of secession
primarily, and slavery incidentally.
Jefferson Davis, afterward the much-loved President of the Confederacy,
in his farewell speech in the United States Senate, March 21, 1861, thus
stated the case of the South: "Then, senators, we recur to the compact
which binds us together. We recur to the principles upon which this
government was founded, and _when you deny them_, and when you deny to
us the right to withdraw from a Union which thus perverted _threatens to
be destructive of our rights, we but tread in the path of our fathers
when we proclaim our independence and take the hazard_. This is done not
in hostility to others, not to injure any section of our country, _not
even for our own pecuniary benefit, but from the high and solemn motive
of defending and protecting the rights we inherited and which it is our
duty to transmit unshorn to our children_."
Southerners were, as Mr. Davis understood it, treading in the path of
their fathers when they proclaimed their independence and fought for the
right of self-government.
Professor Fite, of Yale, justifies secession on the following ground:
"In the last analysis the one complete justification of secession was
the necessity of saving the vast property of slavery from destruction;
secession was a commercial necessity designed to make those billions
secure from outside interference. Viewed in this light, secession was
right, for any people, prompted by the commonest motives of self-defence
and with no moral scruples against slavery, would have followed the same
course. The present generation of Northerners, born and reared after the
war, must shake off their inherited political passions and prejudices
and pronounce the verdict of justification for the South. Believing
slavery to be right, it was the duty of the South to defend it. It is
time that the words 'traitors,' 'conspirators,' 'rebels,' and
'rebellion' be discarded."[82]
[82] "The Presidential Campaign of 1860," Emerson David Fite, 1911,
introductory chapter.
These words of Professor Fite will waken a responsive echo in the hearts
of Southerners, but Southerners place, and their fathers planted,
themselves on higher ground than commercial considerations. The
Confederates were defending their inherited right of local
self-government and the Federal Constitution that secured it. It was for
these rights that, as Mr. Davis had said, they were willing to _follow
the path their fathers trod_.
The preservation of the Union the North was fighting for, was a noble
motive; it looked to the future greatness and glory of the republic; but
devotion to the Union had been a growth, the product largely of a single
generation; the devotion of the South to the right of local
self-government was an older and deeper conviction; it had been bred in
the bone for three generations; it dated from Bunker Hill and Valley
Forge and Yorktown. Close as the non-slave-holders of the South were to
the slave-holders, of the same British stock, and with the same
traditions, blood kinsmen as they were, they might not have been willing
to dare all and do all for the protection of property in which they were
not interested; but they were ready to, and they did, wage a death
struggle to maintain against a hostile sectional majority, their
inherited right to govern themselves in their own way. Added to this was
the ever-present conviction of Southerners all, that they were battling
not only for the supremacy of their race but for the preservation of
their homes. There was a little ditty quite prevalent in the Army of
Northern Virginia, of which nothing is now remembered except the
refrain, but that of itself speaks volumes. It ran:
"Do you belong to the rebel band
Fighting for your home?"
Northerners had, most of them, convinced themselves that the South would
never dare to secede. The danger of servile insurrections, if nothing
else, would prevent it.[83] Many Southerners, on the other hand, could
not see how, under the Constitution, the North could venture on coercion.
[83] See Fite, "Campaign of 1860," passim, and especially speech of
Schurz, p. 244 _et seq._
But to the South the greatest surprise furnished by the events of that
era has been Abraham Lincoln--as he appears now in the light of history.
What, in the minds of Southerners, fixed his status personally, during
the canvass of 1860, was the statement he had made in his speech at
Chicago, preliminary to his great debate with Douglas in 1858, that the
Union could not "continue to exist half slave and half free." And he was
now the candidate of the "Black Republican" party, a party that was
denouncing a decision of the Supreme Court; that, in nearly every State
in the North, had nullified the fugitive slave law, and that stood for
"negro equality," as the South termed it.
There were other statements by Mr. Lincoln in that debate with Douglas
that the South has had especial reason to take note of since the period
of Reconstruction. At Springfield, Illinois, September 18, 1858, he
said: "There is a physical difference between the white and black races
which, I believe, will forever forbid the two races living together on
terms of social and political equality, and, _inasmuch as they can not
so live, while they do live together there must be the position of
superior and inferior; and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of
having that position assigned to the white man_."
The new Confederacy took the Constitution of the United States, so
modified as to make it read plainly as Jefferson had expounded it in the
Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. Other changes were slight. The
presidential term was extended to six years and the President was not to
be re-eligible. The slave trade was prohibited and Congress was
authorized to forbid the introduction of slaves from the old Union.
Abraham Lincoln became President, with a fixed resolve to preserve the
Union but with no intent to abolish slavery. Had the war for the Union
been as successful as he hoped it would be, slavery would not have been
abolished by any act of his. It is clear that, when inaugurated, he had
not changed his opinions expressed at Springfield, nor those others,
which, at Peoria, Illinois, on October 16, 1854, he had stated thus:
"When our Southern brethren tell us they are no more responsible for
slavery than we are, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said the
institution exists and it is very difficult to get rid of it in any
satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I will
surely not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do
myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do
as to the institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves
and send them to Liberia, their native land."
This, he said, it was impracticable to do, at least suddenly, and then
proceeded: "To free them all and keep them among us as underlings--is it
quite certain that this would better their condition?... What next? Free
them and make them politically and socially our equals?" This question
he answered in the negative, and continued: "It does seem to me that
systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted, but for their
tardiness I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the South."
In these extracts from his speeches we find a central thread that runs
through the history of his whole administration. We see it again when,
pressed by extremists, Mr. Lincoln said in an open letter to Horace
Greeley, August 22, 1862: "My paramount object in this struggle is to
save the Union, and it is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I
could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I
could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could
save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that."
Indeed, Congress had, in 1861, by joint resolution declared that the
sole purpose of the war was the preservation of the Union. In no other
way, and for no other purpose, could the North at that time have been
induced to wage war against the South.
Abraham Lincoln, the President of the United States, and Jefferson
Davis, the President of the Confederate States, were both Kentuckians by
birth, both Americans. In the purity of their lives, public and private,
in patriotic devotion to the preservation of American institutions as
understood by each of them, they were alike; but they represented
different phases of American thought, and each was the creature more or
less of his environment. Both were men of commanding ability, but the
destiny of each was shaped by agencies that now seem to have been
directed by the hand of Fate. Mr. Lincoln, by nature a political genius,
was carried to Illinois when a child, reared in the North-west among
those to whom, with the Mississippi River as their only outlet to the
markets of the world, disunion, with its loss of their highway to the
sea, was unthinkable. Lincoln became a Whig, with the Union of the
States the passion of his life, and finally, by forces he had not
himself put in motion, he was placed at the head of the Federal
Government at a time when sectionalism had decided that the question of
the permanence of the Union was to be tried out, once and forever.
Mr. Davis went from Kentucky further South. He was a Democrat, and
environment also moulded his opinions. During the long sectional
controversy between the North and the South, "State-rights" became the
passion of his life, and when the clash between the sections came, he
found himself, without his seeking, at the head of the Confederacy. He
had been prominent among the Southerners at Washington, who had hoped
that the South, by threats of secession, might obtain its rights in the
Union, as had been done in Jefferson's days by New England. In the
movement (1860-61) that resulted in secession, the people at home had
been ahead of their congressmen. William L. Yancey, then in Alabama, not
Jefferson Davis at Washington, was the actual leader of the
secessionists. Mr. Davis feared a long and bloody war and, unlike
Yancey, he had doubts as to its result.[84]
[84] Mrs. Chestnut, wife of the Confederate general, James Chestnut,
writes in her "Diary from Dixie," under date of 1861, at Montgomery,
Alabama, then the Confederate capital: "In Mrs. Davis's drawing-room
last night, the President took a seat by me on the sofa where I sat. He
talked for nearly an hour. He laughed at our faith in our own powers. We
are like the British. We think every Southerner equal to three Yankees
at least. We will have to be equivalent to a dozen now. After his
experience of the fighting qualities of Southerners in Mexico, he
believes that we will do all that can be done by pluck and muscle,
endurance and dogged courage, dash, and red-hot patriotism. And yet his
tone was not sanguine. _There was a sad refrain running through it all._
For one thing, either way, he thinks it will be a long war. That floored
me at once. It has been too long for me already. Then he said, before
the end came we would have many bitter experiences. He said only fools
doubted the courage of the Yankees, or their willingness to fight when
they saw fit. And now that we have stung their pride, we have roused
them till they will fight like devils."
Mr. Lincoln, standing for the Union, succeeded in the war, but just as
he was on the threshold of his great work of Reconstruction he fell,
the victim of a crazy assassin. Martyrdom to his cause has naturally
added some cubits to the just measure of his wonderful reputation.
Jefferson Davis and his cause failed; and the triumphant forces that
swept the Confederacy out of existence have long (and quite naturally)
sought to bury the cause of the South and its chosen leader in ignominy.
But the days of hate and passion are past; reason is reasserting her
sway; and history will do justice to both the Confederacy and its great
leader, whose ability, patriotism, and courage were conspicuous to the
end.
Mr. Davis was also a martyr--his long imprisonment, the manacles he
wore, the sentinel gazing on him in the bright light that day and night
disturbed his rest; the heroism with which he endured all this, and the
quiet dignity of his after life--these have doubly endeared his memory
to those for whose cause he suffered.
Mr. Lincoln had remarkable political tact--he seemed to know how long to
wait and when to act, and, if we may credit Mr. Welles,[85] his
inflexibly honest Secretary of the Navy, he was, with the members of his
cabinet, wonderfully patient and even long-suffering. And although he
was the subject of much abuse, especially at the hands of Southerners
who then totally misunderstood him, he was animated always by the
philosophy of his own famous words, "With malice towards none, with
charity for all." Never for one moment did he forget, amidst even the
bitterest of his trials, that the Confederates, then in arms against
him, were, as he regarded them, his misguided fellow-citizens; and the
supreme purpose of his life was to bring them back into the Union, not
as conquered foes, but as happy and contented citizens of the great
republic.
[85] "Diary of Gideon Welles," 3 vols., passim.
The resources of the Confederacy and the United States were very
unequal. The Confederacy had no army, no navy, no factories, save here
and there a flour mill or cotton factory, and practically no machine
shops that could furnish engines for its railroads. It had one cannon
foundry. The Tredegar Iron Works, at Richmond, Virginia, was a fully
equipped cannon foundry. The Confederacy's arms and munitions of war
were not sufficient to supply the troops that volunteered during the
first six months of military operations. Its further supplies, except
such as the Tredegar works furnished, depended on importations through
the blockade soon to be established and such as might be captured.
The North had the army and navy, factories of every description, food in
abundance, and free access to the ports of the world.
The population of the North was 22,339,978.
The population of the South was 9,103,332, of which 3,653,870 were
colored. The total white male population of the Confederacy, of all
ages, was 2,799,818.
The reports of the Adjutant-General of the United States, November 9,
1880, show 2,859,132 men mustered into the service of the United States
in 1861-65. General Marcus J. Wright, of the United States War Records
Office, in his latest estimate of Confederate enlistments, places the
outside number at 700,000. The estimate of Colonel Henderson, of the
staff of the British army, in his "Life of Stonewall Jackson," is
900,000. Colonel Thomas J. Livermore, of Boston, estimates the
number of Confederates at about 1,000,000, and insists that in the
Adjutant-General's reports of the Union enlistments there are errors
that would bring down the number of Union soldiers to about 2,000,000.
Colonel Livermore's estimates are earnestly combated by Confederate
writers.
General Charles Francis Adams has, in a recently published volume,[86]
cited figures given mostly by different Confederate authorities, which
aggregate 1,052,000 Confederate enlistments. What authority these
Confederate writers have relied on is not clear. The enlistments were
for the most part directly in the Confederate army and not through State
officials. The captured Confederate records should furnish the highest
evidence. But it is earnestly insisted that these records are
incomplete, and there is no purpose here to discuss a disputed point.
[86] "Studies, Military and Diplomatic," p. 282 _et seq._ These studies
make a volume of rare historic value.
The call to arms was answered enthusiastically in both sections, but
the South was more united in its convictions, and practically all her
young manhood fell into line, the rich and the poor, the cultured and
uncultured serving in the ranks side by side.
The devotion of the noble women of the North, and of its humanitarian
associations, to the welfare of the Federal soldiers was remarkable, but
there was nothing in the situation in that section that could evoke such
a wonderful exhibition of heroism and self-sacrifice as was exhibited by
the devoted women of the South, who made willingly every possible
sacrifice to the cause of the Confederacy.
Both sides fought bravely. Excluding from the Union armies negroes,
foreigners, and the descendants of recent immigrants, the Confederates
and the Union soldiers were mainly of British stock. The Confederates
had some notable advantages. Excepting a few Union regiments from the
West, the Southerners were better shots and better horsemen, especially
in the beginning of the war, than the Northerners; and the Southerners
were fighting not only for the Constitution of their fathers and the
defence of their homes, but for the supremacy of their race. They had
also another military advantage, that would probably have been decisive
but for the United States navy: they had interior lines of communication
which would have enabled them to readily concentrate their forces. But
the United States navy, hovering around their coast-line, not only
neutralized but turned this advantage into a weakness, thus compelling
the Confederates to scatter their armies. Every port had to be guarded.
In the West the Federals were almost uniformly successful in the greater
battles, the Confederates winning in these but two decisive victories,
Chickamauga and Sabine Cross Roads, in Louisiana. Estimating, according
to the method of military experts, the percentage of losses of the
victor only, Chickamauga was the bloodiest battle of the world, from and
including Waterloo down to the present time. Gettysburg and Sharpsburg
also rank as high in losses as any battle fought elsewhere in this long
period, which takes in the Franco-German and the Russo-Japanese wars. At
Sharpsburg or Antietam the losses exceeded those in any other one day's
battle.[87]
[87] According to that standard work, E. P. Alexander's "Memoirs," pp.
244, 245, and 274, the Confederates, who stood their ground at
Sharpsburg on the day of battle and the day after, lost in killed and
wounded thirty-two per cent. The French army at Waterloo entirely
dissolved, with a loss in killed and wounded of only thirty-one per
cent. (See figures in Henderson's "Stonewall Jackson.")
The Confederates were successful, excepting Antietam or Sharpsburg and
Gettysburg, and perhaps Seven Pines or Fair Oaks, in all the great
battles in the East, down to the time when the shattered remnant of
Lee's army was overwhelmed at Petersburg and surrendered at Appomattox.
The _elan_ the Southerners acquired in the many victories they won
fighting for their homes is not to be overlooked. But the failure of the
North with its overwhelming numbers and resources, to overcome the
resistance of the half-famished Confederates until nearly four years had
elapsed, can only be fully accounted for, in fairness to the undoubted
courage of the Union armies, by the fact, on which foreign military
critics are agreed, that the North had no such generals as Lee and
Stonewall Jackson. Only by the superior generalship of their leaders
could the Confederates have won as many battles as they did against
vastly superior numbers.
But against the United States navy the brilliant generalship of the
Confederates and their marvellous courage were powerless.
Accepted histories of the war have been written largely by the army and
its friends, and, strangely enough, the general historians have been so
attracted by the gallantry displayed in great land battles, and the
immediate results, that they have utterly failed to appreciate the
services of the United States navy.
The Southerners accomplished remarkable results with torpedoes with the
_Merrimac_ or _Virginia_ and their little fleet of commerce destroyers;
but the United States navy, by its effective blockade, starved the
Confederacy to death. The Southern government could not market its
cotton, nor could it import or manufacture enough military supplies.
Among its extremest needs were rails and rolling stock to refit its
lines of communication. For want of transportation it was unable to
concentrate its armies, and for the same reason its troops were not half
fed.
In addition to its services on the blockade, which, in Lord Wolseley's
opinion, decided the war, the navy, with General Grant's help, cut the
Confederacy in twain by way of the Mississippi. It penetrated every
Southern river, severing Confederate communications and destroying
depots of supplies. It assisted in the capture, early in the war, of
Forts Henry and Donelson, and it conducted Union troops along the
Tennessee River into east Tennessee and north Alabama. It furnished
objective points and supplies at Savannah, Charleston, and Wilmington,
to Sherman on his march from Atlanta; and finally Grant, the great Union
general, who had failed to reach Richmond by way of the Wilderness,
Spottsylvania, and Cold Harbor, achieved success only when the navy was
at his back, holding his base, while he laid a nine months' siege to
Petersburg.
That distinguished author, Charles Francis Adams, himself a Union
general in the Army of the Potomac, says that the United States navy was
the deciding factor in the Civil War. He even says that every single
successful operation of the Union forces "hinged and depended on naval
supremacy."
The following is from the preface to "The Crisis of the Confederacy," in
which, published in 1905, a foreign expert, Captain Cecil Battine, of
the King's Hussars, condenses all that needs further to be said here
about the purely military side of the Civil War:
The history of the American Civil War still remains the most
important theme for the student and the statesman because it was
waged between adversaries of the highest intelligence and courage,
who fought by land and sea over an enormous area with every device
within the reach of human ingenuity, and who had to create every
organization needed for the purpose after the struggle had begun.
The admiration which the valor of the Confederate soldiers,
fighting against superior numbers and resources, excited in Europe;
the dazzling genius of some of the Confederate generals, and in
some measure jealousy at the power of the United States, have
ranged the sympathies of the world during the war and ever since to
a large degree on the side of the vanquished. Justice has hardly
been done to the armies which arose time and again from sanguinary
repulses, and from disasters more demoralizing than any repulse in
the field, because they were caused by political and military
incapacity in high places, to redeem which the soldiers freely shed
their blood as it seemed in vain. If the heroic endurance of the
Southern people and the fiery valor of the Southern armies thrill
us to-day with wonder and admiration, the stubborn tenacity and
courage which succeeded in preserving intact the heritage of the
American nation, and which triumphed over foes so formidable, are
not less worthy of praise and imitation. The Americans still hold
the world's record for hard fighting.
The great majority of the Union soldiers enlisted for the preservation
of the Union and not for the abolition of slavery. But among these
soldiers there was an abolition element, and very soon the tramp of
federal regiments was keeping time to
"John Brown's body lies a mouldering in the ground,
As we go marching on."
Early in the war Generals Fremont and Butler issued orders declaring
free the slaves within the Union lines; these orders President Lincoln
rescinded. But Abolition sentiment was growing in the army and at the
North, and the pressure upon the President to strike at slavery was
increasing. The Union forces were suffering repeated defeats; slaves at
home were growing food crops and caring for the families of Confederates
who were fighting at the front, and in September, 1862, President
Lincoln issued his preliminary proclamation of emancipation, basing it
on the ground of military necessity. It was to become effective January
1, 1863.
And here was the same Lincoln who had declared in 1858 his opinion that
whites and blacks could not live together as equals, socially and
politically; and it was the very same Lincoln who had repeatedly said he
cherished no ill-will against his Southern brethren. If the slaves were
to be freed, they and the whites should not be left together. He
therefore _sought diligently to find some home for the freedmen in a
foreign country_. But unfortunately, as already seen, the American
negro, a bone of contention at home, was now a pariah to other peoples.
Most nations welcome immigrants, but no country was willing to shelter
the American freedman, save only Liberia, long before a proven failure,
and Hayti, where, under the blacks, anarchy had already been chronic for
half a century. Hume tells us, in "The Abolitionists," that for a time
Mr. Lincoln even considered setting Texas apart as a home for the negro.
Later the surrender of the Confederate armies, together with the
adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, consummated
emancipation, foreseeing which President Lincoln formulated his plan of
Reconstruction. Suffrage in the reconstructed States under his plan was
to be limited to those who were qualified to vote at the date of
secession, which meant the whites. The sole exception he ever made to
this rule was a suggestion to Governor Hahn, of Louisiana, that it might
be well for the whites (of Louisiana) to give the ballot to a few of the
most intelligent of the negroes and to such as had served in the army.
The part the soldiers played, Federal and Confederate, in restoring the
Union, is a short story. The clash between them settled without reserve
the only question that was really in issue--secession; slavery, that had
been the origin of sectional dissensions, was eliminated because it
obstructed the success of the Union armies. By their gallantry in battle
and conduct toward each other the men in blue and the men in gray
restored between the North and the South the mutual respect that had
been lost in the bitterness of sectional strife, and without which
there could be no fraternal Union.
Mr. Gladstone, when the war was on, said that the North was endeavoring
to "propagate free institutions at the point of the sword." The North
was not seeking to propagate in the South any new institution whatever.
Mr. Gladstone's paradox loses its point because both sections were
fighting for the preservation of the same system of government.
The time has now happily come when, to use the language of Senator Hoar,
as Americans, we can, North and South, discuss the causes that brought
about our terrible war "in a friendly and quiet spirit, without
recrimination and without heat, each understanding the other, each
striving to help the other, as men who are bearing a common burden and
looking forward with a common hope."
The country, it is believed, has already reached the conclusions that
the South was absolutely honest in maintaining the right of secession
and absolutely unswerving in its devotion to its ideas of the
Constitution, and that the North was equally honest and patriotic in
its fidelity to the Union. We need to advance one step further. Somebody
was to blame for starting a quarrel between brethren who were dwelling
together in amity. If Americans can agree in fixing that blame, the
knowledge thus acquired should help them to avoid such troubles
hereafter.
It seems to be a fair conclusion that the _initial cause of all our
troubles was the formation by Garrison of those Abolition societies_
which the Boston people in their resolutions of August 1, 1835,
"disapproved of" and described as "associations instituted in the
non-slave-holding States, with the intent to act, within the
slave-holding States, on the subject of slavery in those States, without
their consent." And further, that it was the creation of these
societies, the methods they resorted to, and their explicit defiance of
the Constitution that roused the fears and passions of the South and
caused that section to take up the quarrel that, afterward became
sectional; and that, after much hot dispute and many regrettable
incidents, North and South, resulted in secession and war.
In every dispute about slavery prior to 1831, the Constitution was
always regarded by every disputant as supreme. _The quarrel that was
fatal to the peace of the Union began when the New Abolitionists put in
the new claim, that slavery in the South was the concern of the North,
as well as of the South, and that there was a higher law than the
Constitution. If the conscience of the individual, instead of human law,
is to prescribe rules of conduct, society is at the mercy of anarchists.
Czolgosz was conscientious when he murdered McKinley._
Had all Americans continued to agree, after 1831, as they did before
that time, that the Constitution of the United States was the supreme
law of the land, there would have been no fatal sectional quarrel, no
secession, and no war between the North and South.
* * * * *
The immediate surrender everywhere of the Confederates in obedience to
the orders of their generals was an imposing spectacle. There was no
guerilla warfare. The Confederates accepted their defeat in good faith
and have ever since been absolutely loyal to the United States
Government, but they have never changed their minds as to the justice of
the cause they fought for. They fought for liberty regulated by law, and
against the idea that there can be, under our system, any higher law
than the Constitution of our country. That the Constitution should
always be the supreme law of the land, they still believe, and the
philosophic student of past and current history should be gratified to
see the tenacity with which Southern people still cling to that idea. It
suggests that not only will the Southerners be always ready to stand for
our country against a foreign foe, but that whenever our institutions
shall be assailed, as they will often be hereafter by visionaries who
are impatient of restraints, the cause of liberty, regulated by law,
will find staunch defenders in the Southern section of our country.