Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 by Various

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The historical conclusions to be drawn from the above slight sketches
are important in several respects. Mr. Davis, Mr. Toombs, and Mr. Hunter
are among the strongest leaders of the Rebellion. Representing the
Northern, Southeastern, and Southwestern populations of the disaffected
regions, their testimony had a wide application, and was perhaps as
characteristic and pointed in these brief conversations, occurring just
upon the eve of the bursting of the storm, as we should have heard in a
hundred interviews. That they spoke frankly was not only evidenced to
us by their entire manner, but, as it is not unimportant to repeat,
has been proved by subsequent events. The conversations, therefore,
indicate,--

1. That the grand, fundamental, legal ground for the Rebellion was a
view of Constitutional rights by which property in human beings claimed
equal protection under the General Government with the products of Free
Labor, and to be admitted, therefore, at will, to all places under the
jurisdiction of the Federal power, and not simply to be protected under
local or municipal law,--rights which the South proposed to vindicate,
constitutionally, by Secession, or, in other words, by the domination of
State over National sovereignty: an entire view of the true intent of
the Federal compacts and powers, which, in the great debates between Mr.
Webster and Mr. Calhoun, to say nothing of elucidations by previous and
subsequent jurists and statesmen, has been again and again abundantly
demonstrated to be absurd.

2. That the immediate, comprehensive pretext for the Rebellion was the
success of a legal majority having in its platform of principles the
doctrine of the non-extension of involuntary human bondage in the
territories over which the Constitution had given to the whole people
absolute control, a doctrine which the mass of the Southern populations
were educated to believe not only deadly to their local privileges, but
distinctly unconstitutional.

3. That the leaders of the Rebellion frankly admitted, that, excepting
this one point of Constitutional grievance, the interests of the
populations which they represented would be better subserved in the
Union than out of it.

4. That the leaders of the Rebellion appear not to have anticipated
coercion; but yet, from the earliest days of Secession, contemplated
the spoliation of the Southern National property, and particularly the
seizure of the Federal capital.

5. That, even should the independence of the South be acknowledged,
peace could not result so long as Slavery should continue: their avowed
system of reprisals for the certain escape of slaves precluding all
force in any but piratical international law.

6. That the spirit of the Rebellion is the haughty, grasping, and,
except within its own circle, the remorseless spirit universally
characteristic of oligarchies, before the success of whose principles
upon this continent the liberties of the whites could be no safer than
those of the blacks.

"We are the gentlemen of this land," said the Georgian senator, "and
gentlemen always make revolutions in history." And just previously he
had said, with haughty significance, "_Your_ poor population can hold
ward-meetings, and can vote. But _we_ know better how to take care of
ours. They are in the fields, and under the eye of their overseers."

In these two brief remarks, taken singly, or, especially, in
juxtaposition, from so representative a source, and so characteristic
of oligarchical opinions everywhere, appears condensed the suggestive
political warning of these times, indeed of all times, and which a
people regardful of civil and religious liberty can never be slow to
heed.

Let the pride of race and the aristocratic tendencies which underlie the
resistance of the South prevail, and we shall see a new America. The
land of the fathers and of the present will become strange to us. In
place of a thriving population, each member socially independent,
self-respecting, contented, and industrious, contributing, therefore,
to the general welfare, and preserving to posterity and to mankind a
national future of inconceivable power and grandeur, we shall see a
class of unemployed rich and unemployed poor, the former a handful, the
latter a host, in perpetual feud. The asylum of nations, ungratefully
rejecting the principles of equality, to which it has owed a career
of prosperity unexampled in history, will find in arrested commerce,
depressed credit, checked manufactures, an effeminate and selfish,
however brilliant, governing class, and an impoverished and imbruted
industrial population, the consequences of turning back upon its path of
advance. The condition of the most unfortunate aristocracies of the Old
World will become ours.

But the venerated principles partially promulgated in our golden age
forbid such unhappy auspices. Undoubtedly gentlemen make revolutions in
history; but since all may be Christians, may not all men be gentlemen?
At least, have not all men, everywhere, the sacred and comprehensive
right of equal freedom of endeavor to occupy their highest capacities?
_Does not the Creator, who makes nothing in vain, wherever He implants a
power, imply a command to exercise that power according to the highest
aspiration, and is not responsibility eternally exacted, wherever
power and command coexist?_ By that fearful sanction, may not all men,
everywhere, become the best they can become? What that may be, is not
free, equal, and perpetual experiment, judged by conscience in the
individual and by philanthropy in his brother, and not by arrogance
or cupidity in his oppressor, to decide? To secure the wisdom and
perpetuity of this experiment, are not governments instituted? Is not
a monopoly of opportunity by any single class, by all historical and
theoretical proof, not only unjust to the excluded, but crippling
and suicidal to the State? Nay, is not the slightest infringement of
regulated social and political justice, liberty, and humanity, in
the person of black or of white, that makes the greatest potential
development of the highest in human nature impossible or difficult, to
be resisted, as a violation of the peace of the soul, endless treachery
to mankind, an affront to Heaven? Would not the very soil of America,
in which Liberty is said to inhere, cry out and rise against any but an
affirmative answer to such questions?

A near future will decide.

* * * * *

THE HOUR AND THE MAN.

The Twenty-Second of September, 1862, bids fair to become as remarkable
a date in American history as the Fourth of July, 1776; for on that day
the President of the United States, availing himself of the full powers
of his position, declared this country free from that slaveholding
oligarchy which had so long governed it in peace, and the influence of
which was so potently felt for more than a year after it had broken up
the Union, and made war upon the Federal Government. Be the event what
it may,--and the incidents of the war have taught us not to be too
sanguine as to the results of any given movement,--President Lincoln has
placed the American nation in a proper attitude with respect to that
institution the existence of which had so long been the scandal and
the disgrace of a people claiming to be the freest on earth, but whose
powers had been systematically used and abused for the maintenance and
the extension of slave-labor.

It was our misfortune, and in some sense it was also our fault, that we
were bound to uphold the worst system of slavery that ever was known
among men; for we must judge of every wrong that is perpetrated by the
circumstances that are connected with it, and our oppression of the
African race was peculiarly offensive, inasmuch as it was a proceeding
in flagrant violation of our constantly avowed principles, was continued
in face of the opinions of the founders of the nation, was frankly
upheld on the unmanly ground that the intellectual weakness of the
slaves rendered it safe to oppress them, and was not excused by that
general ignorance of right which has so often been brought forward in
palliation of wrong,--as slavery had come under the ban of Christendom
years before Americans could be found boldly bad enough to claim for it
a divine origin, and to avow that it was a proper, and even the best,
foundation for civil society. Our offence was of the rankest, and its
peculiar character rendered us odious in the eyes of the nations, who
would not admit the force of our plea as to the great difficulties that
lay in the way of the removal of the evil, as they had seen it condemned
by most communities, and abolished by some of their number.

The very circumstance upon which Americans have relied for the
justification of their form of slavery, namely, that it was confined to
one race, and that race widely separated from all other races by
the existence of peculiar characteristics, has been regarded as an
aggravation of their misconduct by all humane and disinterested persons.
The Greek system of slavery, which was based on the idea that Greeks
were noblemen of Heaven's own creating, and that they therefore were
justified in treating all other men as inferiors, and making the same
use of them as they made of horses; the Roman system, which was based on
the will of society, and therefore made no exceptions on the score of
color, but saw in all strangers only creatures of chase; the Mussulman
system, brought out so strongly by the action of the States of Barbary,
and which was colored by the character of the long quarrel between
Mahometans and Christians, and under which Northern Africa was filled
with myriads of slaves from Southern Europe, among whom were men of
the highest intellect,--Cervantes, for example;--all these systems
of servitude, and others that might be adduced, were respectable in
comparison with our system, which proceeded upon the blasphemous
assumption that God had created and set apart one race that should
forever dwell in the house of bondage. If, in some respects, our system
has been more humane than that of other peoples in other times, the fact
is owing to that general improvement which has taken place the earth
over during the present century. The world has gone forward, and even
American slaveholders have been compelled to go with it, whether they
would or not.

It was a distinctive feature of slavery, as here known, that it tended
to debauch the mind of Christendom. So long as all men were liable to be
enslaved, and even Shakspeare and Milton were in some danger of sharing
the fate of Cervantes,--and the Barbary corsairs did actually carry
off men from the British Islands in the times of Milton and
Shakspeare,--there could not fail to grow up a general hostility to
slavery, and the institution was booked for destruction. But when
slavery came to be considered as the appropriate condition of one race,
and the members of that race so highly qualified to engage in the
production of cotton and sugar, tobacco and rice, the danger was, not
only that slavery would once more come into favor, but that the African
slave-trade would be replaced in the list of legitimate commercial
pursuits, and become more extensive than it was in those days when it
was defended by bishops and kings' sons in the British House of Lords.
That this is not an unfounded opinion will be admitted by those who
recollect that the London "Times," that representative of the average
English mind, but recently published articles that could mean nothing
less than a desire to revive the old system of slavery, with all that
should be necessary to maintain it in force; that Mr. Carlyle is an
advocate of the oppression of negroes; and that the French Government
at one time seemed disposed to have resort to a course that must, if
adopted, have converted Africa into a storehouse of slaves.

Our slaveholders were not blind to this altered state of the European
mind, of which they availed themselves, and of which, in a certain
sense, they had the best of all rights to avail themselves, for it was
largely their own work. At the same time that England abolished slavery
in her dominions, the chief Nullifiers, who were the fathers of the
Secession Rebellion, assumed the position that negro slavery was good in
itself, and that it was the duty of white men to uphold and to extend
it. This was done by Governor McDuffie, of South Carolina, in 1834,
and it was warmly approved by many Southern men, as well out of South
Carolina as in that most fanatical of States, but generally condemned by
the Democrats of that time, though now it is not uncommon to find men
in the North who accept all that the old Nullifier put forward as a new
truth eight-and-twenty years ago. Earnestly and zealously, and with no
small amount of talent, the friends of slavery labored to impose their
views upon the entire Southern mind,--and that not so much because they
loved slavery for itself as because they knew, that, if the slaveholding
interest could be placed in opposition to the Federal Union, that Union
might be destroyed. They were fanatics in their attachment to slavery,
but even their fanaticism was secondary to their hatred of that
power which, as represented by Andrew Jackson, had trampled down
Nullification, and compelled Carolina and Calhoun to retreat from cannon
and the gallows. Mr. Rhett, then Mr. Barnwell Smith, said, in the
debates in the Convention on the proposition to accept the Tariff
Compromise of 1833, that he hated the star-spangled banner; and
unquestionably he expressed the feelings of many of his contemporaries,
who deemed submission prudent, but who were consoled by the reflection
that slavery would afford them a far better means for breaking up the
Union than it was possible to get through the existence of any tariff,
no matter how protective it might be. All the great leaders of the first
Secession school had passed away from the earth, when Rhett "still
lived" to see the flag he hated pulled down before the fire that was
poured upon Fort Sumter from Carolina's batteries worked by the hands
of Carolinians. Calhoun, Hamilton, McDuffie, Hayne, Trumbull, Cooper,
Harper, Preston, and others, men of the first intellectual rank in
America, had departed; but Rhett survived to see what they had labored
to effect, and what they would have effected, had they not encountered
one of those iron spirits to whom is sometimes intrusted the government
of nations, and who are of more value to nations than gold and fleets
and armies. All that we have lately seen done, and more, would have been
done thirty years since, had any other man than Andrew Jackson been at
that time President of the United States. There was much cant in those
days about "the one-man power," because President Jackson saw fit to
make use of the Constitutional qualified veto-power to express his
opposition to certain measures adopted by Congress; but the best
exhibition of "the one-man power" that the country ever saw, then or
before or since, was when the same magistrate crushed Nullification,
maintained the Union, and secured the nation's peace for more than a
quarter of a century. We never knew what a great man Jackson was, until
the country was cursed by Buchanan's occupation of the same chair that
Jackson had filled,--a chair that he was unworthy to dust,--and by his
cowardice and treachery which made civil war inevitable. One man, at the
close of 1860, could have done more than has yet been accomplished by
the million of men who have been called to arms because no such man was
then in the nation's service. The "one hour of Dundee" was not more
wanting to the Stuarts than the one month of Jackson was wanting to us
but two years ago.

The powerful teaching of the Nullifiers was successful. The South, which
assumed to be the exclusive seat of American nationality, while the
North was declared given up to sectionalism, with no other lights on its
path than "blue lights," became the South so devoted to slavery that
it could see nothing else in the country. Old Union men of 1832 became
Secessionists, though Nullification, the milder thing of the two, had
been too much for them to endure. They not only endured the more hideous
evil, but they embraced it. Between 1832 and 1860 a change had been
wrought such as twice that time could not have accomplished at any
earlier period of human history. The old Southern ideas respecting
slavery had disappeared, and that institution had become an object of
idolatry, so that any criticisms to which it was subjected kindled the
same sort of flame that is excited in a pious community when objects of
devotion are assailed and destroyed by the hands of unbelievers.
The astonishing material prosperity that accompanied the system of
slave-labor had, no doubt, much to do with the regard that was bestowed
upon the system itself. That was the time when Cotton became King,--at
least, in the opinion of its worshippers. The Democratic party of the
North passed from that position of radicalism to which the name of
_Locofocoism_ was given, to the position of supporters of the extremest
Southern doctrines, so that for some years it appeared to exist for no
other purpose than to do garrison-duty in the Free States, the cost of
its maintenance being supplied by the Federal revenues. Abroad the same
change began to be noted, the demand for cotton prevailing over the
power of conscience. Everything worked as well for evil as it could
work, and as if Satan himself had condescended to accept the post of
stage-manager for the disturbers of America's peace.

To take advantage of the change that had been brought about was the
purpose of the whole political population of the South. But though that
section was united in its determination to support the supremacy of
slavery, it was far from being united in its opinions as to the best
mode of accomplishing its object. There were three parties in the South
in the last days of the old Union. The first, and the largest, of these
parties answered very nearly to the Southern portion of the Democratic
party, and contained whatever of sense and force belonged to the South.
It was made up of men who were firmly resolved upon one thing, namely,
that they would ruin the Union, if they should forever lose the power to
rule it; but they had the sagacity to see that the ends which they had
in view could be more easily achieved in the Union than out of it.
They were not disunionists _per se_, but were quite ready to become
disunionists, if the Union was to be governed otherwise than in the
direct and immediate interest of slavery. Slavery was the basis of their
political system, and they knew that it could be better served by the
American Union's continued existence than by the construction of
a Southern Confederacy, provided the former should do all that
slaveholders might require it to do.

The second Southern party, and the smallest of them all, was composed
of the minions of the Nullifiers, and of their immediate followers, men
whose especial object it was to destroy the Union, and who hated the
subservient portion of the Northern people far more bitterly than they
hated Republicans, or even Abolitionists. They would have preferred
abolition and disunion to the triumph of slavery and the preservation of
the Union. It was not that they loved slavery less, but that they hated
the Union more. Even if the country should submit to the South, the
leaders of this faction knew that they would not be the Southrons to
whom should be intrusted the powers and the business of government. Few
of them were of much account even in their own States, and generally
they could have been set down as chiefs of the opposition to everything
that was reasonable. A remarkable proof of the little hold which this
class of men had on even the most mad of the Southern States, when at
the height of their fury, was afforded by the refusal of South Carolina
to elect Mr. Rhett Governor, her Legislature conferring that post on Mr.
Pickens, a moderate man when compared with Mr. Rhett, and who, there
is reason for believing, would have prevented a resort to Secession
altogether, could he have done so without sacrificing what he held to be
his honor.

The third Southern party consisted of men who desired the continuance
of the Union, but who wished that some "concessions" should be made, or
"compromises" effected, in order to satisfy men, one portion of whom
were resolved upon having everything, while the other portion were
resolute in their purpose to destroy everything that then existed of a
national character. This third party was mostly composed of those
timid men whose votes count for much at ordinary periods, but who in
extraordinary times are worse than worthless, being in fact incumbrances
on bolder men. They loved the Union, because they loved peace, and were
opposed to violence of all kinds; but their Unionism was much like
Bailie Macwheeble's conscience, which was described as never doing him
any harm. What they would have done, had Government been able to send a
strong force to their assistance at the beginning of the war, we cannot
undertake to say; but they have done little to aid the Federal cause in
the field, while their influence in the Federal councils has been more
prejudicial to the country than the open exertions of the Secessionists
to effect the nation's destruction.

Of these parties, the first had every reason to believe that it could
soon regain possession of Congress, and that in 1864 it would be able to
elect its candidate to the Presidency. Hence it had no wish to dissolve
the Union; and if its leaders could have had their way, the Union would
have been spared. But the second party, making up for its deficiency in
numbers by the intensity of its zeal, and laboring untiringly, was too
much for the moderates. Hate is a stronger feeling than love of any
kind, stronger even than love of spoils; and the men who followed Rhett
and Yancey, Pryor and Spratt, hated the Union with a perfect hatred.
They got ahead of the men who followed Davis and Stephens, and the rest
of those Southern chiefs who would have been content with the complete
triumph of Southern principles in the Republic as it stood in 1860. As
they broke up the Democratic party in order to render the election
of the Republican candidate certain, so that they might found on his
election the _cri de guerre_ of a "sectional triumph" over the South, so
they "coerced" the Southern people into the adoption of a war-policy. We
have more than once heard Mr. Lincoln blamed for "precipitating matters"
in April, 1861. He should have temporized, it has been said, and so
have preserved peace; but when he called for seventy-five thousand
volunteers, he made war unavoidable. The truth is, that Mr. Lincoln did
not begin the war. It was begun by the South. His call for volunteers
was the consequence of war being made on the nation, and not the cause
of war being made either on the South or by the South. The enemy fired
upon and took Fort Sumter before the first call for volunteers was
issued; and that proceeding must be admitted to have been an act of war,
unless we are prepared to admit that there is a right of Secession.
And Fort Sumter was fired upon and taken through the influence of the
violent party at the South, who were resolved that there should be war.
They knew that it was beyond the power of the Federal Government to send
supplies to the doomed fort, and that in a few days it would pass into
the hands of the Confederates; and this they determined to prevent,
because they knew also that the mere surrender of the garrison, when
it had eaten its last rations, would not suffice to "fire the Northern
heart." They carried their point, and hence it was that war was begun
the middle of April, 1861. But for the triumph of the violent Southern
party, the contest might have been postponed, and even a peace patched
up for the time, and the inevitable struggle put off to a future day.
As it was, Government had no choice, and was compelled to fight; and it
would have been compelled to fight, had it been composed entirely of
Quakers.

War being unavoidable, and it being clear that slavery was the cause of
it as well as its occasion, and that it would be the main support of our
enemy, it ought to have followed that our first blow should be directed
against that institution. Nothing of the kind happened. Whatever
Government may have thought on the subject, it did nothing to injure
slavery. But for this forbearance, which now appears so astonishing, we
are not disposed to blame the President. He acted as the representative
of the country, which was not then prepared to act vigorously against
the root of the evil that afflicted it. A moral blindness prevailed,
which proved most injurious to the Union cause, and from the effect of
which it may never recover. It was supposed that it was yet possible to
"conciliate" the South, and that that section could be induced to "come
back" into the Union, provided nothing should be done to hurt its
feelings or injure its interests! Looking back to the summer of 1861, it
is with difficulty that we can believe that men were then in possession
of their senses, so inconsistent was their conduct. The Rebels were at
least as sensitive on the subject of their military character as they
were on that of slavery; and yet, while we could not be sufficiently
servile on the latter subject, we acted most offensively on the former.
We asserted, in every form and variety of language, our ability to "put
them down;" and but for the circumstance that not the slightest atom of
ability marked the management of our military affairs, we should
have made our boasting good. Men who could not say enough to satisfy
themselves on the point of the right of the chivalrous Southrons to
create, breed, work, and sell slaves, were equally loud-mouthed in their
expressed purpose to "put down" the said Southrons because they had
rebelled, and rebelled only because they were slaveholders, and for the
purpose of placing slavery beyond the reach of wordy assault in the
country of which it should be the governing power. There has been much
complaint that foreigners have not understood the nature of our quarrel,
and that the general European hostility to the American national cause
is owing to their ignorance of American affairs. How that may be we
shall not stop to inquire; but it is beyond dispute that no European
community has ever displayed a more glaring ignorance of the character
of the contest here waged than was exhibited by most Americans in the
early months of that contest, and down to a recent period. The war
was treated by nearly the whole people as if slavery had no possible
connection with it, and as if all mention of slavery in matters
pertaining to the war were necessarily an impertinence, a foreign
subject lugged into a domestic discussion. Three-fourths of the people
were disposed querulously to ask why Abolitionists couldn't let slavery
alone in war-time. It was a bad thing, was Abolitionism, in time of
peace; but its badness was vastly increased when we had war upon our
hands. Half the other fourth of the citizens were disposed to agree with
the majority, but very shame kept them silent. It was only the few who
had a proper conception of the state of things, and they had little
influence with the people, and, consequently, none with Government. Had
they said much, or attempted to do anything, probably they would have
found Federal arms directed against themselves with much more of force
and effectiveness in their use than were manifested when they were
directed against the Rebels. When a Union general could announce that
he would make use of the Northern soldiers under his command to destroy
slaves who should be so audacious as to rebel against Rebels, and the
announcement was received with rapturous approval at the North, it was
enough to convince every intelligent and reflecting man that no just
idea of the struggle we were engaged in was common, and that a blind
people were following blind leaders into the ditch,--even into that
"last ditch" to which the Secessionists have so often been doomed, but
in which they so obstinately continue to refuse to find their own and
their cause's grave.

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