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Title: The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement
Author: Merriam, George Spring, 1843-1914
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement" ***
THE NEGRO AND THE NATION
_A History of American Slavery
and Enfranchisement_
BY
GEORGE S. MERRIAM
HASKELL HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.
_Publishers of Scarce Scholarly Books_
NEW YORK. N. Y. 10012
1970
First Published 1906
HASKELL HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.
_Publishers of Scarce Scholarly Books_
280 LAFAYETTE STREET
NEW YORK, N. Y. 10012
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-95441
Standard Book Number 8383-0994-1
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. HOW SLAVERY GREW IN AMERICA 1
II. THE ACTS OF THE FATHERS 8
III. CONFLICT AND COMPROMISE 21
IV. THE WIDENING RIFT 28
V. CALHOUN AND GARRISON 46
VI. BIRNEY, CHANNING AND WEBSTER 58
VII. THE UNDERLYING FORCES 67
VIII. THE MEXICAN WAR 71
IX. HOW TO DEAL WITH THE TERRITORIES 79
X. THE COMPROMISE OF 1850 84
XI. A LULL AND A RETROSPECT 92
XII. SLAVERY AS IT WAS 97
XIII. THE STRUGGLE FOR KANSAS 112
XIV. "FREMONT AND FREEDOM" 122
XV. THREE TYPICAL SOUTHERNERS 132
XVI. SOME NORTHERN LEADERS 140
XVII. DRED SCOTT AND LECOMPTON 147
XVIII. JOHN BROWN 158
XIX. ABRAHAM LINCOLN 172
XX. THE ELECTION OF 1860 185
XXI. FACE TO FACE 197
XXII. HOW THEY DIFFERED 205
XXIII. WHY THEY FOUGHT 211
XXIV. ON NIAGARA'S BRINK--AND OVER 221
XXV. THE CIVIL WAR 237
XXVI. EMANCIPATION BEGUN 248
XXVII. EMANCIPATION ACHIEVED 258
XXVIII. RECONSTRUCTION: EXPERIMENTS AND IDEALS 267
XXIX. RECONSTRUCTION: THE FIRST PLAN 274
XXX. CONGRESS AND THE "BLACK CODES" 281
XXXI. RECONSTRUCTION: THE SECOND PLAN 294
XXXII. RECONSTRUCTION: THE FINAL PLAN 306
XXXIII. RECONSTRUCTION: THE WORKING OUT 316
XXXIV. THREE TROUBLED STATES 331
XXXV. RECONSTRUCTION: THE LAST ACT 344
XXXVI. REGENERATION 354
XXXVII. ARMSTRONG 362
XXXVIII. EVOLUTION 371
XXXIX. EBB AND FLOW 382
XL. LOOKING FORWARD 391
INDEX 413
THE NEGRO AND THE NATION
CHAPTER I
HOW SLAVERY GREW IN AMERICA
An English traveler, riding along the banks of the Potomac in mid-July,
1798, saw ahead of him on the road an old-fashioned chaise, its driver
urging forward his slow horse with the whip, until a sharp cut made the
beast swerve, and the chaise toppled over the bank, throwing out the
driver and the young lady who was with him. The traveler--it was John
Bernard, an actor and a man of culture and accomplishments, spurred
forward to the rescue. As he did so he saw another horseman put his
horse from a trot to a gallop, and together they reached the scene of
action, extricated the woman and revived her from her swoon with water
from a brook; then righted the horse and chaise, helped to restore the
half-ton of baggage to its place; learned the story of the couple--a New
Englander returning home with his Southern bride--and saw them safely
started again. Then the two rescuers, after their half-hour of
perspiring toil in a broiling sun, addressed themselves courteously to
each other; the Virginian dusted the coat of the Englishman, and as Mr.
Bernard returned the favor he noticed him well,--"a tall, erect,
well-made man, evidently advanced in years, but who appeared to have
retained all the vigor and elasticity resulting from a life of
temperance and exercise. His dress was a blue coat, buttoned to the
chin, and buckskin breeches." The two men eyed each other, half
recognizing, half perplexed, till with a smile the Virginian exclaimed,
"Mr. Bernard, I believe?" and, claiming acquaintance from having seen
him on the stage and heard of him from friends, invited him to come and
rest at his house near by, to which he pointed. That familiar front, the
now wholly familiar face and form,--"Mount Vernon! Have I the honor of
addressing General Washington?" With a charming smile Washington offered
his hand, replying, "An odd sort of introduction, Mr. Bernard; but I am
pleased to find you can play so active a part in private and without a
prompter." There followed a long and leisurely call at Mount Vernon, and
Bernard, in his volume of travels which did not see the light for nearly
a century, has given a most graphic and winning picture of Washington in
his every-day aspect and familiar conversation. To the actor's keen eye,
acquainted with the best society of his time, the near approach showed
no derogation from the greatness which the story of his deeds conveyed.
"Whether you surveyed his face, open yet well defined, dignified but not
arrogant, thoughtful but benign; his frame, towering and muscular, but
alert from its good proportions--every feature suggested a resemblance
to the spirit it encased, and showed simplicity in alliance with the
sublime. The impression, therefore, was that of a most perfect whole."
The talk ran a various course. Washington incidentally praised the New
Englanders, "the stamina of the Union and its greatest benefactors." The
Englishman acknowledged a tribute to his own country, but Washington
with great good humor responded, "Yes, yes, Mr. Bernard, but I consider
your country the cradle of free principles, not their arm-chair." He had
proceeded a little way in a eulogy of American liberty, when a black
servant entered the room with a jug of spring water. Bernard smiled, and
Washington quickly caught his look and answered it: "This may seem a
contradiction, but I think you must perceive that it is neither a crime
nor an absurdity. When we profess, as our fundamental principle, that
liberty is the inalienable right of every man, we do not include madmen
or idiots; liberty in their hands would become a scourge. Till the mind
of the slave has been educated to perceive what are the obligations of a
state of freedom, and not confound a man's with a brute's, the gift
would insure its abuse. We might as well be asked to pull down our old
warehouses before trade has increased to demand enlarged new ones. Both
houses and slaves were bequeathed to us by Europeans, and time alone can
change them; an event which, you may believe me, no man desires more
heartily than I do. Not only do I pray for it on the score of human
dignity, but I can clearly foresee that nothing but the rooting out of
slavery can perpetuate the existence of our Union, by consolidating it
in a common bond of principle."
These words of Washington, with the incident that supplies their
background, are an epitome of the view and attitude of that great man
toward slavery. Before measuring their full significance, and the
general situation in which this was an element, we may glance at the
preliminary questions; how came slaves in Virginia and America; whence
came slavery; what was it?
Primitive man killed his enemy and ate him. Later, the sequel of battle
was the slaying of all the vanquished and the appropriation of their
goods, including women and other live stock. Then it was found more
profitable to spare the conquered warrior's life and set him to do the
victor's disagreeable work; more profitable, and incidentally more
merciful. Civilization advanced; wars became less general; but in the
established social order that grew up there was a definite place for a
great class of slaves. It was part of Nature's early law, the strong
raising themselves upon the weak. Morality and religion by degrees
established certain limited rights for the slave. But the general state
of slavery was defended by philosophers like Aristotle; was recognized
by the legislation of Judea, Greece, and Rome; was accepted as part of
the established order by Jesus and the early church. It is beyond our
limits here to measure either its service, as the foundation on which
rested ancient society; or the mischief that came from the supplanting
of a free peasantry, as in Italy. We can but glance at the influence of
Christianity, first in ameliorating its rigor, by teaching the master
that the slave was his brother in Christ, and then by working together
with economic forces for its abolition. By complex and partly obscure
causes, personal slavery--the outright ownership of man--was abolished
throughout Christendom. Less inhuman in theory, less heartless in
practice, though inhuman and harsh enough, was the serfdom which
succeeded slavery and rested on Europe for a thousand years; till by
slow evolution, by occasional bloody revolt, by steady advance in the
intelligence and power of the laborer, compelling for him a higher
status, the serf became a hired laborer and thence a citizen throughout
Europe.
The recrudescence of slavery came when the expanding energies of
European society, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, dashed
against the weak barbarians of Africa and America. The old story was
retold,--the stronger man, half-savage still under the veneer of
civilization and Christianity, trampled the weaker man under foot. In
Europe there was little need or room for slaves--the labor supply was
sufficient, but on the new continent, in the words of Weeden (_Economic
and Social History of New England_): "The seventeenth century organized
the new western countries, and created an immense opportunity for
labor. The eighteenth coolly and deliberately set Europe at the task of
depopulating whole districts of western Africa, and of transporting the
captives, by a necessarily brutal, vicious and horrible traffic, to the
new civilization of America." The European was impartial between African
and Indian; he was equally ready to enslave either; but the Indian was
not made for captivity,--he rebelled or ran away or died; the more
docile negro was the chief victim. The stream of slavery moved mainly
according to economic conditions. Soil and climate in the Northern
States made the labor of the indolent and unthrifty slave unprofitable,
but in the warm and fertile South, developing plantations of tobacco,
rice, and indigo, the negro toiler supplied the needed element for great
profits. The church's part in the business was mainly to find excuse;
through slavery the heathen were being made Christians. But when they
had become Christians the church forgot to bid that they be made
brothers and freemen. Some real mitigation of their lot no doubt there
was, through teaching of religion and from other conditions. Professor
Du Bois says that slavery brought the African three advantages: it
taught him to labor, gave him the English language and--after a
sort--the Christian religion. But it ruined such family life as had
existed under a kind of regulated polygamy. Again we must decline to
measure the good and the evil of the system. Probably the negro was in
better condition in America than he had been in Africa, as he certainly
was in far worse condition than he was entitled to be--and was in future
to be.
The traffic was maintained chiefly by trading companies in England,--at
first a great monopoly headed by the Duke of York, then rival companies.
The colonists made some attempts to check the traffic,--growing alarmed
at the great infusion of a servile and barbaric population. Virginia
long tried to discourage it by putting a heavy import tax on slaves,
which was constantly overruled by the English government under the
influence of the trading companies. At a later day every one tried to
put the responsibility of slavery on some one else,--the North on the
South, the South on England. But in truth the responsibility was on all.
The colonists did not hesitate to refuse to receive tea which England
taxed; equally well they could have refused to buy slaves imported by
trading companies if they had not wanted them; but they did want them.
The commercial demand overrode humanity. The social conscience was not
awake,--strange as its slumber now seems. Stranger still, as we shall
see, after it had once been thoroughly roused, it was deliberately
drugged to sleep. But this belongs to a later chapter.
New England had little use for slaves at home, but for slave ships she
had abundant use. With a sterile soil, and with the sea at her doors
swarming with edible fish and beckoning to her sails, her hardy industry
found its best field on the ocean. The fisheries were the foundation of
her commerce. The thrifty Yankee sold the best of his catch in Europe
(here again we follow Weeden); the medium quality he ate himself; and
the worst he sent to the West Indies to be sold as food for slaves. With
the proceeds the skipper bought molasses and carried it home, where it
was turned into rum; the rum went to Africa and was exchanged for
slaves, and the slaves were carried to the West Indies, Virginia, and
the Carolinas. Rum and slaves, two chief staples of New England trade
and sources of its wealth; slave labor the foundation on which was
planted the aristocracy of Virginia and the Carolinas,--alas for our
great-grandfathers! But what may our great-grandchildren find to say of
us?
The social conscience was not developed along this line; men were
unconscious of the essential wrong of slavery, or, uneasily conscious of
something wrong, saw not what could be done, and kept still. Here and
there a voice was raised in protest. There was fine old Samuel Sewall,
Chief Justice of Massachusetts; sincere, faithful man; dry and narrow,
because in a dry and narrow place and time; but with the capacity for
growth which distinguishes the live root from the dead. He presided over
the court that adjudged witches to death; then, when the community had
recovered from its frenzy, he took on himself deepest blame; he stood up
in his pew, a public penitent, while the minister read aloud his humble
confession, and on a stated day in each year he shut himself up in
solitude to mourn and expiate the wrong he had unwittingly done, and,
almost alone among his people, he spoke out clear and strong against
human slavery.
A little later, in the generation before the Revolution, came the
Quaker, John Woolman,--a gentle and lovely soul, known among his people
as a kind of lay evangelist, traveling among their communities to utter
sweet persuasive words of holiness and uplifting; known in our day by
his _Journal_, a book of saintly meditations. Sensitive and shrinking,
he yet had the moral insight to see and the courage to speak against the
wrong of slavery. The Quakers, rich in the virtues of peace and
kindliness, were by no means unpractical in the ways of worldly gain, or
inaccessible to its temptations; they had held slaves like their
neighbors, though we should probably have preferred a Quaker master. But
the seed Woolman sowed fell on good ground; slavery came into disfavor
among the Quakers, and when sentiment against it began to grow they lent
strength to the leadership of the public conscience.
CHAPTER II
THE ACTS OF THE FATHERS
The revolt of the colonists from British rule was not inspired
originally by abstract enthusiasm for the rights of man. It was rather a
demand for the chartered rights of British subjects, according to the
liberal principles set forth by Locke and Chatham and Burke and Fox; a
demand pushed on by the self-asserting strength of communities become
too vigorous to endure control from a remote seat of empire, especially
when that control was exercised in a harsh and arbitrary spirit. The
revolutionary tide was swelled from various sources: by the mob eager to
worry a red-coated sentry or to join in a raid under Indian disguise; by
men who embodied the common sense and rough energy of the plain people,
like Samuel Adams and Thomas Paine; by men of practical statesmanship,
like Franklin and Washington, who saw that the time had come when the
colonists could best manage their own affairs; and by generous
enthusiasts for humanity, like Jefferson and Patrick Henry.
With the minds of thoughtful men thoroughly wakened on the subject of
human rights, it was impossible not to reflect on the wrongs of the
slaves, incomparably worse than those against which their masters had
taken up arms. As the political institutions of the young Federation
were remolded, so grave a matter as slavery could not be ignored.
Virginia in 1772 voted an address to the King remonstrating against the
continuance of the African slave trade. The address was ignored, and
Jefferson in the first draft of the Declaration alleged this as one of
the wrongs suffered at the hands of the British government, but his
colleagues suppressed the clause. In 1778 Virginia forbade the
importation of slaves into her ports. The next year Jefferson proposed
to the Legislature an elaborate plan for gradual emancipation, but it
failed of consideration. Maryland followed Virginia in forbidding the
importation of slaves from Africa. Virginia in 1782 passed a law by
which manumission of slaves, which before had required special
legislative permission, might be given at the will of the master. For
the next ten years manumission went on at the rate of 8000 a year.
Afterward the law was made more restrictive. Massachusetts adopted in
1780 a constitution and bill of rights, asserting, as the Declaration
had done, that all men are born free and have an equal and inalienable
right to defend their lives and liberties, to acquire property and to
seek and obtain freedom and happiness. A test case was made up to decide
the status of a slave, and the Supreme Court ruled that under this
clause slavery no longer existed in Massachusetts. Its 6000 negroes were
now entitled to the suffrage on the same terms as the whites. The same
held good of the free blacks in four other States. In all the States but
Massachusetts slavery retained a legal existence, the number ranging in
1790 from 158 in New Hampshire to nearly 4000 in Pennsylvania, over
21,000 in New York, 100,000 in each of the Carolinas, and about 300,000
in Virginia. Ships of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and the Middle States
were still busy in bringing negroes from Africa to the South, though
there were brave men like Dr. Hopkins at Newport who denounced the
traffic in its strongholds.
Jefferson planned nobly for the exclusion of slavery from the whole as
yet unorganized domain of the nation, a measure which would have belted
the slave States with free territory, and so worked toward universal
freedom. The sentiment of the time gave success to half his plan. His
proposal in the ordinance of 1784 missed success in the Continental
Congress by the vote of a single State. The principle was embodied in
the ordinance of 1787 (when Jefferson was abroad as Minister to France),
but with its operations limited to the Northwestern territory, the
country south of the Ohio being left under the influence of the slave
States from which it had been settled.
The young nation crystalized into form in the constitutional convention
of 1787, and the ratification of its act by the people. It was indeed,
as John Fiske's admirable book names it, "the critical period of
American history." To human eyes it was the parting of the ways between
disintegration toward anarchy, and the birth of a nation with fairer
opportunities and higher ideals than any that had gone before. The work
of those forty men in half a year has hardly a parallel. Individually
they were the pick and flower of their communities. The circumstances
compelled them to keep in such touch with the people of those
communities that their action would be ratified. They included men of
the broadest theoretical statesmanship, like Madison and Hamilton; men
of great practical sense and magnanimity, like Washington and Franklin;
and they also included and needed to include the representatives of
various local and national interests. They had been schooled by the
training of many momentous years, and the emergency brought out the
strongest traits of the men and of the people behind them.
A prime necessity was willingness to make mutual concessions, together
with good judgment as to where those concessions must stop. Large States
against small States, seaport against farm, North against South and East
against West, slave society against free society--each must be willing
to give as well as to take, or the common cause was lost. The theorists,
too, must make their sacrifices; the believers in centralization, the
believers in diffusion of power; Madisonians, Hamiltonians,
Jeffersonians--all must concede something, or there could be no nation.
And between principles of moral right and wrong,--here, too, can there
be compromise? Easy to give a sweeping No; but when honest men's ideas
of right and wrong fundamentally differ, when personal ideals and social
utilities are in seeming contradiction, the answer may be no easy one.
The great difficulty at the outset, as to the relative power in Congress
of the large and small States, was settled at last by the happy
compromise of making the Senate representative of the States in
equality, and the House representative of the whole people alike. But
then came the question, Should the representation be based on numbers or
on wealth? The decision to count men and not dollars was a momentous
one; it told for democracy even more than the framers knew. But now
again, Shall this count of men include slaves? Slaves, who have no voice
in the government, and are as much the property of their owners as
horses and oxen? Yes, the slaves should be counted as men, in the
distribution of political power,--so said South Carolina and Georgia. In
that demand there disclosed itself what proved to be the most determined
and aggressive interest in the convention,--the slavery interest in the
two most southern States. Virginia, inspired and led by Washington,
Madison, and Mason, was unfriendly to the strengthening of the slave
power, and the border and central as well as the eastern States were
inclined the same way. But South Carolina and Georgia, united and
determined, had this powerful leverage; from the first dispute, their
representatives habitually declared that unless their demands were
granted their States would not join the Union. Now it had been agreed
that the Constitution should only become operative on the assent by
popular vote of nine of the thirteen States, and it was plain that at
the best there would be great difficulty in getting that number. With
two lost in advance the case looked almost hopeless. South Carolina and
Georgia saw their advantage, and pushed it with equal resolution and
dexterity. The question of representation was settled by a singular
compromise: To the free population was to be added in the count
three-fifths of the slave population. The slave was, for political
purposes, three-fifths a man and two-fifths a chattel. Illogical to
grotesqueness, this arrangement--in effect a concession to the most
objectionable species of property of a political advantage denied to all
other property--yet seemed to the wisest leaders of the convention not
too heavy a price for the establishment of the Union. The provision that
fugitive slaves should be returned had already been made, apparently
with little opposition.
But the price was by no means all paid. When the powers of Congress came
to be defined, the extreme South demanded that it be not allowed to
forbid the importation of African slaves. With the example of Virginia
and Maryland in view, it was clear that the tide was running so strongly
against the traffic that Congress was sure to prohibit it unless
restrained from doing so. Against such restraint there was strong
protest from Virginia and the middle States. "The traffic is infernal,"
said Mason of Virginia. "To permit it is against every principle of
honor and safety," said Dickinson of Delaware. But the two Pinckneys and
their colleague said, "Leave us the traffic, or South Carolina and
Georgia will not join your Union." The leading members from the
northern and New England States actually favored the provision, to
conciliate the extreme South. The matter went to a committee of one from
each State. There it was discussed along with another question: It had
been proposed to restrict Congress from legislating on navigation and
kindred subjects except by a two-thirds vote of each House. This went
sorely against the commercial North, which was eager to wield the whole
power of the government in favor of its shipping interests. Of this
power the South was afraid, and how well grounded was the importance
each section attached to it was made plain when a generation later the
North used its dearly-bought privilege to fashion such tariff laws as
drove South Carolina to the verge of revolt. Now in the committee a
bargain was struck: The slave trade should be extended till 1800, and in
compensation Congress should be allowed to legislate on navigation as on
other subjects. The report coming into the convention, South Carolina
was still unsatisfied. "Eight more years for the African trade, until
1808," said Pinckney, and Gorham of Massachusetts supported him. Vainly
did Madison protest, and Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey
vote against the whole scheme. The alliance of New England commerce and
Carolina slavery triumphed, and the African slave trade was sanctioned
for twenty years.
For the compromise on representation it might be pleaded, that by it no
license was given to wrong; there was only a concession of
disproportionate power to one section, fairly outweighed in the scale of
the public good by the establishment of a great political order. But the
action on the slave trade was the deliberate sanction for twenty years
of man-stealing of the most flagitious sort. It was aimed at the
strengthening and perpetuation of an institution which even its
champions at that time only defended as a necessary evil. And this
action was taken, not after all other means to secure the Union had been
exhausted, but as the price which New England was willing to pay for an
advantage to her commercial interests.
At a later day, there were those who made it a reproach to the
convention, and a condemnation of their whole work, that they imposed no
prohibition on slavery as it existed in the States. But if such
prohibition was to be attempted, the convention might as well never have
met. The whole theory of the occasion was that the States, as individual
communities, were to be left substantially as they were; self-governing,
except as they intrusted certain definite functions to the general
government. When only a single State, and that almost without cost, had
abolished slavery within itself, it was out of the question that all of
the States should through their common agents decree an act of social
virtue wholly beyond what they had individually achieved. Any human
State exists only by tolerating in its individual citizens a wide
freedom of action, even in matters of ethical quality; and a federated
nation must allow its local communities largely to fix their own
standard of social conduct. At the point which the American people had
reached, the next imperative step of evolution was that they unite
themselves in a social organism, such as must allow free play to many
divergencies. For the convention to take direct action for the abolition
of slavery was beyond the possibilities of the case. It was in making
provision for the extension of the evil that it was untrue to its ideal,
sacrificed its possibilities, and opened the door for the long
domination of a mischievous element.
But the main work of the convention was well and wisely done. Not less
fine was the self-control and sagacity with which the people and their
leaders debated and finally adopted the new order. Advocates of a
stronger government, like Hamilton, and champions of a more popular
system, like Samuel Adams and Jefferson, sank their preferences and
successfully urged their constituents to accept this as the best
available settlement. Slavery played very little part in the popular
discussions, and only a few keen observers like Madison read the
portents in that quarter. The young nation was swept at once into
difficulties and struggles in other directions.
A word, before we follow the history, as to the sentiments of the great
leaders in this period. Broadly, they all viewed slavery as a wrong and
evil; they looked hopefully for its early extinction; they recognized
great difficulties in adapting the negro to conditions of freedom; and
they were in general too much absorbed in other and pressing problems to
direct much practical effort toward emancipation. Washington's view is
nowhere better given than in the casual talk so graphically reported by
Bernard. He desired universal liberty, but believed it would only come
when the negroes were fit for it; at present they were as unqualified to
live without a master's control as children or idiots. Washington's way
was to look at facts and to deal with a situation as he found it, and
not to try to order the world by general and abstract ideals. He was
intensely practical, responsive to each present call of duty, and in his
conception of duty taking wider and wider views as he was trained by
years and experience. The incident which brought him and Bernard
together was characteristic; if any chaise was upset in his
neighborhood, trust Washington to have a hand in righting it! The
natural reply to his talk about the negroes might have been: "Since you
desire their freedom, but think them not fit for it, why not make a
business--you and the country--of making them fit?" And the answer
fairly might have been: "The country and I have as yet had too much else
to do." Besides his public services, he was a planter on the largest
scale; thousands of acres and hundreds of slaves had come to him by
inheritance and by marriage. He was most thorough and successful in his
private affairs; through all his cares in the Revolution, scarcely ever
visiting his home, he kept in close touch with his steward and regulated
the plantation's management by constant correspondence. He had the
reputation of a just but strict master. His slaves were well fed and
clothed; they were supported in infancy and old age; they were trained
in work according to their capacity, and taught something of morals and
religion; in point of physical comfort and security, and of industrial
and moral development, they were by no means at the bottom of the scale
of humanity. The slave-holder's position, however unjust by an absolute
standard, and with great possibilities of abuse, was, in the case of the
rightly-disposed man--and such were common--a position which had its
grave duties and often onerous burdens to be conscientiously borne.
Hardly was the war ended when the country's needs summoned Washington
again to long and arduous service. Retired from the Presidency, his
successor called him, not in vain, to head the army which the threatened
French war would call into action. Who can blame him that he did not
undertake in addition a complete reorganization of the labor system of
his own farms and of Virginia? Inconsistent perhaps it was,--a very
human inconsistency,--that his slaves, who, he told Bernard, were unfit
for freedom, were given their freedom by his will, though not until his
wife's death. That we may take as an imperfect essay of conscience to
deal with a situation so complicated that no ideal solution was
apparent. But we may fairly read as his unspoken legacy to his
countrymen of the next generation: "My associates and I have won
national independence, social order, and equal rights for our own race;
deal you as courageously and strongly with the problems which remain."
Jefferson was an enthusiast for moral ideals, and a warm believer in the
merit and trustworthiness of average humanity. He ennobled the struggle
of the colonies against England by writing on the flag the universal and
undying ideas that the authority of governments rests solely on their
justice and public utility, and that every man has an inalienable right
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And Jefferson did not
flinch, as did many of his associates, from giving that right a full and
general application to blacks as well as whites. Nor was he a mere
doctrinaire. As he revolted from the abstract injustice of slavery, so
its concrete abuses as he saw them, filled him with horror. He wrote: "I
tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." He described
what he had seen. "The whole commerce between master and slave is a
perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions,--the most
unremitting despotism on the one part and degrading submission on the
other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it, for man is an
imitative animal.... The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the
lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller
slaves, gives a loose rein to the worst of passions; and thus nursed,
educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it
with odious peculiarities."
But Jefferson shared a common belief of his time, that it was futile to
hope to "retain and incorporate the blacks into the State." He wrote:
"Deep-rooted prejudices of the whites, ten thousand recollections of
blacks of injuries sustained, new provocations, the real distinction
Nature has made, and many other circumstances, will divide us into
parties and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in
the extermination of one or the other race." So he looked for a remedy
to emancipation followed by deportation. But he hesitated to affirm any
essential inferiority in the negro race. He wrote: "The opinion that
they are inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination must be
hazarded with great diffidence." Later he wrote that "they were gaining
daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making toward
their re-establishment on an equal footing with other colors of the
human family."
Jefferson was more than a theorist; he was skillful to persuade men, and
to organize and lead a party. His general tendency was "along the line
of least resistance,"--the summoning of men to free themselves from
oppressive restraint; and he was highly successful until he called on
them for severe self-sacrifice, when his supporters were apt suddenly to
fail him. Virginia gladly followed his lead in abolishing primogeniture
and entail, and overthrowing the Established Church. She even consented,
in 1778, to abolish the African slave-trade, being then in little need
of more slaves than she possessed. In 1779 he planned a far more radical
and costly project--a general emancipation. All slaves born after the
passage of the act were to be free; they were to dwell with their
parents till a certain age, then to be educated at the public expense in
"tillage, arts, or sciences," until the males were twenty-one years old
and the females eighteen; then they were to be colonized in some
suitable region, furnished with arms, implements, seeds and cattle;
declared a free and independent people, under American protection until
strong enough to stand alone; and meanwhile their place as laborers was
to be filled by whites sent for by vessels to other parts of the world.
It is hardly strange that the Legislature did not even take the measure
into consideration, and it does not appear that Jefferson ever returned
to it. Practical legislation was not his forte. But his influence told
nobly, as has been related, in barring slavery from the Northwestern
territory, and, had just a little more support been found in 1784, would
have saved the Southwest also to freedom, with almost certain promise of
result in early freeing of the whole country. Just two or three votes in
the Continental Congress,--on such small hinges does the destiny of
nations seem to turn.
The inertia which holds men even exceptionally high-minded from breaking
strong ties of custom and convenience is shown by a letter of Patrick
Henry to a Quaker in 1773, in which he declared slavery "as repugnant to
humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive of
liberty. Every thinking, honest man rejects it as speculation, but how
few in practice from conscientious motives! Would any one believe that I
am a master of slaves of my own purchase? I am drawn along by the
general inconvenience of living without them."
There is no need to dwell further on the anti-slavery sentiments of the
group of great leaders who were the glory of the nation. It is to be
noted that Franklin took a characteristically active part in aiding to
establish an anti-slavery society in Philadelphia in 1782. Shrewd as he
was high-minded and benevolent, Franklin was always a special master in
organizing men in societies for effective and progressive action. His
tact won France to the American alliance, and decisively turned the
scale in the Revolutionary war; and his conciliatory yet resolute spirit
was a main factor in the constitutional convention. This Pennsylvania
anti-slavery society led the way to the early adoption by the State of
gradual emancipation. Franklin, an optimist by temperament and by his
large faith in mankind, looked confidently for the early end of slavery;
as fast as men ripened into honesty and sense, he thought, they would
recognize the folly and wrong of it.
Looking from the leaders to the mass of the community, in this early
period, we see these broad facts. Slavery was regarded by all as an
evil, and by most as a wrong. Even its champions in the convention
claimed no more for it than that it was a necessary evil; one of the
Pinckneys expressed the hope of its extinction at an early day, and the
other Pinckney dissented only in thinking this too sanguine. Further,
there was a distinct wave of anti-slavery sentiment, sympathetic with
the lofty temper of the Revolution and the genesis of a free nation.
That wave was strong enough to wipe out slavery where its economic hold
was slight; it was plainly destined to sweep at least through all the
Northern and Middle States, and hope was high that it might go farther.
But this moral enthusiasm broke helpless against the institution
wherever a strong property interest was involved with it. Manumission in
the South went no further than a few individuals. Virginia and Maryland,
needing no more slaves, ceased importing them; but South Carolina and
Georgia bargained successfully for a twenty years' supply.
Massachusetts, having almost inadvertently freed her few slaves, was
willing that the stream of misery should still flow on from Africa to
the South. In a word, so far as the negroes were concerned, the supposed
material interest of the whites remained the dominating factor
throughout the country.
CHAPTER III
CONFLICT AND COMPROMISE
For thirty years after the Constitution was established, slavery falls
into the background of the national history. Other and absorbing
interests were to the front. First, the strife of Federalist and
Democrat: Should the central government be strengthened, or should the
common people be more fully trusted? Twelve years of conservative
ascendency under Washington and Adams; then a complete and lasting
triumph for the popular party led by Jefferson. Mixed with and
succeeding this came an exasperating and perplexing struggle for
commercial rights, invaded equally by England and France in their
gigantic grapple; an ineffectual defense by Jefferson, who in executive
office proved an unskillful pilot; a half-hearted war under Madison, a
closet statesman out of place in the Presidential chair; a temporary
alienation of New England, exasperated by the loss of her commerce and
suspicious of the Jeffersonian influence; a participation in the general
peace which followed 1815, and a revival of industry. Under this surface
tide of events went on a steady, quiet advance of the democratic
movement. With Jefferson's administration disappeared the Federal party
and the old distrust of the common people. State after State gave up the
property qualification--almost universal in the first period--and
adopted manhood suffrage. Slavery disappeared from the North; in New
Hampshire it was abolished by judicial decision, as in Massachusetts;
Connecticut, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania passed gradual emancipation
laws, and a little later New York and New Jersey did the same. In
Kentucky, settled by hardy pioneers from Virginia, there had been a
vigorous campaign to establish a free State; the Baptist preachers,
strong leaders in morals and religion, had championed the cause of
freedom; the victory seemed decisively won, by three to one it was said,
in the election of May, 1798; but a torrent of excitement over the alien
and sedition laws submerged other issues, and the convention sanctioned
slavery as it existed. The African slave trade was made piracy by act of
Congress in 1808, though the extreme penalty was not inflicted for sixty
years, and a considerable traffic still went on. In furtherance of
emancipation, a colonization society was started in Pennsylvania, and in
a few years it had transported 20,000 freed negroes to Africa, and
established the feeble colony of Liberia. Meanwhile the first French
republic had freed half a million slaves in the West Indies; and Chili,
Buenos Ayres, Columbia, and Mexico, as they gained their independence
from Spain, had abolished slavery. The European reaction against the
French republic and empire had largely spent itself; the English
tradition of constitutional freedom had survived and promised to spread;
the Spanish colonies in America had won their independence.
The stiller and deeper current of industrial progress had moved on apace
in the United States. A new New England was being swiftly built in the
Northwest. The Southwest, too, was growing fast. The acquisition of the
Louisiana territory,--through an exigency of Napoleon's politics, and
the wise inconsistency of Jefferson--had opened another vast domain. At
the North, commerce, set free again, spread rapidly, and a new era of
manufactures was opening. The South--more diffusely settled, with less
social activity, with a debased labor class--caught less of the spirit
of advance. But on one line it gained. Following the English inventions
in spinning and weaving, and the utilization of the stationary
steam-engine, a Connecticut man, Eli Whitney, had invented a cotton-gin,
for separating the seed from the fibre, and the cotton plant came to the
front of the scene. The crop rose in value in twenty years from
$6,000,000 to $20,000,000. The value of slaves was trebled, and the
border States began to do a thriving trade in exporting them to the
cotton States--it was said a little later the yearly export reached
50,000.
As new States were organized and admitted, those from the Northwest came
in without slavery, which had been kept out by the ordinance of 1787,
and those from the Southwest, where slaves had been carried by the
emigrants from the seaboard, were allowed without question to retain the
institution. Of the old thirteen, New Hampshire, Massachusetts,
Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York New Jersey, Pennsylvania (spite of a
few slaves lingering in the last three) were counted as free
States--seven in all; Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, the two Carolinas,
Georgia, were claimed as slave States--six. Speedily were added Vermont
to the one column, and Kentucky and Tennessee to the other, making the
numbers equal. The following acquisitions were free and slave States
alternately: Ohio and Louisiana, Indiana and Mississippi, Illinois and
Alabama, a total, so far, of eleven free and eleven slave. Of the new
Southwestern domain, Arkansas had been organized as a territory, early
in 1819, and a motion that slavery be excluded had been defeated in the
House by the casting vote of the speaker, Henry Clay.
But in all these thirty years the subject of slavery had little
prominence in public discussion. Now it suddenly came to the front. A
bill was brought into Congress to permit Missouri to organize as a
State. It was part of the Louisiana purchase, of which the Southern
portion had inherited and retained slavery; but Missouri was
geographically an extension of the region of the Ohio States, in which
free labor had made an established and congenial home. It was moved in
Congress that slavery should be excluded from the new State, and on this
instantly sprang up a fiery debate. On one side it was urged that
slavery was a wrong and an evil, and that Congress had full power to
exclude it from a State as a condition of admittance to the Union. On
the other side slavery was defended not only as an industrial advantage,
but as morally right and a benefit to both blacks and whites. It was
strenuously declared that the people of each incoming State had a right
to determine their own institutions; and it was also urged that to keep
the balance of power between the two sections, it was necessary that
slave States should be admitted equally with free. It was disclosed with
startling suddenness that two systems of labor and society stood face to
face, with different ideals, different interests, and in a mutual
opposition to which no limits could be foreseen. It was plain that with
the increase of profit from slavery all idea of its abolition had been
quietly dropping from the minds of the great mass of the Southern
community. It was equally plain that the sentiment against slavery in
the North had increased greatly in distinctness and intensity. There was
apparent, too, a divergence of material interests, and a keen rivalry of
political interests. The South had been losing ground in comparison.
From an equality in population, the North had gained a majority of
600,000 in a total of 10,000,000. The approaching census of 1820 would
give the North a preponderance of thirty in the House. In wealth, too,
the North had been obviously drawing ahead. Only in the Senate did the
South retain an equality of power, and, to maintain at least this, by
the accession of new slave States, was an avowed object of Southern
politicians.
The debate was so hot, the underlying causes of opposition were so
obvious, and the avowed determination of the contestants was so
resolute, that the unity and continuance of the nation was unmistakably
threatened. State Legislatures passed resolutions for one side or the
other, according to their geographical location; only the Delaware
Legislature was superior to the sectional consideration, and voted
unanimously in favor of holding Missouri for freedom. The alarm as to
the continuance of the Union was general and great. No one felt it more
keenly than Jefferson, startled in his scholarly and peaceful retirement
at Monticello, as he said, as by "a fire-bell in the night." He wrote:
"In the gloomiest movements of the Revolutionary war, I never had an
apprehension equal to that I feel from this source." It was a grave omen
that Jefferson's sympathies were with his section rather than with
freedom; he joined in the opposition to the exclusion of slavery from
Missouri. He had no love for slavery, but he was jealous for the right
of each State to choose its own way, for good or evil; a political
theory outweighed in him the sentiment of humanity.
A compromise was proposed. Let Missouri have slavery if she will, but
for the Northwest let it be "thus far and no farther"; let it be fixed
that there shall be no more slave States north of the line which marks
Missouri's southern boundary, the line of 36 degrees 30 minutes north
latitude. Present advantage to the South, future security to the North;
and meantime let Maine be admitted, which keeps the balance equal. This
was the solution accepted by both sides after a discussion lasting
through the Congressional session of 1819-20 until March. But the
smothered flame broke out again. Missouri in 1820 adopted a
constitution, and asked for admission according to promise; and one
clause in her constitution forbade the entrance of free blacks into the
State. This was too much for the North, already half disgusted with the
concession it had made, and when Congress met for the session of 1820-21
the whole question was reopened, and the dispute was hotter and more
obstinate than ever. The issue was wholly uncertain, and disunion seemed
to hover near and dark, when Henry Clay, who in the first debate had
taken no very important part, but had supported the Southern claim, now
threw his whole power, which was great, in favor of conciliation and
agreement on the original basis. Clay was a politician, and ambitious
for the Presidency, but he was a patriot and a lover of humanity. As to
slavery he was a waverer, disliking it at heart and sometimes speaking
manfully against it, but at other times respectful toward it as an
established and mighty fact, and even lending himself to its eulogy. In
the first debate he had advocated the Southern side, had extolled
slavery, and declared the black slaves of the South to be better off
than the white slaves of the North. Now he gave all his persuasive and
commanding eloquence, all the influence of his genial nature and winning
arts, to rally the lovers of the Union to the mutual concessions by
which alone it could be preserved. He justified the objection to the
exclusion of free negroes, he divested himself of sectional
partisanship, and pleaded with equal skill and fervor for the
compromise. He did not forget that he was a Presidential aspirant, but
he was a true lover of his country, and seldom have the traits of
politician and patriot worked together more effectively. Though the mass
of the Northern members, strengthened doubtless by the influence of
their constituents at home during the recess, were now opposed to the
whole compromise, and a few Southern extremists were against it, yet
the majority of both House and Senate were won to its support, and on
the last day of February, 1821, Missouri was admitted as a slave State,
on condition that she expunge her exclusion of free blacks, which she
promptly did. Maine had already been admitted. The excitement ended
almost as suddenly as it had begun.
CHAPTER IV
THE WIDENING RIFT
For the next twelve years, slavery was in the background of the national
stage. But during this period, various influences were converging to a
common result, until in 1832-3 the issue was defined with new clearness
and thenceforth grew as the central feature in the public life of
America.
From the time of the Missouri debate, the slavery interest was
consolidated and alert, even while other subjects seemed to fill the
public mind. To the North, slavery was habitually a remote matter, but
it was perpetually brought home to the business and bosoms of the South.
The whole industrial system, a social aristocracy, and political
ambition, blended their forces. An instance of the subtle power of the
institution was given in a little-marked incident of Adams's generally
creditable administration. By three men as high-minded as President
Adams, Secretary Clay, and Minister Gallatin, overtures were made to
England for a treaty by which the surrender of deserters from her army
and navy should be her compensation for surrendering our fugitive
slaves! The British government would not listen to the proposal.
The national politics of this period, 1820-32, centred in a group of
strong and picturesque personalities,--Clay, Adams, Calhoun, Jackson,
and Webster. John Quincy Adams was a sort of exaggeration of the typical
New Englander,--upright, austere, highly educated, devoted to the public
service, ambitious, yet not to the sacrifice of conscience, but cold,
angular, repellant. Says Carl Schurz in his _Henry Clay_--a book which
gives an admirable resumé of a half-century of politics: "He possessed
in the highest degree that uprightness which leans backward. He had a
horror of demagogy, and lest he should render himself guilty of anything
akin to it, he would but rarely condescend to those innocent amenities
by which the good-will of others may be conciliated. His virtue was
freezing cold of touch, and forbidding in its look." When the
Presidential election went into the House in 1824, the influence of
Clay--himself a defeated candidate--was decisively thrown for Adams
against Jackson, and Clay served as President Adams's Secretary of
State. The two men supplemented each other well; Clay less austerely
virtuous, but far more lovable; his personal ideals less exacting, but
his sympathies wider. The co-operation between them was honorable to
both and serviceable to the country; but partisan bitterness stigmatized
it as a corrupt alliance; the air was full of suspicion and jealousy
toward the cultivated and prosperous class that had hitherto supplied
the chiefs of the government, and the rising democratic sentiment found
a most congenial hero in Andrew Jackson.
He was a rough backwoodsman; a fighter by nature and a passable soldier;
a staunch friend and a patriot at heart; ignorant, wholly unversed in
statesmanship, arbitrary in temper, and inclined to judge all subjects
from a personal standpoint. He easily defeated Adams for the Presidency
in 1828. His election marked the ascendancy, long to continue, of a more
ignoble element in the nation's political life. His administration began
the employment of the spoils system; and it "handled intricate financial
problems as a monkey might handle the works of a watch." Jackson had
small regard for the rights of those who got in the way of himself, his
party, or his country; he had trampled recklessly on the Indian; and his
triumph fell as a heavy discouragement on the quiet but widespread
movement to elevate the negro. He treated all questions in a personal
way; and the first great battle of his administration was to compel
social recognition in Washington for the wife of one of his cabinet
members whose reputation scandal had breathed upon, unjustly as Jackson
believed. In the revolt against her recognition a leader was the
Vice-President, John C. Calhoun, himself a man of blameless morals and
an advocate of the highest social standards. He thereby lost at once the
favor of Jackson, which was transferred to Martin Van Buren, a wily New
York politician, quite ready to call on any lady or support any policy
that his chief might approve. The breach between Jackson and Calhoun was
widened by the disclosure of an old political secret, probably by
Crawford of Georgia, a disappointed Presidential aspirant. Jackson's
administration naturally fell more and more into the hands of mediocre
men.
Calhoun had already had a long term of distinguished public service; he
had been one of the group of young men who came to the front in urging
on the war of 1812; he had served with success in the cabinet and twice
been chosen to the Vice-Presidency. He was of high personal character; a
keen logician and debater; a leader who impressed himself by the
strength of his character and depth of his convictions. Adams wrote of
him in 1821: "He is above all sectional and factious prejudices, more
than any other statesman of this Union with whom I have ever acted." He
was ambitious of the Presidency, an ambition which saw itself defeated
when Van Buren became the heir-apparent of the Jackson dynasty. A true
lover of his country, his predominant devotion came to be given to his
own section, and that temper fell in with events to make him the
foremost champion of the South.
The prominence of the personal element in public affairs was connected
with the absence of any clear and deep division upon large questions of
policy. There emerged a group of ideas constituting what was called the
"American system," of which Clay was the foremost advocate, and which
became the basis of the Whig party, as it was organized in the early
'30's. Its general principle was the free use of the Federal
government's resources for the industrial and commercial betterment of
the people; and its prominent applications were a national bank, a
system of national highroads and waterways, and a liberal use of the
protective principle in tariff laws. "Protection to American industry"
was the great cry by which Clay now rallied his followers. The special
direction of this protection was in favor of American manufacturers. By
very high taxes levied on imported goods, the price of those was
necessarily raised to the consumer, and the American maker of clothes,
cutlery, and so on, was enabled to raise his own prices correspondingly.
Naturally, this result was most gratifying to the manufacturer and his
dependents and allies. No less naturally, it was highly objectionable to
the consumer. But to the consumer it was pointed out that by thus
fostering the "infant industries" of his country they would be
strengthened to the point where they could and would supply him with his
goods far more cheaply than would otherwise be possible. But this
pleasing promise, held out now for some seventy-five years, somehow
failed to quite satisfy the consumer; and where whole classes and
sections were consumers only, from the tariff standpoint, and saw
themselves mulcted for the benefit of classes and sections already
richer than they, they grumbled loudly, and did not always stop with
grumbling. So when in 1828 a tariff was enacted imposing very high
duties on most manufactured articles, and which delighted the hearts of
New England and Middle States manufacturers, it was so obnoxious to
others that the name was fastened to it of "the tariff of abominations,"
and history has never changed that name.
There were hopes of relief under Jackson, but in the confusion of party
issues, and with the tariff supported by the consolidated strength of
the manufacturers--a consolidation powerful enough to make Webster its
spokesman in Congress; a consolidation as definite and resolute as that
of the slave-holders, and destined to be far longer-lived,--no change in
legislation came till 1832, and then the change was immaterial; the
"tariff of abominations" was substantially re-enacted. The South had
been chafing bitterly, and now South Carolina broke into open revolt.
The whole South felt itself aggrieved by the tariff. Its industrial
system was not suited to develop manufactures; it lacked the material
for skilled labor; it lacked the artisan class who create a demand. Its
staple industry was agriculture, the growth of tobacco, rice, sugar, and
above all, cotton, and it went to the North and to Europe for its
manufactured goods. A system of taxation which doubled the price of its
imports without helping its exports, was resented as unjust, and as
hostile to the spirit if not the letter of the Constitution.
South Carolina took the lead, and indeed stood alone, in applying a
remedy more drastic than the disease--nullification. Calhoun's logic
welded and sharpened the weapon which had behind it almost the entire
weight of the State. The precise relation of the States to the Union,
left indeterminate in the Constitution, and debated in every crisis
which had strained the bonds, was now asserted by Calhoun to involve the
right of any State to declare null and void any action of the Federal
Congress which impaired its rights. South Carolina now put the theory
into action. She held near the close of 1832 a convention, which
declared the tariff law unconstitutional and void; asserted that the
State would no longer pay duties under it, and if coercion was attempted
would secede outright.
Congress discussed the matter; and in the most memorable and classic of
Senate debates, Hayne of South Carolina vindicated the State's position
with logic, passion, and eloquence; while Webster replied with an equal
logic, a broader and higher ideal of nationality, a vindication of New
England which thrilled all hearts, and a patriotism which gave the
keynote to the ultimate triumph of the Union. Hitherto, Massachusetts
and South Carolina had each stood stiffly at times for her own way, even
at peril of the national bond; but in that hour the individuality of
South Carolina was merged in the slave-holding States, and that of
Massachusetts in a Union, one and indivisible.
The challenge of South Carolina was promptly answered by Jackson, just
re-elected President. He issued a proclamation, proclaiming
nullification as political heresy, and threatening to treat its
practical exercise as treason. But the situation was not destined to
settlement by the high hand. Webster favored such a settlement; he was
for no concession. As well make the issue now as ever, he said. The
President's friends introduced a bill giving him authority, if
nullification were insisted on, to close ports of entry, collect duties
by military force, and the like; "the force bill," it was called. But
the "tariff of abominations" was not the most satisfactory or promising
ground on which to assert the national sovereignty. And Jackson was
hardly a desirable man to intrust with indefinite military power. So
urged the timid or the moderate, and Clay was again the spokesman of
compromise. He brought in a tariff bill, by which all duties above 20
per cent. were to be gradually reduced until in 10 years they reached
that figure, at which they were to remain. This bill and the force bill
were passed together, and signed the same day. Confronted by the
government with the sword in one hand and the olive branch in the other,
South Carolina retracted--it was not a capitulation--and repealed the
ordinance. Nullification as a theory passed out of sight. But the
willingness of the extreme South to push to all lengths its resistance
to a hostile policy remained, and was felt in all that followed.
It was a distinct tradition among Calhoun's followers after his
death--and they followed him till Appomattox--that he privately gave as
a reason for making the first battle on the tariff question rather than
on slavery, that on the first the world's sympathies would be with them,
and on slavery against them. The same tradition ascribed to Calhoun the
prediction that the Northern influence would become predominant in the
Union about 1860. Whether or not Calhoun said these things, the tariff
issue certainly was brought on by the North; and the "compromise" on it
was a substantial victory gained by South Carolina for the South. The
final verdict of history may be that it was a just victory, won by
unjust means. Calhoun now stood forth the recognized leader of his
section, while it soon became apparent that of that section slavery was
the special bond, and was to be its avowed creed.
Almost unobserved for a time amid these exciting events, the debate over
slavery had been going on, transferred mainly from the political field
to the minds and consciences of individuals. Once in State politics it
came to an issue. Illinois, a free State without question at its
admission in 1818, had a majority of its early immigrants from the
South, and a determined effort was made to introduce slavery by law. It
met a still more vigorous resistance, in which the Methodist and Baptist
clergy, mainly Southern men, took a leading part. The opposition was
led by a Southerner, Gov. Edward Coles, one of the forgotten heroes.
Inheriting in Virginia some hundreds of slaves, and hindered by the
State laws from emancipating them, he took them all to Illinois, gave
them their freedom, supplied them with land, cabins, stock, and tools,
and watched and befriended them till they became self-supporting. In
each deed of emancipation he gave his testimony: "Whereas, I do not
believe a man can have a right of property in his fellow men ... I do
therefore ... restore to the said ---- that inalienable liberty of which
they have been deprived." He led the fight against the introduction of
slavery into Illinois to a decisive victory in 1824. A few more such men
throughout the South, and history would have been different.
A quiet advocacy of anti-slavery went on throughout the country, except
the extreme South. It was in sympathy with the general revival of
religious activity which began about 1815--a form of the new national
life, disentangled from European complications, and free for home
conquests and widening achievements. Three great evils aroused the
spirit of reform--intemperance, slavery, and war. The general assembly
of the Presbyterian church, representing the whole country, in 1818, by
a unanimous vote, condemned slavery as "a gross violation of the most
sacred and precious rights of human nature, and utterly inconsistent
with the law of God, which requires us to love our neighbor as
ourselves." In 1824-7 the Legislatures of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New
Jersey passed resolutions calling on Congress to provide for compensated
emancipation, and expressing willingness that their States should pay
their share of the burden. This last sentiment was a rare one; the
self-sacrifice it demanded from the non-slave-holding States was very
little in evidence during the long contest that followed; men would
speak and vote for freedom; when angry enough they would fight--to
defeat the master and incidentally to free the slave--but to pay, in
cold blood, and in heavy measure, for the ransom of the slaves, was a
different matter; and few were they who, like Lincoln, favored that way
out. The action of those three Legislatures marked the height of the
early anti-slavery tide, and prompted a hope which was never fulfilled.
In the decade 1820-30, more than 100 anti-slavery societies were
established in slave States (see _James G. Birney and His Times_, an
admirable exposition of the conservative anti-slavery movement). The
Manumission Society of North Carolina in 1825 took a kind of census of
the State, and concluded that of its people 60 in 100 favored
emancipation in some form. In the same year a pamphlet published in
Charleston, S. C., on "The Critical Situation and Future Prospects of
the Slave-Holding States," bitterly declared that the whole book and
newspaper press of the North and East teemed with articles on slavery.
In Maryland, an anti-slavery party in 1826 elected two members to the
House of Delegates; but this movement disappeared on the election of
Jackson two years later. In Alabama, Birney, a man of a fine type, and
growing toward leadership, secured in 1827 the passage of a law
forbidding the importation of slaves as merchandise; but this was
repealed two years later. So the wave flowed and ebbed, but on the whole
it seemed to advance.
Among local societies in the Northern States, one may be instanced in
New Haven, Ct., in which, in 1825, five young men associated themselves;
among them were Edward Beecher, Leonard Bacon, and Theodore D. Woolsey.
They were highly practical; their immediate aims were: First to elevate
the black population of New Haven; secondly, to influence public
sentiment in the city and State; and thirdly, to influence the
theological students in Yale college. So faithful were their labors in
their own city for its black population--described as in most wretched
condition, which seems to have been the case with most of the blacks at
the North in this period--that six years later Garrison pronounced them
more comfortable and less injured by prejudice than in any other place
in the Union. The young men of the New Haven and Andover seminaries
united in a project of a college for the blacks; strong support was
obtained; but the fierce wave of reaction following Nat Turner's revolt
swept it away. Lane seminary at Cincinnati, a Presbyterian stronghold,
became a center of enthusiastic anti-slavery effort, with the brilliant
young Theodore D. Weld as its foremost apostle; he was welcomed and
heard in the border slave States. The authorities of the college,
alarmed by the audacity of their pupils, tried to restrain the movement,
and the result was a great secession of students.
The seceders proposed to form a theological department at Oberlin
College (established two years before) if they could have Charles G.
Finney, the famous revivalist, as their teacher. But Finney declined to
take the place until the conservative trustees consented to admit
colored youths to the College; and thus Oberlin became an anti-slavery
stronghold.
As the anti-slavery movement developed, the call for immediate
liberation became more insistent and imperative. The colonization method
lost credit. Slavery was coming to be regarded by its opponents not
merely as a social evil to be eradicated, but as a personal sin of the
slave-holder, to be renounced as promptly as any other sin. John Wesleys
words were a keynote: "Instantly, at any price, were it the half of your
goods, deliver thyself from blood-guiltiness!" A Virginia minister, Rev.
George Bourne, published in 1816 _Slavery and the Book Irreconcilable_,
in which he said: "The system is so entirely corrupt that it admits of
no cure but by a total and immediate abolition." Two other Southern
ministers, James Duncan and John Rankin, wrote to the same effect. In
England, the abolition of slavery in the West India colonies was being
persistently urged; the impulse was a part of the philanthropic movement
that went along with the evangelical revival, and Wilberforce was its
leader. These English abolitionists were coming to "immediatism" from
1824, and their influence told in America.
Among the most unselfish and devoted laborers for the slave was Benjamin
Lundy. He was a Quaker by birth and training; he overtaxed his strength
and permanently impaired his hearing by prematurely trying to do a man's
work on his father's farm in New Jersey, and settled at the saddler's
trade in Wheeling, Va., in 1808. With the outlawing of the African slave
trade, there was beginning the sale of slaves from Virginia to the
Southern cotton-fields, and the sight of the sorrowful exiles moved
Lundy's heart to a lifelong devotion of himself to pleading the cause of
the slave. Infirm, deaf, unimpressive in speech and bearing, trudging on
long journeys, and accepting a decent poverty, he gave all the resources
of a strong and sweet nature to the service of the friendless and
unhappy. He supported himself by his trade, while he lectured and wrote.
He established in 1821 a weekly _Genius of Universal Emancipation_, at
Mt. Pleasant, O., starting without a dollar of capital and only six
subscribers; and at first walking twenty miles every week to the
printing press, and returning with his edition on his back. Four years
later he moved his paper to Baltimore. Anti-slavery agitation was still
tolerated in the border States, though once Lundy was attacked by a
bully who almost murdered him. When the impending election of Jackson
in 1828 came as a chill to the anti-slavery cause, the waning fortunes
of his paper sent Lundy to Boston to seek aid. There he found sympathy
in a number of the clergy, though fear of arousing the hostility of the
South kept them cautious. Dr. Channing wrote to Daniel Webster,
expressing the fullest sympathy with Lundy's devotion to freedom, but
also the gravest apprehension that unless the slaveholders were
approached in a spirit of friendliness rather than denunciation, there
would result a sectional strife fraught with the greatest danger. We
should say to the South, wrote Channing, "Slavery is your calamity and
not your crime"; and the whole nation should assume the burden of
emancipation, meeting the expense by the revenue from the sale of public
lands. In this brief letter of Channing's there is more of true
statesmanship than in all the utterances of the politicians of his day.
But Lundy (himself not given to denunciation) made one convert of a very
different temper from Channing's or his own--William Lloyd Garrison, a
young man educated in a printing-office, fearless, enthusiastic, and
energetic in the highest degree. Quickly won to the emancipation idea,
and passing soon to full belief in immediate and uncompensated
liberation, he allied himself with Lundy as the active editor of the
_Genius_, while the older man devoted himself to traveling and
lecturing. The _Genius_ at once became militant and aggressive. The
incidents which constantly fell under Garrison's eye--slave auctions and
whippings--fanned the fire within him. One day, for example, a slave
came into the office, told his story, and showed the proofs. His master
had lately died, leaving him his freedom, which was to be legally
effected in a few weeks; but in the meantime the overseer under whom he
worked, displeased at his way of loading a wagon, flogged him with a
cowhide so severely that his back showed twenty-seven terrible gashes.
Garrison appealed to the master's heirs for redress, but was repelled
with contumely. Presently he assailed an old fellow-townsman in
Newburyport, Mass., because a ship he owned had been employed to
transport a cargo of slaves from Baltimore to New Orleans. The
denunciation was unmeasured; the ship-owner brought suit, and as some
points in the article were not sustained by the evidence, Garrison was
fined $100. Unable to pay he went to jail, bearing his captivity with
courage and high cheer, till Arthur Tappan, a New York merchant and a
leader in the anti-slavery cause, paid his fine and released him. The
_Genius_ being ruined, Garrison transferred his field of labor to
Boston, where, at the beginning of 1831, he started the weekly
_Liberator_. He and his partner, Isaac Knapp, did all the work of every
kind, living principally on bread and water, and with only six hours a
week, and those at midnight, for Garrison to write his articles. The
paper's motto was: "Our country is the world, our countrymen are all
mankind." In his salutatory Garrison wrote: "I will be as harsh as truth
and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think
or speak or write with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on
fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife
from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate
her babe from the fire into which it has fallen,--but urge me not to use
moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest--I will not
equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not retract a single inch--and I
will be heard!"
While Garrison's language was constantly such as to arouse passion to
the boiling point, he was always in theory a supporter of peace, opposed
to war under any conditions, and even to resistance of force by force.
But in 1829 there appeared a pamphlet of a different tenor; an
_Appeal_, by Walker, a Boston negro, addressed directly to the slaves.
It was a fiery recital of their wrongs and an incitement to forcible
redress. Its appearance in the South caused great excitement. The
Governors of Virginia and Georgia sent special messages to their
Legislatures about it. Garrison wrote of it, in the _Genius_: "It
breathes the most impassioned and determined spirit. We deprecate its
publication, though we cannot but wonder at the bravery and intelligence
of its author." Garrison's biographers--his sons--speak of Walker as "a
sort of John the Baptist to the new anti-slavery dispensation." It was
well for the Baptist that his head was out of Herod's reach. The Georgia
Legislature passed in a single day a bill forbidding the entry of free
negroes into the State, and making "the circulation of pamphlets of evil
tendency among our domestics" a capital offense.
Large as these events loom in the retrospect, they were comparatively
little noticed in their time. Virginia held in 1830 a convention for the
revision of her constitution; among its members were Madison, Monroe,
and Randolph; and emancipation was not even mentioned. Jefferson was
dead, and the spirit of Jefferson seemed dead. Then the unexpected
happened. There was a negro preacher, a slave named Nat Turner. He was a
man of slight figure, reputed among his people a sort of prophet,
addicted to visions and rhapsodies. He planned in 1831 an uprising of
the slaves. He circulated among them a document written in blood, with
cabalistic figures, and pictures of the sun and a crucifix. One night he
and a group of companions set out on their revolt. Others joined them
voluntarily or by impressment till they numbered forty. They began by
killing Turner's master and his family; then they killed a lady and her
ten children; they attacked a girls' boarding-school and killed all the
inmates. Houses stood open and unguarded, and most of the white men were
away at a camp-meeting. From Sunday night till Monday noon the band went
on its way unchecked, and killed sixty persons. Then the neighborhood
rallied and overcame them; slew several on the spot; but held the rest
for trial, which was held regularly and fairly, and thirteen were
executed. The origin of the outbreak remained mysterious. Turner said on
his trial that he had not been unkindly treated, and there was no
evidence of provocation by special abuse. There was no trace of any
instigation from the North in any form. It seemed not a stroke for
freedom by men worthy to be free; not even a desperate revolt against
intolerable wrong; but more like an outbreak of savagery, the uprising
of the brute in man, thirsty for blood. The fear at first prevailed that
there existed a widespread conspiracy, and various legislation for
protection and repression was enacted or discussed.
But the larger mind of Virginia was moved toward a radical treatment of
the disease itself, instead of its symptoms. In the next session of the
Legislature, 1831-2, proposals for a general emancipation were brought
forward, and the whole subject was canvassed in a long and earnest
debate. For slavery on its merits hardly a word of defense was spoken.
The moral condemnation was not frequent or strong, but the economic
mischief was conceded by almost all. It was recognized that labor was
debased; manufactures and immigration were discouraged; the yeomanry
were leaving the State. One bold speaker declared that the masters were
not entitled to compensation, since property condemned by the State as a
nuisance brings no award of damages to the owner. But the general
agreement was that emancipation should be compensated and gradual, and
that the blacks must be removed from the State. One plan was that they
should be deported in a body to Africa; another, that the
increase--about 6000 a year--should be so deported; while Thomas
Jefferson Randolph urged a plan which recalled that framed by his uncle,
Thomas Jefferson, half a century before. He proposed that the owner
should maintain the slave-child till the age of eighteen or twenty-one,
his labor for the last six or eight years being regarded as compensation
for the expense of infancy; and that the slave should then be hired out
till he had earned his passage to Africa. But, whatever the method, let
decisive action be taken, and taken now! The Legislature, it is said,
was largely made up of young and inexperienced men. Would not the
courage and hopefulness of Virginia youth essay this great deliverance?
Older voices bade them to the task. Said the Richmond _Enquirer_ (edited
by the elder Ritchie), January 7, 1832: "Means, sure but gradual,
systematic but discreet, ought to be adopted for reducing the mass of
evil which is pressing upon the South, and will still more press upon
her the longer it is put off. We say, now, in the utmost sincerity of
our hearts, that our wisest men cannot give too much of their attention
to this subject, nor can they give it too soon." It was one of the
decisive hours of history:
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.
But the task was too great, or the life-long habit of the slave-owner
had been too enervating. The apparent expense, the collision of
different plans, the difficulty in revolutionizing the whole industrial
system, the hold of an aristocracy affording to its upper class a
fascinating leisure and luxury--these, and the absence of any high moral
inspiration in the movement, brought it to naught. Instead of decreeing
emancipation, the Legislature fell back on the policy of stricter
repression. It enacted that the advocacy of rebellion by writing or
printing should be a penitentiary offense, and to express the opinion
that masters had no rights to their slaves was made punishable by a fine
of $500 and one year in jail. To advise conspiracy was treason and its
punishment death. It had been enacted a year before that no white man be
allowed to assemble slaves to instruct them in reading and writing; and
to this it was now added that neither slaves nor free negroes be allowed
to preach.
And so Virginia abdicated her old-time leadership in the cause of human
rights, and the primacy of the South passed to South Carolina and to
Calhoun, the champion of slavery.
In the meantime the organization of the radical anti-slavery force went
on at the North. In 1832 Garrison, Oliver Johnson and ten others
constituted themselves the New England Anti-slavery Society. Almost its
first attack was directed against the Colonization Society, Garrison
being always as fierce against half-way friends as against pronounced
foes. In 1833 a little group of more moderate but resolute men organized
a local association in New York city, and under their call the American
Anti-slavery Society held its first meeting in Philadelphia, in
December. Among the New York leaders were Arthur and Lewis Tappan,
merchants of high standing and men of well-balanced and admirable
character; with them were associated Joshua Leavitt and Elizur Wright.
Among the Massachusetts recruits was Whittier. The sixty-four members
were largely made up of merchants, preachers, and theological students.
Almost all were church members; twenty-one Presbyterians or
Congregationalists, nineteen Quakers, and one Unitarian,--Samuel J. May.
There was a noticeable absence of men versed in public affairs. The
constitution was carefully drawn to safeguard the society against the
imputation of unconstitutional or anarchic tendencies. It declared that
the right to legislate for the abolition of slavery existed only in the
Legislature of each State; that the society would appeal to Congress to
prohibit the interstate slave trade, to abolish slavery in the District
of Columbia and the territories, and to admit no more slave States; and
that the society would not countenance the insurrection of slaves.
Garrison, who had been visiting the Abolitionists in England, was not
among the signers of the call to the convention, and the constitution
was hardly in the line of his views; but he wrote a declaration of
principles which after some debate was adopted. It was impassioned and
unsparing; pictured the woes of the slaves and the essential wickedness
of the system; denounced compensation and colonization; declared that
"all laws admitting the right of slavery are before God utterly null and
void" and "ought instantly to be abrogated"; and called for a universal
and unresting agitation.
CHAPTER V
CALHOUN AND GARRISON
Thus, with the beginning of the second third of the nineteenth century,
the issue as to American slavery was distinctly drawn, and the leading
parties to it had taken their positions. Let us try to understand the
motive and spirit of each.
In the new phase of affairs, the chief feature was the changed attitude
of the South. In the sentiment of its leading and representative men,
there had been three stages: first, "slavery is an evil, and we will
soon get rid of it"; next, "slavery is an evil, but we do not know how
to get rid of it"; now it became "slavery is good and right, and we will
maintain it." To this ground the South came with surprising suddenness
in the years immediately following 1833. What caused the change? The
favorite Southern explanation has been that the violence of the
Abolitionists exasperated the South, checked its drift toward
emancipation, and provoked it in self-defense to justify and extend its
system. This may be effective as a criticism of the extreme
Abolitionists, but as regards the South it is rather a confession than a
defense. On a subject involving its whole prosperity, its essential
character, its relation to the world's civilization, did it reverse its
course at the bitter words of a few critics? If that were true, it would
bespeak passionate irritability, an incapacity for the healthy
give-and-take of practical life, in keeping with the worst that could be
said of the effect of slavery on the master. In truth the violence of
Garrison and his few followers was but a minor element in the case.
Slavery had become immensely profitable; it was the corner-stone of a
social fabric in which the upper class had an extremely comfortable
place; it was involved with the whole social and political life of the
section. It was too important to be dealt with half-heartedly: it must
be accepted, justified, believed in,--or it must be abandoned. John
Randolph of Roanoke had said of slavery: "We are holding a wolf by the
ears; it is perilous alike to hold on or to let go." But one or the
other must be done, and the South elected to keep on holding the wolf.
The better to understand the developments of the following years, it
will be well to consider a group of representative men,--Calhoun,
Garrison, Birney, Channing, and Webster.
Calhoun had many of the elements of high statesmanship--clear views,
strong convictions, forcible speech. He was ambitious, but in no ignoble
fashion; he often served his country well, as in his efficient
administration of the war department under Munroe, his protest against
the spoils system and the personal government of Jackson, and his
influence in averting war with England over the Oregon boundary in
1845-46. After the Presidency was clearly out of his reach--from
1832--he was growingly identified with and devoted to the interests of
his own section, yet always with a patriotic regard for the Union as a
whole. He had that fondness for theories and abstractions which was
characteristic of the Southern statesmen, fostered perhaps by the
isolated life of the plantation. With this went a kind of provincialism
of thought, bred from the wide difference which slavery made from the
life of the world at large. When Calhoun, in one of his Senate orations
was magnifying the advantage of slave over free labor, Wade of Ohio, who
sat listening intently, turned to a neighbor and exclaimed: "That man
lives off of all traveled roads!" He had neither the arts nor the
magnetism of the popular politician; he won no such personal following
as Clay and Jackson; but the South more and more accepted him as the
most logical and far-seeing champion of its peculiar interests.
His personality had much in common with Jonathan Edwards. There was in
both the same inflexible logic and devotion to ideas, the same personal
purity and austerity. The place of the mystic's fire which burned in
Edwards was taken in Calhoun by a passionate devotion to the
commonwealth. In both there was a certain moral callousness which made
the one view with complacence a universe including a perpetual hell of
unspeakable torments; while the other accepted as the ideal society a
system in which the lowest class was permanently debased. Each was the
champion of a cause destined to defeat because condemned by the moral
sentiment of the world,--Edwards the advocate of Calvinism, and Calhoun
of slavery.
Calhoun is to be regarded as a typical slave-holder of the better class.
He owned and cultivated a plantation with several hundred slaves; spent
much time upon it; made it profitable, and dispensed a generous
hospitality. Such a plantation was a little community, organized and
administered with no small labor and skill; with house servants, often
holding a friendly and intimate relation with the family; with a few
trained mechanics and a multitude of field hands. As to physical comfort
the slaves were probably as well or better provided than the bulk of
European peasantry,--this on the testimony of witnesses as unfriendly to
slavery as Fanny Kemble and Dr. Channing. Order and some degree of
morality were enforced, and religion, largely of the emotional type,
prevailed widely. So much may be said, perhaps, for the average
plantation, certainly for the better class, and a very large class.
Joseph Le Conte, the eminent scientist, a writer of the highest credit,
in his pleasing autobiography describes his boyhood on a Georgia
plantation, and characterizes his father as a man of rare excellence to
whom he owed the best of his mental inheritance. He writes of him: "The
best qualities of character were constantly exercised in the just, wise,
and kindly management of his 200 slaves. The negroes were strongly
attached to him, and proud of calling him master.... There never was a
more orderly, nor apparently a happier working class than the negroes of
Liberty county as I knew them in my boyhood."
Against this description are to be set such statements as this made by
Frederick Law Olmsted, after many months of travel in the South: "The
field hand negro is on an average a very poor and a very bad creature,
much worse than I had supposed before I had seen him and grown familiar
with his stupidity, indolence, duplicity, and sensuality. He seems to be
but an imperfect man, incapable of taking care of himself in a civilized
manner, and his presence in large numbers must be considered a dangerous
circumstance to a civilized people." Olmsted saw no resource but gradual
emancipation with suitable training. A resident of this same Liberty
county, Rev. C. C. Jones, himself a staunch supporter of slavery, but
urgent for giving better religious instruction to the slaves, wrote in
1842; "That the negroes are in a degraded state is a fact, so far as my
knowledge extends, universally conceded.... Negro marriages are neither
recognized nor protected by law. Uncleanness--this sin may be considered
as universal.... They are proverbial thieves." But how could "religious
instruction" produce chastity in those for whom the law did not
recognize marriage, or honesty in those who themselves were stolen?
But the bright side of the medal, which had so dark an obverse, was the
interpretation on which Calhoun and the slave-holding class took their
stand. They resolutely ignored the frequent abuses and the essential
degradation of manhood. They fashioned the theory--it was the old
familiar theory of past ages, but had fallen out of sight in the
enthusiasm of the revolutionary period--that society rightly and
properly is constituted with a servile class as its base. Calhoun
declared: "I hold that there never has yet existed a wealthy and
civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in
point of fact, live on the labor of the other." And generally, he adds,
the condition of the laborer has been worse than it now is in the South.
In advance of civilization, he declares, there always comes a conflict
between capital and labor; and this conflict the South avoids by
unflinchingly holding the laborer in his subject condition.
Calhoun is dead, and slavery is dead, but the ideas he then avowed are
still powerfully, if more latently, asserting themselves in our social
order.
For these theories the slave-holders now found justification from the
ministers of religion. The South held more tenaciously than any other
section to the old-fashioned type of Christianity. In earlier days,
religious teachers--as in the unanimous vote of the Presbyterian General
Assembly in 1818--had held slavery to be "utterly inconsistent with the
law of God, which requires us to love our neighbor as ourselves." But
now the Southern ministers of all denominations appealed for ample
justification to slavery as it was permitted under the Jewish law, and
as it existed in the time of Christ and the Apostles, and was unrebuked
by them. They went further back, and in the curse pronounced by Noah
upon the unfilial Ham and his posterity, they found warrant for holding
the African in perpetual bondage. So the South closed up its ranks, in
Church and State, and answered its critics with self-justification, and
with counterattack on what it declared to be their unconstitutional,
anarchic, and infidel teachings.
The agitation against slavery took on a new phase with the appearance of
Garrison and his founding of the _Liberator_ and the New England
Anti-slavery Society in 1831. Garrison was filled and possessed with one
idea--the wrongs of the slave, and the instant, pressing, universal duty
of giving him freedom. It was in him an unselfish and heroic passion.
For it he cheerfully accepted hardship, obloquy, peril. He saw no
difficulties except in the sin of wrongdoers and their allies; the only
course he admitted was immediate emancipation by the master of his human
property, and the instant coöperation and urgency of all others to this
end. His words were charged with passion; they kindled sympathetic souls
with their own flame; they roused to a like heat those whom they
assailed; and they sent thrills of alarm, wonder, and wrath, through the
community. Wherever the _Liberator_ went, or the lecturers of the new
anti-slavery societies were heard, there could be no indifference or
forgetfulness as to slavery. Hitherto, to the immense mass of people
throughout the North, it had been a far-away and unimportant matter. Now
it was sent home to the business and bosoms of all men.
The anti-slavery movement changed its character. Garrison entered on a
very active campaign, lecturing and establishing local societies.
Prominent among his assistants was George Thompson, one of the English
Abolitionists, who, after the emancipation of the West India slaves by
the British government at a cost of £20,000,000, came to this country
and acted as Garrison's ally, winning some converts by his eloquence,
but heightening the unpopularity of the movement through the general
hostility to foreign interference. The early societies had been largely
in the border States, and their efforts had an immediate object in the
political action of their own communities. Now, the resentment and fear
of the slave-holding interest soon drove them out of those communities.
They spread faster than ever,--in a few years it was said that they were
1300,--but were confined to the free States. What immediate and
practical aim could they pursue? It was the question of practical action
that brought Garrison's views to a sharp test, and soon divided him from
the great body of anti-slavery people.
In Garrison's mind there was room for only one idea at a time. Slavery
was a crime, a sin, an abomination,--that to him was the first, the
last, the whole truth of the matter. He had little education, and he had
not in the least a judicial or an open mind. It was to him clear and
certain that the blacks were in every way the equal of the whites. Of
the complexity of human society; of the vital necessity of a political
bond uniting communities, and of the inevitable imperfections and
compromises which are the price of an established social order; of the
process of evolution by which humanity slowly grows from one stage into
another; of the fact that the negro was in some ways better as a slave
in America than as a savage in Africa, and that there must be other
intermediate stages in his development; of the consideration due to
honest differences of opinion and to deeply-rooted habits--of all this
Garrison was as ignorant as a six-years-old child. When facts came in
his way, he denied them; when institutions stood across his path, he
denounced them; when men differed from him, he assailed them.
As to a practical course of action by Northern people, he was absolutely
without resource. How were they to free the slaves? Not by force--force
was to Garrison as wicked as slavery itself. By their votes? That was
only possible under the government as ordained by the Constitution; and
the Constitution allowed no action against slavery except by each State
for itself. The worse then for the Constitution! Ere many years Garrison
declared, and put as a standing heading to the _Liberator_: "The United
States Constitution Is a Covenant with Death and an Agreement with
Hell." He went further; for a time at least he held that all human
governments, as resting on force, were sinful, and to be ignored, or
passively submitted to, without taking active part. He declared the
Union, as a compact with slave-holders, was worthy only to be dissolved.
But how even dissolve it, since he counselled his followers not to vote?
And if it were dissolved, how would the slaves be any nearer freedom?
Was there any possible good outcome to non-voting and dissolution of the
Union, except that there would then be no complicity with slave-holders?
And would such escape from complicity be any help to the slave, any
service to humanity, anything more than an egotistic separation from
political society, a mere refined selfishness?
Such questions never troubled Garrison. Instead of answering them, he
found something else to denounce. The churches he thought were derelict,
in that they did not bear testimony against slavery. True, most of the
great religious bodies of the country were soon rent asunder on the
question: Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, were divided between
North and South, because neither side could tolerate the other's
position on slavery. But nothing satisfied Mr. Garrison. To him the
churches were "cages of unclean birds and synagogues of Satan."
But if the gun was ill-aimed, at least the recoil was prodigious. It is
unreasonable to attribute principally to the violence of the _Liberator_
the new and determined rally of the South in defense of
slavery,--Calhoun and his followers had far wider grounds for their
action than that,--but undoubtedly that violence helped to consolidate
and intensify the Southern resistance. The Abolitionist papers were at
first sent all over the South. The Southerners saw little difference
between such papers as the _Liberator_ and such direct incitements to
insurrection as Walker's _Appeal_; and the horrors of Nat Turner's
rising were fresh in mind. They put all Abolitionist teaching under a
common ban. At the North, the anti-slavery cause became associated in
the popular mind with hostility to the government, to the churches, to
the established usages of society. It was Charles Sumner who said: "An
omnibus load of Boston Abolitionists had done more harm to the
anti-slavery cause than all its enemies."
Garrison's own following was soon divided, and a large part drew away
from him. The most important division came on the question of political
action, when, in the Presidential election of 1840, the practical wing
entered into the political field, as the inevitable and only arena for
effective action; nominated a candidate, and laid the foundation for the
election of Lincoln twenty years later. In the American Anti-slavery
Society there came a contest; Garrison triumphed by a narrow vote, but a
secession followed. Of his immediate and permanent allies the most
important was Wendell Phillips. He threw himself heart and soul into the
cause; he gave to it an educated and brilliant mind, and a fascinating
oratory; he was as uncompromising and censorious as Garrison.
Garrison always held a place of honor and friendship among the
Abolitionists, even those who refused to follow his leadership. In
private life his genial and winning traits were as marked as was his
fierceness on the platform. The term "Abolitionist" is somewhat
indefinite, but it may best be defined as denoting a person to whom the
supreme interest in public affairs was the extinction of slavery. It
included not only those who shared Garrison's ideas of non-voting and
peaceable disunion, but those, too, like Birney and Whittier, who
respected the Constitution and worked for their cause through a
political party. The term also applied to the few who, like John Brown,
would attack slavery by force of arms. On the other hand, the name
Abolitionist did not properly belong to those who were opposed to
slavery, but held that opposition along with other political tenets and
not as a supreme article of faith. These were best included under the
general term of "anti-slavery men," a designation accepted by many of
the Free Soil, Whig and Democratic parties, and later by the Republican
party. The classification cannot be made exact, but the word
"Abolitionists" generally designated the men and women to whom the
extinction of slavery was a primary interest, and who gave to it their
habitual and earnest attention, through the anti-slavery societies and
otherwise. In this broader sense, the Abolitionists were a notable
company. They were bound together by a disinterested and noble
sentiment, and by sacrifices to the cause. The hostility aroused by
Garrison, Phillips, Pilsbury, and a few like-minded associates, extended
to many who went to no such extremes. The anti-slavery speakers were
sometimes mobbed: once in Boston a rope was round Garrison's neck and
his life was in peril; meetings were broken up; and the respectable part
of the community sometimes encouraged or tolerated these assaults.
Actual physical injury was very rare, but a hostile social atmosphere
was the frequent price of fidelity to conscience.
Among the most notable of the leaders was Gerritt Smith. He took active
part in politics, and was for a time in Congress. He is finely
characterized by Andrew D. White:
"Of all tribunes of the people I have ever known he dwells in my memory
as possessing the greatest variety of gifts. He had the prestige given
by great wealth, by lavish generosity, by transparent honesty, by
earnestness of purpose, by advocacy of every good cause, by a superb
presence, and by natural eloquence of a very high order. He was very
tall and large, with a noble head, an earnest yet kindly face, and of
all human voices I have ever heard his was the most remarkable for its
richness, depth, and strength."
Women took a prominent and honorable part; the venerable and beautiful
Lucretia Mott gave her benign presence to the gatherings; Lydia Maria
Child made heavy sacrifices in the good cause. In the common ardor, and
with a Quaker precedent, women took part as speakers. Women's rights was
closely united with anti-slavery; and hence came a fresh odium from
conservative quarters, while the admirable bearing of the leading women
won growing favor for both lines of emancipation. The makers of the new
American literature were friends of the anti-slavery cause. Emerson gave
to it his words of serene inspiration. Whittier was among its ardent
apostles, shared in its political activity, and sang lyrics of freedom.
Bryant was its strong advocate in journalism. Lowell, drawn by his noble
wife, came as a strong ally, and the Biglow Papers gave what had been
greatly lacking,--the salt of humor.
The Abolitionists might be compared to a comet,--a body with a bright
head and a nebulous tail. Like all radicals and reformers they had a
fringe of unbalanced and crotchety folk. It must be said, too, that
absorption in a topic remote from the concerns of one's daily life is
apt to be somewhat distracting and demoralizing. Dr. Joseph Henry
Allen--an admirable and too little known writer--has in an eloquent and
beautiful passage described the Abolitionists (though he was not one of
them) as the devotees of a genuine and heroic religion. But any
adequate religion must find its main application in the duties and
services of the immediate present; and the men and women who were
possessed day and night by the wrongs of those to whom they could render
little service, were apt to be thrown out of touch with near and homely
relations, and become what are now called "cranks."
But to appreciate the service of the Abolitionists we must remember that
up to the birth of the Republican party in 1854 almost all of the
political leaders and men of public affairs, as well as most of the
churches, colleges, and professional educators, held aloof from the
anti-slavery cause. With a few exceptions, they left the work of
educating public sentiment, and shaping some policy on the supreme
question, to be done by this little company,--of lecturers, ministers,
literary men and women. These did loyally and bravely according to their
lights; and they had their reward, outwardly in unpopularity and
sometimes persecution, but inwardly in a social atmosphere within their
own body, warm, joyful, and religious; and the sense of alliance with
the Divine Force in the universe. Said Wendell Phillips: "One man with
God is a majority."
CHAPTER VI
BIRNEY, CHANNING, AND WEBSTER
Of the moderate wing of the anti-slavery men, a good representative was
James G. Birney. With the fine physical presence and genial manhood of
the typical Kentuckian, he had a well-balanced mind and a thorough
loyalty to the sense of duty, which broadened as he grew. Removing to
Alabama, he became anti-slavery in his sentiments, and he was a friend
not only of the negro, but of all who were oppressed. As the legal
representative of the Cherokee nation he stood for years between the
Indians and those who would wrong them. He identified himself for a time
with the colonization cause; and, finding himself growing powerless in
Southern communities, he removed to Ohio, where there was a strong and
vigorous anti-slavery propaganda. One incident of his life in Cincinnati
illustrates the concrete form which slavery sometimes took. A Missourian
owned a slave girl who was his own daughter, a cultivated and refined
woman. He took her to the East for a visit, treated her habitually as
one of his own family, but refused her prayers for freedom. Dreading the
possibilities of her lot, she made her escape in Cincinnati; and,
concealing her identity and history, she got a situation as a servant in
Mr. Birney's family. One day when he was absent from the city she came
home in terror; she had been recognized on the street by two
professional slave-catchers; now she told her story and implored
protection. In vain,--the officers of the law dragged her from the
house; a judge gave speedy sentence that she was a slave; she was taken
sobbing to jail; and the next day she was carried down the river to New
Orleans, where she was sold on the auction block,--and never heard of
again.
Birney took part in the work of the new anti-slavery societies, but he
did not follow Garrison's no-government theories. He favored for a while
the policy of throwing the anti-slavery strength for such congressional
nominees of the regular parties as favored their views, and several
candidates were chosen in this way. But when Clay became pronounced
against the Abolitionists, and even John Quincy Adams, after championing
the right of petition, voted against the abolition of slavery in the
District of Columbia, Birney and his sympathizers gave up hope of help
from existing parties, and organized their own party for the election of
1840. Its principles were resistance to slavery extension, and
opposition to slavery so far as was practicable under the
Constitution,--the principles later of the Republican party. Birney was
nominated for President, and this handful of voters was the seed of the
harvest twenty years later. He was again the candidate in 1844, with an
increased support, and the party now was named "The Liberty Party."
A leader and type of the moderate anti-slavery sentiment was William
Ellery Channing. In Channing was a blending of high moral ideals,
intelligent views of human nature and society, an apostle's earnestness
wedded with "sweet reasonableness," and a personal character of rare
symmetry and beauty. He was an evolutionist and not a revolutionist.
Foremost among the group of New England ministers who broadened and
ripened out of the orthodoxy of their day, and were ostracized by their
former brethren, he was forced into the position of leader of a new
sect, but his utterances and spirit were always those of a minister of
the church universal. He was the early advocate of most of the
religious and social reforms which have since come to the front. By
preference, he always used the methods of peace and persuasion. He had
made early acquaintance with slavery in a two-years' residence in
Richmond while a young man. He was always opposed to it, but his
attention was long absorbed by the immediate needs of his own people. He
spent half a year in Santa Cruz, for his health, in 1830-1,--just when
Garrison was starting the _Liberator_,--and slavery came home to him
with new force. The plantation on which he lived was one of the best in
the West Indies. The proprietor had taken a pride in the character and
condition of his slaves. But he had fallen into bankruptcy, his estate
had been sold, and the new proprietor left it in charge of an overseer
who was a passionate and licentious man, under whom the slaves suffered
a very different treatment. Most pathetic incidents came under Dr.
Channing's notice. But from all he saw about him he concluded that the
physical sufferings of the slaves had been exaggerated by report; that,
with occasional cruelties, they were better off as to physical comfort
than most of the European peasantry. He writes to an English
correspondent, "I suspect that a gang of negroes receive fewer stripes
than a company of soldiers of the same number in your army"; that they
are under a less iron discipline and suffer incomparably less than
soldiers in a campaign. But he adds, and always insists, that their
condition degrades them intellectually and morally, lowers them toward
the brutes, and in this respect the misery of slavery cannot be
expressed too strongly. Marriage is almost unknown; family life, with
its mutual dependence and the resulting tenderness, scarcely exists; and
thus "the poor negro is excluded from Nature's primary school for the
affections and the whole character." "The like causes are fatal to
energy, foresight, self-control."
The inspiration of Channing's creed, the soul of the new movement in
religion, was the potential nobility of human nature--a nobility to be
made real by utmost effort of the individual, and by all wisest
appliances of society. It was from this standpoint that he judged
slavery, and in this spirit that while still in Santa Cruz he began to
write his treatise upon it.
Returning to Boston, he spoke with clearness and weight to his
congregation: "I think no power of conception can do justice to the
evils of slavery. They are chiefly moral, they act on the mind, and
through the mind bring intense suffering to the body. As far as the
human soul can be destroyed, slavery is that destroyer." Having borne
his testimony, he devoted himself to the general work of his ministry.
The violence of the men who had come to the front in Abolitionism was
not only against his taste and feeling, but against his deep
convictions; as he had written years before to Webster, he saw in these
denunciations of the slave-holder seeds of a harvest of sectional hate
and national disaster.
A characteristic conversation with him is recorded by Rev. Samuel J.
May, himself in full alliance with the Abolitionists, but a man of great
sweetness and sanity, never diverted from his religious ministry or
losing his mental balance. Dr. Channing dwelt on the excesses of the
Abolitionists until Mr. May was aroused, and broke out: "Dr. Channing, I
am tired of these complaints! The cause of suffering humanity, the cause
of our oppressed, crushed, colored countrymen, has called as loudly upon
others as upon us, who are known as the Abolitionists. But the others
have done nothing. The wise and prudent saw the wrong, but did nothing
to remove it. The priest and Levite passed by on the other side; the
children of Abraham held their peace, until 'the very stones have cried
out' against this tremendous wickedness. The people who have taken up
the cause may lack the calmness and discretion of scholars, clergy, and
statesmen,--but the scholars, clergy, and statesmen, have done nothing.
We Abolitionists are just what we are,--babes and sucklings, obscure
men, silly women, publicans, sinners; and we shall manage the matter we
have taken in hand just as might be expected of such persons as we are.
It is unbecoming in able men, who stood by and would do nothing, to
complain of us because we manage this matter no better."
And so the torrent of words dashed upon the silent listener, until the
speaker suddenly bethought himself and stopped in abashment,--this man
he was rebuking had been to him as a father in God, his kind friend from
childhood, and first among the great and good. Almost overwhelmed by his
own temerity, he watched the agitated face of his hearer and waited in
painful suspense for the reply. At last, in a very subdued manner and in
his kindest tones of voice, he said, "Brother May, I acknowledge the
justice of your reproof; I have been silent too long."
May's appeal had only quickened a little the sure work of Channing's
conscience. A few months later, in December, 1835, he published his
short treatise on _Slavery_. No weightier word on the subject was ever
spoken. If mankind were moved by their higher reason the North would not
have waited twenty years to be converted to anti-slavery by _Uncle Tom's
Cabin_. And if the South had been wise in her day, she would have
listened to this noble and persuasive utterance. No passion sullied its
temper; slave and slave-holder were held in equal regard; the case was
pleaded on irresistible grounds--of facts beyond question and rooted in
the very constitution of human nature. The needed, the righteous, the
inevitable reform, was shown as part of the upward movement of humanity,
and as appealing to every consideration of practical wisdom and of
justice. The little book of 150 pages deserves to be held as a classic
in American history.
Channing never lost the sense of proportion in his own work. He went on
giving inspiration and leadership to religious thought and to social
advance. It was neither necessary nor possible for him to be in close
sympathy or habitual alliance with the extreme Abolitionists. But he
vindicated the right of free speech when it was denied them, and he was
recognized by the best of their number as a friend of the cause. Mrs.
Lydia Maria Child,--like Mr. May, one of the finest spirits among the
Abolitionists--wrote: "He constantly grew upon my respect, until I came
to regard him as the wisest as well as the gentlest apostle of humanity.
I owe him thanks for preserving me from the one-sidedness to which
zealous reformers are so apt to run. He never sought to undervalue the
importance of anti-slavery, but he said many things to prevent me from
looking upon it as the only question interesting to humanity."
Side by side with the anti-slavery sentiment was growing another
sentiment--distinct from it, at first often in practical hostility to
it, but at last blending with it for a common triumph. It was the
sentiment of American nationality--the love of the Union. The separate
colonies were brought together in the Revolution by a common peril and a
common struggle. Then their tendency to fall apart was counteracted by
the strong bond of the Constitution and the Federal government. Diverse
interests and mutual distrust still tended to draw them asunder. With
the continuance of the Union, the strengthening of the tie by use, the
hallowing of old associations under the glamour of memory, and the
growth of the new bonds of commerce and travel, the sense of a common
country and destiny began to take root in the hearts of men, and on
occasion disclosed itself with the strength and nobility of a heroic
passion. True, a new rift was appearing, in the doctrine of
nullification and the question of slavery, but this evoked at times a
more militant and again a more appealing aspect in the sentiment of
union. Jackson seemed to rise from the rough frontiersman to the
guardian of the nation when he gave the word, "The Federal Union--it
must be preserved!" Clay found the noblest exercise of his eloquence and
his diplomacy in evoking the national spirit and in harmonizing the
differences which threatened it. But the most stirring voice and
effective leadership was that of Daniel Webster.
As Webster is judged in the retrospect, we see that he was not so much a
statesman, still less a moral idealist, as an advocate. His lucidity of
statement and emotional power were not matched by constructive ability.
His name is associated with no great measure of administration, no large
and definite policy. He was luminous in statement rather than sagacious
in judgment, an advocate rather than a judge. On the platform or in the
Senate he was still pre-eminently the lawyer, in that, like a lawyer, he
was the representative and exponent of established interests,--not the
projector of new social adjustments. Civil law represents a vast
accumulated experience and tradition of mankind; it has been slowly
wrought out, as a regulation and adjustment of existing interests; with
an effort toward equity, as understood by the best intelligence of each
period, but always with immense regard for precedent and previous usage.
It was in this spirit, highly conservative of what has already been
secured, and extremely cautious toward radical change, that Webster
habitually dealt with political institutions. It was characteristic of
him that in the Massachusetts constitutional convention in 1820 he
pleaded strongly for the retention of the property qualification of
voters for State senators. But when the tide moved irresistibly toward
manhood suffrage, he acquiesced.
But conservative as he was by nature, he was in profound sympathy with a
sentiment which while rooted in the past was yet in the '20s and '30s a
young, plastic, growing idea,--the idea of American Union, indissoluble,
perpetual. No voice was so powerful as Webster's to fill the minds and
hearts of man with this lofty passion. His orations at Plymouth Rock, at
Bunker Hill, and upon the simultaneous deaths of Adams and Jefferson,
his vindication of the national idea against the localism of Hayne and
Calhoun,--were organ-voices of patriotism. They thrilled the souls of
those who listened; they went over the country and printed themselves on
the minds of men; school-boys declaimed passages from them; they became
part of the gospel of the American people.
We may quote a single passage from the address inspired by that dramatic
circumstance, the death at once of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, on
the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence: "It cannot
be denied, but by those who would dispute against the sun, that with
America and in America a new era commences in human affairs. This era is
distinguished by free representative governments, by entire religious
liberty, by improved systems of national intercourse, by a newly
awakened and an unconquerable spirit of free inquiry, and by a diffusion
of knowledge through the community, such as has been before
altogether unknown and unheard of. America, America, our country,
fellow-countrymen, our own dear and native land, is inseparably
connected, fast bound up, in fortune and by fate, with these great
interests. If they fall, we fall with them; if they stand, it will be
because we have maintained them.... If we cherish the virtues and the
principles of our fathers, heaven will assist us to carry on the work
of human liberty and human happiness. Auspicious omens cheer us. Great
examples are before us. Our own firmament now shines brightly upon our
paths. Washington is in the upper sky. These other stars have now joined
the American constellation; they circle round their center, and the
heavens beam with new light. Beneath this illumination let us walk the
course of life, and at its close devoutly commend our beloved country,
the common parent of us all, to the Divine Benignity."
CHAPTER VII
THE UNDERLYING FORCES
Two master passions strove for leadership in the mind and heart of
America. One was love of the united nation and ardor to maintain its
union. The other was the aspiration to purify the nation, by removing
the wrong of slavery. Unionist and Abolitionist stood face to face.
After many years they were to stand shoulder to shoulder, in a common
cause. In a larger sense than he gave the words, Webster's utterance
became the final watchword: "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and
inseparable."
In the retrospect of history, our attention naturally fastens on the
conspicuous and heroic figures. But we must not forget the underlying
and often determining forces,--the interests, beliefs, and passions, of
the mass of the community. And, while listening intently to the
articulate voices, the impressive utterances, we are to remember that
the life of the community as of the individual is shaped oftenest by the
inarticulate, unavowed, half-unconscious sentiments:
Below the surface stream, shallow and light,
Of what we say we feel,--below the stream,
As light, of what we think we feel, there flows
With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed.
The underlying human force in the slavery question was the primitive
instinct in man to keep all he has got; the instinct of the man who
lives at another's expense to keep on doing so. That underlay all the
fine theories about differences of race, all the theological deductions
from Noah's curse upon Canaan. Another great and constant factor was the
absorption of men and communities, not personally concerned in a social
wrong, in pursuits and interests of their own which shut out all outlook
beyond. In our day we hear much about the crowding rush of material
interests, but that crowd and rush was felt almost as much in the
earlier generations, when hardly less than the most strident tones of
the agitator could pierce the absorption of the street and market-place.
There was the inertia of custom; there were the commercial interests
closely interwoven of the Southern planter and the Northern
manufacturer; there was the prejudice of color and race; and all these
influences, open or latent, told powerfully for keeping slavery as it
was.
The great default, the fatal failure, was the omission of the Southern
whites, especially their leaders by education and by popular
recognition, to take deliberate and systematic measures for the removal
of slavery. Difficult? Yes, very. Impossible? Why, almost every other
country of North and South America,--including the Spanish-Americans on
whom the English-Americans look down with such superiority,--these all
got rid of slavery without violence or revolution. Whatever the case
required,--of preparation, compensation, new industrial
arrangement,--the Southern whites had the whole business in their hands,
to deal with as they pleased. Whatever cries might be raised by a few
for instant and unconditional emancipation, there never was a day when
the vast mass of the American people, of all sections, were not avowedly
and unmistakably committed to letting the Southern States treat slavery
as their own matter, and deal with it as they pleased, provided only
they kept it at home. Excuses for non-action there were, of
course,--the perplexities of the situation, the irritation of criticism
from without,--but Nature has no use for excuses. If there is a cancer
in the system it is useless to plead the expense of the surgery or the
pain of the knife. The alternative is simple--removal or death.
It is always impossible to distinguish closely in the causes of events
between the action of human will and the wider forces which we call
Nature or Providence. But in some eras we distinguish more clearly than
in others the effect of human personalities. For example, in the making
of the Constitution we see a difficult situation taken wisely and
resolutely in hand by a group of strong men; they made themselves a part
of Fate. But in the fluctuating history of slavery, with its final
catastrophe, we seem to be looking at elemental movements; masses of men
drifting under impulses, with no leadership adequate to the occasion.
The men who seemingly might have mastered the situation, and brought it
to a peaceful and right solution, either could not or would not do it.
What happened was, that two opposite social systems, existing within the
same political body, came into rivalry, into hostility, and at last into
direct conflict. In the early stages, slavery had on its side the
advantage of an established place under the law, the support of its
local communities becoming more and more determined, the long-time
indifference and inertia of the free States, custom, conservatism,
timidity, race prejudice. But against all this were operating steadily
two tremendous forces. In the race for industrial advantage which is at
last the decisive test, free society was superior to slave society by as
much as the freeman is superior to the slave. The advantage of the
Northern farmer or mechanic over the negro slave was the measure of the
advantage of the North over the South. In increase of wealth; in
variety, intensity, and productiveness of social life; in immigration;
in intellectual progress, the free States outstripped the slave States
by leaps and bounds. And, again, in the conscience of humanity,--in
mankind's sense of right and wrong, which grows ever a more potent
factor in the world's affairs,--the tide was setting steadily and
swiftly against slavery. To impatient reformers who, as Horace Mann
said, were always in a hurry, while God never is,--the tide might seem
motionless or refluent, as to him who looks hastily from the ocean
shore; but as the sea follows the moon, the hearts of men were following
the new risen luminary of humanity's God-given rights.
And so, under each special phase of the conflict, slavery had against it
that dominant force which acts on one side in the material progress of
society, and on the other side in the human conscience; that
force--"some call it Evolution, and others call it God."
CHAPTER VIII
THE MEXICAN WAR
We have seen that about 1832-3 a new distinctness and prominence was
given to the slavery question by various events,--the substantial
victory of the South Carolina nullifiers, and the leadership thenceforth
of the South by Calhoun; Nat Turner's rising, and the rejection by
Virginia of the emancipation policy; the compensated liberation of the
West India slaves by the British Government; and the birth of aggressive
Abolitionism under the lead of Garrison. We have now to glance at the
main course of history for the next twenty years. Party politics had for
a time no direct relation to slavery. The new organizations of Whigs and
Democrats disputed on questions of a national bank, internal
improvements, and the tariff. The Presidency was easily won in 1836 by
Jackson's lieutenant, Van Buren; but the commercial crash of 1837
produced a revulsion of feeling which enabled the Whigs to elect
Benjamin Harrison in 1840. His early death gave the Presidency to John
Tyler of Virginia, who soon alienated his party, and who was thoroughly
Southern in his sympathies and policy.
The newly aroused anti-slavery enthusiasm in the North found expression
in petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.
It was not intrinsically a great matter, but it was the one point where
the national authority seemed clearly to have a chance to act--questions
of new territory being for the time in abeyance. Petitions poured in on
Congress with thousands of signatures--then with tens, then hundreds of
thousands. There was a hot struggle as to whether the petitions should
be received at all by the Senate and House. John Quincy Adams, willing
after his Presidency to serve in the humbler capacity of congressman,
was the champion of the right of petition. Calhoun had entered the
Senate in 1832 and remained there with a brief intermission until his
death in 1850. He stood independent of the two great parties, with his
own State always solidly behind him, and with growing influence over the
whole South. He was the leader in opposing the admission of the
petitions. He maintained that any discussion in Congress of such a topic
was injurious and incendiary; he voiced the new sentiment of the South
that all agitation of slavery was an invasion of its rights. "Hands
off!" was the cry. The question was settled in 1836, after long debates,
by another compromise, proposed by James Buchanan of Pennsylvania; the
petitions were given a formal reception, but instantly rejected without
debate.
Another burning question was the circulation of anti-slavery documents
through the Southern mails. In 1835 a mob in Charleston broke open the
post-office, and made a bonfire of all such matter they could find. The
social leaders and the clergy of the city applauded. The
postmaster-general under Jackson, Amos Kendall, wrote to the local
postmaster who had connived at the act: "I cannot sanction and will not
condemn the step you have taken." Jackson asked Congress to pass a law
excluding anti-slavery literature from the mails. Even this was not
enough for Calhoun; he claimed that every State had a right to pass such
legislation for itself, with paramount authority over any act of
Congress. But the South would not support him in this claim; and indeed
he was habitually in advance of his section, which followed him
generally at an interval of a few years. Congress refused to pass any
law on the subject. But the end was reached without law; Southern
postmasters systematically refused to transmit anti-slavery
documents--even of so moderate character as the New York _Tribune_--and
this was their practice until the Civil War. "A gross infraction of law
and right!" said the North. "But," said the South, "would you allow
papers to circulate in your postoffices tending directly to breed revolt
and civil war? If the mails cannot be used in the service of gambling
and lotteries, with far more reason may we shut out incitements to
insurrection like Nat Turner's."
On a similar plea all freedom of speech in Southern communities on the
question of slavery was practically denied. Anti-slavery men were driven
from their homes. In Kentucky, one man stood out defiantly and
successfully. Cassius M. Clay opposed slavery, advocated its compensated
abolition, and was as ready to defend himself with pistols as with
arguments. He stood his ground to the end, and in 1853 he settled Rev.
John G. Fee at Berea, who established a group of anti-slavery churches
and schools, which was broken up after John Brown's raid, but after the
war was revived as Berea College. But as a rule free speech in the South
was at an end before 1840. No man dared use language like that of
Patrick Henry and Madison; and Jefferson's _Notes on Virginia_, if newly
published, would have been excluded from the mails and its author
exiled.
South Carolina passed a law under which negro seamen on ships entering
her ports were put in jail while their vessel remained, and if the jail
fees were not paid, they were sold into slavery. When Massachusetts
seamen suffered under this law, the State government in 1844 dispatched
an eminent citizen, Samuel Hoar, to try to secure a modification of the
enactment. Arriving in Charleston, accompanied by his daughter, Mr. Hoar
was promptly visited in his hotel by a committee of prominent men and
obliged to leave the city and State at once.
The North had its share of violence. In Connecticut a school for negro
children, kept by two white women, was forcibly broken up. In Illinois
in 1837 an anti-slavery newspaper office was destroyed by a mob, and its
proprietor, Elijah P. Lovejoy, was murdered.
In the Presidential election of 1840 slavery was almost forgotten. The
Whigs were bent on overthrowing the Democratic administration, to which
they attributed the hard times following 1837; and they raised a popular
hurrah for the candidate of the "plain people," William Henry Harrison
of Indiana, who had won a victory over the Indians at Tippecanoe. In a
canvass where "log-cabins" and "hard cider" gave the watchwords and
emblems, national politics played little part. But now first those
resolute anti-slavery men who were determined to bring their cause
before the people as a political issue, and fight it out in that arena,
with solid ranks be their forces ever so small,--came together and
nominated for the Presidency James G. Birney. They could give him but a
handful of votes, but it was the raising of a flag which twenty years
was to carry to victory. Birney, never an extremist, had grown to a full
recognition of all that was at stake. He wrote in 1835: "The contest is
becoming--has become--not one alone of freedom for the blacks, but of
freedom for the whites.... There will be no cessation of the strife
until slavery shall be exterminated or liberty destroyed."
For a dozen years there had been only skirmishing. Now came on a battle
royal, or rather a campaign, from 1844 to 1850,--the annexation of
Texas, the war with Mexico, and the last great compromise. Texas, a
province of Mexico after Mexico became free from Spain, received a
steady immigration from the American Southwestern States. These
immigrants became restive under Mexican control, declared their
independence in 1835, and practically secured it after sharp fighting.
Slavery, abolished under Mexico, was re-established by the republic of
Texas. From the character of its population, it seemed to gravitate
toward the United States. The keen eyes of the Southern leaders were
early fixed upon it. Annex Texas, and a great field of expansion for
slavery was open. Its votes in the Senate and House would be added to
the Southern column, and from its immense domain future States might be
carved. As early as 1829 Lundy's and Garrison's _Genius_ had protested
against this scheme. The time was now ripe for carrying it out. Calhoun
was again the leader. He claimed to be "the author of annexation," and
with good reason. He exchanged the Senate for Tyler's cabinet as
Secretary of War in 1844, the change being engineered by Henry A. Wise,
one of the rising men in Virginia,--for the express purpose of bringing
in Texas. A treaty of annexation was negotiated with Texas, and sent to
the Senate. There were difficulties; the Texans had cooled in their zeal
for annexation; and the American Senate was not over-favorable. To give
the necessary impetus, Calhoun,--so says Van Holst, in his excellent and
not unfriendly biography,--fell below his habitual sincerity, and
misrepresented a dispatch of the English Foreign Secretary, Lord
Aberdeen, as showing a disposition on England's part to get hold of
Texas for herself. It was a Presidential year; the Democratic convention
nominated James K. Polk of Tennessee, and passed a resolution favoring
annexation. But Calhoun had now shown his motive so plainly that the
country took alarm, and the Senate rejected the treaty. The Whigs
nominated Clay. He was believed to be opposed to the annexation scheme,
but his hunger for the great prize betrayed him into an equivocal
expression, which lost him the confidence of the strong anti-slavery
men. Again they nominated Birney,--taking now the name of the Liberty
party--and gave him so many votes that the result was to lose New York
and Michigan for Clay, and Polk was elected. The administration now
claimed--though in truth the combined Whig and Liberty vote put it in a
minority--that it had received a plebiscite of popular support on its
annexation policy. Thus emboldened, its friends,--knowing that they
could not yet count on the two-thirds vote necessary for a senatorial
confirmation,--dropped the treaty altogether, and brought into Congress
a joint resolution affirming the annexation of Texas to the Union. This
won the necessary majority in both houses, and as the last act of
Tyler's administration Texas was declared a State.
Calhoun now returned to the Senate,--his temporary substitute promptly
vacating at his word. Thus far he had triumphed. But his associates in
their elation were eager for another conquest. Texas is ours, now let us
have California and the Pacific! But to that end, Mexico, reluctant to
yield Texas, and wholly unwilling to cede more territory, must be
attacked and despoiled. At that proposal Calhoun drew back. It does not
appear that he had any scruples about Mexico. But, keener-sighted than
his followers, he knew that any further acquisitions to the West would
be stoutly and hopefully claimed by the North. His warning was in vain;
he had lighted a fire and now could not check it. The next step was to
force Mexico into a war. She claimed the river Nueces as her boundary
with Texas, while Texas claimed the Rio Grande. Instructions were
quietly given to General Taylor, in January, 1846, to throw his small
force into the disputed territory, so near the Rio Grande as to invite a
Mexican attack. The Mexican force did attack him, and President Polk
instantly declared that "war existed by the act of Mexico"--thus
allowing Congress no chance to pass on it. As is the way of nations,
fighting once begun, every consideration of justice was ignored and the
only word was "our country, right or wrong." Congressmen of both parties
voted whatever supplies were needed for the war; and the Whigs, trying
to throw the blame on the President, put no obstacles in the way of his
conquest of Mexico. Only one man in Congress spoke out for justice as
higher than party or country. Thomas Corwin of Ohio, in a powerful
speech, denounced the whole iniquitous business, and declared that were
he a Mexican facing the American invaders of his home, "I would welcome
them with hospitable hands to bloody graves!"
The war called out another voice that went home to the heart of the
people,--the voice of James Russell Lowell in the "Biglow Papers." In
the homely Yankee vernacular he spoke for the highest conscience of New
England. The righteous wrath was winged with stinging wit and lightened
with broad humor. He spoke for that sentiment of the new and nobler
America which abhorred slavery and detested war, and saw in a war for
the extension of slavery a crime against God and man. The politician's
sophistries, the respectable conventionalities current in church and
state, found no mercy at his hands:
Ez fer war, I call it murder,--
There you hev it plain and flat:
I don't want to go no furder
Than my Testyment fer that:
God hez sed so plump an' fairly,
It's ez long ez it is broad,
An' you've got to git up airly
Ef you want to take in God.
'Tain't your eppyletts an' feathers
Make the thing a grain more right;
'Tain't a follerin' your bell-wethers
Will excuse ye in his sight;
Ef you take a sword and draw it,
An' go stick a feller thru,
Guv'ment ain't to answer for it,
God'll send the bill to you.
Massachusetts, God forgive her,
She's a kneelin' with the rest,
She, that ought to hav' clung forever
In her grand old eagle-nest.
* * * * *
Let our dear old Bay State proudly
Put the trumpet to her mouth,
Let her ring this messidge loudly
In the ears of all the South:
"I'll return ye good fer evil
Much ez we frail mortals can,
But I won't go help the Devil
Makin' man the cus o' man;
Call me coward, call me traitor,
Jest ez suits your mean idees,
Here I stand a tyrant-hater,
An' the friend o' God and Peace."
CHAPTER IX
HOW DEAL WITH THE TERRITORIES?
Meanwhile, the American army,--accepting as its sole part to obey
orders, not questioning why,--though such officers as Grant and Lee had
no liking for the task set them,--and reinforced by volunteer regiments
from the Southwest,--was steadily fighting its way to the Mexican
capital; Taylor's force advancing from Texas, while Scott moved from
Vera Cruz. The Mexicans resisted bravely, but were beaten again and
again, and upon the capture of the city of Mexico they gave up the
contest.
Spite of the _éclat_ of victories, the war had been so little popular in
the North that the congressional election of 1846 displaced the
administration majority in the House and gave the Whigs a preponderance.
But, with the excitement of the complete victory over Mexico in the next
year, came a fresh wave of the aggressive temper. It was freely
advocated that Mexico should be annexed bodily. Against this madness
Henry Clay spoke out with his old-time power. Clearly the country would
tolerate no such extreme, and the annexationists contented themselves
with mulcting Mexico, upon the payment of $6,000,000, of the vast
territory known as California.
Then set in with full vigor the controversy over the new territory which
Calhoun had foreseen. Calhoun had been left in a sort of isolation by
his defection from the administration upon the war, but he did not break
with President Polk; for the reason, says Von Holst, that he wanted to
save his influence to oppose the tendency to a war with England. Oregon
had been held in joint occupancy by the two nations for many years; now
a line of demarcation was to be drawn, and there was a loud popular
demand for maintaining at any cost the extreme northern line of
latitude--it was "Fifty-four-forty or fight." But the sense of the
country was against coming to extremities, and Calhoun--a statesman when
slavery was not concerned--threw his influence with the moderate
sentiment which secured the acceptance of the line of 49 degrees. But he
looked with foreboding eyes on the deepening conflict of the sections
and the advantage which gravitated toward the North;--from political
causes, he declared, unwilling or unable to recognize that the
industrial superiority lay inevitably with free labor. He met the danger
with a bolder and more advanced claim. The South, he declared, had had
enough of compromise over territory; it must now fall back on its
ultimate right under the Constitution; and that right was that slaves,
being lawful property, might be taken into any territory of the United
States, and Congress had no right to forbid their introduction; neither
had Congress a right to refuse admission of any State whose people
desired to retain slavery. This was a claim for the nationalization of
slavery; and it was not until after Calhoun's death that the South came
to this position, staked its cause upon it, and when it was rejected by
the popular vote broke with the Union.
But Calhoun's logic and passion had not yet brought his section up to
his own position, and over the division of the newly acquired territory
North and South disputed as before. While the war was still waging,
President Polk asked for an appropriation to be expended as compensation
for new territory; and David Wilmot, a Democratic member from
Pennsylvania, moved that a proviso be added, stipulating that from any
new territory acquired by purchase slavery should be excluded. This was
passed by the House, but rejected by the Senate. The Senate was long the
stronghold of the South, the States having an equal representation,
while in the House the greater increase of free State population gave
them a fresh advantage at each new census and apportionment. The "Wilmot
proviso" was for some years the watchword of the anti-extensionists. To
the typical Northerner, it seemed monstrous that slavery should be
introduced by law in territory where it had no previous existence. To
the typical Southerner it seemed no less unjust that his peculiar
institutions and usages should be excluded from the common domain, for
which his section had paid its share of money and more than its share of
blood.
While the question of the new territory had scarcely taken definite
form, there came the Presidential election of 1848. In the Whig
convention Clay's ambition received its final disappointment; Webster
had hardly a chance; all the statesmen of the party were set aside in
favor of General Zachary Taylor of Louisiana, an upright, soldierly man,
a slaveholder, entirely unversed in civil affairs, and his claim resting
solely on successful generalship in the war. The Democrats nominated
Lewis Cass of Michigan, a mediocre politician, regarded by the South as
a trustworthy servant. The third party displayed new strength, and
exchanged the name of "Liberty" for "Free Soil." Under the stimulus of
recent events recruits of power and promise came to its standard. In
Massachusetts it gained such men as Samuel Hoar, Charles Sumner, Charles
Francis Adams, and Henry Wilson from the Whigs; and from the Democrats,
Robert Rantoul and N. P. Banks. Wilson and Charles Allen, delegates to
the Whig convention, declared,--when that body in its resolutions
absolutely ignored the question of slavery extension, and sank all
principles in a hurrah for "Old Rough and Ready,"--that they would no
longer support the party. They went home to work with their old
friends, the "Conscience Whigs," for the success of the Free Soil party,
whose convention was to meet at Buffalo. To that convention came strong
allies from Ohio. There were Joshua Giddings, for years one of the few
congressmen classed distinctly as anti-slavery, and Salmon P. Chase. New
York State offered a reinforcement strong in numbers, but in some
respects questionable. The anti-slavery Democrats in the State,
nicknamed "Barnburners"--because "they would burn the barn to get rid of
the rats"--were ready to break with their party, but their quarrel was
partly a personal one. They were welcomed, however, and from their ranks
was selected the Presidential candidate--of all men, ex-President Martin
Van Buren, known of old as "the Northern man with Southern principles,"
but willing now to Northernize his principles with the Presidency in
view. Such a nomination went far to take the heart out of the genuine
anti-slavery men; and the strong name of Charles Francis Adams for
vice-president could not make good the weakness of the head of the
ticket. Should a real Free Soiler vote for Van Buren,--the probable
effect being to improve Cass's chances over Taylor, just as the Birney
vote four years earlier had beaten Clay and brought in Polk and all his
consequences--or vote for Taylor, trusting to his personal character and
the influences surrounding him for a practical advantage to the side of
freedom? The latter alternative was the choice of many, including Horace
Greeley and his associates, Thurlow Weed and William H. Seward. With
such help, and mainly on his strength as a military hero, Taylor was
elected. In the result there was considerable hope for the anti-slavery
cause. For Seward, who had been chosen to the Senate from New York, was
very influential with the new President, and Seward was one of the
coming men, clearly destined to be a leader among those who were to
succeed the great triumvirate of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster. He was
high-minded, cultivated, and united lofty ideals with practical wisdom.
A thorough constitutionalist, he believed there were legitimate ways of
advancing freedom under the Constitution; and in a speech at Cleveland
he had declared: "Slavery can be limited to its present bounds; it can
be ameliorated; it can be abolished; and you and I must do it." Ohio
sent to the Senate another of the coming men, Salmon P. Chase,
resembling Seward in his broad and philosophical views and his firm but
constitutional opposition to slavery.
CHAPTER X
THE COMPROMISE OF 1850
To win California as slave territory the Southern leaders had forced the
war on Mexico. The territory was won, and no political force had
developed strong enough to halt their progress. But now came a check
from the realm which could not be cajoled or brow-beaten,--the world of
natural and industrial forces. Gold was discovered in California. There
was a rush of immigrants, and a swift opening and settlement of the
country. The pioneers--hardy, enterprising and democratic--had no use
nor room for slaves. They held a convention, with the encouragement of
President Taylor; framed a Constitution in which slavery was excluded
from the future State--this by unanimous vote, including the 15
delegates who had come from slave States; and the popular vote ratified
the proposed Constitution by 10 to 1. Then they asked for admission to
the Union.
The Southern faction was wrathful. The extremists were for excluding the
new State unless slavery was permitted. But it was clear that slavery
could not be forced on a State against the wish of its entire people.
Then compensation was sought in concessions to be made by the North. The
remainder of the new domain, Utah and New Mexico, was not ripe for
Statehood; but let slavery, it was urged, be established as a
territorial condition. Then came up another grievance of the South. Its
fugitive slaves, escaping over the border line, were systematically
helped, either to make their way to Canada and the protection of the
British flag, or to safe homes in the Northern States. Naturally the
slaves who dared the perils of escape were either the most energetic or
the most wronged, and sympathy for them at the North was active and
resourceful. Along their most frequented routes of flight were
systematic provisions of shelter and help, known as "the underground
railroad." The Federal Constitution required their return, but this task
had been left to State laws and courts, and was performed slackly, if at
all. The total number of fugitives was not large nor the pecuniary loss
heavy, but the South was exasperated by what it considered a petty and
contemptible depredation. So there was a demand that the Federal
government should undertake and enforce the return of fugitive slaves.
Congress opened the session of 1849-50 amid great excitement and
confusion. Once more Clay came forward to reconcile the disputants. Clay
in these last days was at his best. He was no longer swayed by
Presidential aspirations. When in 1849 the Kentucky Constitution was to
be revised, he wrote a letter strongly favoring a gradual emancipation
and colonization. This had no effect, but Clay's unshaken hold on his
State was shown by his unanimous re-election to the Senate. There he at
once entered upon his last great effort at national reconciliation. He
introduced a bill providing for a series of concessions on both sides.
California was to be admitted as a free State; and New Mexico and Utah
were to be organized as territories, leaving the question of slavery for
future settlement. Slavery was to continue in the District of Columbia,
but the slave trade was to be forbidden there. Texas was to cede to New
Mexico a disputed strip of territory, which presumably would ultimately
become free; and was to be compensated by a large grant from the Federal
territory. A law was to be passed for the return of fugitive slaves by
Federal authority.
Over these measures the debate was long and hot. Clay pleaded that by
his scheme the advantages were fairly balanced between North and South.
He urged that the rising spirit of disunion at the South should be
disarmed by reasonable concessions. He appealed to the North for
concessions and to the South for peace. When Jefferson Davis, Senator
from Mississippi, declared that the plan conceded nothing to the South,
and demanded that the Missouri compromise line be extended to the
Pacific (bisecting California), with the express establishment of
slavery south of that line, Clay declared that no earthly power should
make him vote for the establishment of slavery anywhere where it had had
no previous existence. To do so, he said, would be to incur from future
inhabitants of New Mexico the reproach which Americans justly applied to
their British ancestors for fastening the institution on them. But he
would spare Southern sensibilities by withholding an explicit exclusion
of slavery from New Mexico; Nature and the future would attend to that.
Against any right of secession, against any possibility of peaceful
secession, he declared with strongest emphasis: "War and dissolution of
the Union are identical; they are convertible terms; and such a war!"
Fighting for the extension of slavery, the sympathies of all mankind
would be against the South.
The venerable old man, speaking with all the sincerity and warmth of his
heart and with all the powers of his mind, was heard, says Schurz, by a
great and brilliant audience. His first faltering words were followed by
regained power; the old elevation of sentiment, the sonorous flow of
words, the lofty energy of action, were enhanced by the pathetic sense
that this was the final effort.
More pathetic, tragic even, was the last speech of Calhoun, read for him
while he sat in his senatorial chair; the tall form bowed by age and
weakness, the gaunt, impressive face furrowed by the long strife for a
doomed cause, but the old fire still alight in the dark eyes and in the
resolute spirit. He recognized that the strife of the sections was
radical, and that the proposed compromises and palliatives were weak and
temporary. He declared that the South had been thwarted in its rights
from the ordinance of 1787 until now; that the equilibrium would be
destroyed past hope if California and New Mexico were to become free
States; and that the only effective resource lay in some constitutional
amendment to safeguard the rights of the South. What amendment could
effect this, he did not say. But it transpired later that he had in mind
the election of two Presidents, one from each section,--a fantastic and
impossible scheme. In truth, Calhoun in this last utterance was less a
statesman aiming to guide events than a prophet predicting an inevitable
woe. He was too wise to share the elation with which hot-heads talked of
an independent South, and it was with sad forebodings that he sank to
his grave.
When on the 7th of March Webster rose to speak, the Senate and the
country hung on his words. He too was drawing toward the end, but his
powers were unabated. Hope was strong that in him would be found the
champion of freedom. But the key of his speech was a view of the
situation, not as a contest between freedom and slavery, but as an
opposition of geographical sections, inflamed by extremists on both
sides. The mischief, he declared, was due to Southern disunionists and
Northern Abolitionists. The remedy was a calm, patriotic temper; the
rebuke of fanaticism of both kinds, and the acceptance of reasonable
accommodations and adjustments. He approved substantially the scheme
proposed by Clay. The formal exclusion of slavery from New Mexico was an
unnecessary affront to the South; natural conditions would prevent
slavery there. A fugitive slave law was fairly required by the
Constitution and the South had a right to claim it. He, like Clay,
declared peaceable secession an impossibility, and his speech,
impressive throughout by the power of a lucid and massive intellect,
rose at its close to lofty eloquence in a plea for the maintenance of
the Union and a warning of the catastrophe which secession would
precipitate.
The defect of the speech was its complete failure to recognize the wrong
and mischief of slavery. Webster had rarely shown himself a moral
idealist, except as to the sentiment of patriotism. He was identified
with the prosperous and "respectable" classes, and the sufferings of the
poor and oppressed woke little sympathy in him. These limitations had
always been apparent, and while Clay seemed to grow finer and gentler
with advance of years, Webster's course was the other way. That imperial
and commanding presence, with its imposing stature and Jove-like visage,
was the tenement of a richly dowered nature. He had not only great
powers of intellect, but warm affections, generous sentiments, and
wholesome tastes for humanity and the outdoor world, but his moral
fiber, never of the stanchest grain, had been sapped by prosperity. He
was self-indulgent in his personal habits and heedless of homely
obligations. His ambition was strong, and as the favor of the South had
come to be the almost necessary condition of the Presidency, he could
not escape the suspicion of courting that favor. He was in substantial
agreement with Clay as to the compromise measures, but the Kentuckian
rose higher than his section and his look was forward; while Webster was
distinctly below the characteristic temper of New England, and his
movement was retrograde. The anti-slavery men mourned his 7th of March
speech as a great apostasy, and Whittier branded it in his poem of
"Ichabod," which fell with Judgment-day weight. Yet it was not an
apostasy, but the natural culmination of his course; and in spite of its
error, he still was true to the characteristic sentiment of his best
period, the love of the Union. His voice like Clay's gave
inspiration--it may well have been a decisive inspiration--to the cause
which triumphed at Gettysburg and Appomattox. Whittier himself, in a
later poem, recognized the patriotic service of the man whom, in the
heat of conflict, he had so scathingly denounced.
Congress, and especially the Senate, was at this time full of brilliant
men. Among the leaders of the extreme South were Mason of Virginia,
Butler of South Carolina, Davis of Mississippi, and Soule of Louisiana.
From this element came plentiful threats of disunion. But these threats
were met with stern answers. When President Taylor heard of them the
stout old soldier answered that such language was treasonable, and if
necessary he would himself take command of the army that should put down
rebellion. Disunion, he said, is treason; and to one questioning him, he
answered with a soldier's oath that if anyone really attempted to carry
it out, they should be dealt with by law as they deserved, and executed.
Clay's language was no less explicit. When Senator Rhett in Charleston
proposed to raise the flag of secession, and his colleague, Barnwell in
the Senate, half indorsed his words, Clay said, with a lightning flash
that thrilled the audience, that if Senator Rhett followed up that
declaration by overt acts "he will be a traitor, and I hope he will meet
the fate of a traitor!" Clay went on to say that if Kentucky should ever
unfurl the banner of resistance unjustly against the Union, "never,
never will I engage with her in such a cause!"
There was in Congress a new element, of the smallest in numbers, but
with the promise and potency of a great future. Four days after Webster,
Seward spoke in the Senate. He advocated the admission of California as
a free State, with no additions or compromises. No equilibrium between
freedom and slavery was possible; if established to-day it would be
destroyed to-morrow. The moral sentiment of the age would never permit
the enforcement of a law requiring Northern freemen to return slaves to
bondage. The entire public domain was by the Constitution devoted to
union, justice, defense, welfare, and liberty; and it was devoted to the
same noble ends by "a higher law than the Constitution." The extension
of slavery ought to be barred by all legal means. Threats of disunion
had no terrors for him. The question was "whether the Union shall stand,
and slavery, under the steady, peaceful action of moral, social, and
political causes, be removed by gradual voluntary effort and with
compensation; or whether the Union shall be dissolved and civil war
ensue, bringing on violent but complete and immediate emancipation."
Salmon P. Chase of Ohio spoke to similar effect. If, he said, the claims
of freedom are sacrificed here by forms of legislation, "the people will
unsettle your settlement." "It may be that you will succeed in burying
the ordinance of freedom. But the people will write upon its tomb, 'I
shall rise again.'"
The disunionists found that they had little popular support behind them.
A convention at Nashville, held to promote the interests of the South,
refused to countenance any extreme measures. General Taylor steadily
favored the admission of California as a free State, with no
qualifications or accompaniments. Then, while the result in Congress
hung doubtful, in the summer of 1850, President Taylor died. His
successor, Vice-President Millard Fillmore of New York, was a man of
fair ability and cautious or timid disposition; an opponent of Seward in
the politics of their State. He favored the compromise, and called
Webster to his cabinet. The administration's influence seemed to turn
the scale, and Clay's series of measures were adopted one by one. There
was dissatisfaction at the South and indignation at the North. The
territorial settlement was substantially in the North's favor. But the
exasperating fact, and pregnant with consequences, was the Fugitive
Slave law. Its provisions were intolerable to the popular conscience.
All citizens were liable to be called to aid in the pursuit and arrest
of a fugitive. He was to be tried before a United States commissioner,
whose decision was final. A man accused of a crime punishable by a small
fine or a brief imprisonment was entitled to a verdict from an impartial
jury of twelve; but a man whose freedom for life was at stake was at the
mercy of a single official.
Most of the Northern States sooner or later passed "Personal Liberty
laws," which, without directly assuming to nullify the Federal statute,
aimed to defeat its enforcement. They contained such provisions as the
exemption of State officials and State buildings from service in the
rendition of fugitives, and the right of alleged fugitives to be taken
by _habeas corpus_ before a State tribunal. So against the charge of
inhumanity in the Fugitive Slave law, the South brought the
counter-charge of evasion bordering on defiance of a Federal statute.
Few renditions were attempted. Sometimes they were met by forcible
resistance. An alleged fugitive, Jerry, was rescued by the populace in
Syracuse. A negro, Shadrach, arrested as a fugitive in Boston in 1851,
was set free and carried off by a mob. There was a spasm of excitement
in Congress, but it was brief and resultless. Later, in 1854, when the
anti-slavery tide was swiftly rising, came the rendition of Anthony
Burns, who was taken through the streets of Boston under a strong guard
of Federal troops and State militia, while the popular wrath and grief
at the sight swelled the wave which the repeal of the Missouri
compromise had started on its inevitable way.
CHAPTER XI
A LULL AND A RETROSPECT
After the half-year's debate over the compromise of 1850 came a time of
political quiet. "The tumult and the shouting died." It seemed more than
a temporary lull. In a great tide of material prosperity, the country
easily forgot the slaves; if out of sight, they were, to most, out of
mind. Webster's speech had a deep significance. He was identified in
Massachusetts with the classes representing commercial prosperity,
social prominence, and academic culture. In these classes, throughout
the North, there was a general apathy as to slavery. The temper of the
time was materialistic. There was indeed enough anti-slavery sentiment,
stirred by the 7th of March speech and the Fugitive Slave law, to change
the balance of power in Massachusetts politics. The Democrats and the
Free Soilers made a coalition, and it triumphed over the Whigs. The
Democrats took the State offices, with George S. Boutwell as Governor;
and Charles Sumner--a scholar, an idealist, an impressive orator, and a
pronounced anti-slavery man, though never an Abolitionist,--was sent to
the Senate to reinforce Seward and Chase.
The Presidential election of 1852 came on. In the Whig convention
Fillmore had some support, especially from the South; Webster had most
of the Massachusetts votes and scarce any others; and choice was made of
General Winfield Scott, in the hope of repeating the victory of 1848
with another hero of the Mexican war. It was to Webster a blow past
retrieval; in bitterness of spirit he turned his face to the wall, in
his old home at Marshfield, and died. The Democratic convention
hesitated between several Northern politicians of trustworthy
subserviency to the South,--Cass, Douglas, and Buchanan--and its choice
fell upon Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, an amiable man, of fair
ability, but easy to manage; he, too, the winner of a trifle of military
glory in the Mexican conquest. Both conventions professed entire content
with the settlements of the compromise. The Free Soilers nominated John
P. Hale of New Hampshire, and made their familiar declaration of
principles. But they had lost their Democratic allies of four years
earlier, and threw only 150,000 votes--less by 100,000 than at the
previous election. The Whig party proved to be on the verge of
dissolution. It had lost its hold on the "conscience vote" of the North,
and was less trusted than its rival by the South. Pierce was chosen by a
great majority; he carried every State except Vermont, Massachusetts,
Kentucky, and Tennessee.
Party politics were dull; commercial and material interests seemed
wholly in the ascendant, and the anti-slavery cause was at a low ebb.
But many things had happened in two decades, below the surface current
of public events, and, just on the threshold of a new era, we may glance
back over these twenty years. All the European world had been full of
movement. France had passed through three revolutions. Germany, Austria,
and Italy had undergone a political upheaval and subsidence; and the
liberal reverses of 1848 were the precursors of national unity and
constitutional freedom in the near future.
England had gone steadily on in the path of conservative progress; had
widened its suffrage by the Reform Act of 1832; had relieved distress
and disarmed discontent by the free trade policy of Sir Robert Peel; her
factory legislation had met a crying need of the new industrial epoch,
and she had pacified and energized Canada by giving her
self-government. Meanwhile American progress had been along lines of its
own. The country had grown at a tremendous rate, and mainly at the North
and West. Immigration had poured in from Europe, and the stream of
native stock from the seaboard States to the West had hardly slackened.
It was the epoch of the railroad and the telegraph. Manufactures had
increased and multiplied; acres fell under cultivation by the million.
In this industrial growth the North had far outstripped the South.
Calhoun had urged the construction of railroads to link the eastern and
western parts of the South, but the political motive could not supply
the want of industrial force. The figures of the census of 1850 were
more eloquent than any orator as to the relative effects of free and
slave labor. Intellectually the period had been prolific. Emerson had
risen, the bright morning star of American literature. Bryant,
Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, were telling their stories or
singing their songs. Theology was fruitful of debate and change. The
Unitarian movement had defined itself. Presbyterians and
Congregationalists were discussing the tenets of old school and new. For
"women's rights" a strong and promising advance had been made, in the
face of unpopularity and derision. Religious revivals, foreign missions,
social reforms, were making active way. From all this intellectual and
social movement, unless we except the emotional revivals of religion,
the South stood apart. Literature it had virtually none; its theology
was only conservative and defensive; at most so-called reforms it looked
askance.
In two respects the South had an advantage. Its social system was
aristocratic; above the slaves came the non-slave-holding whites,
including a great mass of the ignorant and degraded; but at the summit
the slave-holding class had a social life in many ways attractive and
delightful. The slave-holders, all told, numbered some 350,000. The
controlling element consisted of the large planters, with the affiliated
members of the liberal professions. Plantation life at its best had a
great deal of beauty and charm. A degree of improvidence and
"shiftlessness," by Northern standards, was not inconsistent with free
hospitality, a generous outdoor life, an old-time culture with an
atmosphere of leisure and courtesy, superior in its way to what the busy
and bustling North could show. The charming and chivalrous "Colonel
Carter of Cartersville" had many a prototype in real life. A higher type
was sometimes bred in Southern society; it was not without some reason
that Virginians claimed that the mold which produced Washington was not
broken when it could yield a Robert Lee. There was a somber side;
plantation life was often a rank soil for passions of tyranny and
license. But its better fruitage added an element to the composite
American type which could not and cannot be spared.
The other advantage the South possessed was the devotion of its
strongest men to political life. The loss of commerce and literature was
the gain of politics. The typical Southern leader was apt to be both a
planter and a lawyer, with a strong and active interest in public
affairs. Political oratory was a favorite resource in the
sparsely-settled districts. The personal force which in the North was
scattered among twenty fields was here centered mainly in one. This
feature of Southern society worked together with the fact that the
section had in slavery a common interest and bond. That interest of the
entire section, led by its ablest men, came naturally to be the dominant
factor in American public life. When it could not rule through its own
men, it found agents in subservient Northern politicians. And so it came
about that in the early '50s the South, while outstripped altogether in
population, wealth, industrial and intellectual achievement, was yet in
substantial control of the governmental power. In the North, by the very
magnitude of the commercial and industrial development the moral
sentiment in public affairs seemed submerged or at least eclipsed.
It was during such a period of apathy that there was held an
anti-slavery meeting at which two negroes were present, Sojourner Truth,
an old woman whose shrewdness matched her fervor, and Frederick
Douglass. Douglass was the son of a white father and a slave mother; he
taught himself to read and write, made his escape into freedom, gained
an education, and became an effective speaker for the anti-slavery
cause. On this occasion he spoke with power and passion of the gloomy
prospects of their people; government, wealth, social advantage, all
were on the side of their oppressors; good people seemed indifferent to
their wrongs; was there indeed any help or hope? Then rose Sojourner
Truth, and looking at him said only, "Frederick! Is God dead?"
CHAPTER XII
SLAVERY AS IT WAS
And now, in the year 1852, there befell an event perhaps as momentous in
American history as any between the establishment of the Constitution
and the Civil War. A frail little woman, the wife of an obscure
theological professor in a Maine village, wrote a story, and that story
captured the heart of the world. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say
that _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ converted the North to the cause of the slave.
The typical Union volunteer of 1861 carried the book in his memory. It
brought home to the heart of the North, and of the world, that the slave
was a man,--one with mankind by that deepest tie, of human love and
aspiration and anguish,--but denied the rights of a man.
The book was a birth of genius and love. It is absolutely
sweet-spirited. Its intense and irresistible plea is not against a class
or a section, but against a system. It portrays among the Southern
slave-holders characters noble and attractive,--Mrs Shelby, the faithful
mistress, and the fascinating St. Clare. The worst villain in the story
is a renegade Northerner. Its typical Yankee, Miss Ophelia, provokes
kindly laughter. The book mixes humor with its tragedy; the sorrows of
Uncle Tom and the dark story of Cassy are relieved by the pranks of
Black Sam and the antics of Topsy. With all its woes, the story somehow
does not leave a depressing effect; it abounds in courage and action;
the fugitives win their way to freedom; the final impulse is to hopeful
effort against the wrong. Its basal motive was the same as that of the
Abolitionists, but its spirit and method were so different from
Garrison's that it won response and sympathy where he had roused
antagonism. Against pharisaical religion it uses effective
satire,--which was intensified in its successor, _Dred_,--but the
Christianity of faith and life is its animating spirit. No book is
richer in the gospel of love to man and trust in God. Its rank is high
in the new literature which has stimulated and led the great modern
movement for the uplifting of the poor and oppressed. Its place is with
Victor Hugo's _Les Miserables_ and Tolstoi's _War and Peace_.
The motive of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ was an appeal to the heart of the
American people. There was no reference to political action, far less
any suggestion of servile insurrection, and there was no discussion of
methods of emancipation. The book set forth an organized, monstrous
wrong, which it was in the power of the American nation, and above all,
of the Southern people, to remove. The effect at the North was
immeasurably to widen and deepen the conviction of the wrong of slavery,
and the desire to remove it. But the way to practical action did not
open; and strangely enough there was at first no visible effect on
politics. The political logic of the situation led straight, as a first
step, to the support of the Free Soil party. But though _Uncle Tom's
Cabin_ appeared (as a book) in April, 1852, and its popularity was
instant, the Presidential election seven months later showed a Free Soil
vote less by 100,000 than four years before. The political effect of the
book was to appear only when public events two years later gave a sudden
spur to the hesitating North.
The South turned a deaf ear to the appeal. It shut the book out from its
borders as far as it could, and one who inquired for it in a Southern
bookstore would probably be offered _Aunt Phillis's Cabin_ or some
other mild literary anti-toxin. The South protested that the book's
picture of slavery was untrue and unjust. It was monstrous, so they
said, that their labor system should be shown as having its natural
result in the whipping to death of a saintly negro for his virtuous
conduct. Another reply was: "If the book is true, it is really a eulogy
of slavery, for it depicts slavery as producing in Uncle Tom a perfect
character."
To the objections to the fidelity of her portraiture Mrs. Stowe replied
with _A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin_,--a formidable array of proved facts,
as to the laws of the slave States, and specific incidents which
paralleled or exceeded all she had told. As now judged, the novel has
some serious imperfections as a picture of slavery. Probably the most
important of these was expressed by Judge Tourgee, para-phrasing the
proverb about the Russian and the Tartar: "Scratch one of Mrs. Stowe's
negroes, and you will find a white man." She failed adequately to
differentiate the two races, and described the negro too much from such
specimens as Uncle Tom and George and Eliza Harris. She had never lived
in the South, and her knowledge was obtained from observation in the
border town of Cincinnati, from acquaintance with fugitives, and from
the reports of Northern travelers--all interpreted with the insight of
genius and the impulse of philanthropy. Her avowed purpose was not to
make a literal or merely artistic picture, but to show the actual wrongs
and legalized possibilities of wrong which called for redress. It did
not lessen the justice of her plea, that the mass of negroes were more
degraded than she knew, or that their average treatment was kinder than
her portrayal showed.
But a true historical judgment of slavery must rest on a comparison of
documents. The story told from the master's standpoint should be heard.
Among the faithful and graphic narrations of this sort may be named Mrs.
Burton Harrison's _Flower de Hundred_,--a volume of personal
reminiscences of Virginia before the war. It is a charming story,
without motive other than the pleasure of recalling happy memories, and
it describes a society of various and vivid charm. The mention of the
slaves is occasional and incidental; but the description of the
plantation hands, and especially the household servants, trusted and
beloved, gives a sunny and doubtless a real side of slavery. Another
book is fuller and more impressive in its treatment. It might be said
that every American ought to read _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ as a part of his
education, and to follow it with two other books of real life. One of
these is _A Southern Planter_,--a biography of Thomas Dabney, of
Virginia and later of Mississippi, written by his daughter. It is a
story amply worth reading for its human interest, and for its
presentation of a man of noble and beautiful character. One is enriched
by the acquaintance, even through a book, of a man like Thomas Dabney.
And it is most desirable for the Northerner to vivify his impression of
the South by the knowledge of men like him. We are misled by general and
geographical terms: "an Englishman" is a vague and perhaps unattractive
term to an American until he knows, in books or in flesh and blood, a
few Britons of the right stamp. And so South and North need mutual
interpretation not alone through their historic heroes, but through the
best of their everyday people. And of those best, surely Thomas Dabney
was one,--a strong, tender, noble man, fulfilling each relation in
family and society with loyal conscience and sympathetic heart.
From the book we can give but a few instances of plantation life as such
a man made it. When he was to move from Virginia to Mississippi he
called together all his slaves,--some hundreds--and told them he wanted
to take none of them against their will, and especially he would not
break up any families. If any of them had wives or husbands on other
plantations, he would sell or buy, just as they wished, so that every
family should stay or go together. Every one of them elected to go with
their old master. Settled in Mississippi, his cotton plantation became
the admiration and envy of the neighbors, for the size of the crops as
well as the condition of the workers. Their comfort was amply secured.
The general rule was three hours' rest at midday and a Saturday
half-holiday. At the height of the season hours were longer, but there
was a system of prizes, for four or five months in the year, from $1 a
week to a picayune; with an extra prize of a $5 gold piece for anyone
picking 600 pounds a day; and these prizes roused such interest and
excitement that some of the ambitious ones had to be compelled to leave
the field at night, wishing to sleep at the end of their row. The
inefficient were gently tolerated; severe punishment was held to be
alike cruel and useless; an incompetent servant was carried as a burden
from which there was no escape. Such endurance was the way of all good
masters and mistresses at the South,--"and I have known very few who
were not good," adds the writer. The plantation trained and kept its own
mechanics; two each of carpenters, blacksmiths, millers, with five
seamstresses in the house. In the house, under the mistress's eye, were
cut and made the clothes of all the negroes, two woolen and two cotton
suits a year, with a gay calico Sunday dress for each woman. The women
were taught sewing in the house. When their babies were born a nurse was
provided, and all the mother's work done for her for a month, and for a
year she was allowed ample leisure for the care of the baby. The sons of
the family taught reading to those who wished to learn. Some of the
house servants were very fine characters; the sketch of "Mammy Maria"
one would gladly reproduce. When secession came on, Thomas Dabney
altogether disapproved, and foresaw the ruin of the South. He proposed
to his wife that they close up their affairs, and go to live in England.
Her reply was: "What will you do with Abby? and with Maria and Harriet,
and their husbands and children, and the rest of our people?" That was
unanswerable. So he stayed, and with his family shared the
fighting,--for, the war begun, Dabney gave his hearty support to the
Southern cause, and his sons went to the field,--shared the hardships of
a devastated country, the social chaos that followed, and the slow
reconstruction,--a more intrepid and lovable figure in adversity than
before.
His daughter writes: "In the family of Thomas Dabney the first feeling
when the war ended was of joy that one dreadful responsibility at least
was removed. Gradual emancipation had been a hope and a dream not to be
realized." "A hope and a dream,"--it does not appear that it had ever
been seriously considered as a purpose or a duty. "Not an intelligent
white man or woman in the South," says the writer, "would now wish
slavery restored." But why,--it is impossible not to return to the
question,--why had the South done nothing to rid itself of the evil? Why
had it centered its political energies in maintaining and extending it?
Why had it revolted from the Union and invited war and ruin, for a
system which when once removed it recognized as a burden and a curse? No
right minded man can ponder that question without taking a step further,
and asking whether the evils in our present industrial system shall be
allowed to go on till they bring down the temple on our heads, or be met
with deliberate and resolute cure. And the good and conscientious man
who does his best under the existing system--as Thomas Dabney did under
slavery--is yet derelict unless he gives his thought and effort to such
radical amendment as the system may need.
There is yet another book in illustration of slavery which ought to be
read by every American. It is Fanny Kemble Butler's _A Residence on a
Georgia Plantation_. She was a woman of unusual genius, character, and
sensibility; the inheritor of a great dramatic talent, and a brilliant
actress until she married Mr. Butler of Georgia, and left the stage to
live with him on the plantation owned by himself and his brother. After
no long period she left her husband, not taking the world into her
confidence as to her domestic affairs, but returning to the stage as a
dramatic reader, and passing into honored private life. After the
outbreak of the Civil War she published, with some reserves and some
additions, the journal she had kept during her life on the plantation.
As to her personal relations, except as touching the slaves, the book is
entirely reticent, but it is plain that slavery as she saw it made life
under those conditions literally intolerable. Below all special
cruelties, she writes, she felt the ever-present, vivid wrong of living
on the unpaid labor of servants. The special wrongs were constant. Thus
she describes the parting of a family of slaves, and the husband's awful
distress. She tells of the head-driver, Frank, an every way superior
man, left at some seasons in sole charge of the plantation; but his wife
was taken from him and made the mistress of the overseer. There was
Engineer Ned, intelligent and capable, and himself not badly treated,
but with a wife broken down by being driven to field work too soon after
the birth of a child. Half the women on the plantation were diseased
from the same cause. One woman brought to her mistress a pitiful tale of
such suffering. A little later the mistress learned that the woman, on
the ground that this visit had caused her day's labor to come short,
had received a flogging. She appealed to her husband, but he refused to
interfere. "To Mr. ----'s assertion of the justice of poor Theresa's
punishment, I retorted the manifest injustice of unpaid and enforced
labor; the brutal inhumanity of allowing a man to strip and lash a
woman, the mother of ten children; to exact from her toil which was to
maintain in luxury two idle young men, the owners of the plantation. I
said I thought female labor of the sort exacted from these slaves, and
corporal chastizement such as they endure, must be abhorrent to any
manly or humane man. Mr. ---- said he thought it was disagreeable, and
left me to my reflections with that concession." Presently he refused to
listen to any more such petitions from her. She writes: "A wild wish
rose in my heart that the river and the sea would swallow up and melt in
their salt waves the whole of this accursed property of ours."
The principal physical hardships, she writes, fell to the women. The
children and the old people are idle and neglected; the middle-aged men
do not seem over-worked, and lead a mere animal existence, in itself not
peculiarly cruel or distressing, but with a constant element of fear and
uncertainty, "and the trifling evils of unrequited labor, ignorance the
most profound (to which they are condemned by law), and the unutterable
injustice which precludes them from all the merits and all the benefits
of voluntary exertion, and the progress that results from it."
Her eye notes closely the faces about her. When she gathers the slaves
to read prayers to them, she observes "their sable faces, so many of
them so uncouth in their outlines and proportions, and yet all of them
so pathetic, and some so sublime in their expression of patient
suffering and religious fervor." She says: "Just in proportion as I have
found the slaves on this plantation intelligent and advanced, I have
observed this pathetic expression of countenance in them, a mixture of
sadness and fear." The plantation, she writes, was well reputed, and its
management was considered above the average.
Her analysis of the master class in the South is keen and striking. "The
shop is not their element, and the eager spirit of speculation and the
sordid spirit of gain do not infect their whole existence, even to their
very demeanor and appearance, as they too manifestly do those of a large
proportion of the inhabitants of the Northern States. The Southerners
are infinitely better bred men, according to English notions, than the
men of the Northern States. The habit of command gives them a certain
self-possession, the enjoyment of leisure a certain ease. Their
temperament is impulsive and enthusiastic, and their manners have the
grace and spirit which seldom belong to the development of a Northern
people; but upon more familiar acquaintance the vices of the social
system to which they belong will be found to have infected them with
their own peculiar taint; and haughty, over-bearing irritability,
effeminate indolence, reckless extravagance, and a union of profligacy
and cruelty which is the immediate result of their irresponsible power
over their dependents, are some of the less pleasing traits."
She gives another and darker picture of the planter class. It goes
without saying that it is only a part of the class to which it fairly
applies: "A nation, for as such they should be spoken of, of men whose
organization and temperament is that of the southern European, living
under the influence of a climate at once enervating and exciting,
scattered over trackless wildernesses of arid sand and pestilential
swamp, intrenched within their own boundaries, surrounded by creatures
absolutely subject to their despotic will; delivered over by hard
necessity to the lowest excitements of drinking, gambling, and
debauchery for sole recreation; independent of all opinion; ignorant of
all progress; isolated from all society--it is impossible to conceive a
more savage existence within the border of any modern civilization." The
picture of the poor whites is graphic and somber, but space must limit
these quotations.
She gives credit for the habits of courage and command, which are bred
in the upper class, as when she tells of a heroic rescue from a
shipwreck: "The devil must have his due, and men brought up in habits of
peremptory command over their fellowmen, and under the constant
apprehension of danger and awful necessity of immediate readiness to
meet it, acquire qualities precious to themselves and others in hours of
supreme peril."
She touches repeatedly on the social restrictions on free speech; thus,
speaking of two gentlemen, one a clergyman: "They seem good and kind and
amiable men, and I have no doubt are conscientious in their capacity of
slave holders; but to one who has lived outside this dreadful
atmosphere, the whole tone of their discourse has a morally muffled
sound which one must hear to be able to conceive." She observes that
whenever she discusses slavery with people she meets, they waive the
abstract right or wrong of the system. Now and then she gets a bit of
entire frankness, as when a very distinguished South Carolinian says to
her, "I'll tell you why abolition is impossible; because every healthy
negro can fetch $1000 in Charleston market at this moment."
She generalizes as to the effects of emancipation in a way which later
events completely justified. Unlike the West Indies, she says, the South
is not tropical, and will not yield food without labor, and necessity
would compel the liberated blacks to work. That they would not work, and
the ground would lie idle, was, as we know, the bogy which was held up
to scare away from emancipation--just as in our own day the danger of
race mixture is made a bogy to scare away from social justice. But the
event proved that Fanny Kemble was right in her predictions, in which
indeed she was at one with other candid observers at the time. As to
gradual emancipation, she believed it unwise--the system, she writes, is
too absolutely bad for slow measures. Had she owned her husband's
plantation, she would at once have freed the slaves, and hired them, if
only as a means of financial salvation.
She pronounces _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ to be no exaggeration. Her own story
of facts gives a darker impression than Mrs. Stowe's novel. It may be
asked, why, at this distance, revive the tragic tale? The answer is,
that the truth of history is precious, and our present problems cannot
be understood if we shut our eyes to their antecedents. Just now there
is a fashion, among many Southern writers on the negro question, of
beginning their story with the wrongs and sufferings of the
reconstruction period. Now, it was indeed deplorable, and a thing not to
be forgotten, that ignorant negroes sat in the Senate chambers of South
Carolina and Mississippi, that taxes were excessive, and the public
business mismanaged. But, in the broad view, it is well to remember that
a few years earlier very much worse things than these were happening,
and that a system which made cattle of men and women might be expected
to avenge itself.
Another work may be merely mentioned as illuminating the facts of
slavery. It is Frederic Law Olmsted's three volumes of travels in the
slave States. He studied them with the eyes of a farmer and a practical
man; a well-equipped, fair, and keen observer. His testimony, already
touched on in these chapters, is very strong as to the economic mischief
of the system, its frequent cruelties, its demoralization of both
master and slave, and the absolute need of its ultimate extinction. From
his pages we can borrow but one or two passages. The contrasts of
slavery are epitomized in two plantations he found side by side in
Mississippi. On one the slaves had good food and clothes, were not
driven hard, were given three stops in the day for meals, and had the
time from Friday night till Monday morning for themselves. In this time
the men cultivated gardens and the women washed and sewed. They were
smartly dressed, and seemed very contented; many could read and write;
on Sundays there was a church service and a Sabbath school taught by
their mistress, both of which they could attend or not as they pleased.
On the other plantation, owned by a religious woman, the working hours
were from 3.30 A. M. to 9 P. M. The slaves had only Sunday free from
labor, and on that day there were three services which they had to
attend under penalty of a whipping. They were never allowed off the
plantation, and were whipped if they talked with slaves from other
plantations. Said a neighbor, "They can all repeat the catechism, but
they are the dullest, laziest, and most sorrowful negroes I ever saw."
As to the possibilities of gradual emancipation, which he favored,
Olmsted wrote that in Cuba every slave has the right of buying his own
freedom, at a price which does not depend on the selfish exaction of his
master, but is either a fixed price or is determined in each case by
disinterested appraisers. "The consequence is that emancipations are
continually going on, and the free people of color are becoming
enlightened, cultivated, and wealthy. In no part of the United States do
they occupy the high position which they enjoy in Cuba." So much for the
despised Spanish-American.
From a still different standpoint--that of the non-slaveholding
Southern white--the system was reviewed and scathingly judged in
Helper's _The Impending Crisis_. But that, like _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, was
not merely a book, but an event, and as such is to be mentioned in its
place among events. The general survey of the slave system in itself
need not here be carried further. As to its essential character and
basal principle, no truer word was ever spoken than that which Mrs.
Stowe puts in the mouth of the slaveholder St. Clare:
"The short of the matter is, cousin, on this abstract question of
slavery there can, as I think, be but one opinion. Planters,
who have money to make by it,--clergymen, who have planters to
please,--politicians, who want to rule by it,--may warp and bend
language and ethics to a degree that shall astonish the world at their
ingenuity; they can press Nature and the Bible, and nobody knows what
else, into the service; but, after all, neither they nor the world
believe in it one particle the more. It comes from the devil, that's the
short of it,--and to my mind, it's a pretty respectable specimen of what
he can do in his own line. You seem to wonder; but if you will get me
fairly at it, I'll make a clean breast of it. This cursed business,
accursed of God and man, what is it? Strip it of all its ornament, run
it down to the root and nucleus of the whole, and what is it? Why,
because my brother Quashy is ignorant and weak, and I am intelligent and
strong,--because I know how, and can do it,--therefore I may steal all
he has, keep it, and give him only such and so much as suits my fancy.
Whatever is too hard, too dirty, too disagreeable, for me, I may set
Quashy to doing. Because I don't like work, Quashy shall work. Because
the sun burns me, Quashy shall stay in the sun. Quashy shall earn the
money, and I will spend it. Quashy shall lie down in every puddle, that
I may walk over dry-shod. Quashy shall do my will, and not his, all the
days of his mortal life, and have such chance of getting to heaven, at
last, as I find convenient. This I take to be about what slavery is."
St. Clare goes on to say that "for pity's sake, for shame's sake,
because we are men born of women and not savage beasts, many of us do
not and dare not--we would scorn to--use the full power which our savage
laws put into our hands." In truth, a compilation of the slave laws was
one of the most convincing arguments against the whole system.
This book is characterized by Charles G. Ames,--whose long life of noble
service to humanity included earnest work among the anti-slavery
pioneers: "To my mind, the heaviest blow, though probably not the most
telling one, ever struck against our slave system as a system was the
compilation and publication of Stroud's _Slave Laws_--a codification
from the statute-books of the Southern States of their own barbarous
methods of legislation, made necessary for the protection of the
peculiar institution. All the recent sentimental defenses of it, as
gentle, humane, and patriarchal, seem utterly to ignore the rugged
facts, which Lawyer Stroud's book made as plain as the stratification of
the rocks to the eye of the geologist."
In its actual administration, the system was in a measure softened and
humanized. It was more humane in the border than in the cotton and sugar
States, and it was generally better when a plantation was managed by its
owner than when left to an overseer,--as the plantation of Fanny
Kemble's husband had been left. But in one respect its disastrous effect
was everywhere felt. By associating manual labor with the stigma of
servitude, it bred, in free men, a strong disrelish for work,--a most
demoralizing and ruinous influence. Inefficiency and degradation were
the marks of the non-slaveholding whites. The master class missed the
wholesome regimen of toil. Nature is never more beneficent than when
she lays on man the imperative command "Thou shalt work." Of all ways of
evading it the worst is to shift the burden to another man. In being
driven to do other men's work as well as his own the negro found some
compensation, but his enslaver paid a constant and heavy penalty.
CHAPTER XIII
THE STRUGGLE FOR KANSAS
The foremost politician of the Northwest, in the early '50s, was Stephen
A. Douglas, United States senator from Illinois. He was a native of
Vermont, and had early gone West and pushed his fortunes with energy,
audacity, and shrewdness. He was an effective, popular speaker; and his
short and stout frame and large head had won for him the nickname of
"The Little Giant." He was a leader in the Democratic party, and a
prominent Presidential candidate, but never identified with any great
political principle or broad policy. He was chairman of the Senate
committee on Territories, and early in the session of 1853-4 he
introduced a bill for the organization of a vast section hitherto known
as "the Platte country," a part of the Louisiana purchase, lying next to
the western tier of States, and stretching from Indian Territory to
Canada; all of which was now to constitute the Territory of Nebraska,
or, as it was soon divided, the two Territories of Nebraska and Kansas.
This region had as yet been scarcely touched by permanent settlers, but
it was the next step in the great onward march toward the Pacific. It
lay north of the line of 36 degrees 30 minutes, above which it had been
declared by the compromise act of 1820 slavery should never be extended.
Douglas incorporated in his "Kansas-Nebraska" bill, a clause declaring
that the prohibition of slavery north of 36 degrees 30 minutes, by the
act of 1820, had been "superseded by the principles of the legislation
of 1850," and was "inoperative and void." Later he added the
explanatory clause: "It being the true intent and meaning of this act,
not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it
therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and
regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to
the Constitution of the United States." On its face, this was a proposal
to withdraw the congressional prohibition of slavery in the Northwestern
territory, and remand the question to the territorial population. But
the latent purpose to distinctly favor slavery was proved when Senator
Chase moved an additional clause: "Under which (the Constitution) the
people of the Territory, through their appropriate representatives, may,
if they see fit, prohibit the existence of slavery therein"; and Douglas
and his followers, in defiance of consistency, instantly threw this out.
The meaning of the whole business was unmistakable; under the pretext of
"popular sovereignty,"--Douglas's favorite watchword--the bars were
thrown down and slavery was invited to enter.
The proposal took the country completely by surprise. The South was not
asking for any such advantage as was offered, but was prompt to accept
it. This of course Douglas had expected, and in this lay his personal
gain as a Presidential candidate. But he had utterly misjudged the
temper of the North. The general acquiescence in the compromise of 1850
might seem to indicate a weariness or indifference as to the slavery
question. But just as in 1820 and in 1850, again there sprung up a wide
and deep hostility to any extension of slavery, and now the old
restraints on that hostility were gone, and its sources were newly
filled. For now Clay and Webster were dead, and the case itself offered
no room for compromise; no offset was possible. And the anti-slavery
feeling had strengthened immensely throughout the North. Under the
stimulus of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, the inhumanity of the system had made
the deepest impression on the popular imagination and conscience. To
this system it was now proposed to throw open all the fair and fertile
Northwest, in effect from the Mississippi to the Pacific. The North
awoke like a giant from sleep. The old party organizations went down in
the shock; a new party came instantly to birth; and the last triumph of
slavery in Congress gave the signal for a six-years' campaign, ending in
the triumph of the Republicans and the appeal of the South to
revolution.
The debate in Congress was hot through the winter and spring of 1854. In
the Senate, Seward and Sumner and Chase had been reinforced by such
allies as Benjamin Wade of Ohio, Hamilton Fish of New York, Solomon Foot
of Vermont, and William P. Fessenden of Maine. The supporters of the
bill, with such leaders as Douglas and Cass from the North and Mason and
Benjamin from the South, proved finally to number three-fourths of the
Senate. In the House, party lines were completely broken, and the
division was almost equal,--the bill passed by 113 to 110. Its
supporters included all the Southern and just half of the Northern
Democrats, and two-thirds of the few Southern Whigs. Its opponents were
all the Northern and a third of the Southern Whigs, with half of the
Northern Democrats and the four Free-Soilers in the House.
The bill finally passed on the 25th of May, 1854, and there instantly
began a hot battle for the congressional election. On the very next
morning,--so Henry Wilson relates,--a meeting of about twenty members of
the House was held; among their leaders were Israel Washburn, Jr., of
Maine, and Edward Dickinson and Thomas D. Eliot of Massachusetts; and it
was agreed that the best hope lay not in the Whig organization, but in a
new party, for which the name "Republican" was chosen; and of which
this occasion might now be considered the birth and christening. It
came to its earliest maturity in Michigan, where the Whigs and Free
Soilers united in the new party and carried the autumn election. But in
most Northern States there was political confusion, heightened by the
sudden appearance of the "American" party. This was the political
development of the "Know-nothing" secret society, which came into
existence the year before, on the basis of the exclusion of recent
immigrants from political power. Its special animus was hostility to the
Irish Catholics, and in various parts of the country it had for a year
or two a mushroom growth. In Massachusetts, where the Whigs clung
obstinately to their tradition and their social prestige, and the
Republican party was at first only a continuance of the Free Soil, the
Know-nothings won in 1854 a sweeping victory, carrying the State by
almost two to one and electing all the members of Congress. That shrewd
politician, Henry Wilson, contributed to the result; was elected to the
United States Senate; and led the anti-slavery element which controlled
the American party in Massachusetts and a year or two later divided its
national organization. In other States, the term "anti-Nebraska" was the
basis of a temporary union, such as in Ohio had a majority of 70,000. In
New York the influence of Greeley, Seward, and Weed prolonged the Whig
organization as an anti-Nebraska party. The roster of the new Congress
was a jumble of Democrats, Whigs, Republicans, Americans, and
anti-Nebraskans. But the general result was clear; Douglas's bill had
turned an overwhelming administration majority into a minority of the
popular vote; and the political revolution had carried the House in the
first engagement. The result crystallized a year later, when an
obstinate battle of many weeks for the House speakership ended in the
election of Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts.
The immediate practical effect of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was to throw
the political destiny of those Territories into the hands of the future
settlers. There were men at the North who were prompt to see and seize
the opportunity. In February, 1854, three months before the bill became
law, the New England Emigrant Aid Society was incorporated in
Massachusetts. Its originator was Eli Thayer of Worcester, and among its
active promoters was Edward Everett Hale. In the following July it sent
to Kansas a colony of twenty-four, speedily followed by another of
seventy, which founded the town of Lawrence. Other colonies followed
from various Northern States, and other settlements were made. The
natural westward movement of an active population seeking new homes and
personal betterment was augmented and stimulated by a propaganda of
freedom. Whittier gave the colonists a marching song:
We cross the prairies as of old
Our fathers crossed the sea,
To make the West as they the East
The home of liberty.
A counter movement was started from the South. Missouri was its natural
base. But Missouri furnished the material and leadership for another
kind of crusade. The rough and lawless element of a border community was
brought out in its worst character by the appeal to champion the cause
of slavery. Men high in political life were ready to utilize such
forces. The first settlers of Lawrence, before they had time to raise
their houses, were visited by a ruffianly mob from Missouri, who tried
by threats and show of force to drive them from the Territory, but
failed. When in November the first election was held for Territorial
delegate to Congress, there was a systematic invasion by bands of
Missourians, who captured the polling-places and elected their
candidate by 3000 votes; though it was afterward proved that there were
only half that number of voters resident in Kansas.
In 1855 the first Territorial Legislature was elected by a similar
invasion of armed men, which chose the entire body. A foremost leader in
these operations was United States Senator Atchison of Missouri.
President Pierce's administration recognized the usurping faction. It
sent a succession of governors--Reeder, Shannon, Geary, Walker (the last
was sent by President Buchanan)--who, with the exception of the
incompetent and worthless Shannon, were by the inexorable facts of the
situation won to the side of the Free-State men, and accordingly lost
favor and their office. Meantime the usurping Legislature had enacted an
extraordinary code of laws. By these statutes, decoying a slave from his
master was punishable by death or hard labor for ten years; the
circulation of writings inciting to revolt was made a capital offense;
and the assertion by speech, writing, or the circulation of any book or
paper, that slavery was not lawful in the Territory, was punishable by
two years' hard labor.
It was not in the blood of free men to submit to such usurpation and
tyranny. In the autumn of 1855 the Free State party held a convention,
adopted a State constitution, and petitioned for admission to the Union.
They elected State officers with Charles S. Robinson as Governor. This
organization had really no legal standing; in form it was revolutionary.
But the Free State party were not only resolute, but adroit. They had no
mind to actively rebel against the United States Government, or come
into collision with its forces. Governor Robinson, their foremost
leader, was a man of New England birth, who had served a profitable
apprenticeship in the settlement of California, and learned a lesson
amid the complications of Federal authority and pioneer exigencies.
Counseled by him and men of like mind, the Free State party, while
maintaining the form of a State government, and disavowing the
Territorial Legislature as fraudulent, always deferred to any express
mandate of Federal authority. The Federal troops in the Territory were
commanded by Colonel Sumner, afterward a distinguished commander in the
Union army, and Governor Robinson (_The Kansas Conflict_), credits him
with a loyal and generally successful purpose to preserve order and
peace. In the mixed population there was much bad blood, many threats,
and occasional violence, but no general conflict. The "border ruffians"
were often insulting, and some murders were committed, but the Free
State men kept steadily on the defensive, though there was among them a
faction which favored more aggressive measures.
At last, a Free-State man was wantonly murdered; then an eye-witness of
the murder was got away on an apparently trumped-up charge; this was
followed by a bloodless rescue and the witness was carried off to
Lawrence. Then a sheriff with his posse went to Lawrence to arrest one
of the rescuers. In the night the sheriff was fired at and wounded. He
retreated; and immediately afterward a formidable demonstration was made
against the town of Lawrence. The situation was peculiar. Many of the
Free-State men were armed; contributions had been openly taken in the
North for this purpose, and "Sharpe's rifles" was one of the familiar
words of the day. But this policy was fixed--to disown and disobey the
authority of the Territorial Legislature, but never to oppose or resist
a United States official. In this way, says Robinson, the entire odium
of all oppressive proceedings was fixed on the Federal administration;
"the more outrages the people could get the government to perpetrate
upon them the more victories they would gain, and this simply because
the field of battle embraced the entire country, and the chief
victories at this stage were to be moral, political, and national."
The Territorial authorities were bent on breaking down, if possible, the
passive resistance of the Free-State men. Indictments were found, by a
Federal grand jury, against a number of members of the Free-State
government for "constructive treason," and they were put under arrest.
Indictments were also found against two printing offices in Lawrence,
and the principal hotel in the town. A large force of Missourians, led
by a United States marshal, advanced on the town. The inhabitants
protested, but agreed to respect the United States authority. The hotel
and the two printing offices were accordingly destroyed. A considerable
amount of lawless pillaging was done, and Governor Robinson's house was
burned. Then the force was withdrawn.
The Free-State leaders, as Robinson states, were in no wise cast down by
the course of events. Their actual losses had not been great; the
temporary confinement of a few of their men did not seriously disturb
them; and they considered that by their self-restraint and
non-resistance they had put their enemies thoroughly in the wrong, and
gained a most valuable vantage-ground for the ensuing Presidential and
congressional elections--an estimate which the result fully justified.
But in their party were some spirits to whom these peaceful tactics were
distasteful. Chief in this number was John Brown--little known to the
world at large till a later time. He and his family of sons had made
their homes in Kansas, impelled partly by the hostility to slavery which
in him was a master passion. He was a man personally upright and kindly,
of only moderate interest and capacity for the ordinary practical
affairs of life, given to brooding on public events and ideal causes,
and viewing them with a fanatic's narrowness and a fanatic's
absorption. He was a belated Puritan, and his natural place would have
been with Cromwell's Ironsides. His ideas were largely influenced by his
reading of the Bible, especially of the Old Testament. Of the modern
State and the duties of the modern citizen he had no rational idea.
Following the Old Testament analogy, he conceived of the slaveholders as
the enemies of God--like the Canaanites; and he came to imagine for
himself a mission like one of the Hebrew leaders. His favorite hero
seems to have been Gideon, and to assail and overcome the Midianites, a
handful against a host, became his dream.
How the peaceful tactics of the Free-State party suited his temper may
be easily guessed, and four days after the attack on Lawrence (which was
May 20, 1856), he acted on a plan of his own. At the head of a small
group of men, including two of his sons and a son-in-law, he went at
night down Pottawatomie creek, stopping at three houses. The men who
lived in them were well-known pro-slavery men; they seem to have been
rough characters; their most specific offense (according to Mr. Sanborn,
Brown's biographer and eulogist), was the driving from his home by
violent threats an inoffensive old man. John Brown and his party went
down the creek, called at one after the other of three houses; took five
men away from their wives and children; and deliberately shot one and
hacked the others to death with swords.
Mr. Sanborn's defense of this act is: "Brown long foresaw the deadly
conflict with the slave power which culminated in the Civil War, and was
eager to begin it, that it might be the sooner over." He begins his
chapter on "The Pottawatomie Executions": "The story of John Brown will
mean little to those who do not believe that God governs the world, and
that he makes his will known in advance to certain chosen men and
women, who perform it consciously or unconsciously. Of such prophetic
heaven-appointed men, John Brown was the most conspicuous in our time,
and his life must be construed in the light of that fact." He also
declares that the "execution" of these five men was an offset to the
killing of five Free-State men by various persons during the preceding
twelve-month, and that it was calculated to strike wholesome terror into
evil-doers. The ethics, theology, and statesmanship of this defense are
possible only to one bent on making Brown a hero at any cost.
The natural result of the Pottawatomie "executions,"--in which John
Brown's complicity was for a time concealed--was a series of
retaliations on both sides, and a state of affairs far more anarchic
than Kansas had known before. This lasted through the summer of 1856.
The general impression on the country was to strengthen the opposition
to the usurpation of the Territorial Legislature, and to the
administration which sustained it. In September there came a crisis.
Another and graver attack on Lawrence was threatened, and this time a
vigorous resistance was probable. But a new and able governor, John W.
Geary of Pennsylvania, had been dispatched by President Pierce, with
imperative instructions to pacify the Territory, as a pressing political
necessity. Geary met Robinson--the treason prisoners had already been
released--and as the two men had been near each other in the California
troubles and thus had the advantage of a mutual acquaintance, an
understanding was soon reached; Geary called off the dogs of war, and a
time of quiet followed.
CHAPTER XIV
"FREMONT AND FREEDOM"
The Congress of 1855-6, divided between an administration Senate and an
opposition House, accomplished little but talk. One chapter of this talk
had a notable sequel. Charles Sumner, in an elaborate and powerful
oration in the Senate, denounced slavery, "the sum of all villainies,"
and bitterly satirized one of its prominent defenders, Senator Butler of
South Carolina. He compared Butler to Don Quixote, enamored of slavery
as was the knight of his Dulcinea, and unconscious that instead of a
peerless lady she was but a wanton. The response to the speech was made
by a nephew of Senator Butler and member of the House, Preston S. Brooks
of South Carolina. He entered the Senate chamber during a recess,
accompanied and guarded by a friend and fellow member, Lawrence Keitt;
approached Sumner as he sat writing at his desk, and without words
felled him to the ground with a heavy cane, and beat him about the head
till he was insensible. Sumner, a man of fine physique, was for a long
time an invalid from the assault, and was unable for years to resume his
place in the Senate.
It was not so much the individual act of Brooks as its treatment by his
party and section that gave the deepest significance to the deed and
produced the most lasting effect. A friendly magistrate sentenced Brooks
to a nominal fine and so forestalled further prosecution. His party
friends in Congress left all public rebuke of the deed to Republicans. A
motion to expel Brooks and Keitt from the House failed of the necessary
two-thirds vote. They resigned, and were promptly and triumphantly
re-elected. Noisy applause of the attack came from all parts of the
South, with a stack of canes marked "Hit him again." That better class
of Southerners by whom the assault was felt, as one of them expressed it
long afterward, "like a blow in the face," made no demonstration. So far
from losing caste, as a gentleman or a public man, Brooks not only kept
his place in society, but was honored a few months later with a public
banquet, at which such men as Butler and Toombs and Mason joined in the
laudations, and gave a background to the scene by free threats of
disunion if the Republicans elected their President.
This treatment of Brooks made an impression at the North far beyond the
first hot indignation at his brutal outrage. The condonation and
applause of that outrage was taken as sure evidence of a barbaric state
of opinion, the natural accompaniment of slavery. What made the matter
worse was that the assault had a technical justification under the code
of honor which it was Brooks's pride as a Southern gentleman to observe.
The code called on a man who had given offense by his words to meet the
offended man in a duel, and if he refused, he was fairly subject to
public disgrace or even physical chastisement. Such a theory and
practice, and the sentiments associated with it, stamped slavery with a
heavier condemnation than orator or novelist could frame.
This one week in May, 1856, was dark with omens of impending
catastrophe. On May 20 Lawrence was devastated; on the 22d, Sumner was
assaulted; and on the 24th took place the Pottawatomie massacre. A
shadow as of impending doom was reflected in Mrs. Stowe's second
anti-slavery novel, _Dred_, which appeared about this time. While
lacking the inspiration and power of _Uncle Tom's_ Cabin, it had in the
main a similar tone of humanity, sympathy and fairness. Again the better
element of the Southern whites was portrayed, in the benevolent
slave-holder Clayton; the brave Methodist preacher, Father Dickson; and
the book's heroine, Nina Gordon. There were realistic and graphic
pictures of the negro at his best, in Old Tiff and Milly. The
sophistries and time-serving of ecclesiastics were fairly pictured. The
fundamental attitude of the law in regarding the slave as the creature
of his master's convenience was shown with historic fidelity. But the
book took its name from a negro, half-prophetic, half-crazed, who
maintained in the Dismal Swamp a refuge for slaves, and purposed an
uprising to conquer their freedom. To Southern imaginations it might
well recall Nat Turner and the horrors of his revolt. Mrs. Stowe
inevitably idealized everything she touched; and to idealize the leader
of a servile insurrection might well be regarded as carrying fire into a
powder magazine. The moving expostulation of the Christian slave Milly
with Dred, the death of Dred, the frustration of his plans, and the
pitiful wrongs he sought to redress, veiled from the Northern reader the
suggestion of other dangers and tragedies to which the Southern reader
was keenly alive. As we read the book now, the glimpses of coming terror
and disaster in Dred's visions seem like a presage of the war which in
truth was only four years away.
But the prevailing temper of the time was as yet little clouded by any
such forebodings. It was a great wave of popular enthusiasm, sane,
resolute, and hopeful, which moved forward in the first Presidential
campaign of the Republican party in 1856. The convention met at
Philadelphia in June. Its temper was well described in a letter from
Samuel Bowles to his paper, the _Springfield Republican_,--which which
from moderate anti-slavery Whig had become ardently Republican when the
Missouri compromise was repealed.[1]
"Certainly we never saw a political convention in which there was so
much soul as in that at Philadelphia. It was politics with a heart and a
conscience in it. Cincinnati (the Democratic convention) gathered the
remains of a once powerful national party and contributed to its further
sectionalization and destruction. Philadelphia called together the
heart, the independence, and the brains of all parties, to establish a
broader and juster nationality. Such a fusion of contradictory elements
was never witnessed in this country before since the times of the
Revolution. Nor could it happen now save under a great emergency, and
from a controlling necessity. Such a combination of the material and
mental forces of the republic as was represented in the Philadelphia
convention, and united in its enthusiastic and harmonious results, has
more power than any political combination ever formed before in this
country, and cannot in the nature of things be long kept in the
background. There is no law more certain than that which will throw such
a union of the moral strength, intellectual activity, and youthful
energy of the nation into supremacy, and that right speedily. It may be
delayed for a season, but its course is onward and its victory is
certain."
The declaration of principles dealt wholly with the slavery issue. It
asserted that under the Constitution, as interpreted by the Declaration
and the ordinance of 1787, slavery had no right to exist in any of the
national Territories. It called on Congress to prohibit in the
Territories "the twin relics of barbarism, slavery and polygamy." It
dwelt with great emphasis on the wrongs of the Kansas settlers; the
establishment of a Territorial Legislature by a fraudulent vote; its
outrageous statute-book; the sustaining of the usurpation by the Federal
government; the resulting disorder and violence. Congress was asked to
admit Kansas to the Union under its Free State organization. Nothing was
said as to the fugitive slave law. There was an express disclaimer of
any interference with slavery in the States. The doctrine of the party
was embodied in a phrase which became one of its mottoes: "Freedom
national, slavery sectional."
For its Presidential candidate the convention passed by all the
well-known political leaders, and chose Col. John C. Fremont of
California. Fremont, after a scientific and military education, had
distinguished himself by a series of brilliant exploring expeditions in
the farthest Northwest, marked by scientific achievement and stirring
adventure. Arriving in California at the outbreak of hostilities with
Mexico, he rallied and led the American settlers and drove the Mexicans
from the territory. He took a leading part in organizing the State, and
establishing freedom in its Constitution; and was elected to the United
States Senate as a Free-Soil Democrat. His term as Senator was too brief
to win eminence, but his career as a whole had been singularly various
and distinguished. He was young; he had manly beauty, and a rare
personal fascination. His brilliant and charming wife won favor for him.
Even his name gave aid to the cause, and "Fremont and freedom" became
the rallying cry of the campaign.
But Fremont's personality was an altogether minor element in the
strength with which the Republican party first took the field, and won,
not yet the country, but the strongholds of the North. The new party
gave expression and effect to the anti-slavery sentiment which had
become so deep and wide. It was wholly dissociated from the extremists
who had shocked and alarmed the conservatism of the country; and
Garrison and Phillips had only impatience and scorn for its principles
and measures. Its leadership included many men experienced in
congressional and administrative life, men like Seward and Sumner and
Chase and Wade and Fessenden and Banks, who had matched themselves
against the best leaders of the South and the South's Northern allies.
It brought together the best of the old Whig, Democratic, and Free Soil
parties. In its rank and file it gathered on the whole the best
conscience and intelligence of the North. After the election the
_Springfield Republican_ pointed out that the party's success had been
exactly along the geographical lines of an efficient free-school system,
and it had been defeated where public schools were deficient, as in
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana, and the solid South.
The immediate and burning issue of the campaign was Kansas. Whatever the
exact right and wrong of its local broils, there was no question of the
broad facts--the fraudulent election of the Legislature, the character
of its statute-book, and its support by President Pierce's
administration. It was the wrongs of the Kansas settlers far more than
the wrongs of the Southern slaves on which the Republican speakers and
newspapers dwelt. In truth the animus of the party was quite as much
the resentment by the North of Southern political aggression as it was
regard for the slaves or thought of their future condition. The policy
of excluding slavery from the Territories, and thus naturally from the
new States, tended ultimately to its discouragement and probable
extinction where it already existed. But any such result appeared very
remote.
The opposition to the Republican party was weighty in numbers, but
inharmonious and with no definite creed. The Democratic platform was an
equivocation. It declared for "non-interference by Congress with slavery
in State or Territory." But this left it an open question whether any
one could "interfere." Could the people of a Territory exclude slavery
if they wished? Or did the Constitution protect it there, as Calhoun and
his followers claimed? An ambiguity was left which permitted Calhoun men
and Douglas men to act together against the common foe.
The Democratic candidate was James Buchanan of Pennsylvania. He was one
of those men, decent and respectable, who go through a life of
office-seeking and office-holding without a particle of real leadership,
and are forgotten the moment they leave the stage unless circumstance
throws them into a place so responsible as to reveal their glaring
incompetence. He had escaped the odium which Pierce and Douglas had
incurred, through his absence as Minister to England. There he had
distinguished himself chiefly by his part in a conference at Ostend, in
1854,--incited by President Pierce and his Secretary of State, William
L. Marcy of New York,--where he had met Mason of Virginia and Soule of
Louisiana, ministers respectively to France and Spain; and they had
issued a joint manifesto, declaring that the possession of Cuba was
necessary to the peace and security of the United States, and the island
should be obtained from Spain, with her consent if possible but without
it if necessary. This became a recognized article in the Democratic and
Southern policy. The Republican platform of 1856 denounced the Ostend
manifesto, as the doctrine that "might makes right," "the highwayman's
plea." It was left for a latter-day Republican to give to the same
doctrine the politer name of "international eminent domain."
The American or Know-nothing party nominated ex-President Fillmore and
adopted a platform inclining toward the Southern position. There was a
secession of a Northern element, which nominated Banks, but he declined
and supported Fremont. All the opponents of the Republican party laid
stress on its sectional character. Both its candidates (for
vice-president, William L. Dayton of New Jersey), were from the North;
its creed aimed solely at the restriction of the South's peculiar
institution; south of Mason and Dixon's line, it had an electoral ticket
in four States only--Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky--and
cast hardly 1000 votes. But the South itself had so completely
ostracized even the most moderate anti-slavery sentiment that free
political action was impossible. Thus, Professor Hedrick of the
University of North Carolina said in reply to a question that he favored
Fremont for President; and being denounced for this by a newspaper, he
wrote to it a letter, saying in a modest and straightforward way that he
had made no attempt to propagate his views, but he did desire to see the
slaves free. The students burned him in effigy; the college authorities
forced him to resign; a mob attacked him and he was driven from the
State. It was in the same State that a college professor's right to free
speech on a burning social question was vindicated by his students, his
colleagues, and the community, in 1903, and that Trinity College became
a leader in courageous and progressive sentiment on the questions of
the hour. Few were the men bold enough even to try the question of
personal independence in 1856. The suppression of free speech was in
itself one of the strongest possible arguments for the Republican cause.
The liberty of white men was at stake.
Conservatism, apprehension, timidity, in various phases, told against
the new party and its candidate. Northern commerce was largely bound up
with Southern interests. The threat of disunion weighed with some;
Grant, in his memoirs, says it was this that led him to vote for
Buchanan. Others shrank from trusting the helm in a tempest to hands as
untried as Fremont's. The mob who hated "niggers" swelled the opposition
vote. Taking advantage of the Know-nothing feeling, the fiction was
persistently circulated that Fremont was a Catholic. The disorder in
Kansas was pacified by the dispatch of a new Governor, Geary, to
reassure the North. Finally, money was spent on a scale unknown before
to defeat the Republican party,--itself in the stage of poverty and
virtue,--and spent probably with decisive effect in the critical October
election in Pennsylvania.
Against these disadvantages the young party made head gallantly. It
fired the youth of the North with an ardor unknown since the early days
of the republic. It inspired the poets of the people. Great crowds sang
the strains of the Marseillaise, with the refrain:
Free speech, free press, free soil, free men, Fremont and victory!
The older heads were satisfied by the moderation and wisdom of the
party's principles. The reasonable element among the Abolitionists
hailed this first great popular advance, and allied themselves with it.
Whittier was the chief minstrel of the campaign. Of those to whom "the
Union" had been the talismanic word, that part which cared for nothing
better than the Union as it was, with slavery and freedom mixed,
supported Buchanan or Fillmore. The part that loved the Union as a means
to justice and freedom were for Fremont.
The October elections in Pennsylvania and Indiana showed that the first
Presidential battle was lost. November confirmed that verdict. New
England, New York, Ohio, Illinois, and the Northwest, had been
outweighed by the South and its allies, and Buchanan was the next
President. But never was defeat met with better courage or higher hopes
for the next encounter. Some unknown poet gave the battle-song:
Beneath thy skies, November,
Thy skies of cloud and rain,
Around our blazing camp-fires
We close our ranks again.
Then sound again the bugle!
Call the battle roll anew!
If months have well nigh won the field
What may not four years do?
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: A word should be said as to the frequency with which the
_Springfield Republican_ is quoted in this work. The author wrote an
earlier book, _The Life and Times of Samuel Bowles_, (Century Co.)--the
founder of the Republican. As the background of his life, a careful
study was made of the political events during his years of editorial
activity, 1844-77. The original matter for this was largely drawn from
the files of the _Republican_. In studying the whole ground afresh for
the present history, advantage was taken of this material, and further
citations were drawn from the same paper. The interpretation of current
events by an independent and sagacious newspaper yields invaluable
material for the historian; and my study of the _Republican_, from the
repeal of the Missouri compromise in 1854 to the present, has heightened
my respect for the breadth, sobriety, and moral insight with which it
judged the questions of the day.]
CHAPTER XV
THREE TYPICAL SOUTHERNERS
In the group of leaders of public sentiment in the '30s and '40s, as
sketched in Chapter V, some of the foremost--Clay, Webster, and
Birney--were influential in both sections of the country. But in the
next decade the division is clear between the leaders of the South and
of the North. Let us glance at two separate groups.
Jefferson Davis was in many ways a typical Southerner. He was a sincere,
able, and high-minded man. The guiding aim of his public life was to
serve the community as he understood its interests. Personal ambition
seemingly influenced him no more than is to be expected in any strong
man; and, whatever his faults of judgment or temper, it does not appear
that he ever knowingly sacrificed the public good to his own profit or
aggrandizement. But he was devoted to a social system and a political
theory which bound his final allegiance to his State and his section.
After a cadetship at West Point and a brief term of military service, he
lived for eight years, 1837-45, on a Mississippi plantation, in joint
ownership and control with an older brother. In these early years, and
in the seclusion of a plantation, his theories crystallized and his
mental habits grew. The circumstances of such life fostered in Southern
politicians the tendency to logical and symmetrical theories, to which
they tenaciously held, unmodified by the regard for experience which is
bred from free and various contact with the large world of affairs.
Davis fully accepted the theory of State sovereignty which won general
favor in the South. In this view the States were independent powers,
which had formed with each other by the Constitution a compact, a
business arrangement, a kind of limited partnership. If the compact was
broken in any of its articles, or if its working proved at any time to
be unsatisfactory and injurious, the partners could withdraw at will.
This theory found more or less support among the various utterances and
practices of the framers of the Constitution and founders of the
government. In truth, they had as a body no consistent and exact theory
of the Federal bond. Later circumstances led their descendants to
incline to a stronger or a looser tie, according to their different
interests and sentiments. The institution of slavery so strongly
differentiated the Southern communities from their Northern neighbors,
that they naturally magnified their local rights and favored the view
which justified them in the last resort in renouncing the authority of
the Union if it should come to be exercised against their industrial
system. State sovereignty was the creed, and the slavery interest was
the motive.
To a man living like Davis on his own plantation, the relation of master
and slave seemed a fundamental condition of the social order. Not only
his livelihood rested on it, but through this relation his practical
faculties found their field; his conscience was exercised in the right
management and care of his slaves; there was a true sentiment of
protection on his side and loyalty on theirs. His neighbors and friends
were situated like himself. The incidental mischiefs of the system, the
abuses by bad masters, the ignorance and low morality of the
slaves,--these things they regarded, let us say, as an upright and
benevolent manufacturer to-day regards the miseries of sweatshops and
the sufferings of unemployed labor. Such things were bad, very bad, but
they were the accidents and not the essentials of the industrial
system. They resented the strictures of their critics; they were
apprehensive of the growing hostility in the North to their
institutions; if the national partnership was to last they must have
their rights under it; and one of those rights was an equal share in the
national domain.
Davis entered into active politics when he was elected to Congress in
1844. Repudiation was then in favor in Mississippi, and he opposed and
denounced it. He supported the Mexican War in the most practical way, by
taking command of a volunteer regiment from Mississippi. He served with
distinguished gallantry, and was severely wounded at Buena Vista. After
the war he entered the United States Senate. He supported the compromise
of 1850, regarding it as substantially a continuance of the truce
between the sections, and not now sympathizing with those who threatened
disunion. Later, President Pierce made him Secretary of War; in the
Cabinet he was the leading spirit; and this, with a weak President,
meant large power and responsibility. He showed the extent of his
partisanship by supporting with the full power of the administration the
Territorial government imposed on Kansas by a palpably fraudulent vote.
In 1856 he returned to the Senate, and came to be recognized as the
foremost champion of the Southern interest. He was not a leader in any
such sense as Jefferson or Clay or Calhoun; but he was a representative
man, thoroughly trusted by his associates, their most effective
spokesman, and going by conviction in the midstream of the dominant
tendency. He had that degree of ambition which is natural and normal in
a strong man. He was an effective and elegant orator. When secession
came he was not its originator, but one of a set of men--on the whole
the most considerate and influential men of the Gulf and cotton
States--who took the responsibility of leading their section into
revolution, in the interest of slavery.
In this typical Southern leader, as in his class, were blended the
elements of a disposition and will that would halt before no barrier to
its claim of mastery. A slaveholder, accustomed to supremacy over his
fellowmen as their natural superior; a planter, habituated to the
practical exercise of such supremacy over hundreds of dependents; a
member of an aristocracy, the political masters of their section, and
long the dominant force in the nation; a theorist, wedded to the dogma
of State sovereignty, and convinced of the superiority of Southern
civilization; the self-confident and self-asserting temper bred by such
conditions--here was a union of forces that would push its cause against
all opposition, at the cost if need be of disunion, of war, of all
obstacles and all perils.
By a natural exaggeration, at a later time the President of the
Confederacy was regarded at the North as the very embodiment of its
cause. To the unmeasured hostility on this account was added the
opprobrium of deeds in which he had no part. He was charged for a time
with complicity in the murder of Lincoln. He was branded with
responsibility for the miseries in Andersonville and the other
prison-pens in the war,--but without a particle of evidence. Admiration
was yielded by the North to Stonewall Jackson even in his life-time;
there was early recognition of Lee's magnanimous acceptance of defeat;
but the bitterest odium was long visited upon Davis. It was heightened
by the tenacity with which his intense nature clung to "the lost cause"
as a sentiment, after the reality was hopelessly buried. The South
itself gave its highest favor to Lee, its most effective defender, and a
man of singularly impressive character; while Davis's mistakes of
administration, and his reserved and over-sensitive temper chilled a
little the recognition of his disinterested and loyal service. But in
the retrospect of history he stands out as an honorable and pathetic
figure. The single warping influence of his whole career was the mistake
he shared with millions of his countrymen,--the acceptance and
exaltation of slavery. He was faithful to his convictions; he was free
from covetousness and meanness; and in his personality there were high
and fine elements of manhood. "A very intense man and a very lovable
man" was the judgment of one who was his intimate associate through the
war.
"Love of power was so much weaker in him than love of his theories that
when Congress passed laws enlarging his prerogatives he wrote long
messages declining them on constitutional grounds." A friend described
him as "a game-cock--with just a little strut." Said one who stood in
close relations with him: "He was so sensitive to criticism and even to
questioning that I have passed months of intimate official association
with him without venturing to ask him a question." Pure in his personal
morals, but never having made a religious profession, under the
responsibilities of the Presidency he turned for support to religion,
and was confirmed in the Episcopal Church. Under imprisonment,
indignities, obloquy, long seclusion with the memories of a ruined
cause, he bore himself with manly fortitude and dignity. Schooled by
inexorable reality, he finally acquiesced in the established order, and
his last public words were of fidelity and faith for the new America.
Before the war, Robert Toombs of Georgia played some such part to the
Northern imagination as Phillips or Sumner to the Southern. He was
regarded as the typical fire-eater and braggart. He was currently
reported to have boasted that he would yet call the roll of his slaves
at the foot of Bunker Hill monument. But in truth this ogre was made of
much the same human clay as the Massachusetts Abolitionists. He is well
pictured, together with Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, in Trent's
_Southern Statesmen of the Old Regime_,--a book admirable in its spirit
and its historic fidelity. Both Toombs and Stephens represented, as
compared with Davis, the more moderate sentiment of the South, until
they parted company with each other on the question of secession. Trent
prefaces the companion portraits with a sketch of the typical Georgian;
his State, like the other Gulf States, less civilized and orderly than
Virginia and South Carolina, less critical and more enthusiastic; the
Georgian, "the southern Yankee," "loving success, strength,
straightforwardness, and the solid virtues generally, neither is he
averse to the showy ones; but above all he loves virtue in action."
Among Southerners, says Trent, the Georgian is nearest to a normal
American. Toombs inherited property; grew up like other Southern boys of
the prosperous class; rode and hunted and studied a little in the
interims. As a lawyer, he would not take a case unless satisfied of its
justice. He was of robust physique, vigorous intellect, and high
spirits; and he was happy in his family life.
Stephens worked his way up from poverty, and never lost an active
sympathy with the struggling. He helped more than fifty young men to get
an education. He was of a slight and fragile frame, and had much
physical suffering, which he bore with indomitable courage. His
conscientiousness was almost morbid. His temperament was melancholy, and
his life was lonely. In early life he was twice in love, but poverty
forbade his marriage. He was a clear and logical thinker, much given to
refined exposition of constitutional theories, but deficient in large
culture and philosophy. He held the doctrine of State sovereignty, but
from first to last he opposed secession as against the true interest of
the States. At the beginning of his career he was active in opposing
the vigilance committees organized to harry anti-slavery men. He
supported the annexation of Texas, though objecting to doing it in the
interest of slavery,--slavery, he said, was a domestic matter, which the
Federal government had no call to take care of. He and Toombs generally
stood together, as Whigs and Unionists. They opposed the Mexican War, on
the ground that the Union was not to be extended by force; neither, they
both said later, was it to be maintained by force. But they opposed the
exclusion of slavery from the Territories by the Wilmot proviso; and in
the debate Stephens declared that the morality of slavery stood "upon a
basis as firm as the Bible," and as long as Christianity lasted it could
never be considered an offense against the divine laws. The two men did
yeoman's service in carrying through the 1850 compromise, and afterward
in persuading Georgia not to take part in the Nashville convention--a
disunionist scheme which proved abortive. They, with Howell Cobb, held
Georgia for the compromise and for the Union, and thus fixed the pivotal
point of Southern politics for the next decade. They became leaders in
the Constitutional Union party, which, in Georgia, succeeded the Whig.
They made vigorous and successful fights against the Know-nothing folly.
They accepted the gains which came to the South through Douglas's
breaking down of the Missouri compromise, and, a little later, the Dred
Scott decision of the Supreme Court; but they diverged from Davis, by
not favoring the active intervention of Congress to protect slavery in
the Territories. Toombs was accused of abetting Brooks's attack on
Sumner, which he disclaimed; but he found nothing to hinder his taking
part in a banquet in Brooks's honor a few months later, and on this most
ill-omened occasion he joined in the threats of disunion if Fremont
should be elected. But still the catastrophe lingered, and seemed
improbable. Stephens left Congress in 1858. Two years more, and
secession became a burning question; Stephens and Toombs took opposite
sides, but, the issue decided, they both made common cause with their
State. Toombs served in the Confederate Cabinet and Army. Stephens,
vice-president of the Confederacy, seven years after the close of the
war again became a member of the House; an attenuated figure, confined
to a wheel-chair, but still vital and vigorous; respected by all; his
presence a visible symbol of the spanning of "the bloody chasm."
CHAPTER XVI
SOME NORTHERN LEADERS
Turning now to the North, the principal leaders in its political life
have already been mentioned, except Lincoln, whose star had not yet
risen; but it is worth while to glance at some of those who, apart from
Congress and public office, were molding public sentiment. Perhaps the
man of the widest influence on public opinion was Horace Greeley.
Through his _New York Tribune_ he reached an immense audience, to a
great part of whom the paper was a kind of political Bible. His words
struck home by their common sense, passion, and close sympathy with the
common people. A graduate of the farm and printing office, he was in
close touch with the free, plain, toiling, American people, and in no
man had they a better representative or a more effective advocate. There
was in him something of John Bright's sturdy manhood, direct speech and
devotion to human rights; something, too, of Franklin's homely
shrewdness,--though little of Franklin's large philosophy or serenity.
He was at first a Henry Clay Whig, and always a zealous protectionist;
then in alliance with the anti-slavery element in the party, and soon
the leading Republican editor. He was a lover of peace, in active
sympathy with social reforms, sometimes betrayed into extravagances, but
generally guarded by his common sense against extremists and
impracticables. His limitations were a want of large culture, a very
uncertain judgment in estimating men, and a temperament liable to such
sudden ebb and flow that he fell sometimes into rashness and sometimes
into panic. But he was disinterested and great-hearted. Other men
broadened the _Tribune's_ scope; its editorial tone was for its audience
persuasive and convincing; and the _Tribune_ was one of the great
educational influences of the country. Beside it stood the _New York
Times_, edited by Henry J. Raymond, an advocate of moderate anti-slavery
and Republican principles, with less of masterful leadership than the
_Tribune_, but sometimes better balanced; and the _Herald_, under the
elder James Gordon Bennett, devoted to news and money-making, and
pandering to Southern interests.
The clergy at the South were by this time generally united in the
defense of slavery. At the North, there was great variety among them.
Many ministers ignored slavery as apart from their province. Many spoke
of it occasionally as a sin, but regarded it as little concerned with
that daily life of their people which was their main concern. A few
treated it as a great national wrong, speaking such denunciation as the
Hebrew prophets gave to the national sins of their people; and of these
some were driven from their pulpits. A few expressed open sympathy or
apology for slavery,--such as Dr. Nehemiah Adams, of Boston, and Bishop
Hopkins, of Vermont.
The foremost preacher in America was Henry Ward Beecher. He was above
all things a preacher,--charged with a great spiritual message; of
extraordinary and various eloquence, dramatic, inspiring, thrilling;
impelled and sometimes controlled by a wonderful imagination. He was
taking a leading part in transforming the popular belief. Theology has
radically altered under two influences,--the new view of facts given by
science, and a higher ethical and spiritual feeling. It was under the
ethical and spiritual impulse that Beecher so altered the emphasis of
the traditional theology, so dwelt on the love of God, on Christ's
character as the revelation of God, on the opportunities and
incitements of daily life, on all the hopeful and joyful aspects of
existence,--that in the minds of his hearers the harsher elements, not
only of Calvinism, but of the whole traditional orthodoxy, melted as
imperceptibly and steadily as icebergs melt when they drift southward.
He always avoided any avowed or precipitate break with the old system of
dogma,--partly from a personal sentiment associated with the faith of
the fathers; partly from an instinctive preference of practical and
emotional over intellectual methods; and partly from a studied regard to
the most effective results,--a shrewdness which tempered his
impetuosity.
In these stirring days Beecher began to take active part in political
discussion,--rarely in his pulpit, but as an occasional speaker at
political meetings, or as a writer in the New York _Independent_. His
ground was that of moderate anti-slavery and Republicanism. Shut off on
the political platform from the highest flights of his pulpit oratory,
he yet had large scope for his ideality, his common sense, his rich and
abounding humor, his marvelous range of illustration from all things in
earth and heaven. As the public questions of the day came still closer
home to the business and bosoms of men, he dealt with them more freely
in his preaching, though never to the subordination of the personal
religious life as the paramount interest. One scene in his church comes
vividly to mind; after the sermon, he stated the case of a little slave
girl, allowed to come North on the chance of her being ransomed; and
after a few moving words, he set her beside him--a beautiful,
unconscious child--and money rained into the contribution boxes till in
a few minutes the amount was raised, and the great congregation joined
in a triumphant closing hymn.
Of a different type was Theodore Parker. He stood in his pulpit, the
embodiment of courageous attack on every falsehood and abuse as it
appeared to the lofty and luminous mind of the preacher. With his
prophecy there mingled no expediency. He spoke the truth as he saw it,
and let consequences take care of themselves. For a generation, the
Unitarian ministers had denied the doctrine of the Trinity, but they
held the founder of Christianity in such reverence that they would
scarcely define his divine or semi-divine nature. Parker spoke
frankly of Jesus as a man, and a man liable to imperfections and
mistakes, while he honored him as the greatest leader of humanity. The
Unitarians,--their intellectual radicalism kept well in check by the
conservatism natural to their social and ecclesiastical traditions,--had
held to a decided supernaturalism. Parker put religion on a purely
natural basis, and sent home to men's consciousness the ideas of God and
immortal life. His sermons were iconoclastic, but his prayers were full
of reverence, aspiration, and tenderness. He was ostracized by most of
the Unitarian churches, and dreaded by the orthodox, but he was a power
in Boston and in America. He attacked social wrongs as fearlessly as he
discussed theology. Against slavery he struck as with a battle ax. He
was not greatly concerned with constitutions or tolerant of compromises.
When a fugitive slave was seized in Boston, Parker took active part in a
project of rescue. He roused the conscience of New England and the
North. He died at fifty, just before the Civil War, consumed by his own
fire.
The fable of the traveler who clung the closer to his cloak when the
wind tried to strip it off but cast it aside when addressed by the sun's
genial warmth, had an illustration in the many who surrendered their
prejudice and selfishness, not at the bidding of the stormy reformers,
but touched by the serene light of Emerson. Emerson's specific influence
on slavery or any other social problem is hard to measure, for his power
was thrown on the illumination and inspiration of the individual man.
But in the large view his was an incomparable influence in diffusing
that temper of mingled courage and sweetness, the idealist's vision and
the soldier's valor, which is the world's best help and hope. He spoke
out against slavery whenever he saw that his word was needed; he
vindicated the right of the Abolitionists to free speech, whether they
spoke wisely or not; and in some of his poems, as the "Concord Ode," and
"Boston Hymn," he thrillingly invoked the best of the Puritan and
Revolutionary temper to right the wrongs of the present. It was said of
him that he gave to the war for the Union, "not one son, but a
thousand." But he also gave watchwords that will long outlast the issues
of the war and our issues of to-day. The homely yet soaring idealism of
the true American will always answer to the word, "Hitch your wagon to a
star."
The group of writers who gave brilliancy to this period have already
been cited as champions of freedom. Most effective in his advocacy was
Whittier, who, in early days, took active part in politics as a Free
Soiler, and afterward did greater service by the lyrics of freedom,
which like his songs of labor and poems of home life and religion, went
to the heart of the common people as no other American voice has done.
One who reads Whittier to-day may be allowed to wish that he had known
the sunny as well as the shady side of Southern life; and that, as in a
later poem he softened his fierce criticism on Webster, so he had
celebrated the virtues and graces of his white countrymen below the
Potomac and the Ohio, as well as the wrongs of his black countrymen.
Lowell, usually a scholarly poet, spoke to the common people nobly for
peace and freedom in the Biglow Papers. In 1857 the _Atlantic Monthly_
was started under his editorship, the organ at once of the highest
literary ability of New England, and of pronounced anti-slavery and
Republican sentiment. After he gave up the editorship in 1862, he wrote
at intervals of a few years the second series of Biglow Papers, and his
"Commemoration Ode" was the noblest literary monument of the triumph of
Union and freedom.
Longfellow's main vocation was away from the turmoils of the hour. He
interpreted to America the art, the culture, the legends of Europe and
the Middle Ages; he found the poetry in the early soil of America, as in
"Hiawatha" and "Evangeline." He was not deaf to the wrongs of the slave,
and gave to them some touching poems. But his finest contribution to the
national idea was the apostrophe to the Union which crowns "The Building
of the Ship." It was written in 1849, in the stress of the struggle over
California, and it may well last as long as the nation lasts. The poem
is an idyl of the ship-building folk and the sea; the consummation is
the bridal of the captain and the builder's daughter, and the launching
of the ship, christened "The Union"--emblem of the wife's and husband's
voyage begun together on the sea of life; then,--
Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
We know what Master laid thy keel,
What workmen wrought thy ribs of steel,
Who made each mast, and sail, and rope,
What anvils rang, what hammers beat,
In what forge and what a heat
Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!
Fear not each sudden sound and shock,
'Tis of the wave and not the rock;
'Tis but the flapping of the sail,
And not a rent made by the gale!
In spite of rock and tempest's roar,
In spite of false lights on the shore,
Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea!
Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee.
Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,
Our faith triumphant o'er our fears,
Are all with thee,--are all with thee!
CHAPTER XVII
DRED SCOTT AND LECOMPTON
Under Buchanan's administration, 1857-61, three events befell which were
like wedges riving farther and farther apart the national unity. They
were the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court, the Lecompton
constitution in Kansas, and John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry.
President Buchanan declared in his inaugural that the people of a
Territory had a right to shape their institutions in their own way, but
as to how far that right extended before they organized as a State, the
United States Supreme Court was the proper arbiter. Two days after the
inaugural, the Supreme Court announced its decision, in a case made up
expressly to test the status of slavery in the Territories. Suit was
brought before it to obtain freedom for Dred Scott, who being held as a
slave in Missouri had been taken by his master to reside for a time in
Illinois, and afterward at Fort Snelling in unorganized territory north
of 36 degrees 30 minutes, and so free under the Missouri compromise. It
was claimed that by being taken upon free soil, in State or Territory,
he became free. The court, in an elaborate opinion delivered by
Chief-Justice Taney, dismissed the case for want of jurisdiction, on the
ground that no person of slave descent or African blood could be a
citizen of the United States or be entitled to sue in its courts. The
court affirmed that the sweeping language of the Declaration, that "all
men are born free," had no application to negroes, because at that time
they were generally regarded "as so far inferior that they had no
rights which the white man was bound to respect." The case being thus
thrown out of court, all further discussion of its merits was
superfluous--a mere _obiter dictum_, without legal force. Nevertheless,
the court through its chief-justice went on to pronounce upon the
plaintiff's claim and declare it baseless; on the ground that inasmuch
as a slave was lawful property, and the Constitution decreed that no man
should be deprived of his property without due process of law, therefore
an act of Congress declaring in effect that when carried beyond a
certain line a slave was lost to his master, was unconstitutional and
void. Thus the court set aside as invalid the exclusion of slavery from
the Territories by Congress. As to the effect of a slave's residence in
a free State by his master's act, followed by a return to a slave
State,--the court held that this question belonged properly to the
Missouri courts, which had decided against the slave's claim.
Two of the justices, McLean and Curtis (Northern Whigs), dissented
emphatically from the decision. Justice Curtis pointed out, as to the
alleged incapacity of the negro for citizenship at the era of the
Constitution, that at that period free negroes had the right of suffrage
in five of the thirteen States. As to the argument against depriving a
man of his property, the contention of the Republicans was that slaves
were property, not by the common usage of mankind, but only by local
law, and that when a slaveholder moved into a Territory he did not carry
with him that local law by which alone a man could be held as a chattel.
But the authoritative voice of the highest court in the land had
proclaimed these amazing propositions,--that the guarantee of freedom to
the Northwest, which the nation had accepted for a third of a century,
was invalid, and that no person with negro blood had any civil rights as
a citizen of the United States.
When, forty years later, a law of Congress establishing an equitable
income tax was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and a
Democratic national convention protested against that decision, the
Republican papers of the day denounced the protest as hardly less than
treason. But the Republicans of an earlier day were not so reverential
toward the Supreme Court as an infallible authority. Could the court as
a finality outlaw the negro from the common rights of man, and prevent
Congress from establishing freedom in the national domain? Not so
thought the men who led the Republican party and the sentiment of the
North. The New York Legislature, for example, promptly enacted that
African descent should not disqualify from State citizenship; that any
slave brought into the State by his master became free, and any attempt
to hold him was a penal offense. It passed a resolution declaring that
the Supreme Court had lost the confidence and respect of the people.
Lincoln said in his dry way that the Republican party did not propose to
declare Dred Scott a free man (by the way, he was soon manumitted by his
former master's daughter)--but neither did they propose to accept the
court's decision as a political rule binding the voters, or Congress, or
the President; and they intended so to oppose it as to have it reversed
if possible, and a new judicial rule established. Seward was very
outspoken. He said a year later, in the Senate, "The people of the
United States never can and never will accept principles so
unconstitutional, so abhorrent. Never, never! Let the court recede.
Whether it recede or not, we shall reorganize the court, and thus reform
its political sentiment and practices, and bring them in harmony with
the Constitution and the laws of Nature."
The court's decision, _obiter dictum_ and all, extended only to the
power of Congress over the Territories. What a Territorial Legislature
might do by way of excluding slavery had not been passed on; and
Douglas thus found room for his doctrine of "popular sovereignty." But
as to just what that meant, he was adroitly non-committal, till the more
adroit Lincoln in the joint debate in 1858 drew from him the statement
that a Territorial Legislature might by "unfriendly legislation"
practically exclude slavery--a committal which ended his favor from the
South.
But meanwhile attention was focused on a different and more concrete
question. Buchanan began his administration with an effort to pacify
Kansas, by sending a new governor, Robert J. Walker, of Mississippi,
with strong pledges from the President that the people should have fair
dealing. But the situation was badly complicated. The Legislature had
provided for a convention to frame a State Constitution. This was to be
elected on the basis of a census taken by the county officials. But the
Free State men having never recognized this Territorial Legislature, and
having kept up the form of a State government of their own, there were
no officials to take the census and register the votes in fifteen out of
the thirty-four counties, and the registration was confined to the part
of the Territory lying convenient for invasion from Missouri. Under
these circumstances the Free State party resisted all Governor Walker's
appeals to take part in the election, and the convention was chosen by a
small vote. It met at Lecompton, and drew up a constitution. One article
provided for the exclusion of free negroes, and another forbade any
amendment for seven years. One section affirmed ownership of slaves as
an inviolable right of property, and forbade any adverse legislation;
and this section alone of the Constitution was submitted to the popular
vote. A vote of the people was ordered, as between "constitution with
slavery" and "constitution without slavery." The Free State men scouted
the whole proceeding, and refused to vote. So, by the form of a popular
election, the "constitution with slavery" was adopted.
The administration now gave its whole strength to the admission by
Congress of Kansas with the Lecompton constitution. The same election
that made Buchanan President had made the House as well as the Senate
Democratic. But it was no longer the disciplined and docile Democracy of
old. The proposal to admit a State under a constitution of which only a
single article had been submitted to even the form of a popular vote,
was too obnoxious for any but the most unflinching partisans. It was
impossible to a leader whose watchword was "popular sovereignty."
Douglas broke squarely with the administration, and acted with the
Republicans against the bill. He came in close touch with their leaders,
and his open accession to their party seemed probable. Meanwhile in the
Democratic party he had a small following in Congress and a large
following among the people. The struggle in Congress over the Lecompton
bill was obstinate. Senator Crittenden of Kentucky,--belonging nominally
to the remnant of the American party, which sheltered some of the
moderate Southerners, and himself one of their best leaders--proposed a
bill submitting the entire Constitution to a direct popular vote. This
was defeated in the Senate, but passed by the House, with the support of
the Republicans. A committee of conference sought for some agreement,
and found a singular one: a bill proposed by and named from Mr. English,
a Douglas Democrat from Illinois. It provided that the Constitution
should be submitted to a popular vote; if accepted, Kansas was at once
to become a State and receive an immense land grant; if rejected, it was
to remain a Territory until it had the population requisite for one
representative in the House,--93,340,--and get no land grant. The
combination of a bribe and a threat gave an almost grotesque air to the
proposition. Party lines were broken in the vote; Douglas and a part of
his associates joined with the bulk of the Republicans in opposing the
bill; but enough of both sides saw in it the best they could get, to win
a majority in both houses, and the English bill became law, in April,
1858.
In the previous summer, the assurances of Governor Walker and the advice
of sagacious politicians like Henry Wilson had induced the Free State
men to give up their separate organization and take part in the election
of the Territorial Legislature. They carried the election by two to one.
But again fraud was attempted. From a hamlet with eleven houses was sent
in a return of 1624 votes,--the names, it was found, copied in
alphabetical order from a Cincinnati directory; and from another
district an equally dishonest return was made; and the two would have
changed the majority in the Legislature. This catastrophe was averted by
the firmness of Walker, who threw out the fraudulent returns. In this he
was vainly opposed by the Territorial chief justice, a servile partisan.
After this the President turned against Walker and in the following
December drove him into resignation. He protested in an indignant letter
that the President had betrayed and deserted him, and that his policy
had saved the Territory from civil war and brought the entire people
together for the first time in a peaceable election.
Indeed the troubles of Kansas were practically ended. The people
rejected the Lecompton constitution and its land grant by a heavy
majority. They framed and ratified a Constitution of their own at
Wyandotte, and came into the Union as a free State when secession had
left the Republicans in full control of Congress in the winter of
1860-1.
The accession of Kansas to the Free States was full of significance. It
was fresh evidence that in the actual settlement of the new country the
inevitable preponderance lay with free labor. Its industrial advantage
could not be overborne by a hostile national administration, nor by the
inroads of aggressive and lawless neighbors. The management of their
affairs by the Free State settlers was a great vindication of the
methods of peace. The guerrilla warfare undertaken by Brown and his
party had won no real advantage. The decisive triumph came from the
habitual self-control of the Free State men, their steady refusal to
resist the Federal authority, and the sympathy they thus won from the
peaceful North, turning at last the scales of Congressional authority in
their favor. Thus far, peace and freedom moved hand in hand.
The tide in the country was running strongly with the Republicans. The
alliance with Douglas failed, because his price was the Senatorship from
Illinois, and the Republicans of that State were "willing to take him on
probation, but not to make him the head of the church." They named
Abraham Lincoln as their candidate for the Senatorship, and these two
men held a series of joint debates which fixed the attention of the
country; with the result that Lincoln won the popular majority, but
Douglas the Legislature and the Senatorship. In the country at large,
the Republicans made such gains, in this election of 1858, that they won
the control of the National House. The Whigs were defunct, the Americans
were a dwindling fraction; the "Constitutional Union" party held a
number who sought peace above all things; but the great mass divided
between the Republicans and the Democrats. Douglas, the most dextrous of
rope-dancers, had regained his place as the foremost man in his old
party. The Republicans held firmly to their constitutional principles;
but the depth of the antagonism of the two industrial systems grew ever
more apparent. Lincoln had declared: "A house divided against itself
cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half
slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved, I do not
expect the house to fall, but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing or all the other." Seward, too, had said:
"The United States must and will, sooner or later, become either
entirely a slave-holding or entirely a free-labor nation." Between the
two systems there was an "irrepressible conflict." But he added that he
desired and expected the triumph of freedom "not otherwise than through
the action of the several States, co-operating with the Federal
Government, and all acting in conformity with their respective
constitutions." Yet over these utterances of Lincoln and Seward some
conservatives in the party shook their heads, as liable to be
misinterpreted and to needlessly alarm the South. But men more radical
than Lincoln and Seward were coming to the front. Sumner was silenced
for the time, but among the leaders of Massachusetts now appeared John
A. Andrew, her future war Governor, large-brained and large-hearted. In
this year, 1858, at the State convention of which he was president, he
said, "I believe in the Republican party because I believe that slavery,
the servitude of humanity, has no business to exist anywhere; because it
has no business to exist and no right to be supported where the sun
shines or grass grows or water runs."
One of the sensations of the time was a book, dated 1857, which showed a
rift in the solid South. It was _The Impending Crisis_, by Hinton Rowan
Helper, a North Carolinian by long descent, birth, and residence; the
son of "a merciful slave-holder"; writing at the age of twenty-seven.
His standpoint was that of the non-slave-holding Southern white. "Yankee
wives"--so he begins--"have written the most popular anti-slavery
literature of the day. Against this I have nothing to say; it is all
well enough for women to give the pictures of slavery; men should give
the facts." His method is largely the comparison of the industrial
progress of the two sections, and his chief arsenal is the United States
census. North and South started, he says, with the establishment of the
government and the North's abolition of slavery, with advantage in soil,
climate, rivers, harbors, minerals, forests, etc., on the side of the
South, but in sixty years she has been completely outstripped. He
brackets Virginia and New York; at the start, Virginia had twice the
population of New York; now New York's population doubles Virginia's.
Virginia's exports have been about stationary at $3,000,000; New York's
have risen from $2,500,000 to $87,000,000. New York almost trebles
Virginia in valuation, even including slaves. So he compares North
Carolina and Massachusetts; the empty port of Beaufort and the teeming
one of Boston; the northern State with a production from manufactures,
mines, and mechanic arts double the whole cotton crop of the South. So
he compares South Carolina and Pennsylvania. Again: Sail down the Ohio,
and you will find the lands on the right bank worth double and treble
those on the left bank,--slavery makes all the difference. The hay crop
of the free States is worth more in dollars and cents than all the
cotton, tobacco, rice, hay, and hemp, in the slave States. The marble
and free-stone quarries in New England yield more wealth than all the
subterranean deposits in the slave States. And so for many pages he goes
on piling Pelion upon Ossa with his figures. He pictures the South's
economic dependence: "In infancy we are swaddled in Northern muslin; in
childhood we are humored with Northern gewgaws; in youth, we are
instructed out of Northern books; at the age of maturity, we sow our
wild oats on Northern soil.... In the decline of life we remedy our
sight with Northern spectacles, and support our infirmities with
Northern canes; in old age we are drugged with Northern physic; and
finally, when we die, our inanimate bodies, shrouded in Northern
cambric, are stretched upon the bier, borne to the grave in a Northern
carriage, entombed with Northern spade, and memorized with a Northern
slab!"
Land in the Northern States averages $28.07 an acre in value, and in the
Southern States it is $5.34. The difference measures the robbery
committed on a community of 10,000,000 by the 350,000 slave-holders.
These "chevaliers of the lash" he arraigns with a rhetoric compared to
which Sumner's and Phillip's words were pale. The slave-holders are
worse, he declares, than thieves, for they steal from all. They are
worse than common murderers, for they issue to themselves licenses to
murder; the slave who resists may be killed. He is for no
half-measures,--he avows himself a free-soiler, an emancipationist, an
abolitionist, a colonizationist. "The liberation of five millions of
'poor white trash,' from the second degree of slavery, and of three
millions of miserable kidnapped negroes from the first degree, cannot be
accomplished too soon." The process is simple and easy; emancipation
will be followed by such an instant rise in all values and in general
prosperity that the slave-owners themselves will be recouped. Let each
of these, he says, give to each slave his freedom and $60 in money; half
that sum will transport him to Liberia, whither all should go. He
foresees the tempest which his book will arouse. "What are you going to
do about it? Something dreadful as a matter of course? Perhaps you will
dissolve the Union. Do it, if you dare! Our motto, and we would have you
understand it, is the abolition of slavery and the perpetuation of the
American Union. If by any means you do succeed in your treasonable
attempt to take the South out of the Union to-day, we will bring her
back to-morrow,--if she goes away with you, she will return without
you." In his closing paragraph he predicts the election to the
Presidency in 1860 of some anti-slavery Southerner, of the type of
Cassius M. Clay, or James G. Birney, and in 1864, of a Northerner like
Seward or Sumner. And he thus concludes: "Furthermore, if in these or in
any other similar cases the oligarchy do not quietly submit to the will
of a constitutional majority of the people, as expressed at the
ballot-box, the first battle between freedom and slavery will be fought
at home--and may God defend the right!"
The book raised a tempest of denunciation. The more it was denounced the
more it was read. It was easily "the best-selling book" of the time. The
concrete reply of the party criticised was first to drive Helper out of
North Carolina. Next his book was condemned in a resolution proposed at
the opening of Congress in 1859-60, and aimed especially at John
Sherman, of Ohio, the Republican candidate for speaker, who had signed a
qualified recommendation of the book. After a long contest the
Republicans dropped Sherman for Pennington, of New Jersey, whom they
elected. _The Impending Crisis_ was a portent and an impulse of the
coming catastrophe.
CHAPTER XVIII
JOHN BROWN
About this time there was a revival of activity in the slave trade
between Africa and Cuba. The American Government had always acted
half-heartedly in its co-operation with the British Government for the
suppression of this traffic. Now it happened that some British cruisers
in the West Indies stopped and examined some vessels under the American
flag, suspected of being slavers. This was resented by the American
Government, which sent war ships to the scene and took the British
Government to task. In Congress both parties joined in denunciation of
British aggression. The right of search, exercised by England for the
reclamation of her seamen from American vessels, had been one of the
grounds of war in 1812. It had been left unmentioned in the treaty of
peace, but England had silently relinquished the practice. Now, at the
demand of the United States, she expressly relinquished the right of
search in the case of supposed slave ships under the American flag,
unless the result should justify the suspicion. Thus the honor of the
Stars and Stripes was vindicated,--and the flag was made a great
convenience to slavers. The administration, however, bestirred itself
toward doing its own share in the work of sea-police, and several slave
ships were captured. The crew of one of these were acquitted, by a
Charleston jury, against the clearest evidence. There was some open talk
in the Southern papers of legalizing the traffic. But the trade was
destined to a discouraging check a year or two later, when President
Lincoln signed the first death warrant of the captain of a slaver.
After the Kansas troubles had subsided, John Brown sought some way to
make a direct attack on slavery. For many years he had brooded on the
matter, in the light of his reading of the Old Testament, and he felt
himself called to assail it as the Jewish heroes assailed the enemies of
Jehovah and his people. As early as 1847 he had disclosed to Frederick
Douglass, during a visit to Brown's home in Springfield, Mass., a plan
for freeing the slaves. He did not contemplate a general insurrection
and slaughter. But he proposed to establish a fugitive refuge in the
chain of mountains stretching from the border of New York toward the
Gulf. "These mountains," he said, "are the basis of my plan. God has
given the strength of the hills to freedom; they were placed here for
the emancipation of the negro race; they are full of natural forts,
where one man for defense will be equal to one hundred for attack; they
are full also of good hiding-places, where large numbers of brave men
could be concealed, and baffle and elude pursuit for a long time.... The
true object to be sought is, first of all, to destroy the money-value of
slave property; and that can only be done by rendering such property
insecure. My plan, then, is to take at first about twenty-five picked
men, and begin on a small scale; supply them arms and ammunition, and
post them in squads of five on a line of twenty-five miles. The most
persuasive and judicious of them shall then go down to the fields from
time to time, as opportunity offers, and induce the slaves to join them,
seeking and selecting the most restless and daring."
It was substantially this plan to which Brown now returned, and he
sought aid among those men at the East who had backed the Free State
cause in Kansas. He was not known to them, as he has been presented to
the reader, as the chief actor in the Pottawatomie massacre, but as a
bold guerrilla chief, who had lost a son in the Kansas strife. Even so,
he was a recognized dissenter from the peace policy which had finally
won success for freedom in the Territory. But there were men in the
anti-slavery ranks who were impatient of the whole policy of peace, and
the impressive personality of Brown won some of these to active support
of his project. Among them were Theodore Parker, Gerritt Smith, Dr. S.
G. Howe, George L. Stearns, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Franklin B.
Sanborn, who formed a secret committee to forward this plan. They were
not informed of its details, but knew its general scope. To a
considerable number Brown was known as a hero of past fights and not
averse to fresh ones. He visited Concord, where he spoke at a public
meeting, and made a great impression on Emerson, Alcott, and Thoreau.
Alcott made a pen-picture of him. "I think him equal to anything he
dares,--the man to do the deed, if it must be done, and with the
martyr's temper and purpose. Nature obviously was deeply intent in the
making of him. He is of imposing appearance personally,--tall, with
square shoulders and standing; eyes of deep gray, and couchant, as if
ready to spring at the least rustling, dauntless yet kindly; his hair
shooting backward from low down on his forehead; nose trenchant and
Romanesque; set lips, his voice suppressed yet metallic, suggesting deep
reserves; decided mouth; the countenance and frame charged with power
throughout."
Emerson, from his own observation and from hearsay, drew his spiritual
portrait: "For himself, Brown is so transparent that all men see him
through. He is a man to make friends wherever on earth courage and
integrity are esteemed,--the rarest of heroes, a pure idealist, with no
by-ends of his own. Many of us have seen him, and everyone who has heard
him speak has been impressed alike by his simple, artless goodness and
his sublime courage. He joins that perfect Puritan faith which brought
his ancestor to Plymouth Rock, with his grandfather's ardor in the
Revolution. He believes in two articles--two instruments, shall I
say?--the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence; and he used
this expression in a conversation here concerning them: 'Better that a
whole generation of men, women, and children should pass away by a
violent death, than that one word of either should be violated in this
country.'... He grew up a religious and manly person, in severe poverty;
a fair specimen of the best stock of New England, having that force of
thought and that sense of right which are the warp and woof of
greatness.... Thus was formed a romantic character, absolutely without
any vulgar trait; living to ideal ends, without any mixture of
self-indulgence or compromise, such as lowers the value of benevolent
and thoughtful men we know; abstemious, refusing luxuries, not sourly
and reproachfully, but simply as unfit for his habit; quiet and gentle
as a child, in the house. And as happens usually to men of romantic
character, his fortunes were romantic."
But the romance in this portrait is due quite as much to the imagination
of the artist as to the character of the subject. Emerson seems to have
entirely overlooked in his estimate of Brown that he had no rational
idea of the moral obligations of the citizen to the civil government and
to the peace of society; and that his conscience in its apparent
simplicity was really in dire confusion. The sentence he quotes from
Brown's conversation has its practical commentary in Brown's acts. He
was as ready to take the sword, to redress what he considered a breach
of the Golden Rule or the Declaration of Independence, as if mankind had
not for thousands of years and with infinite cost been building up
institutions for the peaceful settlement of difficulties. In Kansas he
saw in the political struggle simply an issue to be tried out by force
between good men and bad men; and he made himself executioner of a group
of men he considered bad, thereby plunging into a series of murders
utterly repugnant to his natural humanity. He afterward justified the
deed, without avowing his own part in it, which was not fully known till
twenty years later. After Harper's Ferry, the _Springfield Republican_
(which judged him very favorably), speaking partly from personal
knowledge gained during his residence in Springfield, said: "He is so
constituted that when he gets possessed of an idea he carries it out
with unflinching fidelity to all its logical consequences, as they seem
to him, hesitating at no absurdity and deterred by no unpleasant
consequences to himself personally. He is a Presbyterian in his faith,
and feels that it is for this very purpose that God has reared him up."
When a man is so possessed by the conviction that he is God's instrument
as to set himself outside of ordinary human morality, he is presumably
on the verge of shipwreck. The _Republican_, while emphasizing the
popular estimate of John Brown as "a hero," coupled with this the
characterization of him as "a misguided and insane man."
The project he was now pressing--the establishment of a mountain refuge
for fugitive slaves, working toward the depreciation of slave property,
and the ultimate extinction of the system--had a certain superficial
plausibility; and it seemed to avoid the inhumanity of general
insurrection. But it was at the best hardly more than a boy's romance,
and at the last moment Brown abandoned it for a still more impracticable
plan.
On the morning of October 17, 1859, the little town of Harper's Ferry,
on the upper Potomac, awoke to the amazing discovery that in the night
the buildings of the United States armory had been seized and held by a
company of armed men, white and black; that they had gathered in a
number of prisoners, including some prominent citizens; and that their
design was to free the slaves. Brown had struck his blow. With eighteen
faithful associates, including three of his sons, he had lurked near the
town till all was ready; then in the night he had marched in and seized
the armory, and brought in as prisoners some of the neighboring planters
who were told they were held as hostages. Other citizens were captured
almost without resistance in the early morning hours, till the prisoners
were twice the number of their captors. But there was no rising of the
negroes. Brown, after his first easy success, stayed still as if
paralyzed. Either he had no further plan, or his judgment and will
failed him at the crisis. His complete failure to improve his
first advantage--whether the weakness lay in his plan or the
execution--indicated the radical unsoundness which underlay his
impressive exterior. The town rallied its forces, surrounded the armory,
and a fight was kept up through the afternoon. At night Colonel Robert
E. Lee with a force of troops arrived from Washington, and the next
morning they easily stormed the armory, which had lost half its
garrison, including two of Brown's sons, and Brown and the rest of his
party were made prisoners.
The country was in a state of profound peace; Kansas had fallen out of
mind; the Presidential election was a year away; and even political
discussion was languid. The news of the raid came as an utter surprise.
Brown was unknown to the general public, and beyond the patent fact of
an attempted slave insurrection there was at first general bewilderment
as to the meaning of the event. Brown's secret committee,--ignorant of
his exact plan, most of them having had but little to do with him, and
none of them expecting the blow when it fell,--were in no haste to
enlighten the public, or acknowledge their responsibility. But Brown
became his own interpreter. The ubiquitous _New York Herald_ reporter
was instantly on the ground, and never were interviews more eagerly read
and more impressive in their effect than Brown's replies to his various
examiners. A prisoner, wounded, in the shadow of a felon's death, the
old man bore himself with perfect courage and composure. Asked on what
principle he justified his acts, he replied: "Upon the Golden Rule. I
pity the poor in bondage, that have none to help them; that is why I am
here; not to gratify any personal animosity, revenge, or vindictive
spirit. It is my sympathy with the oppressed and wronged, that are as
good as you and as precious in the sight of God." The Virginians
recognized his sincerity and integrity. The Governor of the State, Henry
A. Wise--an extreme Southerner in his politics--visited Brown, and said
publicly: "They are mistaken who take Brown to be a madman. He is a
bundle of the best nerves I ever saw,--cut and thrust and bleeding and
in bonds. He is a man of clear head, of courage, fortitude, and simple
ingenuousness. He is cool, collected, and indomitable, and it is but
just to him to say that he was humane to his prisoners, and he inspired
me with great trust in his integrity as a man of truth. He is a fanatic,
vain and garrulous, but firm, truthful, and intelligent."
For Brown and his associates there could be but one conclusion to the
business. They were put on trial for treason and murder. They had a fair
trial, and indeed the case admitted of no doubt. They were sentenced to
be hanged, and the sentence was carried out, within six weeks of their
act.
At the North, Brown was widely honored as a hero and a martyr. No one
defended his act,--a slave insurrection, in whatever form, found no
public justification. Probably a considerable majority of the community,
including all the more conservative political elements, condemned the
man and his deed, and perhaps justified his execution. But wherever
anti-slavery feeling was strong, and with a multitude who, apart from
such feeling, were sensitive to striking qualities of manhood, there was
great admiration and sympathy for Brown and sorrow for his fate. John A.
Andrew spoke a common feeling when he said: "Whatever may be thought of
John Brown's acts, John Brown himself was right." Emerson eulogized him
in daring words. If, he said, John Brown is hung, he will glorify the
gallows as Jesus glorified the cross. On the day of his death the church
bells were tolled in many a Northern town. Said the _Springfield
Republican_ the next morning: "There need be no tears for him. Few men
die so happily, so satisfied with time, place, and circumstance, as did
he.... A Christian man hung by Christians for acting upon his
convictions of duty,--a brave man hung for a chivalrous and
self-sacrificing deed of humanity,--a philanthropist hung for seeking
the liberty of oppressed men. No outcry about violated law can cover up
the essential enormity of a deed like this."
Never was a man dealt with more generously by posthumous fame. In the
Civil War, two lines of verse, fitted to a stirring melody, became the
marching song of the Union armies:
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave
His soul is marching on!
This was the last touch of the apotheosis; John Brown became to the
popular imagination the forerunner and martyr of the cause of Union and
freedom.
At the North, one immediate and lasting effect of the tragedy was to
intensify the conviction of the essential wrong of slavery. However
mistaken was Brown's way of attack, it was felt that nothing short of an
organized system of injustice and cruelty could have inspired such a man
to such an attempt. The very logic of facts, which compelled Virginia in
self-defense to hang him, showed the character of the institution which
needed such defense. Yes, it was necessary to hang him,--but what was
the system that made necessary the sacrifice of such a life?
But Andrew's words "whatever may be thought of John Brown's acts"--call
for further consideration. What were his acts, and what were their
consequences? A part of the answer was seen in the bodies of men of
Harper's Ferry, lying in the streets, peaceful men with wives and
children, slain for resisting an armed invasion of their quiet little
village. The first man to fall was a negro porter of a railway train,
who, failing to halt when challenged by one of Brown's sentinels, was
shot. The second man killed was a citizen standing in his own doorway.
The third was a graduate of West Point who, hearing of trouble, came
riding into town with his gun, and was shot as he passed the armory.
Among the letters that came to Brown in prison was one from the widow of
one of the Pottawatomie victims, with these words: "You can now
appreciate my distress in Kansas, when you then and there entered my
house at midnight and arrested my husband and two boys, and took them
out in the yard, and in cold blood shot them dead in my hearing. You
can't say you did it to free our slaves; we had none and never expected
to own one; but it only made me a poor disconsolate widow with helpless
children."
Brown's first plan, of drawing off the slaves to a mountain
fortress,--peaceable only in semblance, and involving inevitable
fighting,--he exchanged at last for a form of attack which was an
instant challenge to battle. In a conference with Frederick Douglass, on
the eve of the event, Douglass vainly urged the earlier plan, but found
Brown resolved on "striking a blow which should instantly rouse the
country." On the day of his death, Brown penned these sentences and
handed them to one of his guards: "I, John Brown, am now quite certain
that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with
blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very
much bloodshed it might be done." But no man so directly and
deliberately aimed to settle the difficulty by bloodshed as he. It is
thus that men make God responsible for what themselves are doing.
The Civil War when it came brought enough of suffering and horror. But
it was mild and merciful compared to what a slave insurrection might
have been. And it was essentially a slave insurrection that Brown aimed
at. The great mass of the Northern people would have recoiled with
abhorrence from a servile revolt. But who could wonder if the Southern
people did not believe this, when they saw honors heaped on a man who
died for inciting such an insurrection? How could they nicely
distinguish between approval of a man's acts and praise for the man
himself? If the North had one thinker who set forth its highest ideals,
its noblest aims, that man was Emerson. Yet Emerson passed Brown's acts
almost unblamed, and named his execution together with that on Calvary.
Not all the disclaimers of politicians, the resolves of conventions,
could reassure the South, after that day of mourning with which Northern
towns solemnized John Brown's death. What wonder that an ardent
Southerner like Toombs, speaking to his constituents a few months later,
called on them to "meet the enemy at the door-sill." And what wonder
that the Southern people were inclined as never before to look upon the
Northern people as their foes?
The more deeply we study human life, the more do we realize that as to
individual responsibility "to understand is to forgive." Half a century
after the event, we may well have forgiveness--not of charity, but of
justice--for John Brown, and for the Governor who signed his
death-warrant; we can sympathize with those who honored and wept for
him, and with those who shuddered at his deed. But, for the truth of
history and for the guidance of the future, we must consider not only
the intentions of men, but the intrinsic character of their deeds; not
only John Brown himself, but John Brown's acts. And in that long series
of deeds of violence and wrong which wrought mutual hatred and
fratricidal war between the two sections of a people, that midnight
attack on the peaceful Virginia village must bear its heavy
condemnation. Hitherto aggression had been almost entirely from the
South; this was a counter-stroke, and told with dire force against the
hope of a peaceable and righteous settlement.
Probably most readers of to-day will wonder at the degree of admiration
and praise which Brown received. It must be ascribed in part to some
quality in his personality, which cast a kind of glamour on some of
those who met him, and inspired such highly idealized portraiture as
Emerson's. But there remains the extraordinary fact that men like
Theodore Parker and Gerritt Smith and Dr. S. G. Howe gave countenance
and aid to Brown's project. Before history's bar, their responsibility
seems heavier than his; they, educated, intelligent, trained in public
service; he an untaught, ill-balanced visionary, who at least staked his
life on his faith. Their complicity in his plot illustrates how in some
moral enthusiasts the hostility to slavery had distorted their
perception of reality. Such men saw the Southern communities through
the medium of a single institution, itself half-understood. They saw, so
to speak, only the suffering slave and his oppressor. They failed to see
or forgot the general life of household and neighborhood, with its
common, kindly, human traits. They did not recognize that Harper's Ferry
was made up of much the same kind of people, at bottom, as Concord. They
did not realize that a slave insurrection meant a universal social
conflagration. Indeed, Brown's original scheme of a general flight of
slaves to a mountain stronghold had a fallacious appearance of avoiding
a violent insurrection, and it was with the background of this plan that
Brown, a wounded prisoner with death impending, appealed to the Northern
imagination as a hero and martyr.
But this glorification of him wrought a momentous effect in the South.
It is best described by those who witnessed it. John S. Wise, son of the
Governor who signed Brown's death-warrant, writes in his graphic
reminiscences, _The End of an Era_: "While these scenes were being
enacted"--the trial and execution of Brown and the Northern comments--"a
great change of feeling took place in Virginia toward the people of the
North and toward the Union itself. Virginians began to look upon the
people of the North as hating them, and willing to see them assassinated
at midnight by their own slaves, led by Northern emissaries; as flinging
away all pretense of regard for laws protecting the slave-owner; as
demanding of them the immediate freeing of their slaves, or that they
prepare against further attacks like Brown's, backed by the moral and
pecuniary support of the North. During the year 1860 the Virginians
began to organize and arm themselves against such emergencies."
The spirit of proscription against all anti-slavery men broke out
afresh. At Berea, Kentucky, a little group of anti-slavery churches and
schools had been growing for six years, championed by the stalwart
Cassius M. Clay, and with the benignant and peaceful John G. Fee as
their leader. A month after Brown's foray a band of armed horsemen
summoned twelve of their men to leave the State. Governor Magoffin said
he could not protect them, and with their families they went into
exile--stout-heartedly chanting at their departure the 37th Psalm: "Fret
not thyself because of evil-doers."
In the South itself there had been developing recently an antagonism to
the slave power. Its strength lay not in the moral opposition to
slavery, which indeed always existed, but was quiet and apparently
cowed; but rather in the growing class of city residents,--merchants and
professional men,--whose interests and feelings were often antagonistic
to the large planters. The hostility to slavery on economic grounds, and
in the white man's interest, found passionate expression in Helper's
_Impending Crisis_, and in a milder form was spreading widely. But at
the menace of invasion and servile insurrection all classes drew
together. Especially the women of the South became suddenly and
intensely interested in the political situation. The suggestion of
personal peril appealed to them, and to the men who were their natural
defenders. The situation is well described in Prof. J. W. Burgess's _The
Civil War and the Constitution_,--a generally impartial book, written
with personal appreciation of the Southern standpoint: "No man who is
acquainted with the change of feeling which occurred in the South
between the 16th of October, 1859, and the 16th of November of the same
year can regard the Harper's Ferry villainy as anything other than one
of the chiefest crimes of our history. It established and
re-established the control of the great radical slaveholders over the
non-slaveholders, the little slaveholders, and the more liberal of the
larger slaveholders, which had already begun to be loosened. It created
anew a solidarity of interest between them all, which was felt by all
with an intensity which overbore every other sentiment. It gave thus to
the great radical slaveholders the willing physical material for the
construction of armies and navies and for the prosecution of war."
CHAPTER XIX
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Every American may be presumed to be familiar with the external facts of
Abraham Lincoln's early life,--the rude cabin, the shiftless father, the
dead mother's place filled by the tender step-mother; the brief
schooling, the hungry reading of the few books by the fire-light; the
hard farm-work, with a turn now of rail-splitting, now of flat-boating;
the country sports and rough good-fellowship; the upward steps as
store-clerk and lawyer. But the interior qualities that made up his
character and built his fortune will bear further study.
He was composed of traits which seemed to contradict each other. In a
sense this is true of everyone. Dr. Holmes says (in substance): "The
vehicle in which each one of us crosses life's narrow isthmus between
two oceans is not a one-seated sulky, but an omnibus." Sometimes, as
depicted in that wonderful parable, _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, one
inmate ejects the others. But in Lincoln the various elements were
wrought as years passed by into harmony.
He was prized among his early companions as a wit and story-teller. The
women complained because at their parties all the men were drawn off to
hear Abe Lincoln's stories. When he came to be a public speaker, he
feathered the shafts of his argument with jest and anecdote. The vein of
humor in him was rich and deep; it helped him through the hard places.
When as President he announced to his cabinet the Emancipation
Proclamation, he first refreshed himself by reading to them a chapter
from Artemus Ward.
His early growth was in rough soil, and some of the mud stuck to
him,--his jests were sometimes broad. But if coarse in speech he was
pure in life, and neither the rancor of political hate nor the research
of unsparing biographers ever charged him with an unchaste act.
Along with this rollicking fun he had a vein of deepest melancholy. In
part it was temperamental. The malarial country sometimes bred a strain
of habitual depression. His mother was the natural daughter of a
Virginia planter, and had the sadness sometimes wrought by such
pre-natal conditions; it was said she was never seen to smile. Lincoln's
early years had hardships and trials, over many of which he triumphed,
and triumphed laughing; but there were others for which there was
neither victory nor mirth. Some of his early letters of intimate
friendship (as given in Hay and Nicolay's biography), show a singular
capacity for romantic affection, and gleams of hope of supreme
happiness. But death frustrated this hope, and the disappointment
brought him to the verge of insanity. In his domestic life,--it was an
open secret,--he had some of the experience which disciplined Socrates.
Perhaps we go to the root of his sadness if we say that in his deepest
heart he was a passionate idealist, and by circumstances he was long
shut out from the natural satisfaction of ideality. His partner Herndon
said of him, "His melancholy dripped from him as he walked."
Out of these experiences he brought a great power of patience and a
great power of sympathy. These armed him for his work. He became
invincible against the perversities and follies of men, and the blows of
fate. He ripened into a tenderness such as prompted him, when burdened
with cares beyond measure, to give a sympathetic hearing to every mother
who came to the President with the story of her boy's trouble.
To take another brace of qualities, he was at once a powerful fighter
and an habitual peace-maker. His long, gaunt, sinewy frame, and his
tough courage, made him a formidable antagonist, but it was hard to
provoke him to combat. Lamon,--whose biography is a treasury of good
stories, sometimes lacking in discretion, but giving an invaluable
realistic picture,--relates an encounter with the village bully, Jack
Armstrong. The "boys" at last teased Lincoln into a wrestling match, and
when his victory in the good-natured encounter provoked Jack to unfair
play, Abe shook him as a terrier shakes a rat. Then he made peace with
him, drew out the better quality in him; and the two reigned "like
friendly Cæsars" over the village crowd, Abe tempering Jack's
playfulness when it got too rough, and winning the boys to kindly ways.
In that day and region, men were very frank about their religious
beliefs and disbeliefs. The skepticism or unbelief which lies unspoken
in the hearts of a multitude of men,--silent perhaps out of regard to
public opinion, perhaps from consideration for mother or wife--found
free and frequent utterance in the West, long before Robert Ingersoll
gave it eloquent voice. Lincoln, though we have called him an idealist
at heart, habitually guided himself by logic, by hard sense, and by such
evidence as passes in a court of law. He was one of the class to whom
books like Tom Paine's _Age of Reason_ appealed strongly. In early life
he wrote a treatise against Christianity. A politic friend to whom he
showed his manuscript put it in the stove, but the writer was not
changed in his opinions. To Christianity as a supernatural revelation he
never became a convert, but the belief in "a Power that makes for
righteousness" grew with his growth and strengthened with his strength.
With deepening experiences, the awe and mystery of life weighed heavily
on him. When travelling on circuit, his days spent in law-cases,
diversified with sociability and funny stories, he would sometimes be
seen in the early morning brooding by the fire-place with hands
outspread, and murmuring his favorite verses,--a soliloquy on the
mournfulness and mystery of life: "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal
be proud!"
In his early youth he read eagerly and thoroughly such few books as came
in his way. Later, his taste for reading seemed to grow less. He had a
keen instinct for reality, and perhaps he found little in books that
satisfied him. For poetry and philosophy he had small aptitude, and in
science he had no training. What books he read he seemed to digest and
get the pith of. Once, made suddenly conscious by defeat of his lack of
book-culture, he took up Euclid's geometry, and resolutely studied and
re-studied it. Doubtless that helped him in the close logic which often
characterized his speeches. The strength of his speeches lay in their
logic, their close regard to fact, their adaptation to the plain people
of whom he was one, their homely illustrations, and, as the years
developed him, an appeal to some high principle of duty. His chief
library was men and women. From them, and from his own experience, he
drew the elements of his politics, history, philosophy.
He had the ambition natural to a man of high powers. With all his genial
sociability, he was in a way self-centered. His associates often thought
him,--and Lamon shares the opinion--not only moody and meditative, but
unsocial, cold, impassive; bent on his own ends, and using other men as
his instruments. Partly we may count this as the judgment of the crowd
to whom Lincoln's inner life was unimaginable. He shared their social
hours, and then withdrew into thoughts and feelings and purposes which
he could share with no one. Doubtless, too, he was in fault for some of
that neglect of the small courtesies and kindnesses which besets men
whose own thoughts fascinate them too strongly. There is a graphic
touch, in the story of his love affairs, of a girl who rejected his
advances because she had seen him on a hot day walk up a hill with a
woman and never offer to relieve her of the baby she was carrying.
As a lawyer he won more than ordinary success, making good his lack of
erudition by shrewdness and knowledge of human nature. It was observed
that he always tried a case honestly and fairly; that he was not fond of
controversy, and always preferred to settle a case out of court; that he
never argued well or strongly unless his conviction was fully on his
client's side; that, if unconvinced himself, he simply brought forward
the proofs which fairly counted on his side, and left the decision to
others; and that he was so little attentive to gain that, although he
became one of the leading lawyers of Illinois, he never accumulated much
money.
His fairness as a lawyer, and his integrity in politics, won his popular
nickname of "Honest Abe." Perhaps honesty, in its fullest sense, was his
central quality. He was always true to the truth as he saw it--true in
thought and word and deed. One feels in his printed speeches that he is
trying to see and to say things as they are. He had not the aid of the
mystic's vision, in which the moral universe is revealed in such
splendor that to accept and obey it is pure joy. But he saw and felt and
practiced the homely obligations of honesty and kindness. His education
came largely as at successive epochs there were disclosed to him new
heights of moral significance in the life of the nation; and as fast as
such disclosures came to him he set himself to obey them with absolute
loyalty.
His conscience was not of the self-contemplating and self-voicing kind.
He was chary of words about duty. It has been alleged that the typical
New Englander is afflicted with "a chronic inflammation of the moral
sense." Such a malady does exist, though many a New Englander is bravely
free from it, while it is not unknown in Alaska or Japan. From such an
over-conscientious conscience, and from its incidents and its
counterfeits, there is bred a redundancy of verbal moralising. That was
not a foible of Lincoln. The sense of moral obligation underlies his
weightier utterances, as the law of gravitation underlies scientific
demonstrations,--not talked of, but assumed.
Lincoln's political career gave high promise at the start. He seemed to
have the qualities for success,--ambition, shrewdness in managing men,
power as a speaker, integrity which won general confidence, ideals not
too high above the crowd. Yet his success was so moderate that in
contrasting himself with Senator Douglas, at the outset of their debate
in 1858, he declared that, "With me the race of ambition has been a
failure,--a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success."
There were reasons for it: Douglas had given himself without reserve to
his personal advancement, and Lincoln had been hampered by regard for
other men and for larger ends. After one term in Congress as a Whig,
1847-8, he retired in deference to the fashion of "rotation" between
localities. When roused to new activity by the anti-Nebraska campaign in
1854, he was the favorite candidate of his party for the senatorship;
but seeing that the knot of men who held the balance of power were
gravitating to the other side, he insisted on withdrawing in favor of
Lyman Trumbull, as a stronger candidate, who accordingly won the day.
Before the revival of the slavery issue, there had been nothing in the
old-time Whig and Democratic contests to appeal to the deeper elements
in Lincoln's nature, and personal ambition alone was not strong enough
to push him to eminence. Though he could handle men skillfully, he had a
distaste for the petty arts of the politician's trade. "Politics," he
said, "is the combination of individual meannesses for the general
good." And he had small relish for the game, until "the general good"
loomed clear and large.
His attitude on slavery was typical of the men at the North who were at
once humane and regardful of the established order. He gave his general
position, in homely and graphic fashion, in a letter to his old friend,
Joshua F. Speed, of Kentucky, in 1855. This was at the time he referred
to when he wrote: "I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of
the Missouri Compromise roused me again." To Speed he wrote: "I
acknowledge your rights and my obligations under the Constitution in
regard to your slaves. I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted
down and caught, and carried back to their stripes and unrequited toils;
but I bite my lips and keep quiet. In 1841, you and I had together a
tedious low-water trip in a steamboat from Louisville to St. Louis. You
may remember, as well as I do, that from Louisville to the mouth of the
Ohio there were on board ten or a dozen slaves shackled together with
irons. That sight was a continued torment to me; and I see something
like it every time I touch the Ohio or any other slave border. It is not
fair for you to assume that I have no interest in a thing which has, and
continually exercises, the power of making me miserable. You ought
rather to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do
crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the
Constitution and the Union. I do oppose the extension of slavery,
because my judgment and feelings so prompt me; and I am under no
obligations to the contrary."
It was this strong regard for the established law of the land which set
the moderate anti-slavery men apart from the Abolitionists of the
extreme type. And up to this time, Lincoln, though hostile to slavery,
had not been especially concerned as to the nation's dealing with it.
But now came the opportunity and call to resist its extension into the
territories, and with the response to that call came the sense that a
great contest was impending between right and wrong, between the good of
the many and the selfishness of the few.
Lincoln had close at hand a friend to spur him on. His law-partner,
William H. Herndon, was an enthusiastic radical in politics and
religion. He was an Abolitionist, and a follower of Theodore Parker. He
had long plied Lincoln with Parker's sermons and with anti-slavery
literature. When in 1856 Herndon and his friends began to organize to
support armed resistance in Kansas, Lincoln remonstrated with them
successfully. Then came the parting of the ways,--Republican, Democrat,
or Know-nothing? The Illinois Abolitionists threw themselves heartily
into the Republican movement. At its first State convention, at
Bloomington, Lincoln was the great figure. The faithful Herndon, his
missionary zeal rewarded at last by such a convert, describes in glowing
language the speech of Lincoln,--which so carried him away that after
trying for fifteen minutes to take notes as usual, he threw away his
pencil. "Heretofore, and up to this moment, he had simply argued the
slavery question on grounds of policy,--on what are called the
statesman's grounds,--never reaching the question of the radical and the
eternal right. Now he was newly baptized and freshly born; he had the
fervor of a new convert; the smothered flame broke out; enthusiasm
unusual to him blazed up; his eyes were aglow with an inspiration; he
felt justice; his heart was alive to the right; his sympathies,
remarkably deep for him, burst forth, and he stood before the throne of
the eternal Right, in presence of his God, and then and there unburdened
his penitential and fired soul. This speech was fresh, new, genuine,
odd, original; filled with fervor not unmixed with a divine enthusiasm;
his head breathing out through his tender heart its truths, its sense of
right, and its feeling of the good and for the good. If Lincoln was six
feet four inches high usually, at Bloomington he was seven feet, and
inspired at that."
But the prairie fire was slow to light. Five days after the convention,
Herndon and Lincoln got up a ratification meeting in Springfield. There
were posters, illuminations, a band of music,--and at the appointed
hour, one man in the hall besides Lincoln and Herndon! Lincoln took the
platform, began with words half-sad, half-mirthful, and concluded: "All
seems dead, dead, dead; but the age is not yet dead; it liveth as sure
as our Maker liveth. Under all this seeming want of life and motion, the
world does move nevertheless. Be hopeful. And now let us adjourn, and
appeal to the people."
The prairie caught fire at last. The Republicans carried Illinois that
autumn for Fremont. Two years later, Lincoln and Douglas traversed the
State in their famous series of joint debates. The main issue was
slavery in the territories; the background was the general attitude of
the white man toward the negro. Douglas held that the whole business was
a question for white men only. If they wanted slavery in any Territory,
let them have it. If they did not want it, let them keep it out--unless
the Supreme Court forbade. Lincoln summed up this "popular sovereignty"
doctrine: "If one man wants to make another man a slave, a third man has
no right to prevent him!" His position was that the nation's duty was to
hold the common domain for freedom, and that this was the business of
Congress. Douglas constantly twitted Lincoln with belief in negro
equality. This Lincoln disclaimed; he did not believe in the negro's
equality with the white man; did not believe in making him a voter or a
juror; but because an inferior, had a negro no rights? Lincoln's
anti-slavery position was very moderate; in reply to Douglas's
challenge, he disclaimed any disposition to agitate against the fugitive
slave law; as to practical restriction, he had nothing to urge except
exclusion from the territories. Here he was emphatic, and he protested
earnestly against Douglas's "not caring whether slavery was voted up or
voted down."
The best test which the debate gave of his quality was the memorable
passage in which he declared his conviction that "A house divided
against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot
permanently endure half slave and half free." In this he rose above his
wonted level, and spoke with a prophet's forecast. He read this passage
in advance to a group of the party leaders. Though, after this bold
opening, the speech was only a calm and weighty argument that the
interest of slavery was being deliberately and systematically promoted
by all branches of the Democracy,--yet all, except Herndon, were alarmed
at this passage, and besought Lincoln to withhold it. But he answered
soberly and half-mournfully that it expressed his full conviction, and
he would face defeat rather than suppress it. In the immediate result,
it injured his cause; a general comment of Republicans, through the
campaign, says Herndon, was "Damn that fool speech!"
Douglas won the Legislature and the senatorship, though Lincoln won the
popular majority. When he was asked how he felt about his defeat, he
answered: "I feel as the boy did when he stubbed his toe,--he was too
big to cry, and it hurt too bad to laugh!" The country at large, which
had closely watched the debate, forgot him for two years. Early in 1860
he was invited to lecture in New York. He was not regarded as a
Presidential candidate; and when he appeared,--in clothes full of
creases from his carpet-bag, with no press copy of his speech and not
expecting the newspapers to report it--he was such a figure as to his
audience in Cooper Institute seemed to give little promise. But he
carried them with him completely, and the next morning the seven-column
report in the _Tribune_ told the country that in this man there was a
new force to reckon with. The speech ranks with the great historical
orations of the country. The first part was a careful review of the
position which the signers of the Constitution took in their individual
capacity as to the right of Congress to regulate or exclude slavery from
the territories. He showed by specific proof that of the thirty-nine
signers twenty-one voted definitely on various occasions for
Congressional Acts which did so exclude or regulate slavery; and that of
the remaining eighteen almost all were known to have held the same
opinion. This was a masterly refutation of the claim of Douglas and the
Democracy that the fathers of the nation were on their side as to the
territorial question. Lincoln then passed to a broader view, and
inquired: What can we do that will really satisfy the South? Every word
is sober, temperate, well-weighed. The South, he showed, is really
taking very little interest now in the Territories. It is excited about
the John Brown raid, and accuses the Republican party of responsibility
for that. But not a single Republican was implicated in the raid--not
one. You, said Lincoln, addressing the South--interpret your
constitutional rights in a different way from what we do, and say if we
do not admit your interpretation,--if we elect a Republican
president,--you will break up the Union. But this is simply the
highwayman's plea. What, then, can we Republicans do to satisfy the
South? We must not only let them alone, but somehow convince them that
we do let them alone. In a word, this and this only will convince them;
we must cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.
And this must be done thoroughly,--done in acts as well as in words.
Silence will not be tolerated; we must place ourselves avowedly with
them. "Douglas's new sedition law must be enacted and enforced,
suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in
politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and
return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our
Free-State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from
all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe
that all their troubles proceed from us."
Thus he concludes: "If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand
by our duty fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of
those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied
and belabored,--contrivances such as groping for some middle ground
between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should
be neither a living man nor a dead man,--such as a policy of 'don't
care' on a question about which all true men do care,--such as Union
appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to disunionists, reversing
the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous, to
repentance,--such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay
what Washington said and undo what Washington did. Neither let us be
slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened
from it by menaces of destruction to the government, nor of dungeons to
ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith,
let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."
In behalf of the South, Jefferson Davis, at about this time, presented
in the Senate, as their ultimatum, a set of resolutions. These called
for the recognition of slave-property as an indefeasible right of
territorial settlers, entitled to congressional protection; for the
enforcement of the fugitive slave law, and the repeal of the "personal
liberty laws" by which it was hindered or nullified in many States; and
in general, for the rebuke of all anti-slavery agitation. This was an
exact equivalent of Lincoln's interpretation of the South's demand; the
North must say that slavery is right, and act accordingly. And this was
indeed an ultimatum, with the distinct intimation: "This, or we dissolve
the Union."
CHAPTER XX
THE ELECTION OF 1860
Now came on the battle in the Presidential convention. The Democratic
convention was dramatic and momentous. It met at Charleston, S. C., in
the last days of April, 1860. The struggle was between Douglas and the
extreme South. The contest was not over the nomination, but on the
resolutions. The Douglas party proposed the reaffirmation of the
Cincinnati platform of 1856, of which the kernel lay in the words:
"Non-intervention by Congress with slavery in State or Territory"; and
to this they would now add only a clause referring doubtful
constitutional points to the Supreme Court. But the Southern party would
accept nothing short of an affirmation that in the Territories until
organized as States, the right of slave-holding was absolute and
indefeasible, and Congress was bound to protect it. On this issue the
dispute in the convention was obstinate and irreconcilable.
The South had long held unbroken sway in the Democracy and in the
nation. It had absolutely controlled the last two administrations,
though headed by Northern men. Its hold on the Senate had been unbroken,
and temporary successes of the Republicans in the House had borne no
fruit. The Supreme Court had gone even beyond the demands of the South.
Only in Kansas had its cause been lost, because the attempt to coerce a
whole territorial population had at last provoked revolt in the Northern
Democracy. The breach had been in some sort healed, but the leader of
the revolt was not forgiven or trusted. Meantime the alarm at John
Brown's raid had intensified the South's hostility to all opponents or
critics. All through the winter there had been constant expulsion of
anti-slavery men from that section. And now the Southern forces mustered
in the convention of the party they had so long controlled, insistent
and imperious, rejecting anything short of the fullest affirmation of
their claims in the territories.
Douglas was not on the ground, but through his lieutenants, and still
more through the spirit he had infused into his followers, he was a
great and decisive power. In the Senate he had been almost isolated
among the Democrats; of late only Senator Pugh of Ohio had stood with
him against the administration. But he had appealed to the people, and
they had answered the call of the sturdy, audacious leader. However he
might at times court the favor of the South, he really stood for a broad
and simple principle,--the right of the majority of white men to rule.
For the negroes he cared nothing. But, in the territories, the majority
of white men should have slavery or not as they pleased. In the
Democratic party, the majority should control. And, in the last resort,
in the nation itself the majority should rule. Douglas thus stood
squarely for the rule of the majority within the white race. The
Republicans coupled with the supremacy of the legal majority in the
nation the right and obligation of the majority to maintain the personal
freedom of the negro, except where the Constitution allowed the States
to maintain slavery. The Southern Democracy asserted as its paramount
principle the right of slave-holding wherever the flag flew, except
where the State constitution forbade. If that right was denied or
limited--by a majority in the Democracy, or by a majority in the
nation--then beware!
The Douglas men met the threat with a defiance,--not wordy, but
resolute. In Charleston, the stronghold and citadel of the South, with
their leader absent, with the disruption of the party impending, they
stood their ground. The majority should rule, or they would know the
reason why! They decisively outvoted their opponents as to the platform.
Then the delegates from South Carolina and the Gulf States deliberately
and solemnly marched out of the hall, and organized a separate
convention. With that act the rift began to open which was to be closed
only after four years of war.
With what expectation did the extreme South thus break up the party? Did
they believe that their Northern associates would again capitulate, as
they had done so often before? Failing that, did they not know that a
divided Democracy meant victory for the Republicans? and had they not
committed themselves in that event to dissolve the Union? Were they
deliberately courting disunion, and wilfully throwing away the large
chance of continued dominance within the Union which a united Democracy
might have? Did they really attach supreme importance to this dogma
about the territories, when Kansas had shown how inevitably the local
population must determine the question, even against the efforts of the
Federal Government? Did the Southern leaders prefer the election of a
Republican, their open opponent, to Douglas, their friend and half-ally?
To such questions as these there can be little more than a conjectural
answer. It would be most interesting to know the true thoughts and
purposes of the leading delegates. We shall see a little later the
interpretation given by one of their defenders. But the strong
presumption is that their action was the fruit less of a policy than of
a temper. They had long been growing into a disposition which could
brook no resistance and no contradiction. The irresponsible power of the
master over his slaves; the domination of the slave-holding class over
the local communities, and the expulsion of their opponents; the control
of the government by a united South over a divided North,--these things
had bred a self-confidence and self-assertion which would stop at
nothing. The slave-holding principle, in full flower, was a principle
which recked nothing of legal majorities or governments. Its basis was
force, and it would use whatever force was necessary to maintain itself.
The Douglas Democrats were still patient. Left with the original
convention in their hands, they declined to press their advantage. The
traditional rule required a two-thirds vote to nominate; and it was
agreed that for this purpose the seats left vacant by the seceders must
be counted,--which would prevent the nomination of Douglas.
Administration men from the North had stayed in the convention when
their Southern friends left. The body adjourned, to meet in Baltimore in
the last of June. The rival convention met in Richmond only to adjourn
to the same time and place. But any hopes of reunion were vain. Neither
side would yield. In the regular convention, to some of the vacant seats
Douglas delegates had in the interim been chosen. They were admitted,
against the protest of the administration minority, who found in this a
pretext for withdrawing and joining the seceding convention. With these
went a majority of the Massachusetts delegates, including Benjamin F.
Butler and Caleb Cushing; Cushing had been president of the Charleston
body. The two conventions now made their respective nominations. With
Douglas was joined for Vice-President Herschel V. Johnson of Georgia.
The seceders nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky and Joseph Lane
of Oregon. Breckinridge was Vice-President under Buchanan; a man of
character and ability, of fine presence and bearing, a typical
Kentuckian, afterward a general in the Confederate service.
Alexander H. Stephens in his _War Between the States_--perhaps the best
statement of the Southern side of the whole case that has ever been
made,--says that this secession from the party was made (against his own
judgment) not recklessly, nor to provoke disunion, but with the
expectation of electing Breckinridge. The calculation was that with four
Presidential candidates there would be no choice by the people, and, the
election being thrown into the House, Breckinridge would be chosen; or,
if the House could not choose, Lane would surely be elected by the
Senate. This, says Stephens, was the view of President Buchanan, of
Breckinridge, Davis and a great majority of the Charleston seceders.
Stephens himself considered this a most precarious and hazardous
calculation, wholly insufficient for so grave a step. So obviously sound
was this judgment, that we inevitably recur to the belief that the
Southern secession was inspired not by calculation, but by a temper of
self-assertion, which fitted its hopes to its wishes.
The "Constitutional Union" party--legatee of the Whig and American
parties--held a convention at Baltimore in May; resolved simply for the
maintenance of the Union and Constitution and the enforcement of the
laws; and nominated John Bell of Tennessee and Edward Everett of
Massachusetts. It was the refuge of those who disliked the whole
sectional controversy, and were indifferent to both pro-slavery and
anti-slavery claims in comparison with peace and union. It held a middle
position, geographically as well as in sentiment, and was strong in the
border States.
The Republican convention met in Chicago in May. It was a more
sophisticated body than its predecessor of 1856; with less of youthful
and spontaneous enthusiasm for a principle, and more of keen maneuvering
for the candidates. But it represented a disciplined and powerful
party, clear and strong in its essential principles, and looking
confidently to a national victory as almost within its grasp. The
platform affirmed its familiar doctrines as to slavery, and threw out
various inviting propositions as to foreign immigrants, a homestead law,
a Pacific railroad, etc. The vote of Pennsylvania being important and
doubtful, a bait was thrown out in a high-tariff resolution. When a year
or two later the exigencies of the war demanded a large revenue, this
was obtained partly by a high tariff. In these circumstances originated
the Protectionist character of the Republican party; a character
confirmed by the natural alliance of the favored interests with the
favoring power.
The most prominent and in a sense logical candidate was William H.
Seward. As Governor and then Senator of New York, as a polished and
philosophic orator, as a man whose anti-slavery and constitutional
principles were well understood,--he was easily in the popular estimate
the foremost man of the party. Lincoln was in comparison obscure; his
fame rested mainly on his achievements as a popular debater; he was
wholly unversed in executive work and almost equally so in legislation;
highly esteemed in his own State, but little known beyond its borders.
He had been proposed for the Presidency only a week before in the State
convention, with great hurrahing for "the rail-splitter," "honest old
Abe." It seemed hardly more than one of the "favorite son" candidacies
which every canvass knows in plenty. But he was supported by a group of
very skillful Illinois politicians. They worked up the local sentiment
in his favor; they filled the galleries of the Wigwam at daylight of
the decisive day, and they took quieter and effective measures. Simon
Cameron claimed to control the vote of Pennsylvania in the convention,
and a bargain was made with him that if Lincoln were elected he should
have a seat in the Cabinet. Lincoln was not a party to the compact, but
when informed of it afterward he reluctantly made good his part. The
same thing was done with the friends of Caleb B. Smith of Indiana, and
with a like sequel.
Meantime, Seward met such difficulties as always beset the first
favorite in a race. The old alliance between Seward, Weed and Greeley,
had been broken, with anger and resentment on Greeley's part, and he was
now on the floor of the convention actively opposing his old ally.
William M. Evarts led the New York delegation for Seward. Edward Bates
of Missouri had some support, as more moderate than Seward in his
anti-slavery principles, but he was too colorless a candidate to draw
much strength. One of Seward's friends, in seeking to win over the Bates
men, declared that Lincoln was just as radical as Seward. A newspaper
containing this being shown to Lincoln, he penciled on the margin a
reply which was forwarded to his supporters, "Lincoln agrees with Seward
in his irrepressible-conflict idea, and in negro equality; but he is
opposed to Seward's higher law." The "irrepressible conflict" was the
exact counterpart of the "house divided against itself." "Negro
equality" marked a distinct advance since the Douglas debate two years
before, and such advance, gradual but steady, was characteristic of
Lincoln. It was no less characteristic of him to disclaim the "higher
law" doctrine,--an obligation recognized by the individual conscience as
paramount to all human enactments. Indeed Seward, though the phrase was
his, was as little an idealist of the individual conscience as was
Lincoln.
Of the circumstances just mentioned, a part belongs to the undercurrents
which few spectators at the time discerned. What the crowd and the world
saw was three successive ballots. First, Seward, 173-1/2; Lincoln, 102;
Cameron, 50-1/2; Chase and Bates following close. Then Cameron's name
was withdrawn, and Lincoln shot up abreast of Seward. A third ballot,
and Lincoln went up, up till he touched the line of a clear majority.
Then the Wigwam roared; the guns boomed; in the first subsidence of the
cheering Evarts gallantly moved that the choice be made unanimous,--and
the tall, homely Illinois lawyer was the Republican candidate for the
Presidency. If the result was not without its illustrations of his own
definition of politics--"the combination of individual meannesses for
the general good,"--he at least had sacrificed nothing of his
convictions, had not worked for his own elevation, or smirched his
hands. And, unproved though he was as to administrative power and
seamanship in a cyclone, there was yet a singular and intrinsic fitness
in his candidacy. His recognized quality was that which is basal and
dear to the common people, honesty; honesty in thought, word and act. In
his convictions, he was near to the great mass of the party of freedom
as it actually was; frankly opposed to slavery, but reverent and
tenacious of the established order, even though it gave slavery a
certain standing-ground. He had, too, that intimate sympathy with the
common people, that knowledge of their thoughts and ways, that respect
for their collective judgment and will as the ultimate arbiter--which
are the essential traits in a great leader of democracy.
In the four-sided canvass which followed, the lines were not strictly
geographical. The Republican party indeed took its Vice-Presidential
candidate from the North--Hannibal Hamlin of Maine; for no Southern man
was likely to invite exile or worse by taking the place; and the
Republican electoral tickets had no place or only a nominal one south of
Mason and Dixon's line, except in Missouri, where the emancipation idea
was still alive. But the three other parties contested with each other
in all the States. In Massachusetts, the Breckinridge party had as its
candidate for Governor the unscrupulous Butler; and among its
supporters was Caleb Cushing, erudite, brilliant, conscienceless, and a
pro-slavery bigot. At the South, the Douglas party had considerable
strength. The hot-heads who had split the Democracy and were ready to
divide the nation had by no means an undisputed ascendency. Stephens and
Toombs parted company; they headed respectively the Douglas and
Breckinridge electoral tickets in Georgia. Davis spent part of the
summer in privacy at the North; he saw enough to convince him that the
North would fight if challenged, but the warning was in vain.
The special interest of the campaign centered in the menace of disunion.
The territorial question in itself had grown almost wearisome, and had
no immediate application. The fugitive slave law had fallen into the
background; renditions were so uncertain and dangerous that they were
seldom attempted. John Brown's foray was to the North a bygone affair,
with no dream of its repetition. The few promoters of his project had
shrunk back at the catastrophe; the mass of the people had always looked
on it as a crazy affair; and with personal sympathy or honor for him,
the raid was almost forgotten,--but the South could not so easily
forget. But the living and burning issue was the threat of secession if
Lincoln should be elected,--a threat made openly and constantly at the
South. The campaign was full of bitterness. "Black Republicans" was a
term in constant use. The violent language was not all at the South.
Cushing declared, when in the preceding autumn Massachusetts reëlected
Banks as governor, "A band of drunken mutineers have seized hold of the
opinion of this commonwealth--the avowed and proclaimed enemies of the
Constitution of the United States,"--with further hysteric talk about
the ship of state, with the pirate's flag at the masthead, drifting into
the gulf of perdition. The New York _Herald_ was full of wild and
inflammatory words. Papers of a different character--like the Boston
_Courier_, representative of the party which included Everett and
Winthrop--habitually charged the Republican party with John Brownism and
disunionism. The South not unnaturally believed that the North was
seriously divided, and could never hold together against its claims. But
most Northern people regarded the disunion threats as mere
gasconade,--meant only to carry an election, and then to be quietly
dropped. But if they were meant in earnest--well, there would be
something to be said, and done too, on the other side.
Douglas, with almost no chance of success, made a bold and active
canvass. Through this year he showed a courage far higher than the mere
dexterity which had been his chief distinction before. In part, it was
an expression of a changing temper in the people. He stood openly and
stoutly for the principle of majority rule. While speaking at Wheeling,
Va., he was questioned as to whether he held that the election of
Lincoln would justify secession. He answered promptly that it would not,
and if secession were attempted, he would support a Republican President
in putting it down by force. That pledge to the country he redeemed,
when at the outbreak of the war he gave his immediate and full adherence
to President Lincoln,--representing and leading the "War Democrats" who
practically solidified the North, and insured its victory. At Wheeling,
he passed on the question answered by him for Breckinridge to answer.
But Breckinridge ignored the challenge,--a silence which was what the
lawyers call a "pregnant negative."
November brought victory to the Republicans. In the popular vote,
Lincoln had about 1,860,000; Douglas, 1,370,000; Breckinridge, 840,000;
and Bell, 590,000. The electoral votes stood--or would have stood, if
the electoral conventions had all met--Lincoln, 180; Breckinridge, 72;
Bell, 39; Douglas, 12. Lincoln carried every Northern State except New
Jersey; Douglas, only part of New Jersey and Missouri; Bell, Virginia,
Kentucky and Tennessee; Breckinridge, all the rest of the South. The
successful candidate was thus in a popular minority,--no new thing. The
distinctively Southern candidate was doubly in a minority. The
supporters of Lincoln, Douglas and Bell, were all to be counted against
the extreme Southern claim, and much more against any assertion of that
claim by secession. Unitedly, their support outnumbered that of
Breckinridge by more than four to one. If ever a party was fairly and
overwhelmingly out-voted, it was the party whose central doctrine was
that slavery must be protected in the United States territories.
Now the question was, would that party acquiesce in the decision of the
majority? At every previous election in the nation's history the
minority had acquiesced promptly and loyally. When Jefferson was
elected, New England looked on the new President as a Jacobin in
politics and an infidel in religion. But New England acquiesced without
an hour's hesitation. When Jackson was chosen, his opponents saw in him
a rude and ignorant demagog. But the anti-Jackson people accepted the
new President as they had accepted Monroe and Adams. In the choice of
Buchanan, the Republicans saw an assertion of the nationalism of
slavery, and a menace of the subjugation of Kansas. But the supporters
of Fremont recognized Buchanan as unhesitatingly as if he had been their
own choice. What was the meaning of popular government, except that the
minority should submit to the legitimate victory of the majority? On
what did the nation's existence rest, but the loyalty of its citizens to
the nation's self-determination in its elections? And now, would the
minority resist the decision of the majority? Would the Southern States
attempt to break up the Union? The North could not and would not
believe it. But there was a strong party at the South which was fully
convinced that the election of Lincoln was the crown of a series of
grievances which justified the South in withdrawing from the Union; that
such withdrawal was a clear constitutional right; and that the honor and
interest of the South demanded that it be made.
CHAPTER XXI
FACE TO FACE
To understand the meaning of secession and the Civil War which followed
it, we must fathom the thoughts and feelings of the opposing parties.
Let us suppose two representative spokesmen to state their case in turn.
Let the Secessionist speak first. The Secessionists were not at first a
majority of the people of the Southern States, but it was their view
which prevailed. What that view was we know certainly and from abundant
evidence,--the formal acts of secession, the speeches of the leaders in
Congress and at home, the histories since written by the President and
Vice-President of the Confederacy, and countless similar sources. This,
substantially, was the Secessionist's position:--
"This Union is a partnership of States, of which the formal bond is the
Constitution; the vital principle is the enjoyment by each section and
community of its rights; and the animating spirit is the mutual respect
and good-will of all members of the Union. The Northern people have
violated the provisions of the Constitution; they have infringed the
essential rights of the Southern communities, and threatened to invade
them still further; and they have displaced the spirit of mutual
good-will by alienation, suspicion, and hostility. The formal bond of
the Union being thus impaired, and its vital spirit lost, we propose
explicitly and finally to dissolve this partnership of States, and
reorganize our Southern communities in a new Confederacy.
"We charge you of the North with explicit violation of the Constitution
in the matters of the territories, the Supreme Court and the fugitive
slaves.
"You deny our right to carry a part of our property,--our unquestioned
property under the Constitution,--into the territories which belong
equally to the whole nation, and which have been acquired by our
treasure and our blood not less than by yours. You prevent slave-holders
from participating in the colonization of this domain, and thus
determine in advance that its future States shall exclude our
institutions. You thus unfairly build up a political preponderance,
which you use for the discouragement and injury of our industrial
system.
"Against this wrong we have appealed to the Supreme Court, and secured
its express affirmation of the right to carry slave property, equally
with any other property, into the territories. This solemn decree of the
highest judicial authority you set at naught and defy. You say you will
reorganize the court and reverse the decision. You do not even wait for
that; you assume in party convention to reverse the mandate of the
Supreme Court. You not only contradict its declaration that slavery in
the territories is protected by the Constitution; you go farther, and
affirm that Congress has no authority to protect it there.
"The Constitution affirms that fugitives from labor must be returned to
their masters. A Federal statute provides for such return. That statute
is not only decried by your orators and resisted by your mobs; it is
contravened and practically nullified by statutes in all the free
States.
"These specific wrongs against us are inspired by a disposition which in
itself dissolves the bond of friendship between you and us,--a spirit of
open and avowed hostility to our social and industrial system. The Union
as our fathers established it, and as alone it has any value, is not a
thing of mere legalities,--it must be a true union of hearts and hands,
a spirit of mutual confidence and respect among the various communities
of one people. But for many years our most characteristic Southern
institution has been widely and loudly denounced among you as wicked and
inhuman. It has been proclaimed as 'the sum of all villainies.' We have
been held up to the reprobation of the world as tyrants and
man-stealers. Those at the North who disapproved of such abuse have
failed to silence or repress it. This denunciation has spread until
apparently it has won the preponderating sentiment of the North. A
national household in which we are thus branded as sinners and criminals
is no longer a home for us.
"This hostility has borne its natural fruit in open attack. A peaceful
Virginia village has been assailed by armed men, its citizens shot down
while defending their homes, and the summons given for servile
insurrection with all its horrors. The leader in this crime, justly
condemned and executed under Virginia's laws, has been widely honored
throughout the North as a hero and martyr. By the light of that applause
we must interpret the real feeling of the North, and its probable future
course toward us.
"The Presidential election has now been won by a party whose avowed
principle is the restriction of slavery, while its animating spirit is
active hostility to slavery. We cannot trust the Republican party in its
profession of respect for the Constitution. Even in its formal
declaration it ignores a Supreme Court decision, and advances a
revolutionary doctrine as to slavery in the territories. Its elected
candidate has declared that 'this government cannot endure permanently
half slave and half free.' The party's only reason for being is
opposition to slavery, and there is every probability that this
opposition will, with growing power and opportunity, be directed against
the system as it now exists in our Southern States.
"The spirit of the American Union is dissolved already, when its chief
magistrate has been elected by the votes of one section and by a party
animated solely by hostility to the industrial and social system of the
other section. The formal bond of the Union can hereafter be only an
instrument to harass and destroy our liberties. We therefore propose
that that bond be at once and finally cancelled. It is and has been from
the beginning the right of any State to withdraw from the national
partnership at its own pleasure. We call on our brethren of the South to
take prompt action for the deliberate, legal and solemn withdrawal of
their States from the Union, and their organization in a new
Confederacy."
So in effect spoke the leading spirits of the Gulf and Cotton States as
soon as Lincoln was elected in November, 1860. Less promptly, coming
only gradually into unison, but with growing clearness and emphasis,
spoke the dominant spirit of the North in the months between Lincoln's
election and inauguration. This in substance was the Northern reply to
the Secessionist:--
"We deny that we have violated the Constitution, that we have wronged
you, or that we intend to wrong you. We have taken no advantage of you
beyond the legitimate victories of political controversy. We are loyal
to the Constitution, and to that which is deeper and higher than the
Constitution,--the spirit of American nationality.
"Taking up your specific charges,--the status of slavery in the various
territories has been debated and battled in Congress and among the
people for seventy years, and as now one decision and now another has
been reached it has been accepted by all until peaceably changed. For
six years past it has been the cardinal question in national politics.
Within that period three views have been urged,--that slavery goes by
natural and constitutional right into all the territories, that the
matter is to be settled in each territory by the local population, and
that slavery should be excluded by national authority from all the
territories. For this last view we have argued, pleaded, waited, until
at last the supreme tribunal of all--the American people in a national
election--has given judgment in our favor.
"You cite the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court as establishing
slavery in the territories. But you wrest from that decision a force
which it does not legally carry. The best lawyers are with us as to
this. The court at the outset dismissed the case for want of
jurisdiction, because Dred Scott, being a negro, could not be an
American citizen, and therefore had no standing before the court. This
being said, the court by its own decision could go no farther with the
case. When a majority of the judges went on to discuss the status of
slavery in the territories,--as it might have come up if they had gone
on to try the case on its merits--they were uttering a mere _obiter
dictum_,--a personal opinion carrying no judicial authority. The attempt
to make these side-remarks a decisive pronouncement on the supreme
political question of the time is beyond law or reason. It is
preposterous that the court's incidental opinion, on a case which it had
disclaimed the power to try, should invalidate that exclusion of slavery
by national authority which had been affirmed by the great acts of 1787
and 1820, and had been exercised for seventy years.
"As to fugitive slaves, the Personal Liberty laws are designed to
safeguard by the State's authority its free black citizens from the
kidnapping which the Federal statute, with its refusal of a jury trial,
renders easy. If they sometimes make difficulty in the rendition of
actual fugitives,--you must not expect a whole-hearted acceptance of the
rôle of slave-catchers by the Northern people. You have the Federal
statute, and may take what you can under it,--but if under the bond
Shylock gets only his pound of flesh, there is no help for him.
"Come now to your broader complaint, that the spirit of the Union has
been sacrificed by Northern hostility toward your peculiar institution.
True, you have had to put up with harsh words, but we have had to put up
with a harsh fact. You have had to tolerate criticism, but we have had
to tolerate slavery under our national flag. It is an institution
abhorrent to our sense of right. We believe it contrary to the law of
God and the spirit of humanity. We consider it unjust in its essential
principle, and full of crying abuses in its actual administration. Its
existence in one section of the Union is a reproach to us among the
nations of the earth, and a blot on the flag. Yet we so thoroughly
recognize that our national principle allows each State to shape its own
institutions that we have not attempted and shall not attempt to hinder
you from cherishing slavery among yourselves as long as you please. If,
for the vast and vital interests bound up with the unity of this nation,
we can tolerate the presence within it of a system we so disapprove,
cannot you on your part tolerate the inevitable criticism which it calls
out among us?
"If mutual grievances are to be rehearsed, we have our full share. What
has become of the constitutional provision which guarantees to the
citizens of every State their rights in all the States? When black
seamen, citizens of our commonwealths, enter South Carolina ports, they
are thrown into jail or sold into slavery. If we send a lawyer and
statesman to remonstrate, he is driven out. Our newspapers are excluded
from your mails. You have extinguished free speech among your own
citizens. If the Republican party is sectional, it is because any man
who supports it, south of the Ohio, is liable to abuse and exile. You
have shaped our national policy in lines of dishonor. With your
Northern allies you have forced war on a weak neighbor and despoiled her
of territory. You have poured thousands of fraudulent voters into
Kansas, have supported their usurping government by Federal judges and
troops, and have tolerated the ruffians who harried peaceful settlers.
One of your congressional leaders has answered a senator's arguments by
beating him into insensibility, and you have honored and reëlected the
assailant. And now, when we have fairly won the day in a national
election, and for purposes peaceful, constitutional, and
beneficent,--you propose to break up the nation, and reorganize your
part of it expressly for the maintenance and promotion of slavery.
"With such complaints on your part, and such complaints on ours, what is
the manly, the patriotic, the sufficient recourse? That which we offer
is that you and we, the whole American people, go forward loyally and
patiently with the familiar duties of American citizens. Let Time and
Providence arbitrate our controversies. Let us trust the institutions
under which for seventy years our nation has grown great; let us, now
and hereafter, acquiesce in that deliberate voice of the people which
our fathers established as the sovereign authority. For thirty years you
have had in the Presidency either a Southerner or a Northern man with
Southern principles,--and we acquiesced. Now we have chosen a genuine
Northerner,--will not you acquiesce? Four years ago the Presidential
contest was held on the same lines as this year; you won, and we
cheerfully submitted,--now we have won, will not you loyally submit? We
disclaim any attack on your domestic institutions. The invasion by John
Brown was repudiated by practically the entire North. Honor for a brave,
misguided man meant no approval of his criminal act. For the advance of
our distinctive principles,--inimical, we own, to your system of slave
labor,--we look only to the gradual conversion of individual opinion,
and to the ultimate acceptance by your own people of the principles of
universal liberty. We believe that civilization and Christianity must
steadily work to establish freedom for all men. On that ground, and in
that sense, do we believe that 'this government cannot permanently
endure half slave and half free.' Pending that advance, we propose only
to exclude slavery from the common domain; to tolerate slavery as
sectional, while upholding freedom as national. If you are still
dissatisfied, yet is it not better to bear the evils that we have than
fly to others that we know not of? Nay, do we not too well know, and
surely if dimly foresee, the terrific evils which must attend the
attempted disruption of this nation?
"A nation it is, and not a partnership. A nation, one and inseparable,
we propose that it shall continue. We deny that the founders and fathers
ever contemplated a mere temporary alliance dissoluble at the caprice of
any member. To the Union, established under the Constitution, just as
earnestly as to the cause of independence, they virtually pledged 'their
lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.' With every year the
nation has knitted its texture closer, as its benefits increased and its
associations grew. A nation is something other than a pleasure party, or
a mutual admiration society,--it includes a principle of rightful
authority and necessary submission. The harmony vital to national unity
is not merely a mutual complacence of the members,--at its root is a
habitual, disciplined obedience to the central authority, which in a
democracy is the orderly expressed will of the majority. You cannot
leave us and we cannot let you go. And if you attempt to break the bond,
it is at your peril."
CHAPTER XXII
HOW THEY DIFFERED
If the typical Secessionist and the typical Unionist, as just described,
could rally a united South and a united North to their respective views,
there was no escape from a violent clash. Whether the two sections could
be so united each in itself appeared extremely doubtful. But below these
special questions of political creed were underlying divergences of
sentiment and character between North and South, which fanned the
immediate strife as a strong wind fans a starting flame. There was first
a long-growing alienation of feeling, a mutual dislike, rooted in the
slavery controversy, and fed partly by real and partly by imaginary
differences. Different personal and social ideals were fostered by the
two industrial systems. The Southerner of the dominant class looked on
manual labor as fit only for slaves and low-class whites. His ideal of
society was a pyramid, the lower courses representing the physical
toilers, the intermediate strata supplying a higher quality of social
service, while the crown was a class refined by leisure and cultivation
and free to give themselves to generous and hospitable private life,
with public affairs for their serious pursuit. He regarded the
prominence of the laboring class in Northern communities as marking the
inferiority of their society, and in the absorption of the wealthier
class in trade he read a further disadvantage. The virtues he most
honored were courage, courtesy, magnanimity,--all that he delighted to
characterize as "chivalry." He was inclined to consider the North as
materialistic and mercenary, and even its virtues as based largely on
"honesty is the best policy."
This low opinion was heartily reciprocated by the Northerner. He
believed the very foundation of Southern society to be injustice,--the
unpaid labor of the slave,--and the superstructure to correspond. He
looked on the slave-holders as cruel to their slaves and arrogant
toward the world at large, especially toward himself. The popular
opinion of slavery fastened on its abuses and ignored its mitigations.
On the average reader of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, Legree made a deeper
impression than St. Clare or Mrs. Shelby.
Even the religious and intellectual life of the two sections had grown
unsympathetic and often antagonistic. The South held tenaciously to the
traditional orthodox theology. In the North there was free discussion
and movement of thought. Even the conservative Presbyterian church had
its New School and Old School; and in New England the Congregational
body was divided by the birth and growth of Unitarianism. At all this
turmoil the South looked askance, and was genuinely shocked by the
disintegration of the old creed. The North in turn looked with something
like suspicion, if not scorn, on a Christianity which used the Bible as
an arsenal to fortify slavery. The Northern brood of reforms and
isms,--wise, unwise, or fantastic,--moved the South to a hostility which
made little discrimination between the idealism of Emerson, the
iconoclasm of Parker, and the vagaries of "free love." The group of
literary lights,--Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Holmes, and
their compeers,--won Southern dislike by their hostility to slavery. The
South itself, singularly barren of original literature,--its prolific
new births in our own day are one of the most conspicuous fruits of
emancipation,--clung fondly to the classical and feudal traditions, and
hardly admitted any literary sovereign later than Scott and Byron.
In a national union, as in marriage, there may be long continuance and
even substantial happiness in spite of many differences. So was it with
England and Scotland, so is it with Germany and with Italy. But in
slavery there was so profound an incompatibility with the fact and idea
of personal freedom as held by the American people at large, that the
inevitable opposition of the two systems was desperate almost beyond
cure. That opposition, and all the attendant circumstances of
divergence, were aggravated in their divisive effects by the extreme
bitterness of the foremost debaters on both sides. The very nature of
the subject tempted to vehement criticism, and defense of equal
vehemence. But there was a great aggravation of bitterness when, in the
van of the attack on slavery, the temper of Woolman and Lundy, of
Jefferson and Franklin and Channing, was replaced by the temper of
Garrison and his followers. Their violence inflamed alike the North and
the South, and, with the answering violence it provoked, worked the two
peoples into a largely false and unjust conception of each other's
character. The South's retort was no less passionate in words, while in
act it took form in expulsion of citizens and suppression of free
speech. Garrison's burning words, and the polished invective of
Phillips, live in literature; the wrath which answered them in Southern
orators and newspapers has left less of record; but on both sides the
work was effectually done of sowing mutual suspicion and hate.
If only North and South could have known each other's best, as they knew
each other's worst! They were kept apart by the want of any stream of
migration between them, like that which united East and West, with the
resulting network of family connections and friendly intercourse.
Sometimes a Northern visitor, or an English traveler like Thackeray, saw
and appreciated the cultivated society of Charleston or Richmond, or
plantation life at its best,--a hospitable, genial, outdoor life, with
masters and mistresses who gave their best thought and toil to the care
of their servants. Sometimes a Southerner had a revelation like that of
General Zachary Taylor, when, looking from one of the heights in
Springfield, "the city of homes," on a landscape thick dotted with the
cheerful abodes of an industrial community, he exclaimed: "You can see
no such sight as that in a Southern State!" And always there were some
men and women who out of wide knowledge or a natural justice recognized
and loved the people of the whole land. But too frequently, in those
days, the Southerner saw in the North only a mass of plebeian laborers
excited by political and religious fanaticism; while the Northerner
looked south to a group of tyrannical and arrogant slaveholders lording
it over their victims. To the one, the typical figure of the North was
John Brown; to the other, the representative of the South was Brooks of
South Carolina.
There were two other marked differences between the sections. The first
was the greater concentration of interest in the South on national
politics, and the leadership conceded to the political class. In the
North, the general occupation in laborious and gainful pursuits,
and the wide variety of social interests which competed for
attention,--education, reform, the debating society, the
town-meeting,--all acted to hold men in other fields than those of
national politics. The best brains were invited by commerce, the
factory, the railroad, the college, the laboratory, the newspaper,--as
well as by the Capitol. But to the Southern planter and his social
compeer no pursuit compared in attraction with the political field, and
above all the public life of the nation. The mass of the people,
especially in the country districts, found in the political meeting an
interest whose only rival was the camp-meeting. Besides, when the
burning political question was slavery, it came home to the business and
bosoms of the South, while to the North it was remote. And thus, when
the secession movement broke upon the land, the Southern people grasped
it with a concentration, energy, and response to their habitual leaders,
in strongest contrast to the surprise, hesitation, and division, which
at first characterized the North.
And, as the last distinction to be here noted, one section was far more
habituated than the other to methods of physical force in private and
public affairs. It was an instance of this that the duel was in common
practice at the South up to the Civil War, while at the North it had
disappeared sixty years earlier, after the encounter of Burr and
Hamilton. At the South the street affray was common. There is a picture
of Southern life which ought to have a wide reading, in _Kate Beaumont_,
a story of South Carolina, written by J. W. De Forest, a Northerner and
a Union soldier. Its tone is sympathetic, and neither the negro nor the
sectional question plays a part. It portrays admirable and delightful
people; old Judge Kershaw is indeed "the white rose of South Carolina
chivalry," and the Beaumonts and McAllisters, with all their foibles,
are a strong and lovable group. But the pistol is the ready arbiter of
every quarrel; the duelist's code is so established that it can hardly
be ignored even by one who disapproves it; and the high-toned gentleman
is no whit too high for the street encounter with his opponent. Old-time
Southerners know how faithful is that picture. So, too, the Southern
people turned readily to public war. They supplied the pioneers who
colonized Texas and won by arms its independence of Mexico. They not
only supported the Mexican war by their votes, but many of the flower
of their youth enlisted for it. From their young men were recruited the
"filibusters" who, from time to time, tried to revolutionize or annex
Cuba or some Central American State. The soldier figured largely in the
Southern imagination. But the North inclined strongly to the ways of
peace. That is the natural temper of an industrial democracy. It is the
note of a civilization advanced beyond slavery and feudalism. And of the
moral leaders of the North, some of the foremost had been strong
champions of peace. Channing had pleaded for it as eloquently as he
pleaded for freedom. Intemperance, slavery, and war had been the trinity
of evil assailed by earnest reformers. Sumner had gone to the length of
proclaiming the most unjust peace better than the justest war,--an
extreme from which he was destined to be converted. Garrison and
Phillips, while their language fanned the passions whose inevitable
tendency is toward war, had in theory declared all warfare to be
unchristian. And, apart from sentiment or conviction, the industrial and
peaceful habit was so widely diffused that it was questionable how much
remained of the militant temper which can and will fight on good
occasion. The South rashly believed that such temper was extinct in the
North, and the North on its part doubted how far the vaunts of Southern
courage had any substance.
CHAPTER XXIII
WHY THEY FOUGHT
Now, when the issue was about to be joined, let it be noted that
Secession based itself, in profession and in reality, wholly on the
question of slavery. There lay the grievance, and for that alone a
remedy was to be had even at the price of sundering the Union. Later,
when actual war broke out, other considerations than slavery came into
play. To unite and animate the South came the doctrine of State rights,
the sympathy of neighborhood, and the primal human impulse of
self-defense. But the critical movement, the action which first sundered
the Union and so led to war,--was inspired wholly and solely by the
defense and maintenance of slavery. The proposition is almost too plain
for argument. But it receives illustration from the great debate in the
Georgia Legislature, when Toombs advocated Secession and Stephens
opposed it. Toombs, evidently unwilling to rest the case wholly on
slavery, alleged three other grievances at the hands of the North--the
fishery bounties, the navigation laws, and the protective tariff.
Stephens easily brushed aside the bounties and navigation laws as bygone
or unimportant. As to the tariff, he showed that the last tariff law,
enacted in 1857, was supported by every Massachusetts member of Congress
and every Georgia member, including Toombs himself. What further he said
belongs to a later chapter. But he was unquestionably right, and all
rational history confirms it, that the one force impelling the South to
Secession was the imperilled interest of slavery.
But the resistance which Secession encountered from the North was from
the outset other and wider than hostility to slavery. Anti-slavery
feeling was indeed strong in the Northern heart; the restriction of
slavery was the supreme principle of the Republican party; the
resentment that the national bond should be menaced in the interest of
slavery gave force to the opposition which Secession instantly aroused.
But, on the one hand, the extreme opponents of slavery, Garrison and his
followers, were now, as they had always been, willing and more than
willing that the South should go off and take slavery with it. And on
the other hand, the anti-secessionists of the nation included a
multitude, North and South, who were either friendly to slavery or
indifferent to it. Even of the Republican party the mass were more
concerned for the rights of the white man than of the black man. They
were impatient of the dominance of the government by the South, and
meant to unseat the Southern oligarchy from the place of power at
Washington.
They intended that the territories should be kept for the free
immigrant, who should not be degraded by slaves at work in the next
field. Only a minority of the party,--though a minority likely in the
long run to lead it--looked with hope and purpose to ultimate
emancipation. And when the question of Secession was at issue by the
people's votes and voice, and had not yet come to the clash of arms, the
rights and interests of the slave fell into the background. The supreme
question of the time was felt to be the unity or the division of the
nation.
The Secessionists' plea was in two clauses; that their States were
aggrieved by Northern action, and that they had a legal right to leave
the Union without let or hindrance. A double answer met them, from their
fellow-Southerners that it was impolitic to secede, and from the North
that secession was illegal, unpermissible, and to be resisted at all
costs.
The Secessionists were fluent in argument that the framers of the
Constitution intended only a partnership of States, dissoluble by any at
will. However difficult to prove that the original builders purposed
only such a temporary edifice, there was at least ground for maintaining
that they gave no authority for coercing a State into obedience or
submission, and indeed rejected a proposal to give such authority. If
there were no legal or rightful authority to keep a State in the Union
by force, then for all practical purposes its right to go out of the
Union was established. But against that right, as ever contemplated by
the fathers, or allowable under the Constitution, there was strong
contention on legal and historic grounds.
But deeper than all forensic or academic controversy was the substantial
and tremendous fact, that the American people had grown into a nation,
organic and vital. That unity was felt in millions of breasts, cherished
by countless firesides, recognized among the peoples of the earth.
There had developed that mysterious and mighty sentiment, the love of
country. It rested in part on the recognition of material benefits. From
the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Lakes to the Gulf, the tides of
commerce flowed free, unvexed by a single custom-house. The Mississippi
with its traffic united the Northern prairies and the Louisiana delta
like a great artery. Safety to person and property under the laws,
protection by an authority strong enough to curb riot or faction at
home, and with a shielding arm that reached wherever an American
traveler might wander,--these benefits rooted patriotism deep in the
soil of homely usefulness. And the tree branched and blossomed in the
upper air of generous feeling. Man's sympathy expands in widening
spheres, and his being enlarges as he comes into vital union, first
with wife and children, then successively with neighborhood, community,
country, and at last with humanity. The Russian peasant, in his
ignorance and poverty, or facing the foe in war, is sublimated by his
devotion to the White Czar and Holy Russia. Still more inspiring and
profound is the patriotism of a citizen whose nation is founded on equal
brotherhood. Deeper than analysis can probe is this passion of
patriotism. Gladstone characterized it well, when, writing in August,
1861, he recognized among the motives sustaining the Union cause, "last
and best of all, the strong instinct of national life, and the
abhorrence of Nature itself toward all severance of an organized body."
This sentiment, though strained and weakened in the South, was still
powerful even in that section. This was especially true of the border
States, where slavery was of less account than in the Gulf and Cotton
States. The spirit of Clay was still strong in Kentucky, and was
represented by the venerable John J. Crittenden in the Senate. Of a like
temper was John Bell of Tennessee, Presidential candidate of the Union
and Constitutional party in 1860. From the same State Andrew Johnson, in
the Senate, stood for the sturdy and fierce Unionism of the white
laboring class. Virginia was strongly bound to the Union by her great
historical traditions. North Carolina, Missouri, and Arkansas were,
until the war broke out, attached to the Union rather than the Southern
cause. It was in the belt of States from South Carolina to Texas, in
which the planter class was altogether dominant, that the interest of
slavery, and the pride of class and of State, had gradually loosened the
bonds of affection and allegiance to the national idea. Calhoun himself
had been an ardent lover of the Union. The clash between the national
and sectional interests had been to him a tragedy. Nullification was his
device for perpetuating the Union while allowing its members relief
from possible oppression,--but nullification had failed, in fact as in
logic.
Now the Secessionists went further than Calhoun had ever found occasion
to go. They proposed to break up the nation, at first by the withdrawal
of their separate States, to be followed by the organization of a
Southern Confederacy. Their grievance was the restriction of their
industrial system, and its threatened destruction, and the failure of
the Union to serve its proper ends of justice and fraternity. But they
wholly disclaimed any revolutionary action. They maintained that the
withdrawal of their States was an exercise of their strictly legal and
constitutional right. This is the plea which is insistently and
strenuously urged by their defenders. Their foremost actors in the
drama, Davis and Stephens, became at a later day its historians, not so
much to record its events, as to plead with elaboration and reiteration
that Secession was a constitutional right. But all their fine-spun
reasoning ran dead against a force which it could no more overcome than
King Canute's words could halt the tide,--the fact of American unity, as
realized in the hearts of the American people.
The mass of men live not by logic, but by primal instincts and passions.
Where one man could explain why the nation was an indestructible
organism rather than a partnership dissoluble at will, a thousand men
could and would fight to prevent the nation from being dissolved. But
here and there on this planet is a man who must think things through to
the end, and have a solid reason for what he does. Such a man was
Abraham Lincoln. He never could rest contented till he had worked the
problem out clearly in his own head, and then had stated the answer in
words that the common man could understand. Such an answer to the whole
Secessionist argument, quite apart from the slavery question, he gave in
one brief paragraph of his inaugural. "There is no alternative for
continuing the government but acquiescence on the one side or the other.
If the minority in such a case will secede rather than acquiesce, they
make a precedent which in turn will ruin and divide them; for a minority
of their own will secede from them, whenever a majority refuses to be
controlled by such a minority. For instance, why not any portion of a
new Confederacy, a year or so hence, arbitrarily secede again, precisely
as portions of the present Union now claim to secede from it? All who
cherish disunion sentiments are now being educated to the exact temper
of doing this. Is there such perfect identity of interests among the
States to compose a new Union as to produce harmony only, and prevent
renewed Secession? Plainly, the central idea of Secession is the essence
of anarchy." That was the key-word of the situation, in the court of
reason and conscience,--"the central idea of Secession is the essence of
anarchy."
The system which the Secessionists proposed to break up had a part of
its highest value in that very division of authority between State and
nation which gave them their pretext for a separation. The Federal plan
was the special contribution of America to the evolution of popular
self-government. Until that step had been taken, not only did the
practical difficulties of democracy increase enormously with the
increase of area and population, but a vast centralized democracy was
liable to be itself an oppressive despotism, as France has learned at
bitter cost. The Federal plan, like most other great advances, came not
as the conception of an ingenious brain, but from the growth of social
facts. The thirteen colonies started and grew as individual offshoots
from Great Britain. Under a common impulse they broke loose from the
mother-country; then, by a common necessity, they bound themselves
together in a governmental Union, each member retaining jurisdiction in
such affairs as were its special concern. The resulting Federal Union
was a combination of strength and freedom such as the world had never
seen. With this for its organic form, with its spiritual lineage drawn
from the Puritan, the Quaker and the Cavalier, with Anglo-Saxon stock
for its core, yet with open doors and assimilating power for all races,
and with a continent for its field of expansion,--the American people
became the leader and the hope of humanity. This was the nation which
the Secessionists proposed to rend asunder.
All government implies a principle of authority, and requires the
occasional sacrifice of the individual's pleasure. The national bond has
one strand in mutual good-will, but another strand is personal
sacrifice, and another is stern command. The Union required some
sacrifices, not only of material price,--as when a man pays just taxes,
or acquiesces in a fiscal system which he considers unjust,--but
sacrifices sometimes even of moral sentiment. Lincoln, explaining his
position in 1855 to his old friend Speed, of Kentucky, repelled the
suggestion that he had no personal interest in slavery. He says that
whenever he crosses the border he sees manacled slaves or some similar
sight which is a torment to him. "You ought to appreciate how much the
great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings in order to
maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and the Union."
That acquiescence,--a costly sacrifice to the higher good; and the
typical attitude of the Republicans and the moderate anti-slavery
men,--seemed to Garrison and Phillips and their school a sinful
compliance with evil. The extreme Abolitionists, as much as the
extremists of the South, were opposed to the Union. They had no
comprehension of the interests and principles involved in the
preservation of the national life. One of the pleasant traits told of
Garrison's private life is this: He was fond of music, especially
religious music, but had little cultivation in that direction; and he
would sit at the piano and pick out the air of the good old hymn-tunes
with one hand, not knowing how to play the bass which makes a harmony.
That was typical of his mental attitude,--he knew and loved the melody
of freedom, but the harmony blended of freedom and national unity he did
not comprehend.
The Southern disunionists finally carried their section, but the
Abolition disunionists never made the slightest approach to converting
the North. It was not merely that many at the North were indifferent to
slavery, while to the whole community its interest was remote compared
to what it was to the South. There was another reason for the failure of
the Northern disunionists. Among the class to whom the appeal for
freedom came closest home, the idealists, the men of moral conviction
and enthusiasm, were many to whose ideality and enthusiasm American
unity also spoke with powerful voice. Patriotism was more to them than a
material interest, more than an enlarged and glowing sentiment of
neighborhood and kinship,--it was devotion to moral interests of which
the national organism was the symbol and the agent. They saw, as Webster
saw, that "America is inseparably connected, fast bound up, in future
and by fate, with these great interests,"--of free representative
government, entire religious liberty, improved systems of national
intercourse, the spirit of free inquiry, and the general diffusion of
knowledge. They looked still higher than this,--they saw that America
rightly tended toward universal personal liberty, and full opportunity
and encouragement to man as man, of whatever race or class. That was
what America stood for to those moral enthusiasts whose sanity matched
their ardor. They saw that this ideal was still in the future, and that
progress might be slow and difficult, but they were pledged in their
souls to pursue it. And, with that purpose at heart, they were ready to
maintain the national unity at whatever cost.
This was the composite and mighty force against which the Secessionists
unwittingly set themselves,--the love of country, strong alike in the
common people and the leaders, a love rooted in material interest and
flowering in generous sentiment; and beyond that the moral ideals which,
born in prophets and men of genius, had permeated the best part of the
nation. With this, too, went the preponderance of physical resources
which free labor had been steadily winning for the North. Judging even
in the interest of slavery, was it not wise to acquiesce in the
election, to remain under the safeguards with which the Constitution
surrounded slavery in the States, to have patience, and to make the best
terms possible with the forces of nature and society? So urged the
wisest counselors, like Stephens of Georgia. But men rarely act on a
deliberate and rational calculation of their interests. They are swayed
by impulse and passion, and especially by the temper and habit which
have become a second nature. The leaders in Secession acted in a spirit
generated by the very nature of slavery, and fostered by their long
defense of slavery. That genesis of the movement is all the more
impressive when we recognize the high personal character of its leaders,
and acquit them of conscious motives of personal ambition. Slavery was
their undoing. The habit of absolute control over slaves bred the habit
of mastery whenever it could be successfully asserted. There grew up a
caste, its members equal and cordial among themselves, but
self-assertive and haughty to all besides. They brooked no opposition at
home, and resented all criticism abroad. They misread history and
present facts, misconceived their place in the order of things, and set
themselves against both the finest and the strongest forces of the
time. When the political party which had been their most effective tool
became difficult to handle, they broke it in two. When they could no
longer rule the nation, they set out to sunder it.
Thus, after forty-five years, we try to trace the springs of
action,--action which at the time moved swiftly, in cloud and storm and
seeming chaos. We have endeavored to see a little of how the men of the
North and of the South thought and felt. Now let us see what they did.
CHAPTER XXIV
ON NIAGARA'S BRINK--AND OVER
The election of Lincoln in November, 1860, found South Carolina
expectant and ready for action. The Legislature was in session, and
immediately ordered an election to be held December 6 for a convention
to meet December 17, and pass on the question of Secession. The action
of the convention was in no doubt.
Governor Pettus of Mississippi summoned a group of leading men to
consider the question of immediate Secession. In the conclave the
principal opponent of instant action was Jefferson Davis. His grounds
were prudential; he knew that the arsenals, foundries, and military
supplies were chiefly at the North; he foresaw a long and bloody war; he
advised that further efforts be made at compromise, or at least that
united action of the South be insured. This counsel prevailed, and the
convention was deferred until mid-January.
In the Georgia Legislature it was proposed that the question of
Secession be at once submitted to a popular vote. Toombs and Stephens
threw each his whole weight respectively for and against Secession.
Stephens has preserved his own speech in full. He emphasized the gravity
of the South's grievances, and the need of redress from the North if the
Union was to permanently endure. But he denied that the danger was so
pressing as to justify immediate Secession. He pointed out that Lincoln
would be confronted by a hostile majority in the Senate, the House and
the Supreme Court, and could not even appoint his Cabinet officers
except with the approval of a Senate in which his opponents outnumbered
his friends. He urged that it was wise to wait for some overt aggression
on the President's part before seceding. He dwelt on the immense
advantages the Union had brought to all sections. He showed (as in our
last chapter) that Toombs could allege no injuries except such as
affected slavery. Georgia's wealth had doubled between 1850 and 1860. "I
look upon this country," he said, "with our institutions, as the Eden of
the world, the paradise of the universe. It may be that out of it we may
become greater and more prosperous, but I am candid and sincere in
telling you that I fear if we yield to passion, and without sufficient
cause shall take that step, that instead of becoming greater or more
peaceful, prosperous and happy,--instead of becoming gods we will become
demons, and at no distant day commence cutting one another's throats."
Stephen's counsel was that the State should hold a convention, that with
the other Southern States it should draw up a formal bill of complaint
as to the personal liberty laws and the like, and if the North then
refused redress, secede. But whatever the State should do, he would
accept its decision, since the only alternative was civil war within the
State. He succeeded in having the convention deferred till January, and
the other Gulf States took similar action, while Virginia called a
convention for February 13.
With the tide of secession rising swiftly in the South, and surprise,
consternation, and perplexity at the North, Congress met in early
December. President Buchanan, in his message, following the advice of
his attorney-general, Jeremiah S. Black of Pennsylvania,--both of them
honest and patriotic men, but legalists rather than statesmen--argued
that Secession was wholly against the Constitution, but its forcible
repression was equally against the Constitution. Thus encouraged, the
Southern leaders confronted the Republicans in Congress,--how far would
they recede, how much would they yield, to avert Secession? Naturally,
the Republicans were not willing to undo the victory they had just won,
or to concede the very principle for which they had fought. But in both
Houses large committees were appointed and the whole situation was
earnestly discussed. On all sides violence was deprecated; there was
general dread of disruption of the Union, general doubt of the
feasibility of maintaining it by force, and the wide wish and effort to
find some practicable compromise.
But there was no hesitation on South Carolina's part. Her convention
passed, December 20, an Ordinance of Secession; a clear and impressive
statement of her complaints and the remedy she adopts. The Federal
compact has been broken; the personal liberty laws violate the
Constitution; the Northern people have denounced as sinful the
institution of slavery; they have elected a man who has declared that
"this government cannot permanently endure half slave and half free";
they are about to exclude Southern institutions from the territories,
and to make the Supreme Court sectional. "All hope of redress is
rendered vain by the fact that public opinion at the North has invested
a great political error with the sanction of a more erroneous religious
belief." So, from a partnership of which the letter has been broken and
the spirit destroyed, South Carolina withdraws.
The State was, at least on the surface, almost unanimous,--in Charleston
only the venerable James L. Petigru ventured to call himself a
Unionist,--and was in high heart and hope for its new venture. But,
facing the palmetto flags so gayly unfurled to the breeze, still floated
the Stars and Stripes over a little garrison in Fort Moultrie, commanded
by Major Anderson. His supplies were low; should aid be sent him? No,
said Buchanan timidly; and thereat Cass withdrew indignantly from the
Cabinet, to be replaced as Secretary of State by Black, while the
vigorous Edwin M. Stanton took Black's former place; and Buchanan's
courage rose a little. At the request of the South Carolina authorities,
Floyd, the Secretary of War, had ordered Anderson to act strictly on the
defensive. Finding himself at the mercy of his opponents on the
mainland, he quietly withdrew his handful of men, on the night of
December 26, to Fort Sumter, whose position on an island gave
comparative security. The South Carolinians instantly occupied Fort
Moultrie and Castle Pinckney, and took possession of the custom-house
and post-office. They cried out against Anderson's maneuver as a breach
of good faith, and Secretary Floyd resigned, in sympathy with the
Carolinians. The President, heartened by his new counselors, dispatched
the steamer _Star of the West_ with supplies for Anderson, but she was
fired on by the South Carolinians and turned back, January 9. Resenting
the President's act, Thompson of Mississippi and Thomas of Maryland left
his cabinet. The President brought in General Dix of New York; Joseph
Holt, now Secretary of War, was a Southern loyalist, and in its last
months Buchanan's Cabinet was thoroughly Unionist. But in him there was
no leadership.
Leadership was not wanting to the Secessionists. A movement like theirs,
once begun and in a congenial atmosphere, advances like a glacier by its
own weight, but with the pace not of the glacier but of the torrent. In
the country at large and at Washington there was confusion of counsels.
There was manifest disposition among the Republicans to go a long way in
conciliation. Of forcible resistance to Secession there was but little
talk. But that the Republicans should disown and reverse the entire
principles on which their party was founded was out of the question. On
the night of January 5 there met in a room at the Capitol the Senators
from Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and
Texas. They agreed on a common program, and telegraphed to their homes
that Secession was advisable at the January conventions and that a
common convention was to be held at Montgomery, Ala., in mid-February,
for the organization of the Southern Confederacy. Meantime, all United
States officials were to resign, and the Federal forts, arsenals and
custom-houses were to be seized.
A last formal presentation of the Southern ultimatum was made by Toombs
in the Senate. It was the familiar demand--slavery in the territories;
slavery under Federal protection everywhere except in the free States;
fugitives to be returned; offenders against State laws to be surrendered
to justice in those States; inter-State invasion and insurrection to be
prohibited and punished by Congress. No partial concessions would
answer: this, or nothing! "Nothing be it then!" was the answer of the
Republicans: and Toombs, Davis, and their associates bade a stern and
sad farewell to their fellow-congressmen and went home to organize the
Confederacy. Congress took up fresh plans for reconciliation and
reunion.
Mississippi, through its convention, seceded January 9, 1861. Florida
followed, January 10, and Alabama, January 11. Then, in the great
"keystone State" of Georgia, came deliberation and momentous debate.
Against immediate Secession, the policy of patience, of conference with
the other Southern States including the new "independent republics," and
a united remonstrance to the North, of which the rejection would justify
Secession,--this policy was embodied in a resolution presented by
Herschel V. Johnson and supported by all the eloquence and
persuasiveness of Stephens. Against him was the strong personal
influence of Howell Cobb, and the argument--which Stephens says was
decisive,--"we can make better terms out of the Union than in it." The
test vote was 164 to 133 for immediate Secession. On the motion of
Stephens the action was made unanimous. This accession of Georgia marked
the triumph of the Secessionists' cause; and most fitly, in a speech on
the evening of the same day, Stephens declared the fundamental idea of
that cause. Jefferson, he said, and the leading statesmen of his day,
"believed slavery wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically
... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the
assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy
foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the storm came
and the wind blew. Our new government is founded upon exactly the
opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon
the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that
slavery--subordination to the white race--is his natural and normal
condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the
world based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."
The Louisiana convention voted to secede January 26, and Texas February
1. The seven seceded States sent delegates to a convention which met at
Montgomery, February 4. They quickly organized the Confederate States of
America, with a Constitution closely resembling that of the United
States. One article forbade the foreign slave trade, except that with
"the United States of America," which was left subject to Congress.
Davis was elected President, by general agreement. He was clearly marked
for the place by ability, by civil and military experience, by
unblemished character, and by his record as a firm but not extreme
champion of the Secessionist cause. He disclaimed any desire for the
office, preferring the position which Mississippi had given him as
commander of her forces, but when the summons came to him at his
plantation home he promptly accepted. Stephens was chosen
Vice-President, in spite of his late and half-hearted adherence, to
conciliate Georgia and the old Whigs. In the Cabinet the leading figures
were Toombs of Georgia and Benjamin of Louisiana.
With this purposeful, swift, and effective action, Secession seemed to
have reached its limit. The other Southern States held back. Among the
plain folk, not over-heated about politics, there was wide
disinclination to any such extreme measure as disunion. It was well
represented by Robert E. Lee, in whom the best blood and worthiest
tradition of Virginia found fit exemplar. He wrote to his son, January
23: "Secession is nothing but revolution. The framers of our
Constitution never expended so much labor, wisdom and forbearance, in
its formation, and surrounded it with so many guards and securities, if
it was intended to be broken by every member of the Confederacy at
will."
North Carolina voted against a convention by 1,000 majority. Tennessee
voted against it by 92,000 to 25,000. Arkansas postponed action till
August. Missouri held a convention which voted not to secede. In
Maryland the governor would not convene the Legislature, and an
irregular convention took no decisive action. Delaware did nothing.
Virginia held a convention, which was not ready for Secession, but
remained in session watching the course of events. The Kentucky
Legislature refused to call a convention, but pledged assistance to the
South in case of invasion.
This last declaration illustrated the second line of defense, behind the
Secessionist advance. The sentiment was general throughout the South,
even among Unionists, that there must be no armed repression of
Secession. It rested partly on the theory of State Sovereignty, and
partly on the sympathy of neighborhood and of common institutions. Even
at the North there was wide disinclination to the use of force against
the Secessionists. The venerable General Scott, chief of the Federal
Army, gave it as his personal opinion that the wise course was to say,
"Wayward sisters, depart in peace." The New York _Tribune_, foremost of
Republican newspapers, declared: "If the cotton States wish to withdraw
from the Union, they should be allowed to do so." "Any attempt to compel
them to remain by force would be contrary to the principles of the
Declaration of Independence, and to the fundamental ideas upon which
human liberty is based." And again: "We hope never to live in a Republic
whereof one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets." Such
expressions were not uncommon among Republicans, and very frequent among
Democrats. Garrison and Phillips were loud in welcoming a separation.
But there were leaders like Wade of Ohio and Chandler of Michigan, whose
temper was very different, and ominous that the West would never consent
to a disruption of the nation.
The governor of Virginia invited all the States to send delegates to a
Peace congress to find means to save the Union. Almost all sent
delegates, and the congress held long sessions, while the Senate and
House were essaying the same task. Little result came in either body,
because neither party would accept the other's concessions. The favorite
measure was that known as the Crittendon compromise, framed by the
Kentucky senator, of which the central feature was the extension of the
old Missouri compromise line of 36 degrees 30 minutes to the Pacific,
with express provision that all territory north of this should be free
and all south should be slave. To this the Republicans would not
consent, but they went far toward it by agreeing to a plan proposed by
Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts,--that New Mexico (including all
present territory south of 36 degrees 30 minutes except the Indian
territory), be admitted as a State with slavery if its people should so
vote. They offered also to admit Colorado, Nevada, and Dakota as
territories, with no express exclusion of slavery. But neither side
would leave to the other the possible future extension to the South--in
Mexico and Cuba. Further, the Republicans showed a willingness to amend
the Personal Liberty laws, so far as they might be unconstitutional, and
to provide for governmental payment for fugitives who were not returned.
They expressed entire readiness to unite in a national convention for
the revision of the Constitution. And finally there was not only
proposed, but actually passed by the Senate and House, by two-thirds
majorities, at the very end of the session, a constitutional amendment
prohibiting any future amendment that should authorize Congress to
interfere with slavery in the States where it existed.
In vain, all,--in vain for the Republicans to hold out the olive branch,
to mutilate their own principles, and to bar the door against any
ultimate constitutional abolition of slavery. Even the slave States
still in the Union were not to be satisfied by all this, and the
Confederacy gave it no heed. And now, in the background, was visible a
rising force, in which the temper was far other than compromise. The
most significant voice came from Massachusetts. After all the old
antagonism of Massachusetts and South Carolina,--after the clash of
Calhoun and Hayne with Webster, the expulsion of Samuel Hoar, the
assault of Brooks on Sumner,--the two commonwealths stood forth, each
the leader of its own section. It was a hostility which sprung from no
accident, and no remembrance of old feuds, but from the opposition of
two types of society, the oligarchic idea most fully developed in South
Carolina, the industrial democracy in Massachusetts. The new Governor of
the State was John A. Andrew, a man of clear convictions, a great heart,
and a magnanimous temper. His New Year's message to the Legislature
opened with a businesslike discussion of the State's finances and other
materialities. Thence he passed to national affairs; he defended the
Personal Liberty law, of which his more conservative predecessor,
Governor Banks, had advised the repeal, but which Andrew justified as a
legitimate defense against kidnapping; while suggesting that whatever
slaves South Carolina had lost from this cause were offset by
Massachusetts black seamen enslaved in her ports. Then he took up the
matter of disunion. "The question now is, Shall a reactionary spirit,
unfriendly to liberty, be permitted to subvert democratic republican
government organized under constitutional forms?... The men who own and
till the soil, who drive the mills, and hammer out their own iron and
leather on their own anvils and lapstones ... are honest, intelligent,
patriotic, independent, and brave. They know that simple defeat in an
election is no cause for the disruption of a government. They know that
those who declare that they will not live peaceably within the Union do
not mean to live peaceably out of it. They know that the people of all
sections have a right, which they intend to maintain, of free access
from the interior to both oceans, and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico,
and of the free use of all the lakes and rivers and highways of
commerce, North, South, East and West. They know that the Union means
peace and unfettered commercial intercourse from sea to sea and from
shore to shore; that it secures us against the unfriendly presence or
possible dictation of any foreign power, and commands respect for our
flag and security for our trade. And they do not intend, nor will they
ever consent, to be excluded from these rights which they have so long
enjoyed, nor to abandon the prospect of the benefits which humanity
claims for itself by means of their continued enjoyment in the future.
Neither will they consent that the continent shall be overrun by the
victims of a remorseless cupidity, and the elements of danger increased
by the barbarizing influences which accompany the African slave trade.
Inspired by the ideas and emotions which commanded the fraternization of
Jackson and Webster on another great occasion of public danger, the
people of Massachusetts, confiding in the patriotism of their brethren
in other States, accept this issue, and respond in the words of Jackson,
'The Federal Union, it must be preserved.'... We cannot turn aside, and
we will not turn back."
The crowded, anxious, hurrying months, brought the 4th of March, and
Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as President. His speeches on his way to
the capital,--pacific, reassuring, but firm for national unity and
liberty,--had in a degree brought him into touch with the mass of the
people. But when his gaunt and homely form rose to deliver the inaugural
address, it was as a little-known and untried man that he was heard.
That speech gave signal that the man for the hour had come. No words
could better describe its quality than "sweet reasonableness";--that,
and unflinching purpose. He began by earnest reassurances as to the
fidelity to the Constitution of himself and the party behind him. He
suggested the means and temper by which mutual grievances might be
approached. Then in his clear, logical fashion, and in the plain speech
of the common man, he showed that the Union is in its nature
indissoluble, older than the Constitution, unaffected by any attempted
Secession. His own official, inevitable duty is to maintain the Union.
But there need be no bloodshed or violence. "The power confided to me
will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places
belonging to the government, and collect the duties and imports; but
beyond what may be necessary for these objects there will be no
invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere." If
resident citizens will not hold Federal offices, there is to be no
intrusion of obnoxious strangers. The mails will be furnished wherever
they are wanted. "So far as possible the people everywhere shall have
that sense of perfect security which is most favorable to calm thought
and reflection." This will be his course unless events shall compel a
change. And then follows a most calm, rational, moving plea against
sacrificing a great, popular, orderly self-government, to individual
caprice or fancied wrongs; a demonstration, irresistible as mathematics,
that "the central idea of Secession is anarchy." "Unanimity is
impossible, the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is
wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy
or despotism in some form is all that is left." In the address there is
not one word of heat or bitterness; it is all in the spirit of his words
spoken in private, "I shall do nothing maliciously,--the interests I
deal with are too vast for malicious dealings."
He does not belittle the complaints of the South, but pleads for mutual
forbearance. If there are defects in the organic framework of the
nation, let them be discussed and amended if necessary in a
constitutional convention. No justice can be done to this inaugural in a
condensation; it should be studied line by line; it is one of the great
classics of American literature and history. Thus he ended: "I am loth
to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.
Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of
affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every
battlefield and patriot's grave to every living heart and hearthstone
all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when
again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our
nature."
Through the weeks that followed, Lincoln was plunged in a sea of
perplexities, while the nation seemed weltering in chaos, with nothing
clear but the steady purpose of the Confederate leaders to maintain
their position and achieve complete independence by the shortest road.
Lincoln had formed a Cabinet including some very able and some ordinary
men, with one--Seward--of highest promise and at first of most
disappointing performance. He regarded himself as the real power in the
administration; he underrated alike the gravity of the situation and the
President's ability to cope with it; he trusted to conciliation and
smooth assurance; and he tried to take the reins of control into his own
hands--an attempt which Lincoln quietly foiled. The President and his
Cabinet were as yet strangers to each other. In the Senate (the House
was not in session), Douglas assailed the President's position, and
declared three courses to be open: Constitutional redress of the South's
grievances; the acceptance of Secession; or its forcible
repression,--the first the best, the last the worst. Three commissioners
of the Confederacy were in Washington, refused official recognition, but
holding some indirect intercourse with Seward, which they apparently
misunderstood and exaggerated. A swarm of office-seekers, like Egyptian
locusts, beset the President amid his heavy cares. The border States,
trembling in the balance, called for the wisest handling. Heaviest and
most pressing was the problem what to do with Fort Sumter. Closely
beleaguered, with failing supplies, it must soon fall unless relieved.
Almost impossible to relieve or save it, said the army officers; easy to
slip in supplies, contradicted the naval officers. Leave Sumter to fall
and you dishearten the North, urged Chase and Blair in the Cabinet;
answered Seward, Reinforce it, and you provoke instant war.
Lincoln answered the question in his own way. He was true to the
principle he had laid down in his inaugural,--to maintain the essential
rights of the national government, but with the least possible exercise
of force. He would "hold, occupy, and possess the property and places
belonging to the government, and collect the duties and imports"--that
and nothing more. Practically the only "property and places" now left to
the government at the South were Forts Sumter and Pickens. To yield them
without effort was to renounce the minimum of self-assertion he had
reserved to the nation.
As to the means of supply, he had recourse to the best instrument that
offered,--a scheme proposed by Captain Fox, an energetic naval officer,
who planned a relief expedition of five vessels to be privately
dispatched from New York and try to run past the batteries. The
expedition was quickly fitted out and sent, in early April. According to
promise, in case of any such action, notice was telegraphed to the
Governor of South Carolina. He communicated with the Confederate
government at Montgomery. That government was bent on maintaining,
without further debate, its full sovereignty over the coasts and waters
within its jurisdiction. There is no need to impute a deliberate purpose
to rouse and unite the South by bloodshed, any more than there is reason
to impute to Lincoln a crafty purpose to inveigle the South into
striking the first blow. Each acted straight in the line of their open
and avowed purpose,--Lincoln, to retain the remaining vestige of
national authority at the South; the Confederacy, to make full and
prompt assertion of its entire independence.
Orders were telegraphed from Montgomery, and General Beauregard,
commanding the Charleston forces, sent to Major Anderson a summons to
surrender. It was rejected; and the circle of forts opened fire and
Sumter fired back. The roar of those guns flashed by telegraph over the
country. In every town and hamlet men watched and waited with a tension
which cannot be described. All the accumulated feeling of months and
years flashed into a lightning stroke of emotion. All day Friday and
Saturday, April 12, 13, men watched the bulletins, and talked in brief
phrases, and were conscious of a passion surging through millions of
hearts. Saturday evening came the word,--the fort had yielded. After a
thirty-four hours' fight, overmatched, the expected relief
storm-delayed, his ammunition spent, his works on fire, Anderson had
capitulated.
There was a Sunday of intense brooding all over the land. Next morning,
April 15, came a proclamation from the President. The laws of the United
States, it declared, were opposed and their execution obstructed in
seven States, by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the
ordinary course of judicial proceedings; and the militia of the States,
to the number of 75,000 were called to arms for three months to suppress
the combinations and cause the laws to be duly executed.
The North rose as one man to the call. Party divisions were forgotten.
Douglas went to the President and pledged his support. Regiments from
Pennsylvania and Massachusetts hurried to the capital. Every Northern
State hastened to fill its assigned quota of militia. No less promptly
the South rallied to defend the seceding States from invasion. The
Virginia convention voted Secession two days after the President's
proclamation, and the people's vote ratified it by six to one. North
Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas joined the Confederacy. Maryland,
Kentucky, and Missouri, wavered and were distracted, but as State
organizations remained in the Union, while their populations divided.
Constitutional logic, argumentation, distinctions between holding the
national property and invasion, all vanished in the fierce breath of
war. Between union and disunion, argument was exhausted, and the issue
was to be tried out by force. In a day a great peaceful people resolved
itself into two hostile armies.
CHAPTER XXV
THE CIVIL WAR
At the outbreak of war, what the Northerner saw confronting him was an
organized attempt to overthrow the government and break up the nation in
the interest of slavery. This as the essential fact took form in the
circle of fire let loose on a beleaguered fort, and the Stars and
Stripes lowered before an overwhelming force. Close following came the
menace against the national capital, for Washington was believed to be
in imminent peril. A Massachusetts regiment marching to its relief was
assailed by the populace of Baltimore; communication was cut; and the
city which was the centre and symbol of the national life seemed
stretching her hands in appeal to the country's faithful sons. To the
conscience, the heart, the imagination of the North, it was a war of
national self-defense,--a holy war.
What the Southerner saw was an attempt to crush by force a legitimate
exercise of the right of sovereign States to an independent existence.
The typical Southerner, whether he had thought Secession expedient or
not, believed that each State was the rightful judge of its own course,
that the citizen's first allegiance was due to his State; and that the
attempt at coercion was as tyrannical as the refusal by Great Britain of
independence to the American colonies. And, apart from all political
theories, there instantly loomed on the horizon the armies of the North,
bearing down with fire and sword on the people of the Southern States.
The instinct of self-defense, and the irresistible sympathy of
neighborhood and community, prompted to resistance. Beyond doubt, the
typical Southern volunteer could say in all sincerity, as one of them
has expressed it: "With me is right, before me is duty, behind me is
home."
So natural and profound was the motive on each side, when the war began.
Wholly different from the moral responsibility of those who initiated
Secession, is the case of those who afterward fought for what to each
side was the cause of home and country. But, driven though both parties
felt themselves to war, none the less terrible was the war in itself.
There are difficulties from which the only escape is through disaster.
John Morley writes: "It is one of the commonest of all cheap
misjudgments in human affairs, to start by assuming that there is always
some good way out of a bad case. Alas for us all, this is not so.
Situations arise, alike for individuals, for parties, and for States,
from which no good way out exists, but only choice between bad way out
and worse." For the American people, in the situation into which by sins
of commission and omission they had been brought, the only way out was
one of the worst ways that human feet can travel.
It does not belong to this work to give a history of the Civil War. But
a truthful history might be written in a very different vein from the
accepted and popular narratives. These for the most part describe the
conflict in terms resembling partly a game of chess and partly a
football match. We read of grand strategic combinations, of masterly
plans of attack and admirable counter-strokes of defense. On the
battlefield we hear of gallant charges, superb rushes of cavalry,
indomitable resistance. Our military historians largely give us the
impression of man in battle as in the exercise of his highest powers,
and war as something glorious in the experience and heart-thrilling in
the contemplation.
But a succinct account of the whole business would be to say that for
four years the flower of the country's population were engaged in
killing each other. All other industries were overshadowed by the
occupation of human slaughter. Shop and farm, church and college, school
and home, all were subsidiary to the battlefield.
The battlefield itself is not easily conceived by the civilian, even
with the aid of poets and story-tellers from Homer to Kipling. The
reader, who has perhaps never seen a shot fired in anger, may have
chanced to witness a man struck down in the street by a falling beam or
trampled by a runaway horse. Or, as a better illustration, he may
remember in his own case some hour of sudden and extreme suffering,--a
hand caught by a falling window, a foot drenched by scalding water.
Intensify that experience, extend it through days, for the home couch
and the nursing of mother or wife put the bare ground and the onrush of
hostile men,--and you have the nucleus, the constituent atom, of a
battle. Multiply it by hundreds or thousands; give to each sufferer the
background of waiting parents, wife, children, at home; give to a part
death, swift or agonizing; to another part lifelong infirmity or
irritation,--and you begin to get the reality of war.
It was Wellington who said that the worst sight on earth, next to the
field of defeat, was the field of victory. It was Lee who wrote from
Mexico to his son: "You have no idea what a horrible sight a
battle-field is." And he said that the strongest memory left from his
first battle was the plaintive tone of a little Mexican girl whom he
found leaning over a wounded drummer-boy.
Men not only witness such carnage but inflict it, in the excitement of
battle, because animated by feelings of which only a part can rightly be
called heroic. Honor indeed is due to the subordination of personal fear
to the sense of duty and comradeship,--yes, high honor; and the appeal
of the soldier to the imagination, as a type of self-sacrifice and
nobility, has its element of truth. But the ordinary courage of the
battle-field is largely an excitement half-animal, half-contagious,
running often into savagery and insensate fury. In that situation the
highest and lowest elements in man come into play. For the most part
only the highest is portrayed for us by the historians and
romancers,--they keep the wild beast and the devil out of sight. Only in
these later days, when mankind begins to scrutinize its boasted glories
more closely, do Tolstoi in literature and Verestchagin in art give us
glimpses of the grim reality.
An industry which has murder for its main output will have some
by-products to match. In the armies of both sides the human stuff was of
mixed character and motive. Some enlisted from pure patriotism,--for
Union, State, or Confederacy; some from thirst of adventure; others for
ambition; others for the bounty or under compulsion of the conscription
officer; many from the mere contagious excitement. Army life always
brings to many of its participants a great demoralization. Take away the
restriction of public opinion in a well-ordered community, take from men
the society of good women, and there will be a tendency to barbarism. A
civilized army has indeed a code and public opinion of its own, which
counts for some sterling qualities, but it is lax and ineffective for
much that goes to complete manhood. Just as the war left a host of
maimed and crippled, so it left a multitude of moral cripples. At the
reunion, around the "camp fire," with the reminiscences of stirring
times and the renewal of good comradeship runs a vein of comment which
the newspapers do not relate. "What's become of A.?" "Drank himself to
death." "And where is X.?" "Never got back the character he lost in New
Orleans,--went to the dogs." It is a chronicle not recorded on the
monuments, but remembered in many a blighted household. The financial
debt the war left behind it was not the heaviest part of the after-cost.
Nor must there be forgotten the temper which war begets, of mutual hate
between whole peoples. Forty years later we bring ourselves,--some of
us, and in a measure,--to see that our opponents of either side had some
justification or some excuse; that they perhaps were honest as we. But
little room was there for such mutual forbearance of judgment while the
fight was on. For the average man, for most men, to fight means also to
hate. While the contest lasted, Northerners habitually spoke of their
foes as "the rebels,"--not in contumely, but as matter-of-fact
description. They were "rebels" in common speech, and when one warmed a
little they were "traitors." Good men said that now for the first time
they saw why the imprecatory Psalms were written,--theirs was the only
cursing strong enough for the country's enemies. Quite as hearty was the
South's detestation of the Yankee invaders and despots,--the fanatics
and their hired minions. The Southern feeling took the keener edge,
because sharpened by the bitter fact of invasion and the hardships it
brought. With them the home suffered, not only as at the North, by the
departure of father or son to danger or death; the Southern homes often
saw the foes in their midst, and sometimes suffered ravage and spoil.
"How can you expect me to be well reconstructed," asked a Virginian
after the war, "When I remember the family vaults in which the silver
plates were wrenched from the coffins by your soldiers?" When the
fighting was over, the life of the reunited nation had to work its way
for a generation,--and the end is not yet,--against the hostilities, the
rancors, the misunderstandings, generated in those four years of
strife.
The reality of war where it fell heaviest,--in the border States, where
neighborhoods and families were divided, and both armies marched and
fought,--is touched by the graphic pen of a woman, Mrs. Rebecca Harding
Davis, who saw and felt a part of it: "The histories which we have of
the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid
misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up
to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute. Even
on the border, your farm was a waste, all your horses or cows were
seized by one army or the other, or your shop or manufactory was closed,
your trade ruined. You had no money; you drank coffee made of roasted
parsnips for breakfast, and ate only potatoes for dinner. Your nearest
kinsfolk and friends passed you on the street silent and scowling; if
you said what you thought you were liable to be dragged to the county
jail and left there for months. The subject of the war was never
broached in your home where opinions differed; but one morning the boys
were missing. No one said a word, but one gray head was bent, and the
happy light died out of the old eyes and never came to them again. Below
all the squalor and discomfort was the agony of suspense or the
certainty of death. But the parsnip coffee and the empty purse certainly
did give a sting to the great overwhelming misery, like gnats tormenting
a wounded man."
Visiting in war-time the sages of Concord, she saw the difference
between war as viewed by visionaries at a distance and the reality: "I
remember listening during one long summer morning to Louisa Alcott's
father as he chanted pæans to the war, the 'armed angel which was
wakening the nation to a lofty life unknown before.' We were in the
little parlor of the Wayside, Mr. Hawthorne's house in Concord. Mr.
Alcott stood in front of the fire-place, his long gray hair streaming
over his collar, his pale eyes turning quickly from one listener to
another to hold them quiet, his hands waving to keep time with the
orotund sentences which had a stale, familiar ring as if often repeated
before. Mr. Emerson stood listening, his head sunk on his breast, with
profound submissive attention, but Hawthorne sat astride of a chair, his
arms folded on the back, his chin dropped on them, and his laughing,
sagacious eyes watching us, full of mockery.
"I had come up from the border where I had seen the actual war; the
filthy spewings of it; the political jobbery in Union and Confederate
camps; the malignant personal hatreds wearing patriotic masks, and
glutted by burning homes and outraged women; the chances in it, well
improved on both sides, for brutish men to grow more brutish, and for
honorable gentlemen to degenerate into thieves and sots. War may be an
armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the
slums. This would-be seer who was talking of it, and the real seer who
listened, knew no more of war as it was, than I had done in my
cherry-tree time, when I dreamed of bannered legions of crusaders
debouching in the misty fields."
The youth who reads may ask in wonder, "And was then the war to which we
have been used to look back with exultation and pride,--was it but a
horror and a crime?" No; it was something other and more than that; it
had its aspects of moral grandeur and of gain for humanity; it was a
field for noble self-sacrifice, for utmost striving of men and deepest
tenderness of women, it had its heroes and martyrs and saints; it was in
the large view the tremendous price of national unity and universal
freedom. But in the exaltation of these better aspects, we have as a
people too much forgotten the other and awful side. That is what we need
now to be reminded of. For among our present dangers none is greater
than the false glorification of war. Against such glorifications stands
Sherman's word, "War is hell." And on that grand tomb with which our
greatest city crowns its proudest height is inscribed, as the one word
by which Grant forever speaks to his countrymen, "Let us have peace."
The nobler side of the war is told and will be told in many a history
and biography, romance and poem. In the broad view, the grandest fact
was that a multitude of men and women felt and acted as never before for
a cause greater than any personal gain. Under the discipline of
sacrifice and suffering, and with the personal horizon widened to take
in nations and races, a multitude on the field and at home grew to
loftier stature. The hardships and perils which wrecked some
strengthened others. The development of energy and resource was beyond
measure. The North created armies and navies; it organized a new system
of finance; it transformed a peaceful industrial community into an
irresistible military force; and all the while it carried on its
productive industries with scarcely visible shrinkage; farm and mill,
school and college, kept on with their work. The South made itself into
a solid army of resistance; cut off from its accustomed sources of
supply, it developed for itself all the essentials of material life; it
showed an ingenuity and resourcefulness beyond all expectation; and the
fidelity of its slaves supplied its armies with food while keeping its
homes secure. In peace haunted always by latent dread of insurrection,
in war the South found its servants its best friends. So, in both
sections, wonders were wrought and deeds never dreamed of were achieved.
In justly viewing the evil and the good of war, we must compare it with
other disturbances and catastrophes. The finest traits and highest
efficiency of men come out under disasters which yet it must be our
habitual effort to avert. It is the ship on the rocks, the theater on
fire, that shows the hero. But what should we think of one who ran a
ship on shore, or set fire to a theater, in order to call out heroism?
Exactly so are we to regard those who glorify war as in itself a fine
and admirable thing, a proper school and arena of manhood. The
refutation of such talk comes not so well from men of the church or
closet as from those who have drunk deepest of war's reality. A man of
exuberant vitality, whose personal delight in physical strife colors his
statesmanship, and who is exhilarated by the memory of a skirmish or two
in Cuba, may talk exultantly of "glory enough to go round," and preach
soldiering as a splendid manifestation of the strenuous life. But the
grim old warrior whose genius and resolution split the Confederacy like
a wedge, General Sherman, in the very midst of his task wrote to a
friend: "I confess without shame that I am sick and tired of the war.
Its glory is all moonshine. Even success, the most brilliant, is over
dead and mangled bodies, the anguish and lamentation of distant families
appealing to me for missing sons, husbands, and fathers. It is only
those who have not heard a shot, nor heard the shrieks and groans of the
wounded and lacerated (friend or foe), that cry aloud for more blood,
more vengeance, more desolation."
One glance we here may give at the traits which against this dark
background shone with the light which redeems humanity. The worst scenes
of all were not on the battlefield but in the military prisons. At
Andersonville, and other points, thousands of Northern prisoners were
crowded together, with insufficient supply of unnutritious food, with
scanty and foul water; surrounded by harsh guards, quick to shoot if the
"dead line" was crossed by a foot; harassed by petty tyranny; starved,
homesick, diseased, dying like infected sheep. It is a black, black
page,--but let its blackness be mainly charged to war itself, and what
war always breeds. In Northern prisons, the rate of mortality was nearly
as high as in Southern; the work of hunger in the one was matched by
cold in the other. "All things considered," says J. F. Rhodes in his
impartial _History of the United States_, "the statistics show no reason
why the North should reproach the South. If we add to one side of the
account the refusal to exchange the prisoners"--a refusal based by Grant
at one time on the military disadvantage of restoring the Southern
prisoners to active service--"and the greater resources, and to the
other the distress of the Confederacy; the balance struck will not be
far from even." Enough for our present purpose that the Andersonville
prison-pen was a hell. Well, after a time the Union armies were
recruited by negroes, and the Confederates in resentment refused to
consider these when captured as prisoners of war, and would not include
them in the exchanges. Thereupon the Federal Government declared that
its negro soldiers must receive equal rights with the whites, and until
this was conceded there should be no exchange at all. Then some of the
Andersonville prisoners drew up a petition, and signed and sent it to
Washington, praying the government to hasten their release, and if
necessary to hold the question of negro prisoners for negotiation, while
pressing forward the liberation of its faithful and suffering white
soldiers. But promptly by others in the prison-pen a counter petition
was started, signed, and sent on. It ran in substance thus: "We are in
evil case, and we earnestly desire that you hasten our deliverance by
every means consistent with right and honor. But--honor first! Let the
nation's plighted faith to its black soldiers be kept, at whatever cost
to us. We ask you to still refuse all exchange of prisoners, until the
Õsame treatment can be secured for black and white." Was ever a braver
deed than that?
One picture more. In a military hospital at Washington, Walt Whitman was
engaged as a volunteer nurse. In a letter to a friend, he depicted in a
few sentences the tragedy of it all, and yet the triumph of the spirit
over the body and over death itself. He wrote of a Northern hospital,
but the like might be seen on Southern soil, as to-day among Russians or
Japanese,--it is the tragedy and triumph of humanity. "These thousands,
and tens and twenties of thousands, of American young men, badly wounded
... operated on, pallid with diarrhoea, languishing, dying with fever,
pneumonia, etc., open a new world somehow to me, giving closer insights,
... showing our humanity ... tried by terrible, fearful tests, probed
deepest, the living souls, the body's tragedies, bursting the petty
bonds of art. To these, what are your dreams and poems, even the oldest
and the tearfulest?... For here I see, not at intervals, but quite
always, how certain man, our American man,--how he holds himself cool
and unquestioned master above all pains and bloody mutilation.... This,
then, what frightened us all so long! Why, it is put to flight with
ignominy--a mere stuffed scarecrow of the fields. Oh, death, where is
thy sting? Oh, grave, where is thy victory?"
CHAPTER XXVI
EMANCIPATION BEGUN
When the war began, the absorbing issue at the North was the maintenance
of the Union. The supreme, uniting purpose was the restoration of the
national authority. Slavery had fallen into the background. But it soon
began to come again to the front. Two tendencies existed at the North;
one, to seek the restoration of the old state of things unchanged; the
other, to seize the opportunity of war to put an end to slavery.
The pressure of events raised special questions which must be met. As
soon as Northern armies were on Southern soil, slaves began to take
refuge in the camps, and their masters, loyal in fact or in profession,
followed with a demand for their return. Law seemed on the master's
side; but the use of the army, engaged in such a war, to send slaves
back to bondage, was most repugnant. At first some commanders took one
course, some another. General Butler, a volunteer from Massachusetts,
hit on a happy solution; he declared that slaves, being available to the
enemy for hostile purposes, were like arms, gunpowder, etc., "contraband
of war," and could not be reclaimed. The stroke was welcomed with cheers
and laughter; and "contraband" became a catchword. Congress, in March,
1862, forbade the army and navy to return fugitives.
General Fremont was in command in Missouri. He was ardent and
uncompromising, and in August, 1861, he issued a drastic proclamation,
declaring the State under martial law, threatening death to all taken
with arms in their hands, and giving freedom to the slaves of all
rebels. The President remonstrated by letter against this too heroic
surgery, and when Fremont declined to modify his order, used his
authority to cancel it. The public reception of the incident marked and
heightened the growing division of sentiment; the conservatives and
especially the border State men, were alarmed and indignant at Fremont's
action, while he became at once a favorite of the strong anti-slavery
men.
This divergence among his own supporters added another to the
complications which beset Lincoln and taxed him to the utmost. He had
extraordinary tact and shrewdness in managing men, and in dealing with
tangled situations. He showed this power toward his Cabinet officers,
who included the most various material,--Seward, accomplished,
resourceful, somewhat superficial, but thoroughly loyal to his chief
after he knew him, managing the foreign relations with admirable skill,
and somewhat conservative in his views; Chase, very able as a financier
and jurist, but intensely ambitious of the Presidency, regarded as a
radical as to slavery; Stanton, a great war minister but of harsh and
intractable temper. These men and their colleagues Lincoln handled so
skilfully as to get the best each had to contribute, and keep them and
the political elements they represented in working harmony. No less
successfully did he deal with Congress, guiding it to a great extent,
but acquiescing in occasional defeats and disappointments so patiently
that he disarmed hostility. He kept in closest touch with the common
people; he was accessible to every one, listened to each man's
grievance, remonstrance, or advice; and acquired an instinctive
knowledge of what was in the hearts and minds of the millions.
In his own conduct, his guiding principle was fidelity to his official
duty as he read it in the Constitution and the laws. He felt the
specific, supreme task laid upon him to be the restoration and
maintenance of the Union. And to succeed in that, he knew he must
rightly interpret and enforce the general sentiment and desire of the
loyal people. If he let them become so divided as to no longer act
together, the cause was lost. And to follow any personal opinion or
conviction of his own, in disregard of his official duty, or in defiance
of the popular will, was to betray his trust.
It was under these conditions that Lincoln dealt with slavery. No man
more than he detested the institution, or desired its removal. But he
felt that he had no right to touch it, except as empowered by the
Constitution and the laws, or as guided by the supreme necessity of
saving the nation's life. Beyond that he had no authority. Beyond that,
his position toward slavery must be like that of a President toward, for
example, a system of religion which he believed to be false and
injurious. Be he intensely orthodox, believing infidelity to be the road
to hell,--yet he must not as President, put a straw across the path of
the free-thinker. Be he as heretical as Thomas Jefferson, he must not
as President, any more than did Jefferson, lay a finger on the churches.
Just so did Lincoln feel himself restricted as to slavery,--he could not
touch it, except as the civil laws brought it within his province, or
unless as supreme military commander the laws and necessities of war
brought it within his authority.
Congress soon proceeded to discuss questions about slavery. Sumner, the
foremost leader of the radicals, proposed resolutions, in February,
1862, declaring that the seceded States had by their acts extinguished
their State organizations and relapsed into a territorial condition,
subject only to Congress; and that slavery within them, existing only by
a local authority now defunct, was thus abolished. Congress would take
no such ground as that. But, as within its proper sphere, it abolished
slavery in the District of Columbia, in April, 1862, giving
compensation to owners at a maximum rate of $300 for each slave. And in
the following June, it abolished slavery in all the national
territories,--thus giving full force to the cardinal doctrine of the
Republican party up to the war. But the war had inevitably brought a
more radical issue to the front,--the question of slavery in the States.
Under the name of a confiscation act, Congress passed a law, July 17,
1862, which declared freedom to all slaves of convicted rebels; to
slaves of rebels escaping within the army lines, or captured, or
deserted by their masters; and to all slaves of rebels found in places
captured and occupied by the Union army. This came near to making the
abolition of slavery follow exactly the progress of the Union arms. But,
leaving untouched the slave property of loyalists, it spared the
institution as a system.
Lincoln, in many ways a man of the people by his convictions and
sympathies, in other aspects towered in solitude. He was almost unique
in that he could fight--fight if need were to the death,--with no spark
of hatred in his heart. In the midst of war he was a devoted
peace-lover. To an old friend, though a political opponent, Congressman
D. W. Voorhees, of Indiana, who called on him at the White House, he
said with a pathetic look of anxious pain: "Voorhees, doesn't it seem
strange that I should be here--I, a man who couldn't cut a chicken's
head off,--with blood running all around me?" While he was overseeing
campaigns, selecting and rejecting generals, learning the business of a
commander, keeping touch with all the great matters of administration,
besieged by office-seekers, importuned by people in all manner of
private troubles,--he found intervals in which to devise ways out of the
horrid business of war, ways that might lead both to peace and freedom.
The key of the situation he thought lay largely with the border
States,--Maryland, Missouri and Kentucky,--all of them formally in the
Union, but their population divided, sending recruits to both armies,
and with hopes in the Confederacy that they might be entirely won over.
If they could be bound faster to the Union, if at the same time they
could be helped to make themselves free States,--then might the Union
cause be mightily helped, and at the same time the work of emancipation
be begun. Aiming at this result, Lincoln sent a message to Congress,
March 6, 1862, proposing this resolution: "That the United States ought
to co-operate with any State which may adopt gradual abolishment of
slavery, giving to such State pecuniary aid, to be used by such State,
in its discretion, to compensate for the inconveniences, public and
private, produced by such change of system." He urged this with special
reference to its application in the border States; and, inviting the
Congressional members of these States in a body to the White House, he
pleaded with them earnestly to support the resolution, and apply the
plan. They listened, but were non-committal. Congress received the plan
coolly. The Radicals were little in the humor of compensating
slaveholders, and the Conservatives apprehended a progressive attack on
slavery. But the President's influence triumphed; the resolution passed
in mid-April; and the nation pledged itself to assist compensated
emancipation in any State that would adopt it.
Nothing came of it. The border States did not move. Three months later,
July 12, their delegations were again invited to the White House. The
situation was at the gravest; McClellan's army had been baffled in the
desperate seven-days' fight; factions at the North were growing hot.
Lincoln pleaded reasonably, movingly, that they would bring decisive
help to the national cause, by committing their States to emancipation,
with help from the nation, gradually if they pleased, with colonization
if they desired--peace, union, freedom, all lay that way! Two days they
took to make answer, and then of the twenty-nine members only nine were
favorable; the rest with one accord began to make excuse,--and that hope
failed.
Events were forcing on the question of slavery. In the previous May,
General David Hunter, in South Carolina, finding himself with 10,000
fugitives in his camps, whom the laws forbade him to return to their
masters and did not permit him to hold as slaves, met the difficulty by
a proclamation, declaring that the martial law of the United States was
incompatible with slavery, and the slaves in his military
district--South Carolina, Georgia and Florida,--were set free. Again the
President overruled his subordinate, but in the proclamation he
distinctly said that the question of emancipation as a military
necessity belonged to himself as commander-in-chief. It was a note of
warning. Twenty years before, John Quincy Adams had written,--and the
words came from a conservative statesman of the highest standing: "I say
that the military authority takes for the time the place of all
municipal institutions, and slavery among the rest"; and had elaborated
and reiterated the doctrine that in case of war slavery might be
abolished by the commander. These statements had lately been recalled;
the action of Fremont and Hunter had given life to the idea; and Lincoln
now intimated that he might yet assume this authority.
Party divisions had soon reappeared at the North. The Democrats were not
harmonious; a part called themselves "War Democrats," and a part were
ready to let the South go, or went as near that as they prudently could;
now one and now the other faction controlled the party according to time
and locality. The Republicans were more united, yet among them was a
cleavage between conservatives and radicals; the one taking for their
watchword, "the Constitution as it is and the Union as it was"; the
other eager to see the war turned against slavery; and both claiming the
President, and jealously watching any leaning on his part toward their
rivals.
There was developing at the North a profound sentiment for attacking
slavery. The war was protracted beyond all early expectation; it was
costly, bitter, woeful. What was to be at last the recompense for all
this blood and tears? Was there, if victory came at last, to be with it
no advance, nothing but the old Union, half slave and half free? For
nothing better than this were sons, fathers, brothers, husbands to be
sacrificed? Was the nation crossing a Red Sea of anguish only to emerge
into the old bondage? Rather, let us fight at once for union and for
liberty!
Those who voiced this cry could not always see the difficulties that
beset the President. Many of them failed to realize that at heart he was
as true to freedom as they. Even Lowell, in the later _Biglow Papers_,
which pleaded with deeper pathos and power than before for freedom--even
he could write of "hoisting your captain's heart up with a derrick."
Wendell Phillips on one occasion, impatient of Lincoln's attitude toward
the fugitive slave law, called him "the slave-hound from Illinois."
Beecher,--who did great service, especially by his speeches in
England,--wrote in the _Independent_ a series of articles, to spur the
President to more pronounced action. Some one gave the articles to
Lincoln; he sat down and read them all, then rose to his feet
exclaiming, "Am I a dog?"
All this time the conservatives were no less urgent that the President
must make no move against slavery. Among their spokesmen was General
McClellan. On him rested the chief hope of the North for military
success during the year following the disaster of Bull Run. He was an
admirable organizer and a good theoretical strategist; his care for his
men won their affection; and sometimes in the field he struck heavy and
effective blows. But he was always prone to overrate the enemy's
resources and underrate his own; he was slow to follow up a success; and
he lacked the bulldog grip by which Grant won. Right on the heels of his
failure in the seven-days' fight in the Peninsula, he wrote a letter to
the President, from Harrison's Landing, July 7, 1862, lecturing him
severely as to the errors he must avoid. Nothing must be done or said
looking to confiscation, forcible abolition, or territorial organization
of the States. "Until the principles governing the future conduct of our
struggle shall be made known and approved, the effort to obtain
requisite forces will be almost hopeless. A declaration of radical
views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our armies."
This letter was given to the public, and on this platform McClellan
began to loom up as an opposition candidate for the Presidency.
So Lincoln was buffeted on the right hand and on the left. In this
summer of 1862, Greeley wrote in the _Tribune_, August 20, an open
letter to the President, upbraiding him for his slackness against
slavery. Lincoln replied, August 22, in a letter which startled many of
his friends, and to this day bewilders those who do not understand the
man himself or the position in which he stood. He wrote: "I would save
the Union, I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution....
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and 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." In fact, the last was the
course which he eventually took.
This letter stated with full sincerity Lincoln's basal principle. It was
not necessary to add that the purpose was growing within him to save the
Union by freeing the slaves in the seceded States. The very growth of
that purpose made it necessary for him to freshly bind to himself the
conservatives whose only care was for the Union and not for
emancipation. Nothing could serve this purpose better than the
declaration in this letter to Greeley. In Lincoln, sincerity and
shrewdness were thoroughly blended.
At a later day he told the artist Frank Carpenter, when he was to paint
"The Signing of the Emancipation Proclamation": "It had got to be
mid-summer, 1862. Things had gone on from bad to worse, until I felt
that we had reached the end of our rope on the plan we had been
pursuing; that we had about played our last card, and must change our
tactics or lose the game. I now determined upon the adoption of the
emancipation policy; and without consultation with, or the knowledge of,
the Cabinet, I prepared the original draft of the proclamation, and
after much anxious thought, called a Cabinet meeting upon the
subject.... I said to the Cabinet that I had resolved upon this step,
and had not called them together to ask their advice, but to lay the
subject-matter of a proclamation before them, suggestions as to which
would be in order after they had heard it read." This proclamation--the
first sketch--set forth that at the next meeting of Congress, four
months later, the President designs to again recommend a practical
measure for tendering pecuniary aid to any State then recognizing the
authority of the United States, which should have adopted, or should
thereafter adopt, gradual abolishment of slavery; that the object of
this is to promote the restoration of constitutional relations between
the general government and all the States; and finally, as
commander-in-chief, the President declares that from the first of
January next all slaves in States still rejecting the national authority
shall then and forever be free.
The Cabinet were amazed--and divided. Only Stanton and Bates were for
immediate promulgation. Chase thought it would be better to leave the
matter to district commanders, but would support the proclamation as
better than inaction. Blair opposed it as likely to be unpopular and
lose the Fall election. All this Lincoln had weighed beforehand. But now
came a suggestion from Seward, that the immediate time was inopportune,
because just after military reverses (McClellan's Peninsula defeat) it
would seem like a desperate cry for help,--"our last shriek on the
retreat," as Lincoln phrased it. His judgment welcomed this as a wise
suggestion, and he put the draft of the proclamation aside and waited
for victory. Among the elements which entered into his decisions was a
subtle instinct as to when and how far he could command the support of
the various elements on whom success depended. His rare capacity as a
listener, and his keen sagacity, enabled him to divine that the hour was
at hand when a decisive move against slavery would attract more support
than it would repel. Seward's suggestion gave the final shape to his
purpose.
This happened July 22, 1862; and when the President made his calm reply
to Greeley's onslaught a month later, the unsigned proclamation lay in
his desk, and he was still waiting for a victory before he issued it.
CHAPTER XXVII
EMANCIPATION ACHIEVED
Instead of victory came defeat. Pope, taking the command after
McClellan's failure, was beaten and driven back in the second battle of
Bull Run, and matters were at the worst. McClellan was recalled; his
genius for organization rehabilitated the demoralized army; the
soldiers' confidence in their old chief gave them new courage. When Lee,
after a year on the defensive, took the offensive and entered Maryland,
he was beaten and turned back at Antietam.
Then Lincoln summoned his cabinet again, September 22, 1862. Before he
spoke the momentous word, he freshened himself in his own way,--he said
that Artemus Ward had sent him his book, and he would read them a
chapter which he thought very funny; and read it he did, with great
enjoyment; the secretaries also laughing as in duty bound--all except
Stanton! Then the President became grave enough--he told them that he
had been thinking a great deal about the proclamation he had read them
two months before; that victory seemed to have brought a favorable
occasion; that when the rebel army was at Fredericksburg he determined
as soon as it was driven out of Maryland to proclaim emancipation. He
went on: "I said nothing to any one, but I made the promise to myself,
and,"--hesitating a little--"to my Maker." So now, he tells them, he
fulfills that promise. One last word,--some other might do better than
he; he would surrender his place to a better man if he saw the way; he
believes that he has not so much of the confidence of the people as he
once had, but on the whole he does not know that any one has more, and
at any rate there is no way for him to give place to any other. "I am
here; I must do the best I can, and bear the responsibility of taking
the course which I feel I ought to take." It is the counterpart of
Luther's "Here stand I; I cannot do otherwise; God help me!"
Discussion in the Cabinet: general approval; slight modification only.
The proclamation runs on the original lines; compensated abolition
recommended; colonization favored; freedom to be declared next New
Year's day to all slaves in rebellious States: ultimate compensation
recommended for all loyal owners. The proclamation is issued,
September 23, 1862, and the nation is inexorably committed to
emancipation,--compensated if possible; forcible if necessary; partial
at first, but moving inevitably, swiftly, toward universal freedom.
The proclamation with its sequence was the best Lincoln found himself
able to do. What he wanted to do,--his own ideal which he could not
bring his countrymen to accept,--was shown in his message to Congress
when it met in December. The main burden of that message was an earnest
plea for action on the line of compensated emancipation. The President
proposed an amendment to the Constitution, to this effect: every State
abolishing slavery before 1900 to receive compensation from the United
States, at some fixed rate, in government bonds; meantime, all slaves
freed by chances of war to remain free, with compensation to loyal
owners; Congress authorized to spend money for colonization of such as
wish to go. For the general plan of compensation Lincoln argues as
broadly and calmly as if dealing with a purely economic question, and
with the restrained fervor of the patriot and statesman. He dwells on
the vast growth which the country promises; on the increasing resources
which will make light the burden of ransoming the slaves; the safety of
a process of gradual liberation; the humane, economic, Christian
superiority of this settlement instead of prolonged war. This is the
close: "We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility. In
giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free--honorable
alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or
meanly lose the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this
could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just--a way which,
if followed, the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless."
But as for practical effect, he might as well have read Dr. Watts's
Cradle-hymn to a couple of fighting bulldogs. The proposition of
compensated emancipation was thirty years too late. Now the blood of
both sections was up, the fighting animal in man let loose,--and they
would go on indefinitely killing and being killed, to free the slaves or
to hold them, but they would not lay down their arms and peacefully
share the light burden of emancipation.
So came in New Year's day, 1863, and the final word was spoken,
declaring freedom to all the slaves in Arkansas, Texas, Mississippi,
Alabama, Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and the greater portion of
Virginia and Louisiana; enjoining good order on the freedmen; and
opening the army and navy to their enlistment. "And upon this act,
sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the
Constitution upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment
of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God."
How far, it may be asked, was the military necessity on which the
proclamation was based actually met by its results? Immediate gain, in a
military sense, did not accrue. Not a slave was freed except as the
ground was conquered foot by foot. But by opening the door to the
enlistment of negroes, there was soon a substantial advantage won to
the Union armies; for, enlisting by many thousands, they proved
themselves docile, trustworthy, and not lacking in courage. In the last
two years of the war, they added nearly 200,000 men to the Union forces.
They were not considered equal to white soldiers, for they succumbed far
more easily to wounds and disease; and though their officers were chary
of exposing them in battle, their mortality was greater than that of the
whites. In a sense broader than the military, the first results of the
emancipation policy were adverse. It was said by many that the
proclamation would "unite the South and divide the North." The seceded
States could hardly be more united than they were before, but a fresh
motive was added to their struggle. In the border States, there was a
wide alienation of slave owners and their sympathizers. At the North, a
similar effect was obvious at first. From the day of the first
proclamation, a war now evidently waged in part for emancipation lost
favor with many who cared nothing for the slaves. The elections two
months later, in November, 1862, were disastrous. New York,
Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and Indiana, all went against the
administration. Its majority in Congress was greatly reduced.
But the emancipation proclamation had struck deep to the hidden springs
of power. For the exigencies of a prolonged and desperate struggle, it
had evoked the full power of a great sentiment. It had roused the
passion of freedom which nerves men to suffer and die. It was an
unselfish passion,--it was for the freedom of other men that the North
now fought. The loss of the half-hearted and the materialists was
outweighed by the enlistment of the enthusiasts for humanity. And the
sympathies of the nations, which had wavered while the Union cause was
declared to be apart from the slavery question, now swung weightily to
the side of the North, since it was avowedly the side of freedom.
By his proclamation, Lincoln had,--to use his language to
Greeley,--"freed some and left others alone." He could not go further on
the ground of military necessity. But the work, or the promise, could
not be left in that imperfect shape. The natural resource was soon
found,--universal freedom by a constitutional amendment. This, the
Thirteenth Amendment, was brought forward in April, 1864, and received
more than the necessary two-thirds vote in the Senate--38 to 6; but in
the House (elected in the reaction of 1862) only 95 to 66. The next
winter it was brought up again in the same House, but a House
enlightened now by the Republican victory in Lincoln's re-election; and
strongly urged by him it won the necessary two-thirds vote--119 to 56.
The States had still to pass upon it, after the war, but to resist
emancipation then was fighting against the stars in their courses; and
only Kentucky and Delaware rejected the amendment, while Texas was
silent, and Alabama and Mississippi gave a qualified assent. The
amendment was declared adopted, December 18, 1865, and on that day
slavery in the United States came to an end.
When the issue was finally shaped by the Emancipation Proclamation of
January 1, 1863, both sides set themselves anew for the grim
struggle--two years more of hard fighting. Since fighting it must be,
they bore themselves all, let us say, as brave men and women,--North and
South, white and black. The Confederates came often into dire
extremities. Men whose lives had been luxurious fared on the plainest
and hardest. Delicate women bore privations uncomplainingly, and toiled
and nursed and endured. Food, clothing, medicines were scant. Invasion
was borne, with its humiliation and suffering, its train of ravage and
desolation. The supporting motive was the common defense, the
comradeship of danger and of courage. The Confederacy and its flag had
won the devotion which sacrifice and suffering breed. Little thought was
there of slavery, little calculation of the future, as the siege grew
closer and the shadows darkened--but an indomitable purpose to hold on
and fight on. The chief hero of the Confederacy was Lee. He was the
embodiment and symbol of what the Southern people most believed in and
cared for. He was not one of those who had brought on the trouble; his
whole attitude had been defensive. He and his Army of Northern Virginia
were the shield of the South. A skilful commander, strong to strike and
wary to ward; his personality merged in the cause; gentle as he was
strong,--his army trusted and followed him with a faith that grew with
every victory, and did not wane under reverses.
Let the negroes in the war-time be judged in the calm retrospect of
history. Their fidelity meant the security of the families on every
lonely plantation from Virginia to Texas.
Instead of the horror of servile insurrection, women and children were
safe in their homes, supported and protected by their servants. It was
their labor that made it possible for the whole white population to take
the field. It was their fidelity and kindliness that kept the social
structure sound, even though pierced and plowed by the sword. Their
conduct was a practical refutation of the belief that they were in
general sufferers from inhuman treatment. It was a proof that slavery
had included better influences than its opponents had recognized. But it
suggested, too, that a people capable of such things under slavery were
fully ready for an upward step, and might be trusted with freedom.
They gave another proof of fitness for freedom when, enlisted in the
Union armies, they showed the qualities of good soldiership. They
accepted discipline, and developed under it. They were brave in battle,
and in victory they were guiltless of excess. It was a wonderful epoch
in the race's history,--the transition from servitude to freedom,--and
in that ordeal, first as slaves and then as soldiers, they showed
themselves worthy of the deliverance that had come at last.
As soldiers, they found leaders in the flower of the North. Such was
Robert Gould Shaw, of the best blood and training of Massachusetts; a
son of Harvard; serving from the first as private and then as captain;
called by Governor Andrew in 1863 to the command of the Fifty-fourth
Massachusetts, the first black regiment mustered into service; taking a
place which risked not battle peril only but social obloquy; training
his recruits into soldiers; leading them in a hopeless onset against the
batteries of Fort Wagner; falling at their head; buried in a ditch with
his men; honored in an immortal sculpture which portrays the young,
highbred hero in the midst of the humble, faithful men for whom he
gave his life.
All the energies of the North were at the highest stretch. In those
whose hearts were in the strife, at home or in the field, there was a
great glow and elation. The intensity of the time communicated itself to
industry and trade. There was an almost feverish activity; with heavy
taxation and a fluctuating currency--gold was long at a premium of
250--mills and markets and stores were in full tide of operation. The
North matched the South in personal courage and generalship; and greatly
outweighed it in numbers, material, and in the productivity engendered
in a free, urban, industrial society. The passion of the war touched
everything. The churches were strongholds of the national cause. The
Sanitary and Christian Commissions kept camp and home in close touch.
But under all this stir was the tragedy of wide-spread desolation and
bereavement. The multitudinous slaughter of campaigns like the
Wilderness had an awful background of woful families.
Arduous achievement, heroism and anguish, suffering and sacrifice for
the cause of the nation and humanity--that was the North's story in
those years. It is a sublime story as we look back:
The glory dies not, and the grief is past.
Once more the North was called on to solemnly decide, in the election of
1864. Against Lincoln was nominated by the Democrats, General McClellan,
himself a stainless soldier and a patriot, but supported by every
element of hostility to emancipation, of sympathy with the Southern
cause, and of impatience with the long and burdensome struggle. The
platform called for an immediate armistice, to be followed by a
convention of the States, or other peaceable measures for the
restoration of the Union. McClellan's letter of acceptance ignored the
platform, and declared strongly for the persistent maintenance of the
Union. The result of the election was a majority of 400,000 votes in
4,000,000 for Lincoln, every State supporting him save New Jersey,
Kentucky, and Delaware.
It was the greatness of the prize at stake that justified the cost.
Lowell sang the true song of the war, when the end was almost reached,
in the poem that records the sore loss to his own family,--his three
nephews, "likely lads as well could be,"--slain on the battle-field. In
that lofty, mournful verse, there is no drum and trumpet clangor, but
the high purpose whose roots are watered by tears:
Come, Peace, not like a mourner bowed
For honor lost an' dear ones wasted,
But proud, to meet a people proud,
With eyes thet tell o' triumph tasted!
Come, with han' grippin' on the hilt,
An' step that proves ye Victory's daughter!
Longin' for you, our sperits wilt
Like shipwrecked men's on raf's for water.
Come, while our country feels the lift
Of a gret instinct shoutin' "Forwards!"
An' knows thet freedom ain't a gift
Thet tarries long in han's o' cowards!
Come, sech ez mothers prayed for, when
They kissed their cross with lips thet quivered,
An' bring fair wages for brave men,
A nation saved, a race delivered.
With Grant and Lee locked in the last desperate struggle at Petersburg,
with final victory almost in sight, Lincoln spoke his second
inaugural,--too grave for exultation, with the note of humility and
faith. He is awed before the course of events since he stood there four
years ago. He feels the strangeness of both combatants appealing to the
same Bible and the same God. For himself and his people he utters the
fond hope, the fervent prayer, that "this awful scourge of war may pass
away." He accepts the suffering as the penalty of the nation--the whole
nation--for the sin of slavery. Humbly, resolutely, he faces with his
people the final effort, the sacred duty: "With malice toward none, with
charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the
right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the
nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for
his widow and his orphan, and to all which may achieve and cherish a
just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
CHAPTER XXVIII
RECONSTRUCTION: EXPERIMENTS AND IDEALS
"God uses a good many ugly tools to dig up the stumps and burn off the
forests and drain the swamps of a howling wilderness. He has used this
old Egyptian plow of slavery to turn over the sod of these fifteen
Southern States. Its sin consisted in not dying decently when its work
was done. It strove to live and make all the new world like it. Its
leaders avowed that their object was to put this belt of the continent
under the control of an aristocracy which believes that one-fifth of the
race is born booted and spurred and the other four-fifths ready for that
fifth to ride. The war was one of freedom and democracy against the
institutions that rest on slaves. It will take ten years for the country
to shed the scar of such a struggle. The state of society at the South
that produced the war will remain and trouble the land until freedom and
democracy and the spirit of the nineteenth century takes its place. Only
then can we grapple the Union together with hooks of steel, and make it
as lasting as the granite that underlies the continent."
These were the brave words of a Southern newspaper, the Galveston
_Bulletin_, in January, 1867, in the mid-throes of reconstruction. So it
was that the best minds of the reunited nation foresaw and accepted the
path on which we still are slowly mounting; often slipping, stumbling,
falling, but still getting upward.
When, on January 31, 1865, the vote of the House completed the
ratification by Congress of the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing
slavery, a burst of jubilant cheering swept the whole assembly, and a
wave of joy went through the North. Universal freedom seemed close at
hand. Two months more, and the Confederate capital fell, on April 3, and
still higher rose the triumph. Another week, and the North woke at
midnight, to forget sleep and rejoice as over the final
consummation,--Lee had surrendered! In those days it seemed to ardent
souls that all the sacrifices of the past four years were repaid, and
freedom and Union were completely won.
But real freedom of men, true union of a nation, are not achieved by
votes of Congress alone, or victories of the sword. The first and worst
was over, yet the work was only begun. And these first steps had been by
a rough and bitter road, of which the next stage could not be smooth or
sweet. The plow of slavery had been followed by the harrow of
war,--blossoms and fruitage could not instantly follow.
Lincoln practically made his own the motto ascribed to the Jesuits, "The
goal of to-day, the starting-point of to-morrow." Even before to-day's
goal was reached, his eye was measuring the next stage. While his
patient shoulders were still bowed under the weight of war, his hands
were reaching out to the work of reconstruction. In December, 1863, a
year after the Emancipation Proclamation, he issued another
proclamation. In this he offered full amnesty to all who had taken arms
against the government, on condition simply of an oath to support the
Constitution, and all laws and proclamations concerning slavery until
such were legally overruled. From this amnesty were excepted those who
had held diplomatic or high military offices in the Confederacy; those
who had left Congress or the army or navy to aid the Confederate cause;
and those who had maltreated negro prisoners of war. Whether Lincoln in
his own mind regarded the official classes as more blameworthy or more
dangerous than their followers, we can only surmise; but he doubtless
considered that public opinion was not ripe--the war being still
flagrant--for a wider offer of pardon.
Further, he invited a return of the seceded States to their former
relations, under these conditions: Wherever a number of voters equal to
one-tenth of the registered list of 1860, having individually taken the
oath of allegiance, shall unite to form a loyal State government, their
organization will be recognized by the Federal government. It is
desirable to retain as far as practicable the old State boundaries,
constitution, and laws. Such a State government may make regulations for
the negroes,--if their freedom and education are provided for,--as a
"laboring, homeless, and landless class." The admission of
representatives and senators must depend on the action of Congress.
Under this plan--regarded by the President as somewhat tentative and
provisional, and expressly made dependent on Congress for its
consummation by the admission of senators and representatives--within
the next twelve months governments were established in three States
where the Union arms were partly in the ascendant, Louisiana, Arkansas,
and Tennessee. Congress, in July, 1864, passed a reconstruction bill on
more radical lines; assuming that the rebel States were by their own act
extinguished as States and were to be created _de novo_; directing that
a provisional governor be forthwith appointed for every such State;
requiring the new Legislatures to abolish slavery, exclude high
Confederate officials from office, and annul the Confederate debt. The
President let this bill fail for want of his signature, and in a
proclamation explained his objections: He was not ready to accept the
"State suicide" theory; he did not want to rest the abolition of
slavery on the fiat of Congress (he was looking for the adoption of the
Thirteenth Amendment); and he was unwilling to sacrifice the provisional
governments already set up in Louisiana and Arkansas. If in any other
State a movement on the congressional plan was initiated, that might do
well; but for any hard-and-fast, all-round plan the time was not ripe.
The radicals, led by Wade and Henry Winter Davis, chafed bitterly, but
Lincoln was not an easy man to fix a quarrel on.
In the following winter, 1864-5, the new Louisiana Legislature,
recognized and encouraged by the President, elected two senators who
applied at Washington for admission. The judiciary committee, headed by
Lyman Trumbull, reported in their favor, and the large majority of the
Senate took the same view. But Sumner was strongly opposed to beginning
the readmission of the rebel States to congressional power until the
rights of the freedmen were fully and finally established. Aided by two
other radicals, Wade of Ohio and Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, he
"talked against time," and defeated action until the end of the session.
Under senatorial usage it was legitimate--but it was exasperating. The
little world of Washington, always greatly given to tempests in a
teapot, looked for a break between the President and the foremost man of
his supporters. What it saw instead was, at the inauguration ball, Mr.
Sumner entering in company with the President and with Mrs. Lincoln on
his arm! No, Lincoln was not going to quarrel with Sumner--nor with any
one, if it lay with him.
Richmond was taken, and through its streets moved the gaunt form of the
President, his eyes taking grave, kind note of all. Back to Washington,
and the supreme word comes at last. Lee has surrendered, the war is
over, the victory won! A cheering, exultant crowd beset the White
House. Lincoln came out on the balcony, said a word of response, and
invited them to come back two days later for a fuller word. When they
came again, he talked to them and to the country. His whole theme was,
What is our next duty? Here is the next step, the first of the "erring
sisters" to return is to be welcomed back. Louisiana has adopted a
constitution abolishing slavery, establishing public schools for black
and white alike, and allowing the Legislature at its discretion to
extend suffrage to the blacks. Under this constitution 12,000 voters
have been enrolled. The Legislature has met and ratified the Thirteenth
Amendment. Can we do better than to accept and restore them to the full
privileges of statehood? For them would it not also be wise to extend
the suffrage to the most intelligent negroes, and to those who have
served in the Union army? As to all the seceded States, the question
whether they have ever been out of the Union is "a merely pernicious
abstraction." The real question is, how to get them again into proper
practical relations with the Union. "Concede that the new government of
Louisiana is to what it should be only as the egg is to the fowl, we
shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it." Let
us be flexible as to our methods, inflexible as to vital principles.
These were his last words to his countrymen. Three days later, April 14,
as he sat in Ford's theatre,--the strain of responsibility lightened by
an hour of kindly amusement--there fell on him, from an assassin's hand,
the stroke of unconsciousness and speedy death. For himself, how could
he have died better! At the summit of achievement, hailed by the world's
acclaim, in the prime of manly strength, unweakened by decay, unshadowed
by fear; a life of heroic service crowned by a martyr's death; a place
won in the nation's heart of such love and gratitude as has been given
to no other,--how better could he have died?
But never was heavier bereavement than his death brought to the American
people. It was not sorrow only, but lasting loss, beyond estimation and
beyond repair. We know not how in the sum of things all seeming evil may
find place, but to human eyes seldom was man taken who could so ill be
spared. By nature and capacity he was above all else a peace-maker.
Called to be captain in a great war, his largest contribution to its
success had been in holding united to the common purpose men most widely
varying among themselves. He said, toward the end, that he did not know
that he had done better than any one else could, except perhaps at one
point,--he did think he had been pretty successful in keeping the North
united. And while he did this, while he kept radicals and conservatives,
Abolitionists and Unionists, New Englanders and Kentuckians, loyal to
the common cause, he also shaped that cause toward the highest aims that
his various constituency would admit. He could not bring them to his own
highest thought,--they would not be persuaded to try compensated
emancipation and peaceful reunion instead of war to the extremity. But
he did lift a war for the Union to a war for freedom also, and so direct
it that from the strife should emerge not the old, but a nobler nation.
And now, the harder half was to be done! Instead of generalship,
statesmanship; instead of animal courage, justice and kindness toward
former foes; instead of holding the North together, to bring North and
South together; that was the gigantic task now to be wrought. Who so fit
for it as he? And for want of him, grievous and slow has been the
journey.
From the first thrill of passionate grief, men turned to ask anxiously
what the new President was to be. He had been selected with that
carelessness as to the Vice-Presidency which is a tradition of American
politics. Had the convention which renominated Lincoln chosen with care
the man best fitted to aid or possibly succeed him in his work--had they
for instance chosen John A. Andrew of Massachusetts--history might have
been very different. But they took Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, with
little scrutiny of his qualities, but desiring to broaden their ticket
by including a Southern Unionist. Johnson had been bred as a tailor,
with only the meagerest schooling, with no training in the law, going
straight from his trade into politics, and by native force rising to the
senatorship. He was regarded, and rightly, as a man of honesty,
patriotism, courage, and rough energy. He had been conspicuous in
denouncing the seceders with the heat of a border-State Unionist, and
something of the uncontrolled temper of the "poor white." "Treason must
be made odious," had been his cry, "traitors must be punished." In that
war-heated time, there were good men who thought they read the purpose
of the Almighty in removing the too kindly Lincoln, that the guilty
rebels might be more severely scourged.
CHAPTER XXIX
RECONSTRUCTION: THE FIRST PLAN
The new President gave at once the best possible reassurance as to his
general course by retaining all the members of Lincoln's Cabinet. They
remained, not as a temporary formality, but for a considerable time in
full harmony with the President. Chase having left the Cabinet for the
chief-justiceship, by far the two strongest secretaries remaining were
Seward and Stanton. Seward had been struck down at the same time with
Lincoln, and dangerously wounded, but after a few weeks was able to
resume his duties. Thus the two foremost men, after Lincoln, of the
Republican party, Sumner and Seward, had been murderously assaulted, yet
neither of them was embittered or altered in his course. Seward probably
had great influence on President Johnson's early measures. The degree of
that influence is a disputed point among historians, but the internal
evidence points strongly to his having had a large share in the
President's original plans, and materially aided their execution, though
Johnson's strong will and hot temper marred and thwarted Seward's
efforts. One of the secretary's special powers was a genial and
persuasive skill in conversation; his historic place as the Republican
premier gave him influence with the President; he had been in full
sympathy with Lincoln's late course; and his constitutional theories and
his optimism appear in the reconstruction scheme which the President
soon proposed. Responsibility had steadied and sobered Johnson; his
vindictiveness toward the South had disappeared,--one guesses with
Seward's aid; and his plan looked to a prompt and early return of the
seceded States.
His proclamation of amnesty, indeed, issued May 29, was more numerous in
its exceptions than Lincoln's; including almost the entire official
class throughout the South, and adding all such as held property in
excess of $20,000,--which in theory was little other than an attempt to
behead the political community of all its intelligent or wealthy
members. But the added clause providing for a pardon of such by the
President on special application proved in practice more significant
than the formal exemptions. Scarcely an application for amnesty was
refused, and it is recorded that in less than a twelvemonth 14,000 such
applications were made and granted.
On the same day, May 29, President Johnson by proclamation appointed a
provisional governor of North Carolina, and ordered an election of
delegates to a constitutional convention. By July 13, he had issued
similar proclamations for Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina
and Florida. Texas's turn came a little later, the last embers of the
war lingering there for a while. In Virginia, the President had
recognized a shadowy loyal State government which had kept up a nominal
existence. The three other seceded States,--Louisiana, Arkansas and
Tennessee,--had already the State governments established under Lincoln,
though unrepresented in Congress.
These overtures for formal reconstruction came to communities
impoverished, forlorn, and chaotic, almost beyond imagination. Property,
industry, social order, had been torn up by the plowshare of war. The
prolongation of resistance until defeat was complete and overwhelming
had ended all power and all wish to contend with the inevitable. The
people, groping back toward even a bare livelihood,--toward some settled
order, some way of public and private life,--met eagerly the advances
of the President. Constitutional conventions were elected and met,
within the remaining months of 1865; they were chosen on the old basis
of suffrage, conditioned by the exceptions to amnesty and by the oaths
of allegiance; these conventions based the new constitutions largely on
the old; they affirmed the ordinances of secession to be null and void;
they repudiated the Confederate debt, and they declared that slavery no
longer existed. Legislatures were duly elected, and proceeded to enact
laws. They all ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, though Mississippi and
Alabama affixed some qualifications to their assent, while Texas was
still unreconstructed and could not act; and Kentucky and Delaware gave
a negative. The President and Secretary of State, December 18, declared
the adoption of the amendment by the vote of 31 States out of 36.
Slavery was finally and forever abolished.
President Johnson used his influence to have the new constitutions open
the door to a qualified negro suffrage. He telegraphed to the
Mississippi convention, urging that the suffrage be extended to all
negroes who could read and write, or who possessed $250 worth of real
estate. Well would it have been if that appeal had been heeded.
Thus far, reconstruction had moved with singular swiftness and ease. Too
swift and easy was the recovery to be trusted--so thought some--where
the disease had been so desperate. But the Cabinet, including the grim
and jealous Stanton, held with the President. More, the autumn
Republican conventions throughout the North passed resolutions cordially
approving the President's course and its results--all, with the ominous
exceptions of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, controlled respectively by
Thaddeus Stevens and Sumner, the leader of the House and the foremost
man in the Senate.
Thus was initiated and begun the first of the three successive plans of
reconstruction. Before seeing its fate, it is opportune to consider the
general ideal of the situation, as presented by two of the greatest men
of the North, the two, we may say, who best comprehended the whole case;
the one standing in the Church and the other in the State, but alike in
breadth of mind and loftiness of spirit--Henry Ward Beecher and John A.
Andrew.
During the war, the Northern churches had been centers of inspiration to
the national cause, and Plymouth church among the foremost. Beecher had
made a series of speeches in England in 1862, which did much to turn the
tide of English opinion. The disclaimers by the Federal Government of a
crusade against slavery had perplexed and divided the anti-slavery
sentiment of Great Britain; the issues at stake were little understood;
the stoppage of the cotton supply aroused a commercial opposition to the
war; there was some degree of aristocratic sympathy with the Southern
oligarchy; and a wider sympathy with the weaker of the two combatants
that was fighting pluckily against odds. The North had few strong
friends, except a group of radical leaders--Mill, Bright, Cobden and
their allies,--and a host of working people, including even the
suffering cotton operatives, who instinctively recognized and supported
the cause of the common people. Beecher's eloquent and lucid orations
went far to convince that the Union cause was the cause of liberty; and
no less effect was produced by the splendid courage and self-possession
with which he faced and mastered one audience after another where the
mob tried to howl him down. After the close of the war, when a company
went down to raise the Stars and Stripes once more over Fort Sumter,
Beecher was the chosen orator, and his speech was inspired by the spirit
of fraternity and reconciliation. In a sermon in his church, October 29,
1865, he outlined with a master's hand the principles of
reconstruction. The South should be restored at the earliest possible
moment to a share in the general government. Idle to ask them to repent
of secession; enough if they recognize that it is forever disallowed.
The best guarantee for the future is the utter destruction of slavery.
Let there be no further humbling: "I think it to be the great need of
this nation to save the self-respect of the South." What then are the
necessary conditions of reconstruction? The Southern States should
accede to the abolition of slavery by the Constitution. They should
establish the freedman's "right to labor as he pleases, where he
pleases, and for whom he pleases," with full control of his own
earnings; he should be the equal of all men before the courts. What
about suffrage? It is the natural right of all men, says Beecher; but,
tempering as usual his intellectual radicalism with practical
conservatism, he goes on: It will be useless to enforce negro suffrage
on the South against the opposition of the whites. As to the general
treatment of the freedmen, "the best intentions of the government will
be defeated, if the laws that are made touching this matter are such as
are calculated to excite the animosity and hatred of the white people in
the South toward the black people there. I except the single decree of
emancipation. That must stand, though men dislike it." But beyond that,
all measures instituted under the act of emancipation for the blacks in
order to be permanently useful must have the cordial consent of the wise
and good citizens of the South. "These men (the negroes) are scattered
in fifteen States; they are living contiguous to their old masters; the
kindness of the white man in the South is more important to them than
all the policies of the nation put together." As to suffrage, whatever
the colored man's theoretical right, "you will never be able to secure
it and maintain it for him, except by making him so intelligent that men
cannot deny it to him. You cannot long, in this country, deny to a man
any civil right for which he is manifestly qualified." It will be a
sufficient beginning if the vote is given to such as can read and write
and have acquired a certain amount of property. As a beginning, a
stepping-stone to larger things, it might suffice even to give the
suffrage to black men who have borne arms for the Union. And,
emphatically, the negroes should be given such education as will make
them worthy of citizenship. "You may pass laws declaring that black men
are men, and that they are our equals in social position; but unless you
can make them thoughtful, industrious, self-respecting, and intelligent;
unless, in short, you can make them what you say they have a right to
be, those laws will be in vain." The work of education should be done
for black and white alike; the South is not to be treated as a pagan
land to which missionaries are to be sent, but as part of our common
country, to which the richer and more prosperous section ought to give
aid. "I do not think it would be wise for the North to pour ministers,
colporteurs and schoolmasters into the South, making a too marked
distinction between the black people and the white. We ought to carry
the gospel and education to the whites and blacks alike. Our heart
should be set toward our country and all its people, without distinction
of caste, class, or color."
Governor Andrew had been the fit leader of Massachusetts through the war
period. He was strong as an administrator; he inspired and voiced the
patriotism of the people; he supported the forward policy without
harassing the President; and he was the first governor to organize negro
troops. Now, on his retirement to private life, he gave a valedictory
address, January 4, 1866, which was a worthy sequel to his inaugural of
five years before. He specially emphasized the need of a generous and
inclusive policy toward the Southern people and their recent leaders.
"I am confident we cannot reorganize political society with any
security: 1. Unless we let in the people to a co-operation, and not
merely an arbitrarily selected portion of them. 2. Unless we give those
who are by intelligence and character the natural leaders of the people,
and who surely will lead them by-and-by, an opportunity to lead them
now.... The truth is, the public opinion of the white race in the South
was in favor of the rebellion." The loyalists were not in general the
strongest minds and characters, and when the revolution came they were
swept off their feet. For present purposes, there should be no
discrimination. "The capacity of leadership is a gift, not a device.
They whose courage, talents, and will, entitle them to lead, will
lead.... Why not try them? They are the most hopeful subjects to deal
with in the very nature of the case. They have the brain and experience
and the education to enable them to understand the exigences of the
present situation."
The ideals thus presented by Beecher and Andrew,--as practical, we see
now after forty years, as they were lofty,--were at the time somewhat
like what Catholic theologians call "counsels of perfection"--precepts
of conduct too high to be practiced except by the saintly. They fell on
the ears of a people whose two sections had long been struggling in
deadly opposition, and who still surveyed each other through eyes
inflamed by the bitter struggle. Could it be hoped that the North would
invite co-operation as of fellow-patriots from those whom they had been
denouncing as arch-traitors? And was it to be expected that the South,
which had seceded and battled on the ground that the negro was fit only
for slavery, should at once begin heartily and practically to establish
and elevate him as a freeman?
CHAPTER XXX
CONGRESS AND THE "BLACK CODES"
Congress assembled at the beginning of December, 1865, and at the very
outset declared that the work of reconstruction must pass under its
hands. Before the President's message was read, Thaddeus Stevens, the
leader of the House, moved that a joint committee of fifteen on
reconstruction, be appointed by the House and Senate; and that until
that committee had reported no senator or representative from the lately
seceded States should be admitted. This action was taken at once, by a
large majority in both houses, and the committee was promptly appointed,
with Senator Fessenden at its head. Then the President's message was
read,--a very able paper, broad and statesmanlike in tone, recounting
the President's action and the choice of conventions and Legislatures in
the seceded States; their repudiation of secession and slavery; the
inauguration of loyal State governments;--this, with an invitation to
Congress to accept and co-operate in this policy, and a hopeful view of
the general situation. The message was favorably received, and for a
moment it looked as if the President and Congress might work in harmony.
But the claim of Congress to a paramount voice in the settlement was
well based, not only in constitutional theory, but in the immediate
facts. Congress came fresh from the people; its members knew how the
currents of popular thought and feeling ran. The President was
comparatively out of touch with the nation; he had, so to speak, no
personal constituency; he was a Southern loyalist, apart from the mass
of both South and North. Further, this Congress was personally a strong
body of men. They represented in an unusual degree not merely the
average sentiment but the better sentiment of the North. To glance at a
few of their leaders: Thaddeus Stevens was a Pennsylvanian, a leader at
the bar, active in anti-slavery politics, conspicuous by his successful
defense of the State's public school system; a man of strong convictions
and strong passions, a natural fighter; skillful in parliamentary
management; vigorous and often bitter in debate; not scrupulous in
political methods; loyal to his cause and his friends, and vindictive to
his enemies; an efficient party leader, but in no high sense a
statesman. Up to his death in 1868 he exercised such a mastery over the
Republican majority in the House as no man since has approached. He is
sometimes spoken of as if he had been the ruling spirit in
reconstruction, but this seems a mistake. He was a leader in it, so far
as his convictions coincided with the strong popular current; but his
favorite ideas were often set aside. He was an early advocate of a wide
confiscation, but that policy found no support; and at the crucial
points of the reconstruction proceedings he was often thwarted and
superseded by more moderate men.
Charles Sumner was a high-minded idealist and a scholar, devoted to
noble ends, but not well versed in human nature. He was a lover of Man,
but with men he was not much acquainted. His oratory was elaborate and
ornate, and he unduly estimated the power of words. Sometimes, says
Senator Hoar, he seemed to think the war was to be settled by
speech-making, and was impatient of its battles as an interruption--like
a fire-engine rumbling past while he was orating. But he had large
influence, partly from his thoroughly disinterested character, and
partly because beyond any other man in public life he represented the
elements of moral enthusiasm among the people. His counterpart was
Henry Wilson, his colleague in the Senate. Wilson had risen from the
shoe-maker's bench, and knew the common people as a cobbler knows his
tools. He was genial in temperament; public-spirited and generous in his
aims; a most skilful tactician, and not over-scrupulous. He joined the
Know-nothings, with no sympathy for their proscriptive creed, but in the
break-up of parties using them for the anti-slavery cause,--and to
secure his own election to the United States Senate. He was a good
fighter, but without rancor; and he was an admirable interpreter of the
real democracy. Senator Hoar, in his autobiography, graphically
describes how at some crisis Wilson would travel swiftly over the State,
from Boston to Berkshire, visit forty shops and factories in a day, talk
with politicians all night, study the main currents and the local
eddies; and after a week or two of this--seeming meanwhile to be backing
and filling in his own mind--would "strike a blow which had in it not
only the vigor of his own arm, but the whole vigor and strength of the
public sentiment which he had gathered and which he represented."
Prominent in the Senate was "bluff Ben Wade" of Ohio, an old-time
anti-slavery man, radical, vigorous, a stout friend and foe. Another
conspicuous radical was Zachariah Chandler of Michigan. He was born in
New Hampshire, went West early in life, and was a chief organizer and
leader of the Republican party in Michigan. He was a mixture of Yankee
shrewdness and Western energy; patriotic, masterful, somewhat
coarse-grained and materialistic; and, like many of his associates,
better suited for controversy and war than for conciliation and
construction. Of a higher type were three men who stood near the head in
the Senate,--John Sherman of Ohio, Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, and
William P. Fessenden of Maine. In the qualities for solid work, few men
of his time surpassed Sherman. He was wise in framing legislation, and a
good administrator,--an upright, moderate, serviceable man. Trumbull, of
Connecticut birth, was well trained in the law and eminent as a
constitutional lawyer. He made his serious entrance into public life
along with Lincoln, and was his near friend and adviser. He was an able
though not a brilliant debater; a man of independent convictions and
thorough courage. Fessenden, like Trumbull, was entitled to rank as a
real statesman. Like Trumbull he had no popular arts, and where Trumbull
was reticent and withdrawn in manner, Fessenden was austere and
sometimes irascible. In private character both were above reproach.
Fessenden had a finely-trained and richly-equipped mind. In an
emergency, after Chase's retirement, he accepted the secretaryship of an
almost bankrupt treasury, and handled it well. His devotion to duty was
unreserved; he was an admirable debater; and he had the high power of
framing legislation. His was the most important work of the
reconstruction committee, and Trumbull, as chairman of the judiciary
committee, had a chief hand in the other leading measures. The Democrats
were few and not strong in leadership; their ablest man was Reverdy
Johnson of Maryland,---highly educated and large-minded. With these were
other senators of repute; and in the House there were abundant men of
mark,--Colfax, Blaine, Banks, Boutwell, Dawes, Conkling, Henry J.
Raymond, Randall, Hayes, Garfield, Bingham, Shellabarger, Voorhees,
Elihu B. Washburn;--space is wanting to name others, or to individually
characterize these.
In estimating the work of reconstruction we must take account of the
character of the men who shaped it. Taking these leaders as a body, they
fall into groups,--Sumner for the uncompromising idealists; the radicals
by temperament, like Stevens, Wade, and Chandler; the men of higher
training, minds of the statesman's type, and a certain austerity of
temper, such as Fessenden, Trumbull, and Sherman. Among them all there
was a deficiency of that blending of large view, close insight, and
genial humanity, which marked Lincoln. Small discredit to them that they
were not his peers,--but the work in hand demanded just such a
combination.
It is to be remembered that all of these, like the mass of the Northern
people, had been for many years contending with all their might for
certain ends, and in keenest hostility to the Southern whites. They had
fought for the Union and freedom; the South had fought for the
Confederacy and slavery. By sheer overpowering physical force the
Southern armies had been beaten down, and peace restored, and in name at
least the national authority re-established. But by conviction, habit,
instinct, these opponents yet hot from the battle-field would scrutinize
with jealous care the real success of their principles and the
disposition of their late foes.
The President's policy, as laid down in his message, was at once
challenged in Congress. Stevens opened the debate in the House, and,
without directly assailing the President, antagonized his theory that
the States, like the Union, were indestructible, that secession had only
temporarily suspended their relation, and that they now by right
recurred at once to their normal position. Against this Stevens
maintained that by their rebellion these States had, as organizations,
committed suicide, that they now were in the position of conquered
territory, and that out of this territory Congress was to create new
States on whatever terms it judged most expedient. The President's
theory found an able supporter in Henry J. Raymond, who had just
exchanged the editorship of the New York _Times_ for a seat in Congress.
But he had only a single ally among his Republican colleagues, and the
lonely couple, with four Republican senators, proved to be the only
habitual supporters of the President in the party that had elected him.
But the Democrats came to his side with an alacrity that strengthened
the Republican opposition. Their party had as a whole leaned toward the
South during the war, and they now welcomed the easy terms held out by
the President to their old associates. The Republican doctrine was best
formulated by Shellabarger of Ohio, who, without going to the full
length of Stevens's theory, maintained the essential right of Congress
to lay down the conditions on which the seceded States could resume
their old relation with the Federal Government. That seemed the just and
inevitable logic of the situation; and it was expressed in as much
conformity with the Constitution as was practicable after the rude
jostle of a four years' war.
Meantime, Republican leaders in the Senate--Sumner, Wilson and
Fessenden--were announcing the same doctrine, and were earnestly
declaring that the actual conditions of the South called for stronger
remedies than the President had provided. A joint resolution brought
before Congress a report which had been made to the President by Carl
Schurz, after a tour of several months for which he had been specially
commissioned. With this report, the President sent also one from General
Grant, whom he had asked, during an official trip of a few days, to
observe the general disposition and temper of the Southern people. Grant
stated his conclusion to be that "the mass of thinking men of the South
accept the present situation of affairs in good faith"; and that they
cordially acquiesce in the restoration of the national sovereignty and
the abolition of slavery; and Grant's name carried great weight.
But Mr. Schurz's much longer and more careful study had brought him to
very different conclusions. He was a trained observer and thinker; a
German refugee after the disturbances of 1848; a leader among the
emancipationists in Missouri before the war, a general in the Union
army, and a political radical. Mr. Schurz recapitulated his observations
and conclusions, as he then reported them, in an article in _McClure's
Magazine_ for January, 1904; and they come now with increased weight
after a life-time of disinterested and sagacious public service. That he
found the Southern whites acquiescing in their defeat only as of
necessity, conquered but not convinced--is no matter of surprise; though
Mr. Schurz seems somewhat to have shared the Northern expectation that
their late foes should take the attitude of repentant sinners. But as to
their practical attitude toward the negro, his testimony is important.
He relates that he found the general assertion to be "You cannot make
the negro work without compulsion." This conviction he encountered
everywhere; all facts to the contrary were brushed aside, and every
instance of idleness or vagabondage was cited as proof positive of the
negro's unwillingness to labor. The planter who seriously maintained in
Mr. Schurz's presence that one of his negroes was unfit for freedom
because he refused to submit to a whipping, went only a little further
than his neighbors.
As to actual behavior of the negroes, under this sudden and tremendous
change of condition, certain facts were noted; not a single act of
vengeance was charged against them; a great part, probably the large
majority, remained or soon went back to work for their old employers;
but a considerable part began an aimless roaming to enjoy their new
liberty, or huddle around the stations where the agents of the
Freedmen's Bureau doled out some relief. As to their education, popular
opinion was no less unfavorable than as to their labor. The common
expressions were "learning will spoil the negro for work," "negro
education would be the ruin of the South," and even "the elevation of
the blacks would be the degradation of the whites." In practical
application of these views, negro schools were frequently broken up and
the school-houses burned; and in many places they were only safe under
the immediate protection of the Federal troops. After many further
particulars, especially as to the oppressive laws passed by the new
governments, Mr. Schurz sums up: "To recapitulate; the white people of
the South were harassed by pressing necessities, and most of them in a
troubled and greatly excited state of mind. The emancipation of the
slaves had destroyed the traditional labor system upon which they had
depended. Free negro labor was still inconceivable to them. There were
exceptions, but, as a rule, their ardent, and in a certain sense not
unnatural, desire was to resist its introduction, and to save or restore
as much of the slave labor system as possible."
It was the character of the laws and ordinances passed under these
circumstances which was to the better sentiment of the North the most
concrete and convincing argument against restoring the Southern States
by the short and easy road proposed by President Johnson. It is to those
laws, and the condition underlying them, that we must ascribe the
refusal of Congress--backed by Northern conviction--to confirm the early
restoration which at first seemed so promising. So those laws deserve
careful consideration, as well as the situation which led to them.
The Southern people, blacks and whites, were in a position of almost
unexampled difficulty. To the ravages of war and invasion, of
impoverishment and bereavement--and, as it fell out, to two successive
seasons of disastrous weather for crops,--was added at the outset a
complete disarrangement of the principal supply of labor. The mental
overturning was as great as the material. To the negroes "freedom"
brought a vague promise of life without toil or trouble. The hard facts
soon undeceived them. But for the indulgent Providence they at first
hoped for, some occasional and partial substitute appeared in the
offices of the Freedmen's Bureau. This had been established by Congress,
in March, 1865, with the laudable design of helping to adjust the
freedmen to their new condition; to make temporary provision for the
extreme physical wants of some; to aid them in arrangements for labor
and education; and, as was at first contemplated, to lease to them
abandoned or confiscated lands, in plots of forty acres, for three
years. This land provision was soon abandoned, there being no
confiscation to provide the necessary land; but it started the
expectation of "forty acres and a mule," which misled many a freedman.
As chief of the Bureau was appointed General O. O. Howard, a
distinguished Union commander, of the highest personal character, and
entirely devoted to his new work; and under him was a commissioner with
a working force in each of the States. The Bureau accomplished
considerable good; but its administration on the whole was not of the
highest class; among its subordinates were some unfit men; and a good
deal of offense and irritation attended its operations. At most, it
touched only the circumference of the problem. Three and a half millions
of newly enfranchised, ignorant men, women and children! What should
provide for the helpless among them, especially for the children, whom
the master's care had supported? How should order be maintained in the
lower mass, half-brutalized, whom slavery had at least restrained from
vagabondage, rapine, and crime? And how should the whole body be induced
to furnish the dynamic, driving power of industry essential to the
community's needs? These questions the South essayed to answer in part
by a system of laws, of which we may take as a fair specimen the
legislation of Mississippi--the only State which had enacted this class
of laws before Congress met,--as they are summarized in the thorough and
impartial book of Professor J. W. Burgess, _Reconstruction and the
Constitution_.
The law of apprenticeship ran thus: Negro children under eighteen,
orphans or receiving no support from their parents, to be apprenticed,
by clerk of probate court, to some suitable person,--by preference the
former master or mistress; the court to fix the terms, having the
interest of the minor particularly in view; males to be apprenticed till
end of twenty-first year, females to end of eighteenth. No other
punishment to be permitted than the common law permits to a parent or
guardian. If the apprentice runs away, he is to be apprehended and
returned, or, if he refuses to return, to be confined or put under bonds
till the next term of the court, which shall then decide as to the cause
of his desertion, and if it appears groundless compel his return, or if
he has been ill-treated fine the master not more than $100 for the
benefit of his apprentice. This statute seems not oppressive but
beneficent.
The law of vagrancy provided that all freedmen having no lawful
employment or business, or who are found unlawfully assembling, and all
white persons so assembling in company with freedmen, or "usually
associating with freedmen, free negroes, or mulattoes, on terms of
equality," are to be deemed vagrants, and fined, a white man not more
than $200, a negro not more than $50, and imprisoned, a white man not
more than six months, a negro not more than ten days. If the negro does
not pay his fine within five days, he is to be hired out by the sheriff
to the person who will pay his fine and costs for the shortest term of
service. The same treatment is to be applied to any negro who fails to
pay his tax. This statute meant legal servitude for any negro not
finding employment, and the same penalty for a white man who merely
consorted with negroes on equal terms.
The law of civil rights provided that all negroes are to have the same
rights with whites as to personal property, as to suing and being sued,
but they must not rent or lease lands or tenements except in
incorporated towns and cities, and under the control of the corporate
authorities. Provision is made for the intermarriage of negroes, and the
legalization of previous connections; but intermarriage between whites
and negroes is to be punished with imprisonment for life. Negroes may be
witnesses in all civil cases in which negroes are parties, and in
criminal cases where the alleged crime is by a white person against a
negro. Every negro shall have a lawful home and employment, and hold
either a public license to do job-work or a written contract for labor.
If a laborer quits his employment before the time specified in the
contract, he is to forfeit his wages for the year up to the time of
quitting. Any one enticing a laborer to desert his work, or selling or
giving food or raiment or any other thing knowingly to a deserter from
contract labor, may be punished by fine or imprisonment. No negro is to
carry arms without a public license. Any negro guilty of riot, affray,
trespass, seditious speeches, insulting gestures, language or acts, or
committing any other misdemeanor, to be fined and imprisoned, or if the
fine is not paid in five days to be hired out to whoever will pay fine
and costs. All penal and criminal laws against offenses by slaves or
free negroes to continue in force except as specially repealed.
Many of these clauses speak eloquently for themselves, and as to the law
in general Professor Burgess, who certainly has no anti-Southern bias,
comments: "Almost every act, word or gesture of the negro, not
consonant with good taste and good manners as well as good morals, was
made a crime or misdemeanor, for which he could first be fined by the
magistrates and then be consigned to a condition of almost slavery for
an indefinite time, if he could not pay the bill." And Professor Burgess
adds, "This is a fair sample of the legislation subsequently passed by
all the States reconstructed under President Johnson's plan."
The case against this class of laws may be left--in the necessary limits
of space--with this careful and moderate statement, though the
temptation is strong to quote from Mr. Schurz and other authorities
further specimens of the great body of harassing legislation, both state
and local;--the establishment of pillory and whipping-post; the
imposition of unjust taxes, with heavy license fees for the practice of
mechanic arts; requirements of certified employment under some white
man; prohibition of preaching or religious meetings without a special
license; sale into indefinite servitude for slight occasion; and so
on--a long, grim chapter. Whatever excuses may be pleaded for these
laws, under the circumstances of the South, all have this
implication,--that the negro was unfit for freedom. He was to be kept as
near to slavery as possible; to be made, "if no longer the slave of an
individual master, the slave of society." And further, as to the broad
conditions of the time, two things are to be noted. The physical
violence was almost wholly practiced by the whites against the negroes.
Bands of armed white men, says Mr. Schurz, patrolled the highways (as in
the days of slavery) to drive back wanderers; murder and mutilation of
colored men and women were common,--"a number of such cases I had
occasion to examine myself." In some districts there was a reign of
terror among the freedmen. And finally, the anticipation of failure of
voluntary labor speedily proved groundless. A law was at work more
efficient than any on the statute-books,--Nature's primal law, "Work or
starve!" Many, probably a majority of the freedmen, worked on for their
old masters, for wages. The others, after some brief experience of
idleness and starvation, found work as best they could. No tropical
paradise of laziness was open to the Southern negro. The first Christmas
holidays, looked forward to with vague hope by the freedmen and vague
fear by the whites, passed without any visitation of angels or
insurrection of fiends. In a word, the most apparent justifications for
the reactionary legislation,--danger of rapine and outrage from
emancipated barbarians, and a failure of the essential supply of
labor--proved alike groundless.
As the facts of the situation became known, not only by Mr. Schurz's
report, but by news from the Southern capitals and by various
evidence--it was very clear that Congress could not and would not set
the seal of national authority on any such settlement as this. Granted,
and freely, that no millennium was to be expected, that a long and
painful adjustment was necessary,--yet it was out of the question that
any political theory or any optimistic hopes should induce acquiescence
in the legal establishment of semi-slavery throughout the South. It was
not Stevens's rancor, nor Sumner's unpracticability, but the serious
conviction of the North, educated and tempered by long debate and bitter
sacrifice, which ordained that the work of freedom must not be thrown
into ruins.
CHAPTER XXXI
RECONSTRUCTION: THE SECOND PLAN
Congress addressed itself, in the first instance, to extending and
prolonging that provision for the freedmen which it had already made
through the Freedmen's Bureau. A bill was reported, having the weighty
sanction of Senator Trumbull and the judiciary committee, greatly
increasing the force of officials under the Bureau; putting it under the
military administration of the President and so with the direct support
of the army; and broadening its functions to include the building of
school-houses and asylums for the freedmen, and a wide jurisdiction over
all civil and criminal cases in which local laws made an unjust
discrimination between the races. The bill passed the Senate and House,
by the full party majority. It was sent to the President, February 10,
1866, and nine days later he returned it with a veto message, calmly and
ably argued. He objected to the bill as a war measure after peace had
been proclaimed. He took exception to the intrusion of military
authority upon the sphere of the civil courts, and to the extension of
Federal authority in behalf of black men beyond what had ever been
exercised in behalf of white men. The message was strong enough to win a
few of the orthodox Republicans, including ex-Governor Morgan of New
York, and the two-thirds vote necessary to carry the bill over the veto
could not be gained.
Up to this time there seems reason to believe that while the Republicans
in Congress were firm in claiming for that body a decisive voice in
reconstruction, yet a majority of them were more favorable to the policy
of President Johnson than to that of Sumner and Stevens. But now, upon
the necessity of safeguarding the freedmen by exceptional measures in a
wholly exceptional time, the preponderance of conviction turned against
him in Congress and in the country. His own acts quickly converted that
first opposition into hostility and alarm.
Until now President Johnson, whatever dissent he might provoke, had
appeared as a dignified statesman. But three days after his veto, on
February 22--Washington's birthday--a cheering crowd called the
President to the balcony of the White House. They heard a speech,--how
different from what Lincoln had spoken in the same place in the previous
April. Johnson was exhilarated by his success, forgetful that he still
faced a hostile majority in Congress, exasperated by opposition, and
roused by the shouts of the crowd,--and his native passion and
coarseness came out. Sumner had been severe in his language; he had
likened President Johnson to President Pierce in the Kansas days, and
hinted a family resemblance to Pharaoh of Egypt. Wendell Phillips was in
his native element of denunciation. Now the President declared to his
applauding hearers that he had against him men as much opposed to the
fundamental principles of the government, and he believed as much
laboring to pervert or destroy them, as had been the leaders of the
rebellion,--Davis, Toombs, and their associates. To the responsive
cheers, and the cry for names, he answered by naming Stevens, Sumner and
Phillips. He rehearsed his rise from tailor to President, and declared
that a ground swell, an earthquake of popular support, was coming to
him. His speech brought surprise and dismay to the country. It fanned
into hot flame the opposition between President and Congress. In vain
did John Sherman,--who had conferred with the President in the summer,
and thought highly of his patriotism--now hold out the olive branch in
the Senate. A keen observer at Washington, Samuel Bowles,--who had held
a friendly attitude toward both the President and the party
leaders,--now wrote, February 26, "Distrust, suspicion, the conceit of
power, the infirmities of temper on both sides, have brought affairs to
the very verge of disorder and ruin." He dissuaded from taking sides in
the quarrel; there was too much right and too much wrong on both sides.
He urged, March 3,--and no doubt he represented the best sentiment of
the country: "The great point is to secure protection and justice for
the freedmen.... For the present the Freedmen's Bureau, military
occupancy, and United States courts, must be our reliance.... We want
the President firm and resolute on this point, and we want to arouse the
better class of the Southern people to do their duty in the same
regard."
The weakness of the veto message on the Freedmen's Bureau bill had been
the absence of any solicitude for the welfare of the freedmen;
constitutional theory seemed to wholly supersede the practical necessity
of the case. Now Congress again approached the matter in the Civil
Rights bill, carefully formulated in the judiciary committee, thoroughly
debated and amended, and passed by both houses late in March. It
affirmed United States citizenship for all persons born in the country
and not subject to any foreign power; it declared for all citizens an
equal right to make and enforce contracts, sue, give evidence, hold and
sell property, etc.; full equality as to security of person and
property, as to pains and penalties,--in short, complete civil equality.
Original jurisdiction was given to United States courts, and to these
could be transferred any case involving these subjects begun in a State
court. The bill empowered the President to use the army for its
enforcement. All this was under authority of the Thirteenth Amendment.
This, too, the President vetoed, as unnecessary, as employing the
military arm too freely, as extending unwisely the power of the Federal
Government, and as especially unwise legislation while eleven States out
of thirty-six were unrepresented in Congress. But the President was now
going in the face not only of the congressional majority but of the
North at large, which was unmistakably opposed to leaving the freedmen
with no protection against their old masters. The veto was overridden,
and became a law April 9. The Freedmen's Bureau bill, somewhat amended,
was again passed, this time over a veto, and became a law July 16.
It was after the decisive victory over the President on the Civil Rights
bill that Congress took up the comprehensive measure which embodied its
own plan of reconstruction as a substitute for the President's. That
measure was the Fourteenth Amendment. It was drawn up by the
reconstruction committee, of which Senator Fessenden was chairman, and
probably his was the leading part in framing its provisions. The first
proposition was only to make the basis of congressional representation
dependent on the extension or denial of suffrage to the freedmen. This
was proposed January 22, 1866, and after some weeks' discussion passed
the House but failed in the Senate. It was replaced by a broader
measure, which was reported April 30, debated and amended for six weeks,
and finally in mid-June took the form in which it now stands in the
Constitution, and was approved by Congress. It then went before the
States for their action, with a tacit but strong implication that upon
its acceptance and adoption the lately seceded States would be fully
restored. It was in effect the plan of reconstruction first offered by
Congress, as a substitute for the President's.
The first article of the amendment declares that all persons born or
naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States, and
of the State wherein they reside; and that all are entitled to the equal
protection of the laws. Another section guarantees the validity of the
public debt, and forbids payment of the Confederate debt or payment for
the emancipation of slaves. Both these articles appear at this distance
of time to be beyond question or criticism. Another article apportions
representation in Congress, as heretofore, according to population; but
further provides that any State which denies the suffrage to any part of
its adult male population, except for rebellion or other crime, shall
have its congressional representation reduced in the same proportion. It
will be remembered that under the old Constitution the basis of
representation was fixed by adding to the total of the free population a
number equal to three-fifths of the slaves. Now that the slaves had
become freedmen, the representation of the old slave States would to
that extent be increased. But it seemed neither just nor expedient to
permit such an increase of power, unless the class on whose enumeration
it was based were made _bona fide_ citizens, and sharers in this power.
If under this amendment the Southern States should choose to give the
vote to the freedmen, their total representation in Congress would be
raised from sixty-one to seventy. If they did not give it, their
representation would fall to forty-five. There was thus offered them a
strong inducement to establish impartial suffrage; while yet they were
at full liberty to withhold it at the price of some diminution of power
compared with communities adopting the broader principle. The
reconstruction committee had listened to prominent Southerners as to the
probable reception of this provision. Stephens thought his people would
consider it less than their due and would not ratify it. But Lee thought
that Virginia would accept it, and then decide the question of suffrage
according to her preponderating interest; that at present she would
prefer the smaller representation, but would hold herself ready to
extend the suffrage if at any time the freedmen should show a capacity
to vote properly and understandingly.
So far, the Fourteenth Amendment seems now to embody a sound
statesmanship. But the remaining article must be judged by itself. It
excludes from all State and national offices all those, who, having
taken an official oath to support the Constitution, have afterward taken
part in insurrection and rebellion. This was ingeniously framed with an
appearance of justice, as if debarring from office only those who to
rebellion had added perjury. But, as a matter of ethics, the breaking of
official oaths is an inevitable incident of every revolution; and just
as war is held to suspend in a measure the command "thou shalt not
kill," so revolution must be held to cancel the obligation of official
oaths. The opposite view would affix the full guilt of perjury to many
leaders in the American Revolution, perhaps to Washington himself. It
was not really as perjurers that the excluded class were debarred from
office, but as prominent leaders in the rebellion, so marked by having
previously held office. It shut out, and was so intended, a class not
only very large in numbers but including the best intelligence and
social leadership of the South. To exclude these men from all political
leadership in the new régime was in flat defiance of that statesmanship,
as wise as magnanimous, which Andrew and Beecher had voiced. As one New
England observer put the matter, it would help matters greatly if no man
favored a government for others that he would not like to live under
himself; now how would it work in Massachusetts to exclude from the
government the whole Republican party? Yet the Democrats in the State
have ten times the knowledge, character and ability, that are possessed
in the South by the elements free from stain of rebellion.
The disqualification, to be sure, was removable in each case by a
two-thirds vote of Congress. But it could not be foreseen how Congress
would be disposed; and in fact, the President's pardon, so freely given,
had been by Congress expressly deprived of any political value; being
held to exempt only from legal pains and penalties. The new exclusion,
if adopted, could hardly work other than disastrously. And, being
offered, as the entire amendment necessarily was, for acceptance or
rejection by all the States, this provision was as well suited to repel
the South as if it had been designed for that purpose. It offended that
loyalty to their tried leaders in stress and storm which is one of the
best traits in a people's character. Compare it with Beecher's saying of
a few months earlier, "I think it to be the great need of this nation to
save the self-respect of the South." The difference measures the degree
of the mistake under which the mass of the North were still laboring.
They looked upon the rebellion as a moral and personal crime. They had
no comprehension of the Southern standpoint; and, sure that their own
cause was just, they believed that their opponents were not only
mistaken but morally guilty. As it was hardly possible to suppose the
8,000,000 to have all gone wrong out of individual perversity, the
current view at the North was that Secession sprang from a conspiracy;
that its leaders had secretly plotted, like Aaron Burr, and thus misled
their followers. The impulse to inflict death or imprisonment or
confiscation on anybody was infrequent or short-lived; the desire for
such punishment lingered only in an irrational wish for vengeance on
Jefferson Davis. But, if the leading class in the society and public
life of the South were morally responsible for a great treason and
rebellion, it might seem not only just but wise to exclude them from the
new political order.
The critics of the reconstruction policy are often challenged by its
defenders with the question, "But what better course can you suggest,
even now?" And the immense difficulty of the problem, even as calmly
viewed to-day by the closet student, may well make us charitable toward
the men who, for the most part, did the best they knew under the
immediate besetment of measureless perplexities and contradictions. But
while we may approve of their work in the rest of the Fourteenth
Amendment, with equal emphasis we may say: The mistake was great, in the
amendment and later, of shutting out the very men who should have been
included. Better by far would it have been to take their counsel and
co-operation even beforehand in planning the work of reconstruction.
Even as to that crucial point, the legislation oppressive to the
freedmen, and the deeper difficulty underlying it, the ingrained
Southern attitude toward the negro as an inferior being,--even as to
this, something might have been accomplished had the Southern men, who
went to Washington in the vain hope of immediate admission to Congress,
been met by a President of Lincoln's or Andrew's calibre. Even as it
was, there were signs of promise in Georgia,--so says Rhodes in his
excellent _History of the United States_. The newly elected Governor,
Judge Jenkins, a man of "universally acknowledged probity and
uprightness of character" made in his inaugural address (December 14,
1865) a strong plea for the negroes who had so faithfully cared for the
lands and homes and families of the soldiers in the field: "As the
governing class individually and collectively we owe them unbounded
kindness and thorough protection.... Their rights of person and
property should be made perfectly secure." To like effect spoke
Alexander H. Stephens, revered by all Georgians, February 22, 1866;
recalling the fidelity of the slaves during the war and the debt of
gratitude it created; the obligation of honor to the poor, untutored,
uninformed; asking for the negroes ample and full protection, with
equality before the law as to all rights of person, liberty and
property. And such equality the Georgia Legislature speedily ordained.
Tennessee did the like. Rhodes expresses confidence that by gentle
pressure from the President and Congress, Virginia, North Carolina and
Alabama could have been persuaded to similar legislation within a twelve
month, and the other States would have followed.
The excluding article in the amendment was probably made as a concession
by the moderate Republicans to the radicals. It replaced an article
originally reported by the committee, excluding not only from office but
from the suffrage all who had taken part in the Rebellion, until July 4,
1870. The article as adopted was disliked by Sherman and Wilson, the
latter especially declaring his willingness to remove the
disqualifications as soon as possible after a settlement had been made.
In point of fact they were removed piecemeal by Congress almost as
freely as President Johnson had done the like, and were ended except for
a few hundred by a sweeping amnesty in 1872.
Grant said to A. H. Stephens in April, 1866, "The true policy should be
to make friends of enemies." If these men, with a few others of like
temper in North and South, could have settled the terms of the new
order, a different foundation might have been laid. But in default of
any such happy, unlikely conjuncture of the right men in the right
place, it is the deep and wide tides of public opinion that largely
shape events. The average Southern view of the negro, and the average
Northern view of the "rebel," were the Scylla and Charybdis between
which the ship of state steered its troubled voyage.
Returning now to the course of events,--Congress made it plain that the
acceptance of the Fourteenth Amendment would bring the restoration of
the South, not by a formal declaration, but by its action in promptly
admitting Tennessee when within a month it ratified the amendment. So
before the South and the country were now the two policies,--of Congress
and the President,--and the summer and autumn saw a general and eager
discussion. The South waited events, hoping for the President's success.
In the North there was at first a marked effort to rally conservative
men of both parties to his side. A great convention was held at
Philadelphia, promoted by the President, Seward, Weed and Henry J.
Raymond; with delegates from every State; the first day's procession led
by Massachusetts and South Carolina representatives arm-in-arm; Southern
governors and judges heartily assenting to the declaration that not only
is slavery dead, but nobody wants it revived; and with cordial
indorsement of the President's reconstruction policy.
There was a counter-convention at Pittsburg; there were "soldiers' and
sailors' conventions" on both sides. From the Cabinet three members,
Speed, Denison and Harlan, resigned because their convictions were with
Congress; but Stanton remained as Secretary of War, though he was now a
bitter opponent of the President,--a safeguard over the army, as the
radical leaders considered him, and by his attitude and natural temper a
constant exasperation to his nominal chief. A fierce and bloody riot in
New Orleans, of which the precise causes were obscure, but in which the
negroes were the sufferers, heightened the Northern anxiety as to the
general situation.
The popular tide evidently ran with Congress, yet Johnson had the
promise of very respectable support until he threw it away. His
extempore expressions suggested an overweening view of his own position.
To the committee reporting to him the Philadelphia convention, he said,
"We have seen hanging upon the verge of the government, as it were, a
body called, or which assumes to be, the Congress of the United
States--but in fact a Congress of only a part of the States." In
September he made a tour of the Northern States, taking in his train
Secretaries Seward and Welles, with Grant and Farragut;--"swinging round
the circle," he called his trip. He made addresses in the principal
cities, in which he denounced his opponents, sometimes with vulgar
abuse, bragged of his own rise from tailor to President, and bandied
words with the mob. He shamed many of the men of character--Beecher
among them--who had viewed him with favor. The tide turned
overwhelmingly against him. The November election returned a Congress
consisting in the House of 143 Republicans to 49 Democrats, with a
Senate of 42 Republicans to 11 Democrats.
It was like the hand of Nemesis that the South, led to crushing defeat
by its slave-holding aristocracy, should now have its interests
sacrificed through the characteristic faults of one of its poor
whites,--his virtues overborne by his narrow judgment, uncontrolled
temper and coarse speech.
Warned by the election, the South might well have accepted the
Fourteenth Amendment as the price of its restoration. But it failed to
read the handwriting on the wall. It could not yet brook acquiescence in
the exclusion of its old leaders, and the alternative of negro suffrage
or reduced power in Congress. The pride of race, the unquenched spirit
of the "lost cause," prompted it to stand out for better terms. During
the autumn and winter of 1866-7 the lately seceded States, except
Tennessee, rejected the amendment. So failed the first congressional
plan of reconstruction, as the President's earlier plan had failed. And
now there was small hesitation or delay in framing and enforcing the
final plan.
CHAPTER XXXII
RECONSTRUCTION: THE FINAL PLAN
The Congress which met in December, 1866, was the same body as in the
previous winter; but the prolonged contest, the President's misbehavior,
the South's rejection of the offered terms, and the popular verdict at
the November election, had strengthened the hands of the Republicans and
intensified their temper. Thaddeus Stevens brought in, February 6, 1867,
a bill which was trenchant indeed. It superseded the governments of the
ten unreconstructed States, divided their territory into five military
districts, placed their commanders under the orders, not of the
President, but of the general of the army, and suspended the habeas
corpus. It was military rule in its barest form, and for an indefinite
period. Blaine moved an amendment, specifying the terms on which the
States might be released from this military control and restored to
their normal status. But Stevens's despotic sway shut out the amendment
and carried the bill through the House. In the Senate, Sherman
successfully carried a substitute, much the same as the Blaine
amendment. This went back to the House, where a majority of Republicans
favored the change, but Stevens still opposed it, and had enough
followers to make together with the Democrats a majority that threw out
the whole measure. But success by such allies was undesired by the
radicals and alarming to the moderate Republicans. There was
reconsideration, minor concessions to Stevens, and the bill finally
passed February 20, not at all as he had designed it, but in a form due
either to Blaine or Sherman. It is singular that so important a measure
should be of doubtful paternity. It seems more like a production of
Sherman, who in constructive ability was far ahead of Blaine and of most
of his congressional colleagues. In its substance it represents
apparently the judgment and purpose of the great majority of the
Republicans in Congress.
It is remarkable that so vital and momentous a law should have been
enacted with so little discussion. It was hurried through, in order that
its passage twelve days before the close of the session might prevent
the President from "pocketing" it--letting it fail for want of his
signature, without risking a veto. The debate, as Blaine reports it in
his _Twenty Years of Congress_, seems to have been mainly for the
scheme, and against the far more drastic proposal of Stevens and
Boutwell,--in opposing which Blaine himself seems to have done service
certainly as creditable as any in his checkered career. But the radical
character of the bill as passed, its great advance on all earlier
proposals, seems to have called forth hardly any challenge among the
Republicans.
In a word, the law put the whole unreconstructed South,--all of the old
Confederacy except Tennessee,--under temporary military government,
subject to the President; and the commanders were at once to initiate
measures for new State organizations. They were to enroll all adult
males, white and black, as voters, except only such as the Fourteenth
Amendment would shut out from office; these voters were then to elect
delegates in each State to a convention; this body was to frame a
constitution incorporating permanently the same conditions of suffrage;
this constitution was then to be submitted to popular vote; and if a
majority ratified it,--if Congress approved it,--if the Legislature
elected under it ratified the Fourteenth Amendment,--and if and when
that amendment received enough ratifications to enact it,--then, at
last, each State was to be fully restored to the Union.
On this plan the States were rapidly and finally reconstructed. Its
central feature was the enforcement of suffrage for the negroes
throughout the South. Of this tremendous measure, but small discussion
appears in the debate over the bill. But it seems to have had behind it
the prevailing sentiment of the North. A good witness on this point is
the Springfield _Republican_. That paper had strongly advocated the
adoption of the Massachusetts plan, a reading and writing qualification
for suffrage--the State's only good legacy from the Know-nothing period.
Of such a provision it said January 9: "It would be a most potent
stimulus to education, and once made the national rule there would be
such a studying of spelling books as never was seen before.... There can
be no sure reliance on the votes of blacks any more than of whites who
cannot read their ballots." But this plan found little popular favor.
The objection to it which we now recognize,--that the Southern States
might probably have forborne to educate the freedmen, and so left them
disfranchised,--was not then prominent. But there had not come to be a
general recognition at the North of the danger of ignorant suffrage. Of
the actual drift of opinion the _Republican_ said, March 3, that equal
suffrage is "the sole condition about which there is any approach to
unanimity among our people."
To understand this opinion we must look back a little. The belief in
universal male suffrage was part of the Democratic movement that swept
almost unchallenged from Jefferson's time till Lincoln's. The mass of
ignorant immigrants gave some alarm, but they seemed to be successfully
digested by the body politic. Beecher, we have seen, thought suffrage a
"natural right," and that was a common doctrine. Besides, it was assumed
at the North that the negroes were naturally the friends of the
national government and of the party that had given them freedom. There
were politicians in plenty who looked to the negro vote to keep the
Republicans in control of the national government. Many of these
doubtless valued the party organization mainly as a means of
self-advancement; while others like Sumner devoutly believed that in the
Republican party lay the sole hope of justice and freedom. To the North
generally, the convincing argument for negro suffrage was that the
ballot would give the black man the necessary weapon for
self-protection. On this ground Mr. Schurz favored it in his report of
1865, and in reviewing the situation in 1904 he holds the same opinion.
The assumption in this view was that the freedmen and the former master
class were, and were to remain, natural enemies. Looking back to
slavery, which really combined an element of oppression with an element
of protection, the North saw only the oppression. Viewing the present,
it was not merely the State laws, but the frequent personal abuse of the
negroes which confirmed the idea that they must have the ballot for
self-protection.
On broader grounds, the question was reasoned thus: "The logical, the
necessary ultimate step in the negro's elevation to full manhood is his
possession of the vote. By far the most desirable road to this
consummation would be a gradual and educational introduction of the body
of freedmen to the franchise. But toward such a course the South
shows no inclination. The alternative remains--in the brief period
during which the national authority can be applied to organic
reconstruction--of establishing universal manhood suffrage; with the
drawback of a present admixture of a large ignorant and unfit element;
with the great disadvantage, too, of further alienating the two races
for the present; but with the possibility and hope that the exercise of
the ballot will in itself prove educational, and that the Southern white
man and Southern negro will ultimately fare better than if the one is
allowed to permanently disfranchise the other." Something like this,
apparently, whether wise or unwise, was the predominant judgment of the
better class at the North.
With others the argument was simpler. Blaine in his _Twenty Years_ gives
a common sentiment, himself in 1884 still concurring in it: "The North
believed, and believed wisely, that a poor man, an ignorant man, and a
black man, who was thoroughly loyal, was a safer and better voter than a
rich man, an educated man, and a white man, who in his heart was
disloyal to the Union." The _Republican_, on the contrary, expressed the
opinion: "It is better to be governed by ex-rebels than by fools."
The Fourteenth Amendment had been put forward virtually as an
invitation. It was rejected by the South, and the new plan--military
government, to give place to new constitutions with universal
suffrage--was issued as a mandate. It was promptly carried out. In
little more than a twelvemonth, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida,
Alabama, Louisiana, and Arkansas had been reconstructed; their State
organizations were provisionally accepted by Congress in June, 1868; and
as their Legislatures at once ratified the Fourteenth Amendment and
secured its adoption, they were fully restored and their senators and
representatives admitted in July. Virginia and Mississippi managed to
stave off final action, hoping to escape the excluding clauses, until
after Grant's election to the Presidency in 1868; and their hopes were
justified when Grant gave his influence successfully with Congress
against the excluding clauses; so that these two States, with belated
Texas, were reorganized in the following year and admitted early in
1870. Georgia had troubles of her own, and a suspension by Congress
from full statehood for half a year; and her final admission, on July
15, 1870, marked definitely the end of the reconstruction process. The
registration of voters in the ten States had shown that in Alabama,
Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, the colored voters
were in a majority; in Georgia, the two races were about equal; and in
Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas and Texas, one-third or more were
colored. The preponderance of voting power had been given to a people
just out of slavery. The practical working of the plan, and the six
further years of Federal supervision over the South, belong to another
chapter.
An episode in this story, though an important feature in a general
history, must be the impeachment of President Johnson in the spring of
1868. Though the main questions at issue were definitely settled, the
bitterness between the President and Congress lasted and increased. At
the same time with the final reconstruction measure, there was passed
the "Tenure of Office bill," which took away from the President the
power of removing his subordinates which all his predecessors had
enjoyed, and required the Senate's concurrence in removals as in
appointments. Some exception was made as to Cabinet officers; and the
President, exasperated beyond endurance by Stanton, after vainly, though
reasonably, asking the Senate to relieve him of his hostile secretary,
assumed the right to remove him by his own authority, and appointed Gen.
Lorenzo Thomas in his place, February 21, 1868. The House, in which the
radical temper had grown stronger than ever, in a blaze of excitement
voted the President's impeachment. He was tried before the Senate, the
House prosecutors being led by Stevens, Boutwell, and Benjamin F.
Butler, whose vindictive and unscrupulous personality had come to the
front. The President was defended by a group of the foremost lawyers in
the country, including Benjamin R. Curtis, Jeremiah S. Black, and
William M. Evarts. The only weighty article in the charge was that
concerning Stanton's removal, and upon this a legal defense was made
which now seems conclusive. But it has been justly said that the
President was on trial nominally for one class of offenses, but
practically for another--namely, his persistent opposition to the policy
of Congress. Party loyalty was invoked for his condemnation; the general
temper of the North was hot against him; wrath and tribulation were
predicted for any Republican senator who should vote for his acquittal.
In face of the storm, there were a few who quietly let it be known or
surmised that they should vote in their capacity as judges sworn to
follow the law and the facts, whatever the political consequences. The
decisive hour came, May 16, and the result no one could predict; the
Democratic senators and the four administration Republicans all would
sustain the President; seven additional votes would prevent the decisive
two-thirds condemnation. Man after man, Fessenden, Fowler, Grimes,
Henderson, Ross, Van Winkle, and Trumbull--Republicans all--voted "Not
guilty"; and, by nineteen to thirty-five, President Johnson escaped
deposition--to get rid of Stanton finally, and finish his term; to
return to the Senate from Tennessee; to take his place in history as an
honest and patriotic man, beyond his proper sphere, whose limitations
worked a part in the partial failure of reconstruction. The country
escaped a dangerous dislocation of the relation of Congress and the
executive, and the triumph of an exaggerated radicalism. The seven
independent senators sacrificed their future careers, and deserve the
perpetual gratitude of their country.
And now it remained for the nation, through a Presidential election, to
pass upon the completed work. In the Democratic convention at New York,
in July, 1868, the reactionary and the progressive elements strove. A
new Democracy was growing, intent on administrative reform and moderate
Constitutionalism; Samuel J. Tilden of New York and his allies were
among the leaders; their candidate was Chief Justice Chase. Only the
incongruity with his judicial position marred the fitness of Chase's
candidacy. Lincoln, though he had his own troubles in dealing with him,
said, "Of all the great men I have known, Chase is equal to about one
and a half of the best of them." He had proved eminent on the bench as
in the Cabinet, and under his lead the Supreme Court gave a series of
conservative decisions on reconstruction questions which were a most
valuable contribution to the national stability and security--a vital,
though not to the popular eye a conspicuous service in the
reconstruction period. Against him, the candidacy of George H. Pendleton
of Ohio represented the element historically unfriendly to the war for
the Union, and intensely opposed to the reconstruction measures. He had
the support of the Southern delegates, present in full force, and
lending to the cheering the dominant note of the well-known "rebel
yell." The reactionists got their own way with the resolutions, which
declared the reconstruction acts to be "unconstitutional, revolutionary,
and void." On the new question which was looming up, of shirking the
national debt by payment in promises, the platform leaned strongly
toward repudiation. Pendleton's supporters, seeing their candidate could
not win, and determined that the other Ohio man, Chase, should not win,
thwarted their New York opponents by a clever trick, and successfully
rushed through the convention the nomination of its presiding officer,
Horatio Seymour of New York, against his protest and to the discomfiture
of his associates. An able, accomplished man, but reckoned half-hearted
in the war, and not rising to statesmanlike proportions, he could not
outweigh the mischievous platform and the Vice-Presidential candidate,
the hot-headed Gen. Francis P. Blair of Missouri, who had just proposed
measures nothing short of revolutionary to override Congress. Against
this combination the Republicans advanced securely to victory. Meeting
in Chicago in May, they showed a temper more moderate than that of
Congress; they of course condemned the President, but they refused to
censure the seven independent senators; and upon Carl Schurz's motion
passed a resolution welcoming back all former enemies now become loyal,
and favoring the early and rapid removal of disabilities. As to the
Presidential nomination, there was no division,--it was given
unhesitatingly, unanimously, heartily, to General Grant. His
steadfastness and success in war had been matched by his magnanimity in
victory and his prudence in the troubled times that followed. Of manly
simplicity and solid worth, sagacious and successful wherever he had
been tried, he seemed at once an embodiment of past victory and an
assurance of future safety. Of the thirty-four States that voted, all
but eight were for Grant and Colfax. Seymour had New York, New Jersey,
Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Oregon, Georgia, and Louisiana. The
popular vote was 3,012,000 for Grant and Colfax to 2,703,000 for Seymour
and Blair.
The Republican convention had shirked the question of negro suffrage at
the North by referring it to the individual States. Its refusal in many
of the Northern States was felt as a discredit after it had been
enforced throughout the South. The Republicans in Congress took courage
from the election. The Fifteenth Amendment, forbidding the States to
deny the right to vote "on account of race, color or previous condition
of servitude," was brought forward in Congress in December, and passed
February 28, 1869. It was ratified in rapid succession by thirty States
out of thirty-seven,--Tennessee not acting, and negative votes being
given by California, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, and
Oregon,--and proclaimed as adopted, March 30, 1870.
With Grant's election, and the last touches of reconstruction sure to
follow close, the North, as it were, drew a deep breath of relief. It
felt that the fundamental issues were settled. The war had preserved the
Union and destroyed slavery. The consummation had been fitly rounded out
by the changes in the Constitution. The Southern States were restored to
their places. Vast tides of material advance were setting in. New
questions were rising, new ideas were fermenting. Good-bye to the
past,--so felt the North,--to its injustice and its strife. As the
nation's chieftain had said, in accepting the call to the nation's
Presidency, "Let us have peace."
CHAPTER XXXIII
RECONSTRUCTION: THE WORKING OUT
So the North turned cheerfully to its own affairs--and very engrossing
affairs they were--and the South faced its new conditions. It was still
struggling with the economic wreckage left by four years of battle,
invasion and defeat. It had borne the loss of its separate nationality
and the flag endeared by countless sacrifices. It had accepted the
sudden emancipation of its servile class by the conqueror's hand. It had
been encouraged by President Johnson to resume with little change its
old ways of government. For two years it had gone along precariously
with State organizations of the earlier pattern, subject to occasional
interruption by military authority or officials of the Freedmen's
Bureau. Then, in 1867, all State governments were set aside, and
military rule pure and simple held the field,--in most States for about
fifteen months; in Mississippi, Texas and Virginia, by their own choice,
for as much longer. Though as it was generally administered the military
government was just, as well as economical, yet its maintenance was a
bitter ordeal for a people with the American political habit; a people,
too, who had fought gallantly for four years; who had, upon accepting
their defeat, been assured that the object of their conqueror was
attained in restoring them to their old position, except for
emancipation of the slaves; and who now for a year or two longer were
held under martial law.
At last--for most of them in mid-summer of 1868--they were again
restored to self-government of the American pattern. Self-government
for all, thought the North complacently; whites and blacks were equal,
not only as subjects of the law but as makers of the law; and so freedom
and democracy were established. But the Southern whites asked in dismay,
What kind of fellow-lawmakers have we got? The question answered itself.
The million or so of new voters were most of them ignorant in a sense of
which illiteracy gives but a hint. They were unversed even in genuine
family life; skilled only in manual industry; unpracticed in
citizenship; utterly untaught in the principles, the facts of history,
the theory and art of self-government, which make up the proper
equipment of the voter. A great part of them, field hands on the great
cotton and sugar plantations, were rude and degraded, trained to live
solely under close and constant control.
How were the whites to deal with these new-made voters? From the
standpoint of expediency, three courses offered,--to conciliate and
educate them; to outvote them by massing the whites together; or to
suppress them by force or fraud. From the standpoint of unregenerate
human nature, the whites as a body at first took none of these
courses,--they stood apart from the whole business of politics, in wrath
and scorn. Unregenerate perhaps, but most natural, most human! At first,
some crude policy mingled with the sentiment that kept them aloof; there
was the hope that if the whites generally abstained from voting, at the
elections held in November, 1867, to pass on the question whether to
hold constitutional conventions, the proposal might fail for want of the
requisite majority of the registered voters. It was a fallacious hope;
suppose the conventions were to fail, what better terms were now to be
expected from Congress? But the conventions were all held; and as in the
same spirit most of the whites refused to vote for delegates, these were
chosen from the negroes, their friends from the North, and the few
Southern whites who accepted the inevitable.
Is it not the wisest, the manliest course, to accept the inevitable? So
asked General Longstreet, in a letter to a friend, June 3, 1867. He had
just listened to Senator Wilson, and had been surprised by his fairness
and frankness. For himself he says, "I will be happy to work in any
harness that promises relief to our discomfited people, whether bearing
the mantle of Mr. Davis or Mr. Sumner." Negro suffrage is for the
present an established fact; if after a fair trial it works
disastrously, we will appeal to Congress to repeal it. "If every one
will meet the crisis with proper appreciation of our condition and
obligations, the sun will rise to-morrow on a happy people." But his
words fell on deaf ears, and when he acted with the Republicans he was
visited with ostracism, denunciation, and attack upon his war record.
The typical attitude, at first, was that of the planter who, after
listening to a discussion of the final reconstruction act, inquired,
"Does it say anything about raising cotton?" "No." "Then, damn Congress
and its laws! I'm going to raise cotton." So he and a good many others
gave themselves to raising cotton, and for a while left the choice of
State officers and legislators to "niggers," "carpet-baggers," and
"scalawags." A "scalawag" was any Southern white who allied himself
politically with the negroes, and a "carpet-bagger" was a Northern
adventurer, for whose worldly goods a gripsack sufficed,--or, in
general, any Northerner whatever.
For the blacks, the sudden opening of political power and preferment,
however designed, was in effect a very doubtful benefit. It turned their
hopes and aspirations in a way which was really "no thoroughfare." To
the more promising and ambitious it offered sudden and brilliant prizes,
instead of the patient apprenticeship which they needed. Of those who
quickly rose to office, a few were by character and attainments really
fit for their position; many won favor by shallow arts; and others were
thrown up like driftwood by the tide. The negroes as a body could follow
only a personal leadership,--how many whites, North or South, really
follow any other?--could be organized in bodies, attached to a party
name and watchwords, and voted in mass by the men who had their
confidence. They understood that their freedom and their right to vote
had been given them by the North and by the Republican party, and to
that party they naturally turned. Their old masters--in many cases their
best friends--frankly told them they were unfit to vote, and wanted no
dealings with them in political affairs. So they found leadership
principally in the men who had come from the North.
There was a Northern immigration which may be classified as business
men, teachers and adventurers. A considerable number sought an
opportunity in reviving and developing industry,--substantial men and
good citizens. Sometimes a patriotic motive mingled with the industrial.
Governor Andrew, on retiring to private life as a lawyer, tried for some
time to advance a company for bringing into conjunction Southern lands
and Northern enterprise and capital. There were various projects of this
kind, but they met with little success. Private individuals, however,
added something to the industrial and civic forces of the South. A
larger class were the teachers. Men and women by hundreds went to the
South, some sent by missionary organizations, some independently, to
organize schools and to teach the children of the freedmen. Many of them
were of the highest character, devoted, self-sacrificing, going to the
blacks simply because they supposed their need was greatest. But
Beecher's warning proved sound--because as a whole this movement took
the negroes as a distinct field, ignoring the needs of the whites, it
incurred odium as an alien and half-hostile work. The barbaric element
among the whites--and slavery had left a deep taint of barbarism--came
out at its worst in insults to the "nigger teachers," with occasional
burning of a school-house. The better social elements looked askance at
those whose presence was a reminder of conquest and humiliation.
From the business and the educational immigration, a few Northern men
were drawn into public affairs, less by choice than by necessity of the
situation. With these mingled a different class, men who had been
disreputable hangers-on of the army or the Freedmen's Bureau, or who had
come for the sole purpose of plunder. It was a very mixed company of
whites and blacks that made up the conventions and then filled the
legislative halls and the public offices. The constitutions were not
badly framed, except as they, for the most part, continued the exclusive
clauses. The general legislation was various in its character. There
were some excellent features, above all the institution in every State
of a genuine public school system, where before there had been only
makeshifts or make-believes. Some other good constructive work was done,
toward establishing society on the new basis. Certainly nothing was
enacted so bad as the "black codes" of a few years earlier, not to speak
of the legislation under slavery. There were some unsuccessful attempts
at engrafting institutions, like the township system, which had worked
well in their native soil but could not be created out of hand. In
general the white leadership of the dominant party averted much that
might have been expected from the ignorance of its legislators as a
mass. But plenty of waste and mischief was wrought. Place a crowd of
hungry and untaught men next the public treasury with the lid off, and
some results are sure. The men will not be safer guardians of the
treasure for having had for most of their lives no property rights of
their own, not even the ownership of their own souls and bodies. Yet
most of the plunder seems to have gone into the pockets of knaves of the
superior race. There was a degree of extravagance, waste and corruption,
varying greatly with localities and times, but sufficient to leave a
permanent discredit on the Southern Republican governments as a class.
To judge accurately of the merits and demerits of these governments is
perhaps as difficult a task as historian ever undertook. So fierce is
the passion which invests these events in the memory of the present
generation, that it is almost hopeless to sift and adjudicate the sober
facts. Time has softened much; even the Civil War begins to stand forth
in some firmness of outline and clarity of atmosphere. But when we come
to reconstruction--grave historians grow almost hysterical, romancers
pass the bounds of possibilities, and even official figures contradict
one another with sublime effrontery.
Yet this very passion of remembrance, which in one way obscures, in
another way illuminates the historical situation. The grievance most
profoundly felt in the reconstruction period was not unwise laws nor
waste of public money nor oppressive taxes. It was the consciousness by
the master class of political subjection to the servile class. It was
the spectacle of rude blacks, yesterday picking cotton or driving mules,
sitting in the legislators' seats and executive offices of Richmond and
Columbia, holding places of power among the people of Lee and Calhoun.
Fancy the people of Massachusetts, were the state-house on Beacon hill
suddenly occupied by Italian, Polish and Russian laborers,--placed and
kept there by a foreign conqueror. Add to the comparison the prouder
height of the slaveholder, and the lower depth of his serf. Put this as
the case of a people high-strung and sensitive, still fresh from the
passion of war, still smarting from defeat. They had fought to
exhaustion, and their banner had fallen without disgrace. Now the
victors who had won by superiority of force had placed their late
bondmen as their rulers. The offices from which their own captains and
chiefs were shut out were filled by plantation field-hands.
It was not likely that the first attitude of scornful passivity would
long continue, and it did not. The warnings vainly uttered
beforehand,--that the natural leaders would surely lead, and had best be
won as allies, were proved right when it was too late. Said the
_Republican_, August 10, 1868, in protesting against the plan of the
party managers in organizing the Southern wing to consist mainly of the
blacks: "The Republican party cannot long maintain its supremacy at the
South by negro votes alone. The instincts of submission and dependence
in them and of domination in the whites, are too strong to permit such a
reversal of the familiar relations and the natural order. The
slave-holding element has learned to combine, conspire and command, in
the best school on earth, and they will certainly come to the top. Nor
is it desirable that such a state of things should continue."
The old official class being excluded--to the number, it was estimated,
of 160,000,--and the stand-aloof policy, or drift rather, prevailing in
the political field, it was the more lawless element that first began to
conspicuously assert the white supremacy. There grew up an organization
called "the Ku-Klux Klan," designed at first partly as a rough sport and
masquerade, partly to overawe the negroes. There were midnight ridings
in spectral disguises, warnings, alarms and presently whippings and even
murders. The society, or imitations of it, spread over most of the
South. It was at its height in 1868-70, and in the latter year it
gradually gave way, partly owing to vigorous measures ordered from
Washington, and partly perhaps as legitimate political combinations
again occupied the whites. But it is to be noted that throughout the
decade of reconstruction, though the present fashion is to lay exclusive
stress on the wrong-doing of the negroes and their friends, yet the
physical violence, frequent and widespread, was almost wholly practiced
by the whites.
From the political torpor, due to discouragement and resentment, there
was an early recovery. When it was found that cotton-planting pure and
simple, with ignoring of politics, resulted in heavy taxes for the
planter; when to the first numbness there succeeded the active
smart,--the whites betook themselves to the resource which in most
States soon proved adequate,--the ballot, and political combination. In
several States the whites were easily in the majority, and where they
were slightly outnumbered their superior intelligence soon gave them the
advantage. In Georgia, finally readmitted at the end of 1869, the
Democrats--constituting the great body of the whites--carried the
election in the next year, and remained in control of the State.
Virginia, which had advisedly kept under military rule until, with
President Grant's aid, she came in without the excluding clauses, early
in 1870, passed at once under Democratic rule. In the same year North
Carolina became Democratic. Texas and Arkansas remained under Republican
sway until the majority shifted to the Democrats in 1874. In Alabama,
the Democrats gained the Governorship and the lower House as early as
1870; two years later the result was disputed, the Democrats conceding
the Governor but claiming the Legislature, while the Republicans
organized a rival Legislature; the Republican Governor-elect called for
United States troops, which were promptly dispatched, and with their
backing a Republican Legislature was secured. In 1874 a Democratic
Governor and Legislature were chosen and installed without dispute. The
Federal interference in Alabama, and the experience of others of the
reconstructed States,--South Carolina, Mississippi, and
Louisiana,--recalls us to that phase of the history which deals with
Washington and the national government.
Through the eight years of Grant's administration, the public life of
the nation was concerned mainly with clearing away the wreckage left by
the war. There was an enormous debt to be handled and an inflated
currency to be reduced; there was to be curbed administrative
extravagance and corruption, bred of profuse expenditure; a bitter
quarrel with England was to be guided toward war or peace; and the
disordered South was to be composed. These tasks were encountered by men
whose habits and sentiments had been formed in a long and desperate
contest, and in an atmosphere slowly cooling from the fiery glow of
battle. The soldier had to beat his sword into a plowshare, and small
wonder if the blacksmithing was sometimes clumsy.
Grant was too completely a soldier to be changed into a statesman. He
could deal with a definite, limited, though gigantic business,--the
overcoming of the armies of the Confederacy. But it was beyond his power
to comprehend and master the manifold and intricate problems that center
in the Presidency. Given a specific, well-defined question, within the
reach of his sturdy sense and loyal purpose, and he could deal with it
to good effect, as he did with the English arbitration and the Inflation
bill. But he was incapable of far-reaching and constructive plans
carefully laid and patiently pursued. When he communicated to Congress
the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, he urged in wise and forcible
language that the new electorate could only be qualified through
education, and that to provide such education was a pressing duty of
Congress so far as its power extended, and of the people through all the
agencies it could command. But having once said this, he let the subject
drop. National education for the freedmen was left unnoticed, save by an
occasional lonely advocate like Sumner. Nor did President Grant take any
personal and positive measures to win and hold the old South to the new
order; he failed to invite and consult its representative men, he made
no journeys among the people.
In most matters of public policy, save in emergencies, Grant let matters
be shaped by the men whom he had taken into his counsel--in his official
Cabinet or the "kitchen cabinet"--and by the Republican leaders in
Congress, of whom the controlling group, especially in the Senate, were
in close touch with the White House. His affiliations were with men of
material power, men who had strongly administered civil or military
affairs, stout partisans, faithful friends and vigorous haters. His
tastes did not draw him to the idealists, the scholars, the reformers.
He was accessible to good fellowship, he was easily imposed on by men
who were seeking their own ends, and he was very slow to abandon any one
whom he had once trusted. Absolutely honest, the thieves stole all round
him. Magnanimous at heart, the bitter partisans often made him their
tool. Of the great questions of the time, the English quarrel was
brought to an admirable healing, under the management of the Secretary
of State, Hamilton Fish, in 1871, by the joint high commission, the
treaty of Washington, and the Geneva award. In the long contest for a
sound currency, the inflation policy received its death-blow by the
President's veto in 1874, and resumption was undertaken when Sherman
carried his bill through Congress in 1875. As to honesty of
administration, the president's good intentions were constantly baffled
through his misplaced and tenacious confidences. The vast expenditures
of the war, the cheating incident to its great contracts, the
speculation favored by a fluctuating currency, the huge enterprises
invited by the return of peace,--had infected private and public life
with a kind of fever; the treasury was an easy mark; and while the
people held to Grant for his personal honesty, and re-elected him, an
army of rogues throve under his lax administration.
The let-alone policy toward the South, to which Grant was prompted both
by his virtues and his limitations, would not on the whole have been
unacceptable to the mass of the Southern whites. Left wholly to
themselves, those States would soon have righted themselves from the
unstable equilibrium in which they had been placed by the imposition of
an ignorant electorate. Natural forces,--just or unjust, benignant or
cruel,--would soon have reversed the order. But the nation at large
would not at once abandon its protectorate over its recent wards, the
freedmen. For their greatest need, education, it assumed no
responsibility. But when stories were rife of abuse and terrorism under
the masquerade of the Ku-Klux, Congress interfered, even if by some
stretch of its constitutional power, to bring the raiders under the arm
of Federal law. When elections were reported to be controlled by fraud
and intimidation, it seemed incumbent on the national government to
protect the ballot-box by which its own members were chosen. When rival
bodies claimed each to be the legitimate government of a State, it was
necessary for the Washington authorities to decide which they would
recognize, and it was a natural sequence to back their decision by the
military force. And in all of these cases, the maintenance of law and
order easily became confused with the support of factions allied
politically with the party in power at Washington. As the Southern
Republicans were gradually outvoted or overpowered at home, their
appeals for help from the general government became more urgent, while
the continuance of such interference became more questionable to
thoughtful men.
Before this state of things, there was a gradual division of opinion
among Republicans at the North, and especially among their leaders.
Against the call to protect the freedmen and bridle the slave-holding
spirit in its new forms, rose the call to return to the old respect for
local rights, and let each Southern State manage its own affairs, as did
each Northern State. To this changed attitude came some of the
staunchest of the old anti-slavery leaders, and many of the younger
generation. During the early years of Grant's administration, the
question did not present itself in acute forms. The Ku-Klux law of 1870,
though it might strain the Constitution a little, received general
acquiescence because the abuse it aimed at was so flagrant. But the
ostracism of the entire official class of the old South was growingly
recognized as a grievance and a wrong. It was the spirit of proscription
that brought on the political crisis of 1872. That proscriptive spirit
broke up the Republican party in Missouri; the liberal element, led by
Carl Schurz and B. Gratz Brown, held a State convention. Their movement
fell in with a strong rising tide of opposition to Grant's
administration within the Republican party. Its grounds were
various,--chiefly, a protest against wide and gross maladministration, a
demand for a reformed and scientific civil-service, opposition to the
high tariff, and the desire for a more generous and reconciling policy
toward the South. The movement was especially prompted by a group of
leading independent journals conducted by very able men,--the New York
_Evening Post_, under William Cullen Bryant; the _Nation_, edited by E.
L. Godkin; the Cincinnati _Commercial_ of Murat Halstead; the
Louisville _Courier-Journal_ of Henry Watterson; the Springfield
_Republican_ of Samuel Bowles. Sympathetic in the main was Horace
Greeley's New York _Tribune_. In more or less close alliance were a few
of the congressional leaders, notably Sumner, who had quarreled bitterly
with Grant over the proposed annexation of San Domingo; Trumbull, who
was never in close touch with his old party after the impeachment trial;
and Carl Schurz, who was now in the Senate.
A national convention was held at Cincinnati, in May, 1872. The
Democrats had so little hope of separate success that they stood ready
to fall in with the new departure, and this gave greater importance to
its action. For its Presidential candidate, the foremost name had been
that of the elder Charles Francis Adams. Of the most distinguished
family in the country's political annals; one of the founders of the
Free Soil party; a conservative but resolute Republican; minister to
England through the war, and most serviceable there by his firmness and
wisdom; eminent by character, experience, and mental equipment; so
indifferent to office that he almost openly scorned the proffered
honor,--he seemed to the reformers a nearly ideal candidate, however
much his reserved and distant manners might handicap him before a
popular constituency.
But the spite of a disappointed aspirant, B. Gratz Brown, and the
caprice of the convention, turned its choice by a sudden impulse to
Horace Greeley. It was a choice that from the first moment not only
defeated but almost stultified the liberal movement. It mattered not
much what principles the convention set forth. Tariff reform it had
already set aside, and Greeley was a zealous protectionist. For
scientific civil-service reform he cared nothing, and to mistakes in his
personal choices he was at least as liable as Grant. His revolt against
Grant was due partly to a dispute about State patronage. Only in
generous sentiment toward the South did he fitly represent the original
and best element of the convention. He was dropped at once by the
_Evening Post_, the _Nation_, and a large part of the liberals. The
Democrats, despairing of any other way to success, indorsed his
nomination. But the acceptance of a candidate who for thirty years had
been showering hard words on the Democracy was almost grotesque. The
South was halfhearted in his support. A few of the faithful nominated
Charles O'Conor on an independent Democrat ticket. The question was only
of the size of the majority against Greeley.
His wisest supporters avowed as the best significance of his candidacy:
"It means that the war is really over." Greeley had proved the sincerity
of his friendliness toward the South at a heavy cost. President Johnson
held Jefferson Davis in long imprisonment, with the aggravation not only
of close confinement and even a temporary manacling, but of a public
accusation of complicity in the murder of Lincoln. It was treatment
wholly unfit for a prisoner of state and a man of Davis's character. Its
effect on the South may be judged by imagining how the North would have
felt had Lincoln fallen into Southern hands and been kept in shackles
and under the charge of assassination. The imprisonment of Davis and the
avowed purpose to try him as a traitor were utterly out of keeping with
the general recognition that secession and its sequel were to be dealt
with as a political wrong and not a personal crime.
Greeley, who on the very morning after Lee's surrender had called for a
universal amnesty, showed his faith by his works when at the opportunity
in May, 1867, he offered himself, in company with Gerrit Smith, as
bondsmen for Davis, thus obtaining his release, and incurring for
himself a storm of obloquy. The storm was short-lived, but revived in
greater fury when Greeley became a Presidential candidate against Grant,
with the support of the Democracy and the South. The campaign was full
of bitterness and abuse. In _Harper's Weekly_, of which the editorial
page was conducted by the high-spirited and gentle George William
Curtis, Nast assailed the liberals in savage cartoons; in one Sumner was
depicted as scattering flowers on the grave of Preston Brooks, and
another showed Greeley shaking hands with the shade of Wilkes Booth over
the grave of Lincoln. From the other side Grant was attacked with equal
ferocity.
Greeley went down in overwhelming defeat, and died of exhaustion and a
broken heart before the electoral votes were counted. But something had
been gained. There had been a breaking of old lines. And one of the
South's main grievances had been almost removed. Within a month after
the Cincinnati convention, its call for amnesty was vindicated by a bill
passed in Congress removing the disabilities of almost all the excluded
class. Out of some 160,000, only about 700 were left on the proscribed
list.
CHAPTER XXXIV
THREE TROUBLED STATES
In Grant's second term, the divergence between the Republicans on
Southern questions, though never taking permanent form, often found
marked and effective expression. In the Senate, the controlling group,
who were also the special friends and allies of Grant, were radicals,
and generally of a more materialistic class than the earlier leaders.
Fessenden had died in 1869; Sumner was alienated, and died in 1874;
Wilson had passed into the insignificance of the Vice-Presidency;
Trumbull was in opposition. At the front were Chandler, of Michigan;
Oliver P. Morton, War Governor of Illinois, powerful and partisan;
Roscoe Conkling, of New York, showy and arrogant. In the House the
foremost man was James G. Blaine, Speaker until with the Democratic
majority he became leader of the opposition; brilliant in speech,
fascinating and "magnetic" in personal intercourse, always prominent and
popular, but almost never closely identified with any great principle or
constructive measure. Very prominent on the floor was General Butler, a
foremost radical toward the South; always a storm-center; an advocate of
inflation, an ally of most bad causes, an effective mischief-maker;
followed, feared, and hated with equal ardor. The membership of the
House was notable for able men,--the Hoar brothers, Henry L. Pierce,
Eugene Hale, Dawes, Hawley, Poland, Garfield, Kasson, and others of
almost equal mark. The death of Thaddeus Stevens, in 1868, had left the
House without a master. The Greeley campaign, disastrous though it was,
had started a contagious spirit of independence. During Grant's second
administration, 1873-7, there was shown in the House, on important
questions, a degree of independence rare in American politics. It was
the growing Republican opposition to Federal interference in the South
that hastened its end, and prepared the way for the consummation of that
result under President Hayes.
We now return to the individual cases of three Southern States. To South
Carolina fell the bitterest experience of misgovernment. Its black
majority was organized and led by a group of white men of the worst
character, who were resisted for a time without success by a better
element in the party. Under four years' administration of Governor R. K.
Scott, a Northerner, and two of F. J. Moses, Jr., a South
Carolinian--who later disappeared from public view in a
penitentiary,--money was lavished in profligate expenditure; hundreds of
thousands spent for legislative furniture and luxuries; franchises were
corruptly sold; bogus enterprises enriched; debt piled up by millions,
and thrown off by millions. (Repudiation, be it said, always came easily
to the South,--before the war and after; during reconstruction and
after; whether the borrowed money had been spent for railroads or
squandered by thieves; and the ghost of an unpaid $300,000,000 still
scares Southern Senators when a general arbitration treaty is
discussed.) South Carolina went from bad to worse for six years.
When, in 1872, the honest Republicans bolted, under an unimpeachable
candidate, Reuben Tomlinson, a Philadelphia Quaker, and gave him 35,000
votes, the Democrats stood scornfully aloof--"better a native thief than
an honest Yankee!" But in 1874 came a revolution in the Republican
ranks. Honesty triumphed, under the lead of the elected governor, Daniel
H. Chamberlain, of Massachusetts birth and education,--a remarkable
man; shrewd, long-headed, a past master in political management; with
high aims; by no means indifferent to personal success, but generally
succeeding in combining personal and public service. With a Legislature
in which two-thirds were Republicans, and whites and blacks were about
equal in number, he achieved a surprising reversal of the evil
tendencies that had prevailed. In the Legislature the best of the
Democrats backed him, together with the best of the Republicans, and
overmatched the corruptionists. Stealing was stopped; the abuses of the
pardoning power were ended; the tax laws were amended so as to secure
uniformity and equality of assessment; expenditure was reduced and
regulated. These were the statements of the Charleston _News and
Courier_, the leading paper of the State, in July, 1876, when another
election was coming on. Most of the Democratic papers had praised and
supported Governor Chamberlain. It was now very seriously contemplated,
and advocated by the _News and Courier_, to let him be re-elected
without opposition. But the old-time pride of race and party was too
strong, and the Democrats nominated Wade Hampton. They supported him
with little scruple as to means,--with free use of intimidation and
proscription, with frequent threats and often the reality of violence.
There was a shocking massacre at Hamburg. Governor Chamberlain called on
the President for aid, and a thousand troops were sent into the State.
When the election came, there was claimed a majority for Chamberlain and
for the Republican Presidential ticket. The claim was instantly and
fiercely challenged by Hampton's supporters. And here the story pauses,
until it joins the main current of national affairs.
Mississippi was under Republican control until 1875. If one attempts to
judge of the character of that control, he plunges into a sea of
contradictions almost enough to submerge the hope of truth. Whether we
turn to standard historians, to the 1000 pages of sworn testimony before
a Congressional committee, or to individual witnesses, the perplexity is
the same. Thus, we consult Woodrow Wilson's _History of the American
People_,--and this book invites a word of comment. Its author has woven
together the immense material of the national history for three
centuries, in the main with admirable judgment and skill. He has
produced a comprehensive, well-proportioned, graphic narrative, which
closely holds the reader's attention, and gives in general the spirit as
well as the substance of the people's story. But upon the main theme of
the crowning century, he misses some of the vital elements. Of the wrong
and mischief of slavery he has hardly a word, waving the subject aside
as if beyond his province. He gives with admirable sympathy and
intelligence the attitude of the well-meaning Southerner before and
after the war; and this feature has special value for those familiar
only with the Northern standpoint. But he has not the least appreciation
of the anti-slavery spirit in its heroic phase. On the wrongs of the
slave he is silent, while upon the sins of the carpet-bagger he is
eloquent. This one-sidedness robs of its significance what should be the
American epic of the nineteenth century.
Of the misgovernment of Mississippi, Dr. Wilson instances that "before
the work of the carpet-baggers was done, 640,000 acres of land had been
forfeited for taxes, twenty per cent. of the total acreage of the
State." The nearest atlas or gazetteer is enough to check this
statement. The total acreage of the State is 29,640,000,--of which
640,000 is not twenty per cent., but a trifle over two per cent. Dr.
Wilson goes on to say that the State tax levy in 1874 was fourteen times
as great as in 1869. This is apparently taken from the "Taxpayers'
petition" of 1875, but from whatever source, it gives an utterly
exaggerated impression. Before the Congressional committee Judge H. R.
Ware, chairman of the State Republican committee,--a Kentuckian by
birth, and a life-long resident of Mississippi,--gave his testimony; and
it included documents showing that the total State expense during the
last two years of Democratic rule, 1864 and '65, was $1,410,250 and
$1,860,809; for twenty years of Democratic administration, throwing out
the extra expenses of the war period, the average cost was $699,200;
under military government (always the cheapest) in 1869 it was $563,219;
while under the Republicans in 1875 it was $618,259; and the average for
six Republican years had been $992,920. When the Republicans came in,
they had to make payments in warrants worth only sixty-five cents on the
dollar, with proportionate increase of expense; they had to provide for
a free population doubled by the emancipation of the slaves, and for the
last four years they had made an annual reduction.
Yet the "Taxpayers' petition"--addressed to the Legislature early in
1875, and without effect,--must be taken as evidence of at least a
considerable extravagance and waste. A reading of it gives the
impression of a needless multiplication of offices and excessive
salaries. The public printing seems clearly a scandal, running above
$73,000 a year, as against a cost in the sister State of Georgia of only
$10,000. The general charge seems to be of laxness and needlessly high
salaries rather than any wholesale corruption. Some question as to the
justice of the general charge occurs when a point is encountered as to
the payment of teachers in the public schools. The petitioners claim
that this should be reduced to $25 a month for second-class schools, and
$50 a month for first-class schools. In fact, when the Democrats came
into power, they reduced the rate to $40 a month,--which, for a school
year of four months only, seems like penny-wise economy. The petition
makes perhaps the strongest impression in its statement that the boards
of supervisors, controlling local taxation, are, as a general rule,
"wholly unfit to discharge their duties, and without respectability or
even accountability"; that the public works under their care are
recklessly and carelessly managed, and the county taxes are grievous. It
would seem that in these local bodies, especially in the "black
counties," lay the worst of the taxpayers' grievance.
Judge Story makes a vigorous retort, testifying after a year of
Democratic administration, 1875-6, as to the question of comparative
expense. He shows that the State tax had indeed been reduced from 9-1/4
mills to 6-1/2 mills, but this only by cutting off outright the school
tax of two mills. Not to follow further the labyrinth of figures, it is
interesting to note, as to the favorite term "carpet-bagger," that of
the six Republican candidates for Congress in Mississippi, in 1876, only
one was of Northern birth, and he had married and lived in the South
since the war; one had been an old Southern Democrat and a circuit
judge; two had been Confederate officers; and one, John R. Lynch, was a
colored man of high intelligence and excellent character. He, as Speaker
of the House, and B. K. Bruce, United States Senator, were among the
colored men who showed capacity and character worthy of the high
positions they attained. Among the Republican leaders of Northern birth
were some who were honored and trusted in their old homes; such men as
General Eggleston, president of the Constitutional convention; Colonel
Warner, afterward State Treasurer of Connecticut, and Henry W. Warren,
of Massachusetts. The first Republican governor, J. M. Alcorn, was a
Southern man, very able, but apparently not of the highest moral
standards. His successor, Adelbert Ames, was from Massachusetts,
conceded now to have been "honest and brave, but narrow and
puritanical," and with the mysterious trait of "hating the Aryan race of
the South."
These last words are quoted from the story of an old friend of the
reader's,--Thomas Dabney, the "Southern planter," whose noble character
was sketched in chapter XII. He had fought a brave fight with poverty
and hardship since the war, and as we come again into his company for a
moment, it is with a sense of confidence which even official documents
do not inspire. He had no doubt of the oppressiveness of Republican
rule, and the need of shaking it off by vigorous measures. It is related
that the taxes on his plantation for 1873 were over $900, while the
income was less than $800. Yet one letter tells that he is in "a
laughing humor" because he has just paid his taxes for 1875--only
$375,--a reduction of more than half--and this was still under
Republican rule.
One other witness may be heard, the writer's life-long friend, Henry W.
Warren, now of Holden, Mass. To those who know him his name is a synonym
for integrity, efficiency and modesty; he is one of the men who never
seek a public honor and never decline a public service. From his own
words some statements are here condensed. "After graduating at Yale in
1865, I was called to a position as public school teacher at Nashville,
Tenn.; and from there, seeing a promising opportunity, I went with two
friends to work a cotton plantation in one of the 'white' counties of
Mississippi. We bought it from its old owner, who had kept his slaves in
his employ as paid laborers, and they continued to work for us. As
slaves they had not been badly treated, except by the overseer during
the master's absence. Many of the whites of the county, owning no
slaves, had been indifferent to the Confederate cause, and many of them
had served in its army only when hunted by the conscription officer,
sometimes with bloodhounds. More than a few of them were Republicans. I
was asked to serve as registrar of voters for the Constitutional
convention, being one of the few who could take the 'iron-clad oath'
(that is, that he had never aided the Confederacy) and this led to my
going to the convention, and afterward to the Legislature. The Speaker
dying, I was chosen to his place for the rest of the term. Our county
going Democratic, I was not re-elected; but I was chosen chief clerk of
the House, and served for four years, after my two years as a member.
All the Democrats united in signing a paper, asking me to be always
present in the House,--this was after I had induced the Speaker to
change a mistaken ruling. So I was in a position to know pretty well
what was going on. From the first there were plenty of Confederate
generals and colonels in the Legislature." (The excluding clauses were
struck out of the Mississippi constitution at the start.) "The manner of
the blacks to the whites was habitually civil, and something of the
slave's deference to the white man remained. I think the legislation was
generally of reasonably good character. I knew positively of but little
corruption. That there was some corruption and more extravagance, I have
no doubt. But I have served since in the Massachusetts Legislature, and
I think the Southern State was but little worse than the Northern. The
negro members, though with some able and honest leaders of their own,
like Bruce and Lynch, followed largely the prominent white men. Of the
Northerners whom I knew, almost all were men of substance and had come
to stay. Six out of ten owned plantations. A 'carpet-bagger' I hardly
ever met, though no doubt there were some,--but the name was given to
all Northerners. As to expense, you must remember that the State had to
be completely rehabilitated. The war had ruined everything; public
buildings were destroyed or dilapidated; and under military rule things
had simply been kept going. Everything had to be reconstructed. The
slaves had become citizens, and that doubled the number to be provided
for. There had been practically no public schools, and they were set up
throughout the State. Taxes had fallen largely on slave property, now
they came on land. So it was inevitable that there should be an increase
of taxation. About county taxes I have no special knowledge, though in
our locality they certainly were not burdensome. In some of the black
counties it may have been worse. The Republicans, both blacks and
whites, were drilled in the 'Loyal League of America,'--it was a purely
political organization, often meeting in the woods at night. In those
years there was immense progress on the part of the negroes,--political
discussion was educational. I think if the Federal government had
provided better school education, and had protected the voters at the
polls, all might have gone well. That there was more or less of
extravagance on the part of the Legislature is not to be denied. So
there is in Massachusetts. That there was anything to justify the means
resorted to in 1875 and 1876 to get complete control of the State
government, might safely be questioned."
What those means were, there is no serious question. The Democrats
organized a campaign of clubs, processions, enthusiasm,
and--intimidation. The better part would have disclaimed the last
feature, but they did not prevent it. Thomas Dabney was among the
leaders. He relates that the best men were brought out for the
nominations, often against their own desire. He, in his old age, was
made president of the local club, and kept busy with marchings,
meetings, and barbecues. He quotes sympathetically the response of a
friend to his remark that the uprising was wonderful: "Uprising? It is
no uprising. It is an insurrection." He relates that at Clinton the
Republicans got up a riot, that they might have a pretext for asking
President Grant for troops. "They succeeded in getting up their riot,
which was put down by our own people after so sanguinary a fashion as to
strike them with a terror not easily described." There can be no doubt
as to the "sanguinary fashion" and the "terror." Testimony abounds of
the invasion of Republican meetings, enforced demands on the Republican
speakers to "divide the time," with threats and occasional violence.
Sometimes the meetings were prevented, sometimes they were broken up.
There was a great deal of terrorizing and now and then a murder. In some
cases the officers at the polls interposed so many hindrances that many
of the negroes were unable to vote. There was but a handful of Federal
troops in the State, and the President declined to send more at Governor
Ames's request. The reign of terror was effective. Once again we quote
Mr. Warren: "In our part of the country there were constant parades of
the 'red-shirted cavalry,' and the negroes were thoroughly frightened.
Two rough fellows once assailed me with threats and abuse, but drew off
when I stood my ground. When the election came on, to get our ballots
printed I had to go to New Orleans; spies dogged me in going and coming;
and as with a friend I rode toward home, we were beset and besieged in a
planter's house, that they might get possession of the ballots. Finally
we rode away on an unguarded road, pistol in hand, and escaped. But they
afterward captured and destroyed a part of the ballots, and by such
means they carried the local election. By such means and more violent
measures they carried the State."
The Democratic Legislature now proceeded to impeach Governor Ames, on
frivolous charges, but agreed to drop the proceedings if he would
resign, which he did, and left the State, knowing that his trial would
be a farce. In 1876 the campaign was of the same character as in 1875,
and so Mississippi was "redeemed."
The case of Louisiana was widely different. In that State the corruption
of the Republican managers was flagrant; it extended to the manipulation
of election returns; and the Federal Government interfered freely, and
with notable results. A knot of knavish adventurers were in
control,--Henry C. Warmoth, William P. Kellogg, F. F. Casey, and United
States Marshal S. B. Packard. Casey was the President's brother-in-law,
and General Grant was almost as incapable of believing a relative of his
to be a bad man as he was incapable of knowingly supporting a bad man.
Casey was made collector of New Orleans, and was allowed to hold the
Republican convention in the custom-house, with United States soldiers
guarding the doors and regulating the admissions. As he and his crew
were wrecking the finances of the State, there was in 1872 a general
combination against them of the better elements,--they preferred the
name "Conservatives" to "Democrats,"--and they claimed to have elected
their candidate, John McEnery, as governor. Warmouth, who had been
governor for a four years' term, had quarreled with his confederates
over the division of plunder, and gone over to the Conservatives. He
controlled the State returning-board, to which the laws intrusted a very
elastic and dangerous power of throwing out returns from districts where
intimidation was proved, and undertook to declare McEnery elected. But
there was a split in the board; then two rival boards, one awarding the
governorship to Kellogg and the other to McEnery.
The imbroglio was suddenly ended by the intervention of a United States
judge, E. H. Durell, who issued a writ at midnight, directing the United
States marshal, S. B. Packard, to occupy and hold the capitol, and
ordering a detachment of United States troops to support the Kellogg
government. This fixed the character of the State for the next four
years, by perhaps the most lawless act done under the name of law in
this whole troubled period. It was perhaps only the overshadowing
interest of the Presidential campaign that prevented its reversal by
Congress,--that, and the lingering disposition of the North to pin faith
on whatever wore the label "Republican."
McEnery kept up a shadowy claim to the governorship, with the
countenance of the "respectable" element. But Kellogg and his pals had
the actual administration, and used it to such effect that in two years
the State bonds had fallen from seventy or eighty to twenty-five, and
New Orleans city bonds from eighty or ninety to thirty or forty. In 1874
the Conservatives made a determined effort to carry the Legislature.
There was an organization called "The White League,"--a legitimate
political society, said one side;--a revival of the Ku-Klux spirit and
methods in a more guarded form, said the other side. Beyond question,
there was in Louisiana, at all stages of reconstruction, some degree of
terrorism, and occasional acts of cruelty and outrage. There was knavery
among the Radicals, and there was violence among the Conservatives. At
the 1874 election the Conservatives were successful at the polls; but
the State returning-board at once began to juggle with the returns so
palpably that the Conservative member protested and resigned. The
remainder of the board, after a month of diligent work, threw out a
number of districts, on the pretext of intimidation, and as to five
seats referred the question to the House itself. That body met,
organized in a hasty and irregular fashion, and awarded the five seats
to the Democratic claimants. But Governor Kellogg had the United States
troops at his disposal, and by his command General De Trobriand with a
file of soldiers entered the House and ejected the five
Democrats,--whereupon the Republicans organized the House anew.
But now the whole country took alarm. The President sent General
Sheridan in haste to New Orleans, and his first dispatch sustained
Kellogg, and threw the blame on the White League, to which Secretary of
War Belknap telegraphed his full approval. But the affair transcended
ordinary politics in its importance. New York spoke through Cooper
Institute, and Boston by Faneuil Hall. Such citizens as Bryant, Evarts,
and George T. Curtis led the protest. Congress rose above partisanship.
A committee of the House, including such Republicans as George F. Hoar,
William A. Wheeler, Charles Foster, William W. Phelps and William P.
Frye, with Clarkson N. Potter and Samuel S. Marshall for the Democrats,
visited New Orleans, and after full inquiry agreed that the
returning-board had "wrongfully applied an erroneous rule of law"; that
the five Democrats had been defrauded of their seats; and that the
Louisiana House should be advised--the national House having no
compulsory power--to "repair this great injustice." The two Democrats
went further, and declared that Governor Kellogg himself held by no
rightful tenure. But the Republicans backed a compromise offered by
Wheeler, which the Louisianians accepted,--the Democrats took the
Legislature, while the Republicans kept the governorship. The returning
board survived, to put in its deadly work two years later.
CHAPTER XXXV
RECONSTRUCTION: THE LAST ACT
We turn back to the course of national politics. The Republican triumph
of 1872 was followed by an overwhelming reverse at the Congressional
election of 1874. There was a growing impression of maladministration at
Washington. The Credit Mobilier scandal--the easy acceptance by
Congressmen of financial favors from the managers of the Union Pacific
Railway, followed by disingenuous denials--had especially discredited
the party in power. There had been a great financial reverse in 1873,
such as is always charged in the popular mind against the ruling powers.
The South had increased its Democratic vote. So from various causes, in
the new House the Republicans passed from a majority of one hundred to a
minority of forty; with New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and even
Massachusetts, in the Democratic column.
But the clique of bitter partisans and radicals, with whom President
Grant had become closely associated, if they took warning from the
election, drew the inference that they must make good use of the brief
time left them in the final term of the old Congress. While the
Louisiana imbroglio was still seething, the President sent a message, in
February, 1875, recommending that the State government of Arkansas be
declared illegal. It had held an unquestioned tenure for two years, and
the proposal to oust it was simply in the interest of its two Senators,
Powell Clayton and Stephen W. Dorsey, who belonged to the Grant faction.
At the same time there was brought forward a comprehensive measure,
popularly known as the "Force bill," bringing every form of violence or
intimidation of the blacks within the jurisdiction of the United States
courts; putting elections under supervision and control of the Federal
officials, and giving the President large power for the supervision of
the _habeas corpus_. Another long debated measure aimed at the fuller
enforcement of civil rights--a bill good in itself, said the moderate
Republicans; better if a part of a general pacification; but with its
present accompaniment it is "civil rights prodded in with bayonets." In
the Republican press of the country, and in the party in Congress as
well as the opposition, the battle over these measures was hot. The
administration organ in Washington gave big type and prominent display
to the paragraph: "The passage of the bill"--the Force bill--"is
required to preserve to the Republican party the electoral vote of the
Southern States." The President's personal influence was used to its
limits. Butler's unscrupulous tactics were all employed. But the weight,
if not the numbers, of the House Republicans, rose in opposition. Forty
of them, including Garfield, Dawes, the Hoars, Hawley, Hale, Pierce,
Poland, and Kasson, joined with the Democrats under the able leadership
of Samuel J. Randall. In the House, brains and conscience were beaten by
patronage; the bill went through. But it went no further,--in spite of
Morton and Conkling the Senate served again the useful function of
obstruction. The Arkansas bill was beaten in the House. Only the Civil
Rights bill became a law. Independence among Republicans had saved the
party from its most dangerous leadership.
It was perhaps this result, following the reverse of 1874, that
disinclined Grant to further interference in the South, and held his
hand when Governor Ames asked aid in Mississippi. The Louisiana business
had so shown the risks of Federal intervention in local affairs, that
even the best friends of the freedmen began to recognize that the
States were most safely left to themselves. But the sectional fires were
not left to die unfanned. When the new Congress met, 1875-6, the
Democrats showed themselves conservative enough. They chose two
excellent Northern men as speakers: Michael C. Kerr, of Indiana, and
upon his death Randall, of Pennsylvania; and they showed themselves
chiefly concerned to probe administrative abuses, which, in truth,
needed heroic surgery. But for these prosaic matters Blaine, now leader
of the opposition, substituted a far more lively tune, when a bill for
universal amnesty at the South was brought before the House. There was
no serious Republican opposition, but Blaine saw his opportunity,--he
moved that sole exception be made of Jefferson Davis, and on that text
he roused Northern passion by the story of Andersonville, goaded to
exasperation the "Confederate brigadiers" among his listeners, and made
himself most conspicuous for the time among the Republican leaders. He
eclipsed the foremost of the Grant clique, Morton and Conkling, who
after a little fruitless third-term talk were both hoping to be legatees
of the Grant influence in the approaching Presidential convention. But
at the eleventh hour a cloud swept over Blaine's prospects, in charges
of discreditable receipt of favors from railroads looking for political
aid. The testimony was conflicting, but Blaine's palpable seizure of his
own letters from a hostile witness was hardly outweighed even by his
spectacular vindication of his acts before the House. A sudden illness
stopped the investigation; and later his transference to the Senate
postponed its renewal until it frustrated his ambition in 1884. The
convention in 1876 met at Cincinnati, with Blaine the favorite, and
Morton and Conkling dividing the Grant strength. The reform element, led
by George William Curtis, supported Benjamin F. Bristow, of Kentucky,
who had made an honorable record as Secretary of the Treasury, by
attacking powerful rings, which through their connection with the
President's friends succeeded in driving Bristow out of office. The
choice of the convention fell on Rutherford B. Hayes, Union general,
governor of Ohio, leader of a State campaign in 1875 which had been a
decisive victory for sound money, and a man highly acceptable to the
reformers. Against him the Democrats nominated Samuel J. Tilden, of New
York, a statesman in his aims and the craftiest of politicians in his
means; tolerant of Tammany Hall while it was a necessary factor
in the party, but leader in the fierce and skilful assault which
drove the Tweed ring from power. As Governor he had attacked
and routed a formidable gang of plunderers connected with the canal
management. On the issues which to thoughtful men were becoming
paramount,--administrative reform and sound finance,--he offered as good
promise as did Governor Hayes.
The two men, and the elements supporting them, stood for the new
politics instead of the old,--the replacement of the war issues and
their sequels by the matters of clean administration, sound currency,
and interests common alike to the whole nation. But the Republican
leaders found their best campaign material in what the slang of the time
called "waving the bloody shirt,"--reviving the cry of abuse of the
freedmen, suppression of the negro vote, and the need of national
protection for the nation's wards. It was out of keeping with Hayes's
record, and with his later performances,--but he let the campaign take
its way, and the sectional temper that was roused provided the
atmosphere in which the next act of the drama was played.
Election day came: the returns indicated the election of Tilden;
Democrats went to bed jubilant and Republicans regretful. Then, just
before the night-editor of the New York _Times_ put his paper to press
at 3 A.M., he noticed that the returns from South Carolina, Louisiana,
and Florida were hardly more than conjectural, and, on the chance of
making his tables more complete, he sent a neighborly inquiry to the
Republican headquarters as to whether they had definite returns from
those States. The inquiry came to the ears of a little knot of the party
managers, among them Zachariah Chandler, chairman of the national
committee. He caught at it,--"the Democrats are not sure of those
States,--we have a chance." Instantly--so the story goes--he sent
dispatches to the party managers in the three States, "Claim
everything." So they did--and so did he. Next morning, following the
first announcement of Tilden's election, came the assertion that the
Republicans had carried South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida--which
would give Hayes a majority of one vote in the electoral college. All
hung on the vote in those three States,--no, on the counting of the
votes! The returning-board of Louisiana, which had before been so
useful, was in full working order; Florida was similarly equiped; South
Carolina was in much the same case. The boards had authority to throw
out the entire vote of districts where there was proof that intimidation
had tainted the election. The business of merely counting the votes
might be supplemented by the operation of throwing out enough districts
to leave the prize with the party that did the counting. It soon
appeared that the returning boards could be trusted by their friends.
With all reasonable speed, they threw out enough votes to give all the
doubtful States to Hayes. In each of these States an indignant and
protesting opposition sent in a counter set of returns giving the
electoral vote to Tilden. And any one of the three States would be
enough to insure Tilden's election.
The controversy extended to the state governments--in South Carolina,
both Wade Hampton and Chamberlain claimed the Governorship, and each
had a Legislature organized to support him. The case was the same in
Louisiana, with Nichols and Packard. President Grant refused recognition
or active support to either party; but United States troops kept the
peace, and their presence prevented the Democratic claimants from
summarily ousting their opponents.
The whole country was in a storm of excitement. The returning-boards had
done their counting,--but who was to judge the judges? Who was to decide
which of the returns of Presidential electors were the valid ones? They
were to be passed on by the two Houses of Congress in joint session. But
the Senate was Republican, the Representatives were Democratic,--what if
they disagreed as to the returns? The President of the Senate is to
decide, claimed the Republicans,--on very slender grounds, it must be
said. The House of Representatives, said the Democrats,--with more
plausible yet doubtful argument. The deadlock was alarming. Then the
emergency was met with a self-control, a resourcefulness and efficiency,
worthy of the best that is claimed for the American character. By
general agreement of the moderate men of both parties, a special
tribunal was constituted for the occasion. It consisted of five
Senators, five Representatives, and five Justices of the Supreme Court.
The Congressmen were evenly divided between the two parties. The
justices were two and two, with the fifth place assigned to David Davis,
an independent. It was an ideal division. But at the critical moment,
Davis was chosen by the Illinois Legislature to the Senate, so that he
could not act. As a substitute, Justice Joseph Bradley, was put on the
commission. He was a Republican, but in the generous temper which had
risen to meet the emergency, there was a general feeling that party
lines would be forgotten by the tribunal. The commission consisted of
Justices Bradley, Miller, Strong, Field and Clifford; Senators Edmunds,
Morton, Frelinghuysen, Bayard and Sherman; Representatives G. F. Hoar,
Garfield, Payne, Hunton and Abbott.
The two Houses proceeded to count the electoral votes in the usual form,
and whenever the return was contested the case was referred to the
commission and debated before it. Each side had its ablest lawyers to
plead; for the one party, Evarts, Kasson, McCrary, Stoughton and
Matthews; for the other, O'Conor, Black, Field and Tucker. The
commission then made its decision; and the result was reported to the
two Houses for their acceptance. In the pleading, the Republicans took
their stand on legality and the Democrats on equity. The Democrats
claimed as the question at issue, For whom did the majority of the
people of the State give their votes? The Republicans made it, Whom does
the official authority of the State certify as elected? When the
commission came to vote, on the preliminary questions, it was apparent
that the party line was just as rigid among its members as between the
advocates who pled. And it was clear that the Republicans stood upon the
narrowest possible construction of the case before them. For example, in
the case of Louisiana, it was moved, first, that evidence be admitted
that the returning body was an unconstitutional body and its acts void.
No, said the Republican eight. Moved, next, that evidence be admitted
that the board was illegal because its acting members were all of one
party,--No. Moved, that evidence be admitted that the board threw out
votes dishonestly and fraudulently,--No. In each case, the Republican
eight refused to look a hair's breadth beyond the governor's seal to the
returning board's certificate. In the same way they dealt with Florida
and South Carolina.
Tilden's friends had contrived an ingenious scheme to put the commission
in a dilemma. They had managed that there should be two returns from
Oregon,--a Republican State where one of the three electors chosen was
claimed to be disqualified,--the return bearing the Governor's seal
naming one Democrat along with two Republican electors. They argued,
Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander; if the Governor's seal is
taken as settling everything, we gain the one electoral vote we need;
if, confronted by the Oregon case, the commission decide that they may
go back of the governor's seal,--that opens the three Southern States to
our rightful challenge. But the commission, or its Republican members,
were not to be so easily posed; in the case of Oregon, they accepted the
seal of the Secretary of State, certifying the three Republicans. As the
Springfield _Republican_ bluntly put it, "The electoral commission
decided that there was no way of recovering the stolen goods in the
Louisiana case; it has found a way of restoring the Oregon vote to its
rightful owner."
That the goods were stolen, at least in Louisiana, there can scarcely at
this day be any doubt. Whether the commission did its duty in declining
to investigate and right the wrong may be debated, but the judgment of
history will probably say that neither equity nor statesmanship, but
partisanship guided the decision. Undoubtedly in Louisiana, and probably
in Florida, the returning board deliberately threw out some thousands of
votes for no other reason than to change the State's vote, and the
Presidency. The commission refused to correct or even investigate the
wrong, on the plea of scrupulous respect for State rights. A great
victory for the principle of local rights, argues Senator Hoar in his
autobiography. Possibly. But it is also open to say, that the general
government having tolerated and supported an iniquitous local oligarchy,
a special and supreme tribunal of the nation allowed that oligarchy to
decide the Presidency by a fraud.
The popular judgment of the matter at the North was largely affected by
the belief that the frauds of the Republicans were offset by
intimidation on the part of the Democrats. In various parts of the
South, notably in Mississippi and South Carolina, and probably in
Louisiana, there was a wide terrorizing of the negro Republicans. "One
side was about as bad as the other," was a common feeling. A year or two
later, the New York _Tribune_ unearthed and translated a number of
cipher telegrams, which disclosed that while the dispute over the result
was going on, agents high in the confidence of the Democratic leaders
made efforts to buy up a returning board or a presidential elector. So
both parties were badly smirched, and the election and its sequel
furnished one of the most desperate and disreputable passages in
American politics.
Yet the better sentiment of the country, triumphant in the creation of
the commission, but baffled by its partisan action, shone clear again
when the decision was deliberately and calmly accepted by the beaten
party. Congress had reserved to itself the power to reverse by a
concurrent vote of both Houses the commission's decision upon any State.
But each decision was accepted by a party vote, except that in the case
of Louisiana two Massachusetts Republicans, Julius H. Seelye and Henry
L. Pierce, spoke and voted against their party. But when the final count
gave a majority to Hayes, the formal declaration of the result was
supported by all save about eighty irreconcilables, chiefly Northern
Democrats, who were overborne in a stormy night session. It had become
simply a question between order and anarchy, and the party of order, by
a strange chance, was led for the occasion by Fernando Wood, the
"copperhead" of earlier days. For the body of the Southern Democrats,
Henry Watterson spoke manly words, accepting the inevitable with
resolution and dignity. But among the influences that weighed with the
Southern Congressmen was the assurance from Hayes's friends that as
President he would make an end of military interference in the South. In
the giving of the assurance there was nothing unworthy, for the
withdrawal of the troops was dictated by the whole logic of recent
events, and was in keeping with Hayes's convictions.
So, quickly following the inauguration of President Hayes came the
withdrawal of the blue-coats from South Carolina and Louisiana and the
Republican State governments tumbled like card houses. Nicholls took the
governorship in New Orleans and Hampton in Columbia. But it was not by
this act alone that the new President inaugurated a new régime. He
called to his Cabinet as postmaster-general, David M. Key, of Tennessee,
who had fought for the Confederacy. Schurz, liberal and reformer of the
first rank, was given the department of the interior. Evarts in the
State department; Devens, of Massachusetts, as attorney-general; Sherman
in the treasury, to complete the work of resumption; McCrary, of Iowa,
and Thompson, of Indiana, for the war and navy; and Blaine, Morton,
Conkling, Chandler,--nowhere. The administration went steadily on its
way, little loved by the old party chiefs; under some shadow from the
character of its title; but doing good work, achieving resumption of
specie payments; ending the administrative scandals which had grown
worse to the end of Grant's term; reforming the civil service. It was a
peaceful and beneficent revolution, and in its quiet years the Southern
turmoils subsided, and for better or for worse South Carolina and
Mississippi worked out their own way as New York and Ohio worked out
theirs.
CHAPTER XXXVI
REGENERATION
"Evil is good in the making," says the optimist philosopher. Even the
more sober view of life reveals
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.
Out of the calamities and horrors of war came to the nation a larger
life. Communities had been lifted out of pettiness, churches had half
forgotten their sectarianism, to millions of souls a sublimer meaning in
life had been disclosed. Lowell said it in two lines:
Earth's biggest country's got her soul,
And risen up earth's greatest nation.
The South had suffered far more than the North, and the South reaped the
larger profit. The fallacy of the old Southern civilization had been the
idea that labor is a curse and is to be shirked on to somebody else.
Overthrow and impoverishment brought labor as a necessity to every one,
and slowly it was revealed as a blessing.
When General Lee, stately in figure and bearing and splendid in dress,
met in surrender the sturdy Grant, in worn and homely service uniform,
it was emblematic of the yielding of the aristocratic order to the
industrial democracy. There was significance in the victor's kindly
words,--"Let your soldiers keep their horses; they will need them when
they get home for the spring plowing." That was it,--they turned from
chargers to plow-horses, and much to their safety and gain. Their
masters, too, from fighters became toilers, and if it seemed a fall it
proved a rise.
Before long on the street cars of Charleston and New Orleans were seen
young men of good family as drivers and conductors. Anything for an
honest living! Our fine old friend, Thomas Dabney, had been ruined along
with everybody else. He and his family undauntedly set themselves to do
their own household work. General Sherman was reported to have said, "It
would be a good thing if this sent every Southern woman to the
wash-tub." "Did Sherman say that?" said Dabney; "he shall not send my
daughters to the wash-tub!" and the old hero turned laundry-man for the
family as long as the need lasted. But the educated class soon found
fitter work than as laundry-men or car conductors. The more exacting
places called for occupants. There was a great enlistment in the ranks
of teachers. Lee took the presidency of Washington university and gave
to its duties the same whole-hearted service, the same punctilious care,
that he had given to the command of the army of Northern Virginia. In
peace as in war he was an exemplar to his countrymen,--and his
countrymen now were spread from Maine to California.
But what was to be the fate of the emancipated negro? Jefferson had
believed that he must be sent back to Africa. "Colonization" had been
the watchword of Southern emancipators, so long as there were any. Even
Lincoln apparently looked to that. But wholesale colonization was
clearly impossible. The freedmen neither could nor would be transported
in a body to Africa. And had it been possible it would have stripped the
land of laborers and left it a waste.
The South's assumption was that the negro was intrinsically an inferior
and must be kept subordinate to the white man. The North, in its
management of political reconstruction, had practically assumed that the
negro was the equal of the white man and was so to be treated. There was
a third view of the matter,--that the negro was at an inferior stage of
manhood, and the necessary task was to develop him. He is a man, but an
imperfect man,--make him a whole man. To that end some of the finest
forces of the nation were now directed. But the invigorating and
commanding spirit, who conceived the saving idea, put it into practice,
and gave guidance and inspiration to both races,--the man who found the
way out was Samuel Chapman Armstrong.
He came of Scotch-Irish blood, and of sturdy farming stock, bred in the
fertile fields of Pennsylvania and in the best traditions of
Christianity. His father and mother gave themselves to the missionary
work, in that lofty enthusiasm whose wave swept through the country
early in the nineteenth century. The boy was born in 1839 in the
Hawaiian Islands, and grew up in the joy-giving climate, with a happy
boy-life, swimming the sea and climbing the mountains; trained firmly
and kindly in obedience and service; impressed by the constant presence
in the home of unselfish and consecrated lives. As he grew older, his
bright eyes studied the native character, emotional, genial, unstable;
he saw the wholesale conversions to Christianity, speedy, happy, and
well-nigh barren of fruit. Going to America for his education, he
completed it at Williams College under the presidency of Mark Hopkins.
Garfield said that his conception of a university was a pine bench with
Mark Hopkins at one end and a student at the other. He gave a stimulus
alike intellectual and moral; his special teaching was in philosophy,
broadly reasoned, nobly aimed, closely applied to the daily need.
Armstrong spoke of him in later years as his spiritual father.
Graduating in 1862, he enlisted in the Union army, took his share in
Gettysburg and other fights, became an officer of negro troops, and rose
to a brigadier-generalship. He said that to him, born abroad, the cause
of Union made no strong appeal,--what he was fighting for was the
freedom of the slaves. The war finished, he left the army, entered the
service of the Freedmen's Bureau under General Oliver O. Howard, and was
assigned to the Jamestown peninsula in Virginia. There were huddled
together thousands of the freedmen,--the unconscious cause of the war,
the problem of the future,--simple, half-dazed, a mixture of good and
bad, of physical strength, kindly temper, crude morals and childish
ignorance. For a time the officials of the Bureau, as best they could,
kept order, found work, settled quarrels, and promoted schools. But what
was to be the large outcome?
Armstrong had been known to his associates as a man of splendid and
many-sided vitality. A college classmate, Dr. John Denison, graphically
describes him, "A sort of cataclysm of health, like other cyclones from
the South seas"; what the Tennessee mountaineers call "plumb
survigrous"; an islander, with the high courage and jollity of the tar;
"a kind of mental as well as physical amphibiousness." Extraordinary in
his training and versatility; able to "manage a boat in a storm, teach a
school, edit a newspaper, assist in carrying on a government, take up a
mechanical industry at will, understand the natives, sympathize with the
missionaries, talk with profound theorists, recite well in Greek or
mathematics, conduct an advanced class in geometry, and make no end of
fun for little children." He had had the training of a missionary
station in a Robinson Crusoe-like variety of functions. A knight-errant
to the core, the atmosphere of Williams under Hopkins gave him his
consecration. His comrades recognized him as an intellectual leader,
essentially religious but often startlingly unconventional, "under
great terrestrial headway," "the most strenuous man I ever saw." He said
of himself: "missionary or pirate."
Now after the sobering of three years of campaigning his immediate
duties brought him face to face with the tremendous problem of the
negro, and the elements of the solution already lay in his own
character, experience, personality.
What were the assets of the negro? He had, by inheritance and training,
the capacity and instinct of labor. What an advantage that is appears by
the contrast with the Indian, who is perishing for want of just that.
But the negro knew labor only as the hard necessity of his lot,--it had
to him no higher significance. "Education," was the watchword of the
generous spirits of another race who were coming to his help. They found
at first great promise in the freedman's eagerness to learn reading and
writing. But it soon appeared that this was an outreaching toward some
vague social advantage, and that the actual acquisition through speller
and copybook carried him and his children but a little way up. It was a
pressing necessity to provide teachers, and of his own race; so, rightly
and naturally, were founded the normal school and the college. He needed
his own educated preachers, physicians, lawyers; for these, too, there
must be training. So, rightly and naturally, were planted
universities,--Atlanta, Fisk, Howard. It was an unquestioned creed that
the white man's training as preacher, lawyer, physician, teacher, must
begin with years of Latin and Greek; so what other way for the negro?
So, as almost inevitable, the early education of the race began as a
copy of the white man's methods. But sadly inadequate, alas, as we begin
to see, is a classical education for the typical white man of our time;
and immense was the gap between the teaching of which that was the core
and crown, and the wants of the black field-hands and their children.
Labor, education,--and what of religion? The slave had found in
Christianity, often in rude, half-barbaric forms, a consolation, a
refuge, a tenderness and hope, to which we can scarcely do justice.
Perhaps its most eloquent expression to our imagination is those
wonderful old-time melodies, the negro "spirituals," as they have been
made familiar by the singers of the negro colleges. Their words are
mystic, Scriptural, grotesque; the melodies have a pathos, a charm, a
moving power, born out of the heart's depths through centuries of sorrow
dimly lighted by glimmerings of a divine love and hope. The typical
African temperament, the tragedy of bondage, the tenderness and triumph
of religion, find voice in those psalms.
Religion is not to be despised because it is not altogether or even
largely ethical. The heart depressed by drudgery, hardship, forlornness,
craves not merely moral guidance but exhilaration and ecstacy. Small
wonder if it seeks it in whisky; better surely if it finds it in hymns
and prayers and transports partly of the flesh yet touched by the
spirit. Further, by faithful masters and mistresses there was given to
the slave's religion, in many cases, a clear and strong sense of moral
obligation. Uncle Tom in his saintliness may be an idealization, but the
elements were drawn from life.
Yet the slave's and so the freedman's religion was very one-sided and
out of all proportion emotional. Its habitual aim was occasional
transport on earth and rapture in heaven. Of the day's task, of homely
fidelities and services, of marriage and parenthood and neighborhood and
citizenship, it made almost no account.
Face to face with these impoverished and groping souls, what had
Armstrong, in his experience, knowledge, personality, with which to
meet them? "He was filled through and through"--the quotation is from
the admirable biographical sketch by his daughter--"with a deep sense
that by hard work alone can any of us be saved--a sense based on many
obscure foundations of observation and deduction. Away back in the
corners of his mind were recollections of sundry wood-choppings and
milkings carried on under protest by himself and his companions; and
knowledge, too, of how his father and mother had spent their ambitious
youth in work, the mother spinning by the fireside, the father doing
chores at his home in Pennsylvania. It was the boys who faced and
conquered hard physical jobs that became the men of endurance later." He
had seen and shared the devotion of the missionary spirit, and had seen,
too, how largely it failed of fruit by being spent on supernatural
conversion and mystical emotion. He knew the tropical temperament,
common to Hawaiian and negro,--how accessible to transient fervor, how
deficient in persistence and continuity. He had watched his father's
operations, as minister of public instruction under the Hawaiian king;
his experiments in more practical and prosaic education and religion,
half frowned on by the ecclesiastics of America, but rich in suggestion.
He knew that the Hilo manual labor school, where the boys paid their
expenses by labor, slightly trained, was a marked success. His intensely
active nature had caught from Hopkins the philosophic outlook, and the
human materials were before him in rich abundance. Above all, while
unspeculative in religion, and content to employ its traditional
forms,--"they're imperfect enough," he said, "but they're the best we've
got"--the instincts of his great and disciplined nature sent him
straight to the central realities of character, which are the true
foundations of society.
His ideal crystallized by that swift and sudden process in which the
long subconscious growth of the mind sometimes comes to fruitage. He
said in later years that before he entered the Bureau's service, while
sailing on a troop-ship to Texas, he saw as in a dream his school much
as it afterward became. Twice afterward the vision came to him.
Stationed at Hampton in 1866, while he was bringing order out of the
chaos around him, his mind was reaching forward surely and swiftly to
his larger project.
This was the germ thought: Character is to get its direction and energy
in the day's work. Just as man's physical needs drive him to toil, his
spiritual necessities find their best field and cultivation in the same
toil. The freedmen's first need is to earn a living; then to acquire
such a margin as will allow some little ease and comfort and refinement;
and along with these goes the need of good habits, high aims,
disciplined character. Teach the industrial lesson and the moral lesson
together. Train them to work intelligently and cheerfully; teach them at
the same time whatever of book knowledge best fits their need; and
constantly inspire them with the spirit of service to their kind.
Provide in this way for some hundreds of young men and women, who shall
go out as teachers to educate and train their people along these lines.
That was the ideal,--the germ of Hampton, of Tuskegee, of the new
education of the negro; the suggestion and stimulant of the new
education as it is coming to be for the white.
CHAPTER XXXVII
ARMSTRONG
Armstrong was a man of action, and of words only as far as they helped
action. He reached the starting of his school in 1868, within two years
after he was assigned to duty at Hampton. For external help he had first
the countenance and support of the Freedmen's Bureau. He was in its
service and pay until 1872. He had the warm and practical friendship of
General Howard, who, after inviting him to take charge of the new
university in Washington bearing his own name, skilfully gained for his
Hampton enterprise a moderate appropriation from Congress. If the
Freedmen's Bureau had accomplished nothing else,--and it did accomplish
much, especially in education--it would have been justified merely by
giving Armstrong his opportunity. Next he turned to private benevolence.
Of the various organizations, church and secular, that were devising and
doing for the freedmen, perhaps the most efficient was the American
Missionary Association. From its officers Armstrong won response,
sympathy, contributions. He had to face the difficulties of a pioneer.
There were precedents against him. Experiments somewhat similar had been
tried and failed. At Mount Holyoke seminary for women, created by the
genius and devotion of Mary Lyon, and at Oberlin college, where the best
New England tradition had been transplanted--there had been long and
earnest trial of giving the students work by which to partially pay
their expenses. But it had been given up,--the women students were taxed
beyond their strength; the farmers complained that the boys were
thinking of their books, and the teachers said their pupils came with
half strength to their lessons. But Armstrong knew the material he was
dealing with, and how different from the nervous, high-strung pupils of
Oberlin and Mount Holyoke was the vigorous, sensuous material he was to
mold.
He began in April, 1868, with small things,--a matron, a teacher,
fifteen pupils and buildings worth $15,000. In a month there were thirty
pupils. Things moved straight on,--they were moved by the assiduity, the
enthusiasm, the inspiration, of Armstrong, and the answering temper
which he woke in pupils, teachers, contributors, observers. Presently a
special effort, an appeal to friends, solicitude, students zealously
making bricks and laying them, help from General Howard--and so, in
1870, a noble building, Academic Hall, and presently again, Virginia
Hall,--and the school kept growing.
Its moral success was promptly won. The subject answered to the
experiment,--those dark-skinned boys and girls came eager to learn. No
one had believed in them, and they had not believed in themselves, but
they speedily learned self-respect and gained the respect of others.
They did what was asked of them, earned most of their support, showed
good workmanship and scholarship, were blameless in morals, caught the
spirit of the place, and went out to carry light into the dark places.
No holiday task was set them. There was a working day of twelve hours,
between the class-room, the work-shop, the drill-ground and the field,
with rare and brief snatches of recreation. They met the demand with a
resource inherited from their ancestors' long years of patient labor.
The hard toil was a moral safeguard. The African race is sensuous, and
co-education might seem perilous. The danger was completely averted by
the influence of labor, strenuous and constant, but diversified and
interesting. The essentials of character,--industry, chastity, truth and
honesty, serviceable good-will,--were the aim and result of the Hampton
training; and all ran back to the homely root that man should be trained
to earn intelligently and faithfully his daily bread.
The story of Hampton is a theme not for a chapter but for a volume. How
its founder won favor and friendship by his tact and large-mindedness;
how he established good relations with the Virginians; how the Institute
became the parent of other schools; how Booker Washington was there
fitted for the founding of Tuskegee and the leadership of his race; how
the work was extended to the Indians; how Armstrong's spirit and example
gathered and inspired a company of teachers perhaps unsurpassed,--mostly
women, whose refining influence on the pupils he specially valued; how
he dreamed of what he never reached, some day to give industrial
education at Hampton to the whites; how a worthy successor took his
place, efficient and self-effacing; how deeply the Hampton idea has
permeated the education of the Southern negro, and is coming to
influence white education North and South,--all this can here be
recalled but by a word.
But on the personality of its leader we must for a moment linger, to
note one or two of its traits. His splendid vitality overflowed at times
in frolic and extravagance. He never lost the spirit of the boy. He
would come into a group of his serious-minded teachers and say, "Oh!
what's the good of saving souls if you can't have any fun?" and start a
frolic or organize an all-day picnic. In his home he introduced "puss in
the corner" and "the Presbyterian wardance" among the very elect. He
delighted his children with romances. "Like Dr. Hopkins, he believed
that the class-room should be a jolly place, and used to say that no
recitation was complete without at least one good laugh. 'Laughter
makes sport of work,' he said." His teaching sometimes came in a droll
story. "Once there was a woodchuck.... Now, woodchucks can't climb
trees. Well, this woodchuck was chased by a dog and came to a tree. He
knew that if he could get up this tree the dog could not catch him. Now,
woodchucks can't climb trees, but he had to, so he did."
His devotion to his work was so whole-souled that it was joyous and
seemed unconscious of cost. In the touching pages he wrote when death
impended, he said, "I never gave up or sacrificed anything in my life."
Yet he constantly made what most men count heavy sacrifices. His work
involved frequent and laborious trips to the North to arouse interest
and raise money. He did it in as gallant a fashion as he had led a
charge, or as he made appeal to the students hanging reverently on his
words. A glimpse of him on one of these begging tours is given by
Professor Francis G. Peabody:
"I suppose that every lover of General Armstrong recalls some special
incident which seems most entirely typical of the man's life and heart.
For my part, I think oftenest of one of those scenes in his many begging
journeys to the North. It was at a little suburban church far down a
side street on a winter night in the midst of a driving storm of sleet.
There was, as nearly as possible, no congregation present; a score or so
of humble people, showing no sign of any means to contribute, were
scattered through the empty spaces, and a dozen restless boys kicked
their heels in the front pew. Then in the midst of this emptiness and
hopelessness up rose the worn, gaunt soldier, as bravely and gladly as
if a multitude were hanging upon his words, and his deep-sunk eyes
looked out beyond the bleakness of the scene into the world of his
ideals, and the cold little place was aglow with the fire that was in
him, and it was like the scene on the Mount, that was not any less
wonderful and glistening because only three undiscerning followers were
permitted to see the glory."
Those frequent and long journeys went far to break up the happy home
life in which he delighted, with the wife whose congenial and intimate
companionship was his for nine years and the little girls to whom he was
the most delightful of fathers. Then for twelve years, until his second
marriage, he was almost a homeless man. He wore out his wonderful
constitution; he suffered from dyspepsia and sleeplessness; a paralytic
stroke crippled him; but for a year and a half he struggled on,
cheerful, self-forgetful,--then the end.
His countrymen scarcely yet realize all that he was. He was the
successful leader in that real emancipation of the American negro to
which the legal emancipation was but a prelude. Beyond that, it would
hardly be too much to say that he did more than any other man in either
hemisphere to rationalize and Christianize our still half-medieval
system of education. The working ideals of Hampton are to-day higher
than those of Yale and Harvard. It may be questioned whether any
professed preacher has done so much to develop the best modern type of
religion; centered in daily work, reaching out into all human service,
and consciously inspired by the divine life. It would not be extravagant
to say that in the little group--perhaps half a dozen in all--whom
America has contributed to the world's first rank of great men, not one
stands higher in heroic manhood and far-reaching service than Samuel
Armstrong.
But any comparison seems almost unworthy of his lofty spirit. There is
no rivalry among the saints. Would that Armstrong could here be
portrayed as he appeared in life. The outer man spoke well the inner. To
look upon, he was a thoroughbred; of soldierly bearing, alert, vivid,
noble; with the twinkle of mirth, the flash of resistless purpose,--a
man to love, to revere, to follow. As a sort of mental portrait-sketch,
we may glean a few of his sayings. It was as true of him as of Luther
that his words were half-battles. They were flashed out like sparks
struck from action. As to his special work, these:
"The North thinks that the great thing is to free the negro from his
former owner; the real thing is to save him from himself."
On the dissolution of the American Anti-slavery Society, (because
nothing remained for it to do): "It failed to see that everything
remained. Their work was just beginning when slavery was abolished."
"I cannot understand the prevailing views of the war among pious and
intelligent Americans. It is simply barbaric--to whip the South and go
home rejoicing, to build monuments of victory, leaving one-third of
their countrymen in the depths of distress."
"The reconstruction measures were a bridge of wood over a river of
fire."
(In 1878): "Hereafter it will be seen that negro suffrage was a boon to
the race, not so much for a defense, but as a tremendous fact that
compelled its education. There is nothing to do but attempt its
education in every possible way. In their pinching poverty the Southern
States have seized the question of negro education with a vigor that is
the outcome of danger."
(In 1887): "The political experience of the negro has been a great
education to him. In spite of his many blunders and unintentional crimes
against civilization, he is to-day more of a man than he could have been
had he not been a voter."
"The war was the saving of the South. Defeat and ruin brought more
material prosperity to the South than to the North, and the future has
untold advantages in store. Education is part of it, but capital and
enterprise, which make men work, are the greater part. The negro and
poor white, and, more than all, the old aristocrat, are being saved by
hard work, which, next to the grace of God, saves our souls."
"We hew from the raw material, men who have come out of deep darkness
and wrong, without inheritance but of savage nature, the best product we
can, and care as much to infuse it with a spiritual life and divine
energy as with knowledge of the saw, plane, and hoe."
And, of his broader outlook on life, these: "I am convinced of the
necessity of organizing pleasure as well as religion in order to sustain
Christian morality."
"The chief comfort in life is babies."
"Politics and philanthropy are a grind; only when one is at the post of
duty and knows it, there is a sensation of being lifted and lifting (_et
teneo et teneor_) which sometimes comes gradually over one. Detail is
grinding, the whole inspiring. God's kings and priests must drudge in
seedy clothes before they can wear the purple."
"From the deep human heart to the infinite heart there is a line along
which will pass the real cry and the sympathetic answer--a double flash
from the moral magnetism that fills the universe. Its conditions are not
found in theological belief, but in the spirit of a little child. We can
no more understand our human brother than our Father in heaven without
bringing faith--the evidence of things unseen, the substance of things
hoped for--to our aid."
"All progress of strong hearts is by action and reaction. Human life is
too weak to be an incessant eagle flight toward the Sun of
Righteousness. Wings will be sometimes folded because they are wings....
The earthly struggle must be enduring--that is all. There must be no
surrenders; we can't expect much of victory here."
"The longer I live, the less I think and fear about what the world calls
success; the more I tremble for true success, for the purity and
sanctity of the soul, which is as a temple."
"Doing what can't be done is the glory of living."
"What are Christians put into the world for but to do the impossible in
the strength of God?"
In the contemplation of such a spirit we rest for a little from the
turmoils of politics, the mixture of motives, the half-successes. Here
is what glorified the whole business,--the development of souls like
this; and in such is the promise of the future. Fitly to Armstrong
belongs what Matthew Arnold has written of his father, a kindred soul:--
Servants of God!--or sons
Shall I not call you? because
Not as servants ye knew
Your Father's innermost mind,
His, who unwillingly sees
One of his little ones lost--
Yours is the praise, if mankind
Hath not as yet in its march
Fainted, and fallen, and died!
See! In the rocks of the world
Marches the host of mankind
A feeble, wavering line.
Where are they tending?--A God
Marshal'd them, gave them their goal--
Ah, but the way is so long!
Years they have been in the wild!
Sore thirst plagues them, the rocks,
Rising all round, overawe;
Factions divide them, their host
Threatens to break, to dissolve--
Ah, keep, keep them combined!
Else, of the myriads who fill
That army, not one shall arrive;
Sole they shall stray; on the rocks
Batter forever in vain,
Die one by one in the waste.
Then, in such hour of need
Of your fainting, dispirited race,
Ye, like angels, appear,
Radiant with ardor divine.
Beacons of hope, ye appear!
Languor is not in your heart,
Weakness is not in your word,
Weariness not on your brow.
Ye alight in our van! at your voice,
Panic, despair, flee away.
Ye move through the ranks, recall
The stragglers, refresh the outworn,
Praise, re-inspire the brave.
Order, courage, return;
Eyes rekindling, and prayers,
Follow your steps as ye go.
Ye fill up the gaps in our files,
Strengthen the wavering line,
Stablish, continue our march,
On, to the bound of the waste,
On, to the City of God!
CHAPTER XXXVIII
EVOLUTION
The story of slavery merges in the stories of the white man and the
black man, to which there is no end. As the main period to the present
study we have taken the beginning of President Hayes's administration in
1877, when the withdrawal of Federal troops from the South marked the
return of the States of the Union to their normal relations, and also
marked the disappearance of the negro problem as the central feature in
national politics. From that time to the present we shall take but a
bird's-eye view of the fortunes and the mutual relation of the two
races.
The people of the Southern States realized gradually but at last fully
that the conduct of their affairs was left in their own hands. From this
time there was no important Federal legislation directed specially at
the South. The restrictive laws left over from the reconstruction period
were in some cases set aside by the Supreme Court and in general passed
into abeyance. There was rare and brief discussion of a renewal of
Federal supervision of elections. But the Northern people, partly from
rational conviction and partly from absorption in new issues, were
wholly indisposed to any further interference. Without such interference
there was no slightest chance of any restoration of political
preponderance of the negroes over the whites. The specter of "negro
domination" haunted the Southern imagination long after it had become an
impossibility. Then it was used as a bogy by small politicians. But the
only serious attempt at national legislation for the South has been of a
wholly different character. It was the plan of Senator Blair of New
Hampshire, long urged upon Congress, and sometimes with good hope of
success, for national assistance to local education, on the basis of
existing illiteracy, for a term of ten years, to a total amount of
$100,000,000. That is the only kind of special legislation for the South
that has had any chance of enactment for almost thirty years.
Through the twelve years of political reconstruction, 1865-77, the
Southern people were gradually adapting themselves to the new industrial
and social conditions. Then the body of the whites, finding themselves
fully restored to political mastery, grasped the entire situation with
new clearness and vigor. They thrust the freedmen not only out of
legislative majorities and the State offices, but out of all and any
effective exercise of the suffrage. The means were various, consisting
largely of indirect and technical hindrances, "tissue-paper ballots" and
the like. The intelligent class massed against the ignorant found no
serious difficulty in having their own way at all points. A considerable
number of negroes still voted, and had their votes counted, but their
party was always somehow put in the minority; almost all offices passed
out of their hands; their representatives speedily disappeared from
Congress, and before long from the Legislatures. Negro suffrage was
almost nullified, and that, too, before the legislation of the last
decade.
But, in asserting their complete political superiority, the whites also
recognized a large responsibility for the race they controlled. A degree
of civil rights was secured to them, short of a perfect equality with
the whites, but far beyond the status intended by the "black codes" of
1865-6. The fundamental rights, of liberty to dispose of their labor and
earnings in their own way, and protection of person and property by the
law and the courts, were substantially secured. And, very notably, the
common school education of blacks as well as whites was undertaken with
fidelity, energy and new success. This great and vital advance,
inaugurated by the Southern Republican governments, was accepted and
carried on, loyally and at heavy cost, by the succeeding Democratic
governments. The figures show a great advance from 1875 to 1880 in the
number of schools and scholars of both races throughout the South.
Political inferiority for the negroes, but civil rights, industrial
freedom, and rudimentary education,--that was the theory and largely the
practice of their white neighbors.
One clause they added with emphatic affirmation: "I will buy with you,
sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following; but I
will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you." Social
superiority, indicated by separation in all the familiar and courteous
intercourse of daily life, was asserted by the whites with a rigor
beyond that of the days of slavery. When humiliated and stung by the
political ascendency of their former bondmen, they wrapped themselves in
their social superiority with a new haughtiness. The pride of race, of
color, of the owner above the serf, stripped of its old power and
insignia, but no whit weakened in root and core, set an adamantine wall
along the line of social familiarity. Let the black man have his own
place--in school and church, in street and market and hotel; but the
same place, never! Separate schools, churches, cars. And as in a
hospitable country the social meal is the special occasion and symbol of
good fellowship and equal comradeship, right there let the line be
fixed,--no black man or woman shall sit at table with whites.
The usage came down by tradition, and became only a little more rigid
under the new conditions. At the North the general practice had always
been much the same; but there it was occasionally and growingly
superseded, when people of the two races found a common level of
education and manners. The Southern whites for a while took their own
practice as a matter of course. But then, especially as by degrees some
black men and women acquired mental cultivation and social polish,--then
came question and challenge from the world without and from conscience
within; why this rigid separation? An answer must be found or made,--and
presently the answer appeared: If white and black men and women eat and
drink together, play and work together,--then they will intermarry, and
the white race will become mixed and degenerate. So that became the
conviction, the creed, the shibboleth, of the Southern whites,--race
purity, to be safeguarded by complete prohibition of all social
intimacy, especially as symbolized by the common meal. And the
prohibition was enforced among the whites by the penalty of sure and
stern ostracism.
Under these conditions, then, the two sections of the Southern people
have been working their way, for almost thirty years. How first have the
negroes fared? Of the prophecies for their future, made when they were
in bondage and in view of possible emancipation, one was that they would
die out,--but in less than half a century they have doubled. Another was
that if freed they would refuse to work,--but the industrial product of
the South has never fallen off, but has steadily and vastly increased,
with the negro still as the chief laborer. Another prediction was that
they would lapse into barbarism. The Southern negroes as a mass have a
fringe of barbarism--a heavy fringe. So has every community, white,
black or yellow, the world over. Have the Southern blacks, as a body,
moved toward barbarism or toward civilization since they were set free?
The comparative tests between civilization and barbarism are, broadly
speaking, productive industry, intelligence and morality. If we gauge
industry by results, we find that the class which forty years ago
entered into freedom with empty hands now owns more than $300,000,000 of
property by the tax-gatherers' lists. Another estimate--cited by Prof.
Albert Bushnell Hart--puts their entire property holdings at
$500,000,000. Though most of them are tenants or hired laborers, yet
there are more than 173,000 who own their farms. The total number of
farms worked by them in the South--owned, leased, or rented on
shares--is figured at 700,000. The census of 1900 shows that in almost
every profession, trade and handicraft the black race has numerous
representatives--their range of occupation and industrial opportunity
being far wider in the South than in the North. Taking the whole
country, the percentage of adults in gainful pursuits is a trifle higher
among blacks than among whites. Allow for the more frequent employment
in toil of the black woman; allow, too, for the more intermittent
character of black labor,--yet the relative showing is not unfavorable
to the enfranchised race. And this comparison touches, too, the more
difficult problem of morality,--for industry is itself a chief safeguard
of morality.
As to intelligence, the statistics show that, roughly speaking, about
half the blacks over ten years old can read and write. That is not much
below the status of the people of England half a century ago. In the
higher fields of intelligence, the American negroes,--there are
9,000,000 of them,--supply to-day a large part of their own teachers,
ministers, lawyers and doctors, and in all these professions the
standard is steadily rising.
In regard to morality, generalization is difficult. There is undoubtedly
a much larger criminal element among the blacks than among the whites.
There are proportionately more crimes against property, crimes of
sensuality, crimes of violence. Materials are wanting for exact
comparison, either with the whites, or among the blacks at different
periods. Yet there are few or no sections at the South, even in the
worst parts of the Black Belt, as to which the public gets the
impression of any general lawlessness. And in any comparison of the
present with the time of slavery, we must remember what Carlyle says in
speaking of the cruelties of the French Revolution as compared with
those of the tyranny which preceded it,--when the high-born suffer the
world hears of it, but the woes of the inarticulate are unheard. Wrongs
at the South which shock us to-day,--or wrongs as great--were
commonplace, were unnoted and unchronicled, under slavery. It is
offenses against women that rouse the hottest resentment. But for
centuries the black woman's chastity had absolutely no protection under
the law, and her woes were pitiful beyond telling. For the Southern
negro, true family life was impossible until within fifty years. With so
brief experience in the best school of character, there is no ground for
doubting that he has won a vast moral advance, and the promise of
greater.
Of the negroes, as of every race or community, we may consider the
lowest stratum, the great mass, and the leaders. Regarding not morality
only, but general conditions, there is a considerable element of the
Southern blacks whose condition is most pitiable. Such especially are
many of the peasants of the Black Belt; barely able to support
themselves, often plundered with more or less of legality by landlord
and storekeeper, shut up to heavy, dull, almost hopeless lives.
Inheritance weighs on them as well as environment; when these
plantations were recruited from Virginia, it was only the worst of the
slaves whom their masters would sell, and the bad elements propagated
their like. The case of these people to-day presents one of the open
sores, the unanswered questions,--we might say the impossible tasks,
did we not remember Armstrong's attitude toward things "impossible."
Yet, even as to these,--are they not better off than when enslaved? A
part of their trouble is the burden of responsibility--for themselves,
their wives and children. In slavery they had no responsibility beyond
the day's task; the whip and the full stomach were the two extremes of
their possibilities. Now at least they are men--with manhood's burdens,
but with its possibilities, too.
Of the great middle class, something has already been said, as to
industry, property and education. But statistics are cold and dead,
could we but see the living human realities which they vainly try to
express. The growth of a slave, or a slave's child, into a free man or
woman,--the birth and development of true family life,--could we see
this in its millions of instances, or even distinctly in one typical
instance, with all its phases of struggle, mistake, disappointment,
success, the growth of character, the blossoming of manhood and
womanhood,--it would be a more moving spectacle than any that
Shakespeare has given. Here, again, it is mostly the inarticulate class,
and their story is not told to the world. We especially fail to learn
it, because of the wall of caste by which the white man shuts himself
out from the finest sights and the most brotherly opportunities. More
than farming or carpentry, more than school or church, and taking in the
best fruits of all these, is family life, in its fullest and best. That
is where the negro is coming to highest manhood.
A necessary test of a race is its power to furnish its own leaders. The
negro race in America is developing a leadership of its own,--small as
yet, but choice and growing. It was part of Armstrong's central idea to
create and supply such a leadership. Hampton has gone steadily on in the
work, and the sisters and the children of Hampton are multiplying their
fruits. It was by an ideal fitness of things that Armstrong attracted,
inspired and started as his worthy successor one of the negro race. At
Tuskegee the black man is doing for himself what at Hampton the white
man is doing for him. Booker Washington is the pupil and successor of
Armstrong, but he has his own distinct individuality, his own word and
work. His constant precept and practice has been that the black man
should make himself so serviceable and valuable to the community that
every door will open as fast as he is fit to enter it. It is the gospel
of wisdom and of peace. Toward all the opportunities denied to the race,
its attitude is one of patience but of untiring persistence. Its
constant word is, Make yourself fit for any function, any place, and
sooner or later it will be yours. Against political exclusion Mr.
Washington on due occasion speaks his calm word, but he does not beat
against the closed gate; he knows that when the black man shows his full
capacity for citizenship it cannot long be denied him. The social
exclusion he accepts with quiet self-respect; let time see to that, let
us only do our full work, learn our full lesson. His teaching goes far
beyond the schoolroom; he gathers in conference the heads of families,
the fathers and mothers; he sets them to study and practice the
curriculum of the family and the neighborhood. In his intense
practicality he lacks something of the spiritual inspiration which
Armstrong had and gave. But his teaching is in no wise narrow or
selfish, for always it is animated by the spirit of brotherhood and
service. His personal story, _Up from Slavery_, is one of the most
moving of human documents; in itself it is an answer to all pessimism.
It is a typical story; even as these sheets are written there comes to
hand another like unto it, the story of another boy, William Holtzclaw,
who groped his way up from a negro cabin, caught the sacred fire at
Tuskegee, did battle with misfortune and adversity, and now in his turn
is carrying on the good work. And for every such story that gets told
there are a hundred that are acted.
The wider leadership of the negroes by their own men is exemplified,--it
is not measured or exhausted,--by a pregnant little volume of essays
entitled _The Negro Problem_. Seven of its phases are discussed by
Booker Washington, Professor DuBois, Charles W. Chestnutt, Wilfred H.
Smith, H. T. Kealing, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and T. Thomas Fortune. As a
collection, these essays are noteworthy for their cogency and clearness,
for their earnest and self-respectful plea for full justice and
opportunity, and their calmness and candor. The race that can speak for
itself in such tones has an assured future,--if democracy, evolution,
Christianity, are the ruling powers.
This story is concerned mainly with the slave and the freedman, but it
must also touch on his former master, now his neighbor and
fellow-citizen. The new South is far too ample a theme for a paragraph
or a chapter. But it must be said in a word that its main trait is the
substitution, for a territorial and slave-owning aristocracy, of an
industrial democracy. It is the coming of the new man,--laborious,
enterprising, pushing his way. His development began when the whole
community was set to work its way up from the impoverishment left by the
war. It was accelerated when new resources were found, when coal and
iron mines were started, when cotton manufacturing began where the
cotton is grown. New types of character and society are developing, yet
blending with the remnant of the old.
Politics, in all its forms, plays a smaller part in to-day's society
than in that of fifty years ago. Not only has the South never regained
its old ascendency at Washington, but it has not stood, and does not
stand, for any distinct set of ideas or principles in the national life.
It has clung closely together, under the influence of old sentiments
and lingering apprehensions. In its fear of a recurrence of "negro
domination," it has lost touch with the living questions of to-day and
to-morrow. "The Solid South" has meant a secure contingent of electoral
votes for the Democratic Presidential candidate,--whether he stood for a
gold or a silver currency, for revenue reform or its opposite, for
radicalism or conservatism,--and a solid array of members in Senate and
House equally without pilotage on living issues. Until the South breaks
away from its fetish of past fears and prejudices, it cannot rise to its
proper opportunities of statesmanship.
Yet better than the old-time absorption in Federal politics and the
prizes of the Capitol is the more diversified life of the South to-day.
It is being swept into the current of industrialism--with its energies,
its prizes, its perils. In other directions, too, the new life of the
South flows free and strong. It is creating a literature,--a branch of
American literature,--incomparably beyond any product of its earlier
days. After what may be called a literature of statesmanship,--the work
of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Marshall,--the old South was almost
wholly barren of original scholarship and creative genius. Now it bears
a harvest so rich that one cannot here begin to classify or to name. The
war-time is bearing an aftermath, of less importance in its romances,
but admirable and delightful in its biographies and reminiscences. Of
these the most notable feature, full as they are of vivid human interest
and striking personal characteristics,--is the freedom from rancor, the
generosity toward old foes which seems even unconscious of any necessity
to forgive. And in these personal sketches there are disclosed certain
broad yet distinct types of manhood and womanhood, the special Southern
contributions to the composite American. In general literature, too,
the South is doing its full share. In its histories, the note of
provincialism still lingers,--inevitably, and not blamably. The Southern
essayist or historian naturally gravitates to the past of his own
section,--and naturally he seeks to vindicate his comrades or his
ancestors, and to interpret the past from their standpoint. But,
compared with the provincialism of the South of 1860, he is a
cosmopolitan.
The new South is doing perhaps its best work in education. Its leaders
are both raising and widening their standards,--they are reaching out
toward modern and progressive ways, while they are trying to amplify
their systems so as to include the whole youthful population. Their
intelligence and enthusiasm are seen alike in the ancient universities
like that of Virginia, in the younger colleges such as Roanoke and
Berea, and in the leaders of the public schools. Intelligence,
enthusiasm, devotion,--all are needed, and all will be tasked to the
utmost. For the education of the people's children, everywhere the most
pressing of common concerns, and the most perplexing in the transition
from old to new ideas and methods--bears with especial weight and
importunity upon the South. Its thinly-spread population, its still
limited resources of finance, the presence of the two races with their
separate and common needs,--all set a gigantic task to the South, and
one that calls for sympathy and aid from the nation at large.
CHAPTER XXXIX
EBB AND FLOW
Thus, in broadest outline, have the two races at the South been faring
on their way. And now in recent years, under their separate development
and with their close intermingling, have come new complications and
difficulties. The tendency has been in some ways to a wider separation.
The old relations between the household servants and their employers,
often most kindly, and long continuing to link the two races at
numberless points, have passed away with the old generation. Once the
inmates of mansion and cabin knew well each other's ways. Now they are
almost unacquainted. The aristocracy and its dependents had their mutual
relations of protection and loyalty, and gracious and helpful they often
were. Now comes democracy,--vigorous, jostling, self-assertive,--its
true social ideal of brotherly comradeship being yet far from
realization. The negro is in a doubly hard position; under democratic
competition the weaker is thrust to the wall, yet he has not even the
equality which democracy asserts, but is held in the lower place by
caste. And so there is a new or a newly apparent aggression upon the
weaker race.
Its most obvious form is the legal limitation of suffrage. The irregular
and indirect suppression of the negro vote which had prevailed since the
close of the Reconstruction period, was not thorough and sure enough to
satisfy the white politicians. And the lawless habit which it fostered,
and whose effects could by no means be confined to one race, alarmed the
better classes. So from two directions there was a pressure toward some
restriction of the negro vote which should be both legal and effective.
The movement became active about the year 1895, and accomplished its end
in the States of Virginia, the Carolinas, Alabama, Mississippi, and
Louisiana, by constitutional amendments. The qualifications thus
prescribed are so various and so variously combined that a full
statement here is forbidden by limits of space, but their general
characteristics are these: The requirement (in Virginia, South Carolina,
Alabama, Louisiana) of $300 worth of property; the payment of a poll tax
(in Virginia, North and South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana); the
ability to read and write (in North Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana); the
ability, if not to read, to understand and explain any section of the
Constitution (in Virginia, Mississippi); regular employment in some
lawful occupation, good character, and an understanding of the citizen's
duties and obligations (Alabama).[2]
These restrictions apply in theory alike to both races. But exemption
from them is allowed, and the suffrage is given, to certain classes: To
all who served in the Civil War (Virginia, Alabama); to all who were
entitled to vote on January 1, 1867, also to the sons (or descendants)
of these two classes (Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana).
In these States, if these requirements are impartially enforced, the
effect is to impose on the negroes a moderate property or intelligence
qualification, or the two combined; and to give practically universal
suffrage to the whites. This last feature, while essentially unfair, is
a practical grievance to the negroes so long and only so long as the two
races stand as directly opposed forces in politics. Otherwise it is
questionable whether the class who are called on to earn the suffrage by
intelligence or productive industry are not really as well off as the
class to whom it is given regardless of merit.
But in its practical operation the system is so elastic--and
unquestionably was so designed--that it can be easily applied for the
exclusion of a great part of those who nominally are admitted to the
suffrage. The "character" and "understanding" tests leave virtually full
power with the registration officers. There can be no reasonable doubt
that in these six States the suffrage is virtually denied to negroes to
an extent utterly beyond any fair construction of the law. Mr. Charles
W. Chestnutt, in his paper on _Disfranchisement_, cites the case of
Alabama, where the census of 1900 gave the negro males of voting age as
181,471, while in 1903 less than 3000 were registered as voters. And
even in States like Georgia, where suffrage is by law universal, ways of
practical nullification are often applied,--as for example by exclusion
from the nominating primaries, in which the results are principally
determined.
Without the need of legal forms, there is a practically universal
exclusion of all negroes from public offices, filled by local election
or appointment, throughout most of the South. Their appointment to
Federal offices in that region, though very rare, is always made the
occasion of vehement protest.
The theory generally avowed among Southern whites, that the two races
must be carefully kept separate, is apt to mean in practice that the
black man must everywhere take the lower place. At various points that
disposition encounters the natural and cultivated sentiments of
justice, benevolence, and the common good, and now one and now the
other prevails. Thus, there have been efforts to restrict the common
school education of the blacks. It has been proposed, and by prominent
politicians, to spend for this purpose only the amount raised by
taxation of the blacks themselves. There has appeared a disposition to
confine their education to the rudimentary branches and to a narrow type
of industrialism. Strong opposition has developed to the opening either
by public or private aid of what is known as "liberal education" in the
college or university sense. A flagrant instance of injustice is the
enactment in Kentucky of a law prohibiting all co-education of the
races--a law especially designed to cripple the admirable work of Berea
College.
But the most serious obstacle to the black man, the country over, is the
threatened narrowing of his industrial opportunities. Here has been his
vantage-ground at the South, because his productive power was so
great--by numbers and by his inherited and traditional skill,--that
there was no choice but to employ him. At the North, where he is in so
small a minority as to be unimportant, he has been crowded into an ever
narrowing circle of employments. Precisely the same sentiment, though
not so ingeniously formulated, which makes the white gentleman refuse to
receive the black gentleman in his drawing-room, inclines the white
carpenter or mason to refuse to work alongside of his negro
fellow-laborer. Yet against this we have the accomplished fact, in the
South, of black and white laborers actually working together,
harmoniously and successfully, in most industries. We see the divided
and wavering attitude of the trade-unions; some branches taking whites
and blacks into the same society; others allying white societies and
black societies on an equal footing; others refusing all affiliation;
the earlier declarations of the national leaders for the broadest human
fellowship challenged and often giving way before the imperious
assertions of the caste spirit.
A race closely intermixed with another superior to it in numbers,
wealth, and intelligence,--a self-conscious and self-assertive
race,--suffers at many points. There are abuses tolerated by law;
infractions and evasions of law; semi-slavery under the name of peonage;
impositions by the landlord and the creditor. There are unpunished
outrages,--let one typical case suffice: a negro farmer and produce
dealer, respected and esteemed by all, in place of a rude shanty puts up
a good building for his wares; the word goes round among the roughs,
"that nigger is getting too biggity," and his store is burned,--nobody
surprised and nobody punished. Then there is the chapter of lynchings:
First, the gross crime of some human brute, then a sudden passionate
vengeance by the community; the custom spreads; it runs into hideous
torture and public exultation in it; it extends to other crimes; it
knows no geographical boundaries but spreads like an evil infection over
the country--but most of its victims are of the despised race.
Against the worst outrages the best men of all sections are arrayed in
condemnation and resistance. But of its own essential and final social
superiority the white South brooks no question. It expects its social
code to be observed by the nation's representatives. It forgets that the
nation's representatives are cognizant of the general code of the
civilized world,--that breeding, manners, and intelligence, constitute
the gentleman. So when President Roosevelt entertains as his guest the
foremost man of the negro race,--easily one of the foremost half-dozen
men in the country,--the white South indulges in a mood which to the
rest of the world can only appear as prolonged hysteria.
Before this whole wide range of the unjust treatment of the black race
in America, the observer is sometimes moved to profound discouragement.
"Was it all for nothing?" he asks, "have all the struggle and sacrifice,
the army of heroes and martyrs, brought us to nothing better than this?"
But such discouragement overlooks the background of history, and the
vital undergrowth of to-day. We see the present evils, but we forget the
worse evils that preceded. Turn back sixty years,--read, not _Uncle
Tom's Cabin_ if you distrust fiction, but Fanny Kemble's _Life on a
Georgia Plantation_, or Frederick Law Olmsted's volumes of travels.
Glean from the shelves of history a few such grim facts, and let
imagination reconstruct the nether world of the cotton and sugar
plantations, the slave market, and the calaboose; the degradation of
women; the hopeless lot to which "'peared like there warn't no
to-morrow",--and see how far our world has moved into the light since
those days. A race is not developed in an hour or a decade or a
generation.
In the present are facts of solid reassurance, in that the best spirit
of the South is facing the besetting ills, is combating them, and being
thus aroused must eventually master and expel the evil spirit. The South
has a burden to carry which the North does not easily realize. There the
negro is not a remote problem of philanthropy; he is not represented by
a few stray individuals; it is a great mass, everywhere present, in its
surface manifestations often futile, childish, exasperating; shading off
into sodden degradation; as a whole, a century or several centuries
behind its white neighbors. To get on with it peaceably, to rightly
apportion with it the opportunities and the burdens of the community, to
keep the common movement directed upward,--this demands measureless
patience, forbearance, wisdom, and persistence. Against the more
flagrant abuses, the leaders of Southern society are making strong
head. Governor Vardaman of Mississippi, though a reactionary as to negro
education, has struck terror to the hearts of the lynchers. The attitude
of the official class in certain peonage cases is thus described by Carl
Schurz: "These crimes were disclosed by Southern officers of the law,
the indictments were found by Southern grand juries, verdicts of guilty
were pronounced by Southern petty juries, and sentence was passed by a
Southern judge in language the dignity and moral feeling of which could
hardly have been more elevated." As to disfranchisement on grounds of
race, representative Southerners are anxious to demonstrate that the
only real disqualification is for ignorance and unfitness; and we must
look to them to give practical effect to their professions, which can be
done if the existing statutes are applied in a spirit of justice. It is
especially as to education that the better sentiment and purpose of the
South is apparent. The heavy cost of maintaining public schools for the
blacks has been steadily met. It is estimated by the United States
Commission of Education that for this purpose since the beginning
$132,000,000 has been spent. The reactionaries in education, like
Governor Vardaman, seem to be overborne by the progressives like
Governor Aycock of North Carolina. There is a notable growth of the
higher order of industrial schools, mainly as yet by private support,
but with a general outreaching of educational leaders toward more
practical and efficient training for the common body at the common
expense. In the general discussion of race matters, in periodicals and
books, the old passionate advocacy is in a degree giving place to
broader and saner views. Such writers are coming to the front as John S.
Wise, with his frank criticism of the political Bourbons and his forward
look; and Edgar Gardner Murphy, whose book _The Present South_ is full
of the modern spirit. There are others, especially among educators, not
less pronounced and serviceable in the forward movement. It is in these
quarters, and not among politicians or party newspapers, that we must
look for the brightening day.
But it is to be recognized that a right solution of the South's
difficulties will not be reached without a sharp and prolonged
antagonism between the good and the evil tendencies. Mr. Schurz states
the case none too strongly: "Here is the crucial point: There will be a
movement either in the direction of reducing the negroes to a permanent
condition of serfdom--the condition of the mere plantation hand,
'alongside of the mule,' practically without any rights of
citizenship--or a movement in the direction of recognizing him as a
citizen in the true sense of the term. One or the other will prevail."
And he adds, "No doubt the most essential work will have to be done in
and by the South itself. And it can be."
When President Hayes withdrew the Federal troops from the South, it
marked the formal restoration of that local self-government which is a
vital principle of the American Union. Of slower, deeper growth, has
been the spirit of mutual good-will and confidence, with the free
concession to each member of its individual life. Numberless delicate
cords have been reuniting the severed sections. Railways, commerce,
literature, the tides of business and pleasure travel, the pressure of
common problems, the glory of common achievements, the comradeship of
the blue and the gray on Cuban battlefields, the expositions of
industry, the throb of human feeling as the telegraph tells its daily
story of heroism or tragedy--all have done their part. It is by their
nobler interests that the sections are most closely united. Beyond the
squabbles of politicians is the power of such conferences as those of
the Southern Education Commission where meet the best brains and
consciences, the gifts of the liberal, the plans of the wise, and the
energy of the stout-hearted.
The education of a slave into a man, the harmonizing of two races, the
common achievement of a great national life,--it is a long work, but it
moves on.
"Say not, The struggle naught availeth,
The labor and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.
"For while the tired waves vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
"And not through eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright!"
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: In Maryland, an amendment prescribing a series of elaborate
and vexing inquiries, investing the registration officers with judicial
powers, and avowedly aiming at the elimination of the negro vote, was
passed by the Legislature, at the instigation of Senator Gorman and
against the opposition of a Democratic governor, and decisively rejected
by the popular vote in November, 1905.]
CHAPTER XL
LOOKING FORWARD
It is difficult to write history, but it is impossible to write
prophecy. We can no more tell what lies before us than the Fathers of
the Republic could foresee the future a century ago. They little guessed
that slavery, which seemed hastening to its end, would take new vigor
from an increase of its profits,--that, stimulated by the material gain,
a propaganda of religious and political defense would spring up,--that a
passionate denunciation and a passionate defense would gradually inflame
the whole country,--that meanwhile the absorption of the mass of
citizens in private pursuits would blind them to the evil and peril, and
prevent that disinterested, comprehensive statesmanship which ought to
have assumed as a common burden the emancipation of the slaves,--that
the situation would be exasperated by hostility of the sections and
complicated by clashing theories of the national Union,--that only by
the bitter and costly way of war would a settlement be reached,--and
that emancipation, being wrought by force and not by persuasion, would
leave the master class "convinced against its will," and a deep gulf
between the races, whose spanning is still an uncertain matter,--all
this was hidden from the eyes of the wisest, a century ago. So is hidden
from our eyes the outworking of the century to come.
But the essential principles of the situation, the true ideals, the
perils,--these were seen of old. Jefferson wrote, "I tremble for my
country when I reflect that God is a God of justice." And Washington
said, "I can already foresee that nothing but the rooting out of
slavery can perpetuate the existence of our Union, by consolidating it
in a common bond of principle." Just so clearly can we read the basal
principles on which depends our national safety. We look forward to-day,
not to predict what will be, but to see what ought to be, and what we
purpose shall be.
We, the people of the United States, are to face and deal with this
matter. We are all in it together. Secession has failed, colonization is
impossible. Southerner and Northerner, white man and black man, we must
work out our common salvation. It is up to us,--it is up to us all!
The saving principle is as simple as the multiplication table or the
Golden Rule. Each man must do his best, each must be allowed to do his
best, and each must be helped to do his best. Opportunity for every one,
according to his capacity and his merit,--that is democracy. Help for
the weaker, as the strong is able to give it,--that is Christianity.
Start from this center, and the way opens out through each special
difficulty. The situation is less a puzzle for the intellect than a
challenge to the will and heart.
First of all, it is up to the black man himself. His freedom, won at
such cost, means only opportunity, and it is for him to improve the
opportunity. As he shows himself laborious, honest, chaste, loyal to his
family and to the community, so only can he win to his full manhood. The
decisive settlement of the whole matter is being worked out in cotton
fields and cabins, for the most part with an unconsciousness of the
ultimate issues that is at once pathetic and sublime,--by the upward
pressure of human need and aspiration, by family affection, by hunger
for higher things.
On the leaders of the negroes rests a great responsibility. Their ordeal
is severe, their possibilities are heroic. The hardship of a rigid race
severance acts cruelly on those whose intelligence and refinement fit
them for a companionship with the best of the whites, which they needs
must crave, which would be for the good of both races, but which is
withheld or yielded in scanty measure. Self-abnegation, patience, power
alike to wait and to do,--these are the price they are called to pay.
But the prize set before them is worth it all,--the deliverance of their
people, and the harmonizing of the long alienated races. They need to
beware of jealousies and rivalries of leadership such as have made
shipwreck of many a good cause. There is room and need for various
contributions. They have a common bond in that ideal which is the most
precious possession of the American negro. It is the old simple idea of
goodness, set in close relation to this age of productive activity. It
requires that a man be not only good but good for something, and sets
faithful and efficient service as the gateway to all advance.
But for the right adjustment of the working relations of the two races,
the heavier responsibility rests with the whites, because theirs is the
greater power. They can prescribe what the blacks can hardly do other
than accept.
What we are now facing is not slavery,--an institution that may be
abolished by statute--but its offspring, Caste--a spirit pervasive,
subtle, sophistical, tyrannic. It can be overcome only by a spirit more
pervasive, persistent and powerful--the spirit of brotherhood.
Puzzling as the situation is at some points, its essential elements are
far simpler and easier to deal with than slavery presented. There is no
longer a vast property interest at stake,--on the contrary, material
interest points the same way with moral considerations. There are
complexities of the social structure, but nothing half so formidable as
the aristocratic system based on slavery. The gravest difficulty now is
a race prejudice, deep-rooted and stubborn, yet at bottom so irrational
that civilization and Christianity and human progress should be
steadily wearing it away. Let us take heart of grace. If our wills are
true, it should be no great puzzle for our heads to find the way
in this business. Let us test the practical application of our
principle--namely, that each man should do his best, each should be
allowed to do his best, and helped to do his best--let us see how this
should work in industry, education, politics, and social relations.
First in importance is the industrial situation. Broadly, the negro in
this country shows himself able and willing to work. The sharp spur of
necessity urges him, and his inherited habit carries him on. But he
needs a training in youth that shall fit him to work more effectively.
For that matter, his white brother needs it, too. But here is the
inequality of their situations,--whatever the white worker is qualified
to do he is allowed to do, but how is it with the black worker? Let the
Northern reader of these pages see at his door the palpable instance of
a limitation more cruel than can be found at the South. Let him note, as
the children stream out from the public school, the dark-skinned boy,
playing good-naturedly with his white mates, at marbles or ball or
wrestling,--just as he has been studying on the same bench with
them,--he is as clean, as well-dressed, as well-behaved, as they. Now,
five years hence, to what occupation can that colored boy turn? He can
be a bootblack, a servant, a barber, perhaps a teamster. He may be a
locomotive fireman, but when he is fit to be an engineer, he is turned
back. Carpentry, masonry, painting, plumbing, the hundred mechanical
trades,--these, for the most part, are shut to him; so are clerkships;
so are nineteen-twentieths of the ways by which the white boys he plays
and studies with to-day can win competence and comfort and serve the
community. It is a wrong to whose acuteness we are blunted by
familiarity. It can be changed only as sentiment is changed; and for
that there must be white laboring men who will bravely go ahead and
break the cruel rule by welcoming the black laborer to their side.
In the South the negro as yet enjoys industrial freedom, in the choice
of an occupation--or a near approach to it--because his labor is so
necessary that he cannot be shut out. But the walls are beginning to
narrow. White immigration is coming in. The industrial training of the
old plantation is no longer given, and industrial schools are yet very
imperfectly developed. Some trades are being lost to the negroes; they
have fewer carpenters, masons, and the like; they find no employment in
cotton mills, and are engaged only in the least skilful parts of iron
manufacture. The trade unions, gradually spreading through the South,
begin to draw back from their early professions of the equality and
brotherhood of all toilers. An instance comes to hand as these pages are
being written--one instance out of a plenty. "The convention at Detroit,
Mich., of the amalgamated association of steel and iron workers has
postponed for a year consideration of a proposition to organize the
colored iron, steel and tin workers of the South. The white employes of
the Southern mills led the opposition. They objected to seeing the
negroes placed on an equality, and it was further argued that once a
colored man obtained a standing in the association, there was nothing to
prevent his coming North. President Shaffer urged that all men who are
competent workers should be members of the association." Now for next
year it is up to President Shaffer, and those of like mind! On this
question, of comradeship between black and white laborers, there is a
call to the leaders of labor organizations to lead right. These chiefs
of labor hold a place of the highest possibilities and obligations. In
their hands largely lies the advance or retrogression of the industrial
community--and that means our entire community. It is one of the most
hopeful signs of the times that stress of necessity is bringing to
labor's front rank men of a higher type, men often of large brain, high
purpose, and strong will. Brains, purpose, will,--all are needed by
these unofficial statesmen. They must look many ways at once, but this
way they ought not to fail to look,--to the industrial harmonizing and
equality of the two races.
Exclude the colored men from the unions, and what can be expected but
that they serve as a vast reserve for the employers when strikes arise
between the capitalists and the employes? We read now and then of the
introduction of negroes as "strike-breakers," and the bitterness it
causes. But will not this be repeated on the largest scale if the
millions of negroes are to be systematically excluded from the unions?
There may be difficulties in including them,--difficulties partly
running back into other injustices, such as the practice of different
wage-rates for whites and blacks. But it would seem to be the larger
wisdom, in point of strategy, to enroll the two great wings of the host
of labor into a united army. And apart from strategy, that character of
the labor movement which most deeply appeals to the conscience and
judgment of mankind,--the uplift of the great multitude to better and
happier things,--that should rise above the barrier of race-prejudice as
above all other conventional and foolish divisions. Will the labor
leaders see and seize their opportunity at once to strengthen and to
ennoble their cause?
The education of the negroes presents a hundred special questions, but
its basal principles are not difficult to discern. Here, fortunately, we
have in the main an admirable loyalty and good-will on the part of the
white South. It is proved by deeds more than by words. The sum spent by
the Southern States in the last thirty years for the schooling of the
blacks--it is reckoned at $132,000,000, most of it, of course, from
white taxpayers--is the best evidence of its disposition. The occasional
complaints and protests seem no more significant than the occasional
grumbling at the North against its best-rooted institutions,--everywhere
and always the children of light must keep up some warfare with the
Philistines. The main difficulties at the South are two; limited means
for so great a task,--three or four months of schooling burdens
Mississippi more than ten months burdens Massachusetts; and the grave
puzzle as to what kind of elementary education best fits the negro
child.
This puzzle applies almost equally to the white child; throughout the
country and the world a reconstruction of education is struggling
forward, through great uncertainties but under strong pressure of
necessity. It is felt that the old-time book-education, and even its
modern revision--all as yet come vastly short of rightly fitting the
child for manhood or womanhood. We have advanced, but we have still far
to go. To rightly educate "the hand, head and heart," (the watchword of
Tuskegee)--to develop strong, symmetrical character and intelligence,
the sound mind in the sound body,--to train the bread-winner and the
citizen, as well as to open the gates of intellectual freedom and
spiritual power,--this is what we have not quite learned. Socrates and
More and Rousseau and Pestalozzi and Froebel and Armstrong have done
much, but they have left abundant room for their successors. The
millionaire's child, as well as the field-hand's, must wait awhile yet.
So it is small wonder if the Southern public school is still a challenge
to the best wits.
The combined industrial and educational need of the South is excellently
summed up by a sympathetic observer, Ernest Hamlin Abbott:
"The chief industrial problem of the South is, therefore, that of
transforming an indolent peasantry accustomed to dependence into an
active, independent people. This involves an educational problem.
Industrial education is something very different from training a few
hundred girls to cook and sew for others; it is something, even, very
different from supplying a few hundreds of young men with a trade.
Industrial training is this larger undertaking, namely, to train
hundreds of thousands of young people in habits of industry, in
alertness of mind, and in strength of will that shall enable them to
turn to the nearest opportunity for gaining the self-respect that comes
with being of use to the community."
One thing is clear. More than the system is the teacher. Now and always
the first requisite must be instructors of devotion, intelligence,
sympathy, inspiration. To train such, and train them in multitudes,
there must be institutions, ample in intellectual resource and high in
their standards. There can be no fit common schools for the blacks
unless there are worthy normal schools and colleges. Atlanta and its
class are necessary as well as Tuskegee and its class,--and Atlanta
reinforces Tuskegee with a large proportion of its teachers. On broader
grounds, too, the need of the higher education for the black man is
imperative. It can hardly be better stated than in the words of
Professor DuBois, in his book of irresistible appeal, _The Souls of
Black Folk_:
"That the present social separation and acute race-sensitiveness must
eventually yield to the influence of culture, as the South grows
civilized, is clear. But such transformation calls for singular wisdom
and patience. If, while the healing of this vast sore is progressing,
the races are to live for many years side by side, united in economic
effort, obeying a common government, sensitive to mutual thought and
feeling, yet subtly and silently separate in many matters of deeper
human intimacy,--if this unusual and dangerous development is to
progress amid peace and order, mutual respect and growing intelligence,
it will call for social surgery, at once the delicatest and nicest in
modern history. It will demand broad-minded, upright men, both white and
black, and in its final accomplishment American civilization will
triumph. So far as white men are concerned, this fact is to-day being
recognized in the South, and a happy renaissance of university education
seems imminent. But the very voices that cry hail to this good work are,
strange to relate, largely silent or antagonistic to the higher
education of the negro."
It must be remembered that in the growth of a tree the upper boughs must
have space and air and sunlight, as much as the roots must have earth
and water,--and so with a race. There is need of scholars and idealists,
as well as toilers; and for these there should be their natural
atmosphere. Again let us hear the moving words of Professor DuBois: "I
sit with Shakespeare, and he does not wince. Across the color line I
move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming
women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing
between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon
Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all
graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell
above the veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is
this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of
Georgia? Are you so afraid lest, peering from this high Pisgah, between
Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?"
Yet it is not for himself or the cultured few that he makes the
strongest plea:
"Human education is not simply a matter of schools, it is much more a
matter of family and group life, the training of one's home, of one's
daily companions, of one's social class. Now the black boy of the South
moves in a black world--a world with its own leaders, its own thoughts,
its own ideals. His teachers here are the group leaders of the negro
people--the physicians, clergymen, the trained fathers and mothers, the
influential and forceful men about him of all kinds--here it is, if
anywhere, that the culture of the surrounding world trickles through,
and is handed on by the graduates of the higher schools. Can such
culture training of group leaders be neglected? Can we afford to ignore
it? Do you think that if the leaders of thought among negroes are not
trained and educated themselves, they will have no leaders? On the
contrary, a hundred half-trained demagogues will still hold the places
they so largely occupy now, and hundreds of vociferous busy-bodies will
multiply. We have no choice; either we must help furnish this race from
within its own ranks with thoughtful men, of trained leadership, or
suffer the consequences of a headless misguided rabble."
Turning now to the political status of the negro, it may be said that
the most pressing need will be substantially met if the South will carry
out in good faith the provisions of her statute-books. By some of those
statute-books, suffrage is still equal and universal. In others, the
negro in required to own $300 worth of property, or to be able to read
and write, or to understand the Constitution when read to him. That the
white man is practically exempt from these tests, by the "soldier" or
"grandfather" clause, whatever be its theoretic injustice or unwisdom,
would be no great practical grievance to the negro if only he were
fairly allowed to cast his own vote when he can meet the statutory
tests. At present, throughout the greater part of the South, the
practical attitude of the election officials, and the social sentiment
enforced in subtle, effectual ways, debars the negro vote almost as
thoroughly as if it were disallowed by law. That this should be so may
be satisfactory enough for those to whom the matter ends with "This is a
white man's country," or "Damn the niggers anyhow." But will the
intelligent, large-minded Southerners,--the men of light and
leading--always allow the theory of their own statute-books to be
nullified? Will they forever maintain a suffrage-test of race rather
than of property and intelligence?
It is said, no doubt truly enough, that a large part of the negroes are
indifferent to the suffrage, and do not care to vote. But is this a
desirable state of things? Taking the class to whom the law awards the
suffrage,--the men of some modest property qualification and
intelligence,--is it well for the community that they should be
indifferent to questions of taxation, of law-making, of courts and
schools and roads and bridges? Is it not in every sense desirable that
they should be encouraged to take an intelligent and active interest in
such matters? John Graham Brooks tells of his recent observations in
Gloucester county, Virginia, where whites and blacks have been
co-operating for good local government, and the curse of liquor-selling
has been restrained by the votes of a black majority. Surely we should
all like to see that precedent widely followed. That is a very crude
idea of politics which sees in it only a scramble for public offices.
That is an obsolete idea which construes Southern politics as a struggle
for power between whites and blacks. Politics, in a large sense, is the
common housekeeping of the community. It is the administration of the
broadest and highest common interests. The importance to the Southern
negro of the political function was greatly overrated when he emerged
from chattelhood. But is there any wiser course now than to educate and
train and encourage him to a living membership in the body politic?
In this connection we naturally recur to the relation of the national
government to the negro problem. In general, the let-alone policy of the
last twenty-eight years is likely to continue, and there is every reason
why it should. The termination of Federal interference in 1877 was not
due to criminal indifference or lassitude on the part of the North, or
to political accident. It was essentially the gravitation of the nation
to its normal position, after the shock of war and the adjustment of the
vital changes involved in the abolition of slavery. Those changes
recognized in the national Constitution, and the new order set on its
feet, it was natural, inevitable, and right, that the States should
resume the control of their local affairs. The division of governmental
functions between State and nation was one of the most fortunate
circumstances of our birth-period; it was the ripening of our historical
antecedents, felicitously grasped and molded by a group of great men. It
rests on the fitness of each local community to handle its own affairs,
while only the most general and fundamental interests are intrusted to
the central authority. When the Southern States were left to themselves,
they did some unwise and unjust things,--and there had been something of
unwisdom and injustice in the time of Federal supervision--but on the
whole it was the re-establishment of the normal order. The policy which
naturally followed on the part of the general government was the
avoidance of special legislation, especially of the restrictive kind.
But within its own sphere, the national government should follow those
principles which are in the best sense American. Thus the executive, in
its appointments to office, ought to recognize an equality of race, like
that which the Constitution affirm as to civil rights and the suffrage.
It is of vital moment that the American nation,--whatever local
communities may do,--should not bar competent men from office because of
race. Here as elsewhere,--the tools to him who can use them, the career
open to the fit talent. This should hold good wherever the national
executive acts, South as well as North. The principle should
be applied with reasonable regard to the sentiments of the local
community,--reasonable but not servile regard. In a city by character
and tradition a stronghold of the white race, it seems unwise to give a
principal office to a black man. But in a community where the black
element is strong in numbers and in character, and where the dark race
offers fit incumbents for office, there should be a fair number of such
appointments. If it is said "This is offensive to the Southern people,"
the answer is, Who are the Southern people? Not the white people only,
but the black people also.
As to legislation, a measure was recently proposed and somewhat
discussed, which has perhaps passed like other bubbles, but the proposal
of which caused natural agitation and apprehension at the South. This
was a scheme for applying the Fourteenth Amendment to the reduction of
Congressional representation in the South in proportion to the negroes
excluded from suffrage by the new State Constitutions. Some such
reduction may be permissible under the amendments,--for the later
Fifteenth Amendment only forbids the States to limit suffrage by "color,
race, or previous condition of servitude." Limitation by a property or
educational test is not forbidden; but under the Fourteenth Amendment it
might be made the ground for reducing a State's representation in
Congress. But when it has been said that the proposed measure of
reduction is permissible under the Constitution, there is nothing more
in its favor. From the standpoint of its proposers, it would be only
half-effective, for it could reach only those debarred by actual want
of property or education; the larger exclusion by the unfair
administration of election officers is an individual matter, beyond the
cognizance of statute-books. But the weighty objection is that it would
recognize, accept and confirm that very exclusion of the negro vote
against which it professes to be aimed. It would only enforce a penalty,
from which the gain would accrue solely to the Republican majority in
Congress and the electoral college. The Republican party, it is safe to
say, has too much virtue and intelligence in its rank and file to accept
such a gain at such a cost. For the cost would be a bitter intensifying
of race and sectional hostility. The Southern negro, his
disfranchisement accepted and ratified by the North, would be freshly
odious to his white neighbors on whom he had unconsciously brought this
humiliation. The fast closing breach between the North and South would
have a sharp and heavy wedge of division driven in. The peaceful forward
movement of the nation--for forward it is, spite of some lurches and
staggers--would be set back by a return to the old methods of sectional
conflict. But indeed the proposal hardly merits so much space as has
here been given it. It is a scheme of politicians and not of the people,
unhopeful even as a political scheme, unsupported by the sober thought
of the North, utterly unlikely to be realized or seriously attempted.
There is another kind of legislative action which may well be seriously
considered. Would it not be wise, just, and statesmanlike, for the
nation to give financial aid to the tremendous work of public education
with which the South is struggling? The Blair bill for this purpose,--in
a word, an appropriation of $100,000,000, running through ten years, on
the basis of illiteracy,--came very near success in Congress. It was
defeated by an ardent championship in the North of local independence
and self-reliance. It is questionable whether that championship was not
misdirected. Here are States burdening themselves beyond their Northern
neighbors, to give schooling for only a third of a year, and necessarily
sometimes of inferior quality. The deficiency, compared with the
standards of wealthier States, results in a widespread ignorance
detrimental not only to the community but to the nation. The interests
at stake are common to us all. The backlying cause of the
trouble,--slavery and its accompaniments--was in a sense our common
responsibility; we all ought to have united to get rid of it peaceably,
and the North ought to have paid its share. For the dereliction the
South has paid a terrible price. The North, too, suffered wofully, yet
in far less measure. Would it not be the part of patriotism and
statesmanship--of wisdom and good-will--that all should now take some
share in lifting the load which weighs heaviest on the South, but hurts
us all?
We are spending a hundred millions a year for a navy. Would not some of
that money be put to better use in training our own citizens, who will
otherwise go untaught? Someone has said: "The cost of one battleship
would endow the higher education of the Southern negro for half a
century to come."
It is not the negro only, it is his white neighbor also, for whom we are
to provide. So to plan the provision that the money be honestly and
wisely spent; to do it with just consideration of local feeling, yet on
firm lines of American democracy--this would take study and sagacity.
But could study and sagacity be better applied than to make this idea
practical? The project seems prompted by wise self-interest and by
justice. The South is carrying more than its share of national expense,
and without complaint. Our tariff system presses far heavier on the
agricultural South than on the manufacturing North. Of our payment of
pensions,--running up to $130,000,000 a year,--the South bears its
proportion, though it is paid to men for fighting against her, and the
South makes no remonstrance. Is it not simple justice, is it not a
matter of national conscience and honor, that the whole nation should
help her in educating the future citizens of the republic?
From this national aspect, we return to the more personal phases of our
theme. Shall we touch on that subject whose very name seems to prohibit
discussion?--what is called "social equality," or as others would prefer
"social intimacy." Either phrase seems to evoke a phantom before which
consideration and composure flee. But we may, as Epictetus suggests,
say, "Appearances, wait for me a little; let me see who you are and what
you are about, and put you to the test." Social equality--in what sense
does it exist among white men? People find their associates according to
fitness and congeniality. Clean people prefer the society of clean
people, and the dirty must go by themselves or change their habits. Men
and women of refinement and good manners welcome the company of the
refined and well-mannered. They do so no less if these pleasing traits
are found in a Japanese, a Chinese, or, a Hindu. This is the custom of
the civilized world. At the North, as already in Christendom at large,
the same usage is coming to extend to the African. A gentleman, a lady,
by breeding and education and behavior, is admitted to the society of
other ladies and gentlemen, whether in the business office, the
committee-room, or the home. When the Grand Army of the Republic in
Massachusetts this year chose their district commander, the almost
unanimous choice fell on a soldier, a lawyer, and a gentleman, of
African blood. When last fall the students of the Amherst agricultural
college elected the captain of their football team, they took as their
leader a young man of the dark race. A few years since a class in
Harvard awarded their highest honor, the class oratorship, to Mr. Bruce
of Mississippi, of negro blood. When a Springfield lawyer, meeting in
Philadelphia an old classmate in the law school, accepted his invitation
to dinner at his boarding-house, and there found himself among a score
of ladies and gentlemen, all dark-skinned, elegant in dress and manners,
agreeable in conversation, and meeting their guest with entire ease and
composure,--he did not feel that the meeting had injured either him or
them, or shaken the foundations of the social order. Such is the
growing, if not the general, practice in the Northern States; such is
the well-established custom of Christendom. If the white people of the
Southern States, for reasons peculiar to their section, follow a
different rule, they have still no occasion for wonder and dismay at the
practice in other sections, or for indignation when the highest official
in the American capital follows the general usage of the civilized
world.
The reasons given by the Southern whites for their own course in the
matter call no less for respectful consideration. They say: "We are
encompassed and intermingled with a people of negro and mixed blood. If
we associate with them familiarly, the natural result will be
intermarriage. There is no drawing the line short of that. Meet at the
dining-table and in the drawing-room,--visit, study, play, associate
familiarly and intimately,--and the young people of the two races, in
many instances, will pass through acquaintance and friendship to love
and marriage. Then springs a mixed and degenerate race; then the white
race, with its proud tradition, its high ideals, its grand power, shades
off into an inferior, mongrel breed. Our inheritance, our civilization,
our honor, bid us shut out and forbid that degeneracy at the very
threshold."
Let it be assumed that for the present the white South resolutely
maintains its attitude of social separation. But let its defenders
consider some of the consequences it involves, and make account with
them as best they may. Does not this social code strongly confirm, and
indeed carry as a necessary implication, that industrial separation
which must work injuriously not only to the negro but to the community?
If the white gentleman will not associate with a black gentleman in a
committee on school or public affairs, if he will not admit him to his
pew or his drawing-room, is it not to be expected that the white
carpenter or mill-hand will refuse to work side by side with the black?
What that means where the black man is in a small minority, we see here
at the North,--it shuts him out. Where he is in stronger force, as at
the South, the refusal of industrial fellowship means growing
bitterness, and the complication and aggravation of labor difficulties.
It all goes along together,--the social separation and the industrial.
Further, this means that each race is to be ignorant and aloof from the
other, on its best side. The best side of every civilized people is seen
in its homes. The white and the black homes of the South are strangers
to each other. Edgar Gardner Murphy in his admirable book, _The Present
South_, while he does not for a moment question the necessity of the
social barrier, laments that ignorance of each other's best which it
involves. He dwells hopefully on that development of the family life
which marks the negro's best advance,--but what, he asks, can the white
people really see or know of it? Surely it is a very grave matter to
keep two intermingled peoples thus mutually ignorant of each other's
best.
If it be asked, "What course can reasonably be considered as a possible
alternative to the jealous safeguarding of our race integrity?" the
answer might suggest itself: "Simply deal with every man according to
his fitness, his merits, and his needs, regardless of the color of his
skin. Decide to-day's questions on the broad principles of justice and
humanity. Leave the ultimate relation of the races to those sovereign
powers working through Nature and mankind, which we dimly understand,
but with which we best co-operate by doing the right deed here and now."
Some things we say--and think, too,--when we are in debate with our
opponents, and some other things we think when we quietly commune with
ourselves. Any social ordinance or usage finds its final test when we
bring it into the companionship of our highest ideal. We may here borrow
an apologue:
"The other night I fell asleep when soothed by vivid memories of a visit
to Charleston soon after the war. The place was then new to me, and the
warmth of old friends from whom I had long been parted and the cordial
hospitality of those now first met seemed to blend with the delicious
atmosphere which soothed and charmed my senses. The memory prompted a
dream, in which I sat again at that hospitable board, where my host had
summoned a company to meet a special guest. The stranger delighted us
all, partly by his suggestive comments, but still more by some subtle
sympathy which moved us all to free and even intimate speech. Gradually
the company enlarged; presently entered a man, and my host whispered to
me, 'That fellow tried to ruin me, but I can't shut him out now'--and
place was made. Then came in one with marked Jewish features, and the
company drew their chairs together and made room for him. More intimate
and sympathetic grew the talk,--strangely we all felt ourselves in a
region of thought and feeling above our wont, and brought close together
in it. It dawned on me 'this Presence among us is the same that once
walked in Jerusalem and Galilee.' At that moment there appeared at the
door a newcomer of dark hue. A frost fell on the company; they seemed to
stiffen and close their ranks; the host's face turned in trouble and
uncertainty from the newcomer to the guest of honor. The Guest arose
and spoke to the stranger,--'Take my place!' he said."
Each of us dreams his own dream, and thinks his own thought. Differ as
we may, let us unite wherever we can in purpose and action. The perfect
social ideal will be slow in realization, but it is to-day's
straightforward step along some plain path that is bringing us nearer to
it. The black workman who every day does his best work; the white
workman who welcomes him to his side; the trade-union that opens its
doors alike to both colors; the teacher spending heart and brain for her
pupils; the statesman planning justice and opportunity for all; the
sheriff setting his life between his prisoner and the mob; the
dark-skinned guest cheerfully accepting a lower place than his due at
life's feast; the white-skinned host saying, Friend, come up higher,--it
is these who are solving the race problem.
Slowly but surely we are coming together. We confront our difficulties
as a people, however we may differ among ourselves, with a oneness of
spirit which is a help and pledge of final victory. We are one by our
most sacred memories, by our dearest possessions, and by our most solemn
tasks. Our discords are on the lower plane; when the rich, full voices
speak, in whatever latitude and longitude, they chord with one another.
When Uncle Remus tells Miss Sally's little boy about Brer Rabbit and
Brer Fox, the children from the Gulf to the Lakes gather about his
knees. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are claimed as comrades by all the boys
between the Penobscot and the Rio Grande. Lanier's verse rests on the
shelf with Longfellow's. The seer of Concord gives inspiration in Europe
and India and Japan. Frances Willard stands for the womanhood of the
continent. When Fitzhugh Lee died, it was not Virginia only but America
that mourned a son. When Mary Livermore passed away, we all did honor to
her heroic spirit. When Dunbar sings his songs, or DuBois speaks in the
tones of scholar and poet, we all listen. The great emancipators of the
successive generations,--Woolman, Lundy, Channing, Mrs. Stowe, Lincoln,
Armstrong, Booker Washington--do we not all claim a share in them? Just
as all Englishmen feel themselves heirs alike of the Puritan Hampden and
the Royalist Falkland, so we Americans all pay our love and reverence to
the heroes of our war,--Grant and Lee, Jackson and Sheridan, Johnston
and Thomas, and all their peers.
And we are one by the common tasks that confront us. This problem of the
races,--it is a challenge to do our best. "Impossible? What are we put
into the world for, but to do the impossible in the strength of God?"
The rich man and the poor man, the employer and the laborer, must find
some common ground of justice and harmony. The nation must be steered
away from commercial greed and military glory, toward international
arbitration, toward peace, toward universal brotherhood. Knowledge and
faith are to join hands, and the human spirit is to reach nobler
heights. These are the tasks which we Americans are to meet and
master--together.
The hope of Lincoln is finding its late fulfillment: "The mystic chords
of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot
grave"--Northern and Southern graves alike--"to every living heart and
hearth-stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the
Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels
of our nature." The pathetic melody of the negro spirituals, the brave
and rollicking strains of "Dixie," and the triumphant harmony of "The
Star Spangled Banner," blend and interweave in the Symphony of
America.
INDEX
Abbott, Ernest Hamlin, on industrial problem of South, 397.
Abolition, see Emancipation.
Abolitionists (Cf. Anti-slavery men), in England, 38;
opinions of North and South on, 54;
inclusiveness of term, 54 ff;
characterized, 56 ff;
conservatives ally themselves with Republicans, 130;
extremists not opposed to secession, 212;
favor disunion, 217.
Adams, Charles Francis, joins "Free Soil" party, 81;
nominated for Vice-President, 82;
proposes compromise on slavery, 229;
candidate for Presidential nomination, 328.
Adams, John Quincy, characteristics, 28;
relations with Clay, 29;
in Congress, 72;
believes abol. of slavery as war measure legal, 253.
Adams, Nehemiah (Dr.), 141.
Adams, Samuel, 8.
Alabama, admitted as slave State, 23;
forbids importation of slaves, later repeals, 36;
secedes, 225;
emancipation in, 260;
gives qualified assent to thirteenth amendment, 262;
provisional govt. formed, 275;
reconstructed, 310;
negro voters in majority in, 311;
Federal interference in election (1872), 323;
Democrats regain control in, 324;
legal limitation of suffrage in, 383, 384.
Alabama Claims, the, settled, 325.
Alcorn, J. M., first Republican governor of Mississippi, 336.
Alcott, Amos Bronson, characterizes John Brown, 160;
futile views of on war, 242.
Allen, Charles, refuses to support Whig party, 81.
Amendments, constitutional, Thirteenth, 262;
ratified, 268, 276;
declared adopted, 276;
Fourteenth formulated and discussed, 297 ff;
prob. reason for mistake of exclusion art. in, 301;
disqualifications under removed by Congress, 302;
restoration offered to South upon adoption of, 303;
rejected by South, 304, 310;
Grant against exclusion clauses in, 310;
scheme to apply to reduction of Southern representation, 403 ff;
Fifteenth proposed, 314;
adopted, 315, 403.
American Missionary Asso'n, labors of for freedmen, 362.
American Party. (See KNOW-NOTHING PARTY), 115, 151;
death of, 153.
"American system," 31.
Ames, Adelbert, governor of Mississippi, 336;
calls for Federal troops; impeached; driven from state, 340.
Ames, Charles G., characterizes Stroud's Slave Laws, 110.
Amherst agricultural college, chooses negro foot ball captain, 406.
Anderson, Major, at Ft. Moultrie, 223;
Buchanan refuses aid to; withdraws to Ft. Sumter; supported, 224;
surrenders, 235.
Andersonville, terrors of, 245.
Andrew, John A. (Gov.), denounces slavery, 154;
on John Brown, 165;
strongly opposes secession, 230;
course as war governor, 279;
suggests principles of reconstruction, 280;
endeavors to interest Northern capital in South, 319.
"Anti-Nebraska" party, 115.
Anti-secessionists, in North and South, 212.
Anti-slavery men (Cf. ABOLITIONIST),
distinguished from abolitionists, 55;
disheartened by "Free Soil" nomination, 82;
outbreaks against in South, 169, 186.
Anti-slavery movement grows, 35 ff, 37, 51, 52, 71, 91;
women and literary men in, 56;
public leaders keep aloof from, 57;
petitions, 71;
documents excluded
from Southern mails, 72, 73;
made political issue, 74;
strong growth of in North, 113 ff;
assumed by Republican party, 127;
tabooed at South, 129.
Anti-slavery society, American, founded, 44;
purposes of, 45;
dissolution of, 367.
Arkansas, admitted as slave state, 23;
postpones action on secession, 227;
secedes, 235;
emancipation in, 260;
provisional govt. estab. in, 269, 275;
reconstructed, 310;
relative number of negro voters in, 311;
becomes Democratic, 323;
Grant recommends state govt. be declared illegal, 344;
bill defeated, 345.
Armstrong, Samuel Chapman (Gen.), birth and early life of, 356;
in Union Army;
begins labors for freedmen in Virginia; characterization of, 357;
special fitness for work, 359;
religious views, 360;
forms ideals of negro education, 360 ff;
founds Hampton Institute, 362 ff;
personality, 364 ff;
labors of for school, 365 ff;
death of; summary of life work; personal appearance, 366;
sayings of, 367;
Booker Washington, pupil and successor to, 378.
Arnold, Matthew, poem on his father, 369.
Atchison, Senator, of Missouri, 117.
Atlanta University, 358, 398.
_Atlantic Monthly_, begun, 144
Aycock, Governor, of N. C., 388.
Bacon, Leonard, 36.
Baltimore, Maryland, Mass. troops attacked at, 237.
Banks, Nathaniel P., joins "Free Soil" party, 81;
speaker of House, 115;
in Republican party, 127;
refuses nomination of "Know-nothing" seceders,
supports Fremont, 129;
governor of Mass., 193;
in House, 284.
Baptists, champion cause of freedom, 22.
"Barnburners," the, 82.
Barnwell, Senator, advocates secession, 89.
Bates, Edward, candidate for Presidential nomination (1860), 191;
attitude of on emancipation proclamation, 257.
Beauregard, Gen., leads attack on Fort Sumter, 235.
Beecher, Edward, 36.
Beecher, Henry Ward, characterization of, 141 ff;
active in political discussion, 142;
criticises Lincoln in _Independent_, 254;
labors in behalf of Union, 277;
outlines plan of reconstruction, 277 ff;
views on suffrage, 308.
Bell, John, nominated for President, 189;
popular vote for (1860), 194; 214.
Bennett, James Gordon, 141.
Berea College, beginnings of, 73;
discriminated against by Kentucky educational law, 385.
Bernard, John, meets Washington, 1 ff.
"Biglow Papers," Lowell attacks slavery and war in, 77; 144; 254.
Birney, James G., 36;
incidents in life of, 58 ff;
political ideas of, 59;
nominated for President, 74;
views of on slavery question, 74;
again nominated, 75.
Black, Jeremiah S., Attorney-General, 222;
Secretary of State, 244;
defends Johnson, 312.
"Black Codes" of 1865-6, 281 ff, 372.
Blaine, James G., in House, 284;
proposes amend. to Stevens's reconstruction bill, 306;
on debate of bill, 307;
on negro suffrage, 310;
leader in House, characterized, 331;
speaks against Davis, reputation discredited, Presidential
candidate, 346.
Blair, Francis P. (Gen.), nominated for Vice-Presidency; defeated, 314.
Blair, Senator, of N. H., bill of for aid to local education on basis
of existing illiteracy, 372, 404.
"Border Ruffians," the, 116, 118.
Border States, severity of war greatest in, 242;
Lincoln's scheme for compensated emancipation in, 252;
slave owners in alienated by emancipation proclamation, 261.
_Boston Courier_, denounces Republican party in 1860 campaign, 194.
Bourne, George (Rev.), denounces slavery, 37.
Boutwell, George S., governor of Mass., 92;
in House, 284;
House prosecutor of Johnson, 311.
Bowles, Samuel, 124;
"Life and Times of," 124 note;
gives opinion of Johnson imbroglio, 296.
Bradley, Joseph (Justice), on Hayes-Tilden commission, 349.
Breckinridge, John C., nominated for President, 188;
scheme for electing, 189;
popular vote for (1860), 194;
declines to repudiate secession, 194.
Bristow, Benjamin H., Presidential candidate, Sec'y of
Treasury, 346, 347.
Brooks, John Graham, observations of on Virginia politics, 401.
Brooks, Preston S., assaults Sumner, 122;
re-elected and honored, effect on North, 123.
Brown, B. Gratz, leads independent movement in Mo., 327;
aspirant for Presidential nomination, 328.
Brown, John, sketch of, 119 ff;
leads massacre in Kansas, 120;
schemes for extinction of slavery, 159 ff;
in Springfield, Mass., 159, 162;
aided by leading anti-slavery men, 160;
pen pictures of by Alcott and Emerson, 160;
characterization of, 161 ff;
makes raid on Harper's Ferry, 162;
captured, 163;
hanged, 164;
honored as martyr, 164 ff;
eulogized by Emerson, 165, 167;
characterization of his acts and schemes, 166 ff.
Bruce, B. K., U. S. Senator, 336.
Bruce, R. C., of Miss., awarded class oratorship at Harvard, 407.
Bryant, William Cullen, editor of N. Y. _Evening Post_, 327.
Buchanan, James, 72;
Democratic Presidential candidate, characterized, 128;
with Mason and Soulé issues Ostend manifesto, 128;
administration of (1857-61), 147;
sends Gov. Walker to Kansas, 150;
supports Lecompton constitution, 151;
announces position on secession, 222;
refuses aid to Ft. Moultrie, 224;
cabinet, 224.
Burgess, J. W. (Prof), shows effects of John Brown's raid, 170;
comments on laws governing negroes after war, 291.
Burns, Anthony, fugitive slave, 91.
Butler, Senator, from S. C., Sumner attacks in Congressional speech, 122.
Butler, Benjamin F., joins seceding Democratic convention (1860), 188;
candidate for governor of Mass., 192;
declares fugitive slaves "contraband of war," 248;
House prosecutor of Johnson, 311;
in Congress, characterized, 331;
labors for "force bill" (1875), 345.
Butler, Fanny Kemble. See KEMBLE, FANNY.
Calhoun, John C., Vice-President, relations with Jackson, 30;
defends right of nullification, 32;
prophesies concerning relations between North and South, 34;
becomes leader of South, 34, 44;
characterization of, 47 ff;
social theories of, 50;
in Senate, opposes anti-slavery petitions, claims State control of
mails, 72;
in Tyler's cabinet, leader in Texas annexation, 75;
returns to Senate, 76;
politically isolated, 79;
opposes war with Eng., 80;
claims of for nationionalization of slavery, 80;
last speech of, 86;
his opinion of struggle bet. North and South, 87.
California, taken from Mexico, 79;
admission as free State advocated, 88, 90;
swift settlement of; applies for admission with slavery excluded,
South opposes, 84;
rejects Fifteenth amendment, 315.
Cameron, Simon, candidate for Presidential nomination; supports
Lincoln, 190.
Carolinas, the (see also NORTH, SOUTH),
slavery foundation of aristocracy in, 6;
number of slaves in in 1790, 9.
Carpenter, Frank, Lincoln's conversation with, 256.
"Carpet-baggers," the, 318, 336, 338.
Casey, F. F., in government of Louisiana, 341.
Cass, Lewis, nominated for President, 81;
resigns from cabinet, 224.
Chamberlain, Daniel H., governor of So. Carolina, 332, 348.
Chandler, Zachariah, 270;
sketch of, 283;
as radical leader, 285;
party leader, 331;
chairman Republican national committee; disputes Tilden's
election, 348.
Channing, William Ellery, plan of emancipation, 39;
sketch of, attitude toward anti-slavery movement, 59 ff;
treatise on Slavery, 62.
Chase, Salmon P., in "Free Soil" convention, 82;
in Senate, 83;
against extension of slavery, 90;
in Lincoln's cabinet, 249;
attitude of on emancipation proclamation, 257;
becomes chief justice, 274;
candidate for Presidential nomination, Lincoln's opinion of, services
of in supreme court, 313.
Chestnutt, Charles W., 379;
shows discrimination against negro suffrage, 384.
Child, Lydia Maria, 56;
opinion of Channing, 63.
Church, the, early, accepts slavery, works toward abolition, 4;
casuistical defense of slavery by, 5;
in America, justifies slavery, 50;
split over slavery, 53;
united in South in defense of slavery in North divided, 141;
labors of in North in behalf of Union, 277.
Civil rights bill (1866) passed, 296;
vetoed by Johnson, becomes law, 297;
of 1875, 345.
Civil war, the, causes of, 211 ff; 237 ff;
views on in North and South, 237;
moral results of, 240, 244, 247;
emancipation measures discussed and adopted during, 248 ff;
disappointment over protraction of, 254;
negroes in, 261, 263;
courage of both North and South in, 262;
suffering in, 265;
ended, 270.
"Civil War and the Constitution, The," 170.
Clay, Cassius M., opposes slavery, 73;
in founding of Berea College, 73; 170.
Clay, Henry, votes for slavery in Arkansas, 23;
favors Missouri compromise, aspires to Presidency, dislikes but
supports slavery, 26;
relations of with J. Q. Adams, 29;
advocates protective tariff, 31;
proposed tariff compromise, 33;
Whigs nominate for President, 75;
defeated, 76;
opposed to annexation of Mexico, 79;
disappointed of Presidential nomination, 81;
in Senate (1849-50), frames compromise measures of 1850, 85;
opposes extension of slavery, denies right of secession, last
speech of, 86;
denounces threats of secession, 89.
Clayton, Powell, in Grant faction, 344.
Cobb, Howell, 138.
Coles, Edward (Gov.), 35.
Colfax, Schuyler, in House, 284;
Vice-President, 314.
Colonization, Jefferson's schemes for, 18;
Pennsylvania society, 22;
society attacked by New Eng. anti-slavery society, 44.
Compromise of 1820, see MISSOURI
of 1850, 85;
adopted, 90;
causes dissatisfaction in North and South, 91.
Confederacy, the Southern (see also SOUTH, the, etc.).
Secessionists propose to form, 215;
convention to organize, 225;
organized, constitution of, 226;
election of officers of, 226, 227;
disregards peace overtures from Republicans, 229;
courage displayed in, 262;
Lee the chief hero of, 263.
Conkling, Roscoe, in House, 284;
party leader, 331;
favors "force bill," 345;
Presidential candidate, 346.
Connecticut, passes emancipation law, 21.
"Conscience Whigs," 82.
Constitution (See CONVENTION OF 1787),
proposed convention to revise, 229.
Amendments to, see AMENDMENTS.
"Constitutional Union" party, 153, 189.
Convention of 1787, personnel, work, and difficulties of, 10 ff;
results of, 14 ff.
Corwin, Thomas, opposes Mexican war, 77.
Cotton gin, invention of stimulates cotton growing, 23.
Credit Mobilier, 344.
Crittenden, John J., Senator, 151, 214.
Crittenden, compromise, proposed, refused by Republicans, 228.
Cuba, emancipation in, 108;
annexation of demanded in Ostend manifesto, 128.
Curtis, Benj. R., defends President Johnson, 312.
Curtis, George William, editor _Harper's Weekly_, 330;
leads reform element in Republican convention of 1876, 346.
Curtis, Justice, dissents from Dred Scott decision, 148.
Cushing, Caleb, joins seceding Democratic convention, 188;
supports Breckinridge Democracy; bitter words of on Mass.
election, 193.
Dabney, Thomas, sketch of, 100 ff;
experiences of after war, 337, 339, 355.
Davis, David, on Hayes-Tilden commission; in Senate, 349.
Davis, Henry Winter, favors radical reconstruction, 270.
Davis, Jefferson, in Senate, 86, 89;
sketch of life and principles of, 132 ff;
active in politics, in Mexican war, in Senate, Sec'y of War,
leader in secession, 134;
hostility toward, 135;
final estimate of, 136;
presents ultimatum of South in Senate (1859), 184;
residence of at North, 193;
defends secession, 215;
opposes immediate secession (1860), 221;
with others withdraws from Congress to organize Confederacy, 225;
elected President of Confederacy, 226;
North's hatred of, 301;
imprisoned by Pres. Johnson, 329;
attacked by Blaine, 346.
Davis, Rebecca Harding (Mrs.), describes terrors of Civil war in border
states, 242.
Dawes, Henry L., in House, 284, 331.
Dayton, William L., Vice-Presidential candidate (1856), 129.
Declaration of Independence, clause in regarding wrongs of slave
trade suppressed, 9.
DeForest, J. W., 209.
Delaware, votes against extension of slave trade, 13;
rejects Thirteenth amendment, 262, 276;
rejects Fifteenth amendment, 315.
Democratic party (see DEMOCRATS),
power of South in, 185;
extreme South breaks up, 187;
Alex. H. Stephens explains move, 189;
geographical lines of in campaign of 1860, 192.
Democratic sentiment, growth of, 21, 29.
Democrats, opposed to strong central gov't, 21;
favor annexing Texas, 75;
nominate Cass for President, 81;
combine with Free Soilers, 92;
nominate Pierce for President, desert Free Soilers, 93;
vote for Kansas-Nebraska bill, 114;
in Republican party, 127;
platform (1856), campaign, Buchanan candidate of, 128;
uphold Ostend manifesto, 129;
divided over Lecompton constitution, 151;
convention of 1860, 185 ff;
delegates from S. C. and Gulf States leave, 187;
adjourns, 188;
regular convention at re-meeting nominates Douglas and Johnson,
seceders nominate Breckinridge and Lane, 188;
inharmonious in North, 253;
gain in 1862, 261;
nominate McClellan for Presidency, defeated, 265;
in Congress of 1865-6, 284;
hold convention of 1868, repudiate reconstruction acts, favor
repudiation, nominate Seymour, 313;
regain control in many Southern States, 323;
join Independent Republicans, 328;
indorse Greeley's nomination, Independent Democrats nominate
O'Conor, 329;
organize resistance to Republicans in South and begin
intimidation, 339 ff;
in Congress of 1875-6, 346;
nominate Tilden for President, 347;
claim election, 348 ff.
Denison, John, Dr., characterizes Gen. Samuel Armstrong, 357.
Devens, Charles, Attorney-General under Hayes, 353.
Dickinson, Edward, helps organize Republican party, 114.
Dickinson, John, opinion of slave trade, 12.
"Disfranchisement," paper on, by Charles W. Chestnutt, 384.
District of Columbia, slavery abolished in, 251.
Dix, John A. (Gen.), in Buchanan's cabinet, 224.
Dorsey, Stephen W., in Grant faction, 344.
Douglas, Stephen A., sketch of, 112;
introduces "Kansas-Nebraska" bill to aid his Pres. candidature, 112 ff;
doctrine of "popular sovereignty," 150;
supports Republicans on Lecompton bill, 151;
returns to Democrats and becomes Senator, 153;
famous debates of with Lincoln, 180;
elected U. S. Senator, 181;
struggle of, with extreme South on Democratic platform (1860), 185;
great power of in convention; principles of; followers defy Southern
Democracy, 186;
nominated for President, 188;
denounces secession; pop. vote for, 194;
assails Lincoln's position, proposes plans to conciliate South, 233;
supports Lincoln, 235.
Douglass, Frederick, 96.
"Dred," anti-slavery novel, 123 ff.
Dred Scott decision, 147 ff.
DuBois, Prof., 5, 379;
on need of higher education for negroes, 398, 399.
Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 379.
Duncan, James, 38.
Durell, E. H. (Judge), in Louisiana election struggle, 341.
Education, of negroes, 37;
urged by Beecher, 279;
nat'l, of negroes neglected, 325, 326;
higher, for negroes, 358, 377 ff, 398 ff;
Blair bill for local aid to, on basis of existing illiteracy, 372, 404;
of negroes undertaken by Southern whites, 373;
standard of in South being raised, 381;
efforts to restrict for negroes, unjust Kentucky law, 385;
estimate of amt. paid out for negro education to date, 388;
improved industrial for negroes, 388;
of negro presents great difficulty, 396-7;
amount spent by South for edu. of negro in past 30 years, 397;
problems of in South, 397 ff;
need of higher for negroes, 398-9;
gov't aid to in South advocated, 404.
Eggleston, General, Republican leader in Miss., 336.
Eliot, Thomas D., helps organize Republican party, 114.
Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln presents to cabinet, decides to
delay promulgation of, 257;
reintroduces, 258;
discussed and approved by cabinet, issued (1862), 259;
goes into effect, immediate results of, 260 ff.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, in anti-slavery movement, 56;
in literature, 94;
influence of, 143;
pen picture of John Brown by, 160; 243.
"End of an Era, The," 169.
English bill, the, 151.
Evarts, William M., in Republican convention (1860), 191, 192;
defends President Johnson, 312;
Secy. of State under Hayes, 353.
Everett, Edward, nominated for Presidency, 189.
Federalist Party, principles of, 20.
Fee, John G., and Berea College, 73, 170.
Fessenden, William P., in Senate, 114;
in Republican party, 127;
heads reconstruction committee, 281;
in U. S. Senate, 283;
sketch of, 284, 285;
opposes President Johnson's plan of reconstruction, 286;
votes to acquit Pres. Johnson, 312;
death of, 331.
Fillmore, Millard, becomes President, character of, 90;
candidate for Presidential nomination, 92;
nominated (1856) by "Know-nothings," 129.
Fish, Hamilton, in Senate, 114;
in settlement of Alabama claims, 325.
Fisk University, 358.
Florida, secedes, 225;
emancipation in, 260;
provisional gov't of, 275;
reconstructed, 310;
rel. number of negro voters in, 311;
Presidential vote of contested (1876), 348 ff.
"Flower de Hundred," 100.
Floyd, John B., Secy. of War, resigns, 224.
Foot, Solomon, in Senate, 114.
Force bill, of 1833, 33;
---- proposed, of 1875, defeated in Senate, 345.
Fort Moultrie, commanded by Anderson, 223;
Buchanan refuses to aid, 224;
abandoned by Anderson, 224;
occupied by So. Carolinians, 224.
Fort Sumter, Anderson removes to, 224;
debate over, 233;
Lincoln sends aid to, 234;
Confederates attack and take, 235.
Fortune, T. Thomas, 379.
Fowler, Senator, votes to acquit Pres. Johnson, 312.
Franklin, Benjamin, 8;
labors against slavery, skill of as a leader, 19.
Freedmen's Bureau, 287, 289;
Pres. Johnson vetoes bill to increase powers of, 294;
bill amended, passed, 297;
labors of, 357, 362.
"Free Soil" party, previously "Liberty" party, gains from Whigs
and Democrats, 81.
"Free Soilers," convention of (1848), nominates Van Buren, 82;
form alliance with Democrats, 92;
nominate John P. Hale for President, lose Democratic allies, 93;
vote against Kansas-Nebraska bill in House, 114;
unite with Whigs in Mich. in formation of Republican party, 115;
in Republican party, 127.
Free State men, in Kansas struggle, 117 ff;
refuse to vote in Kansas, 150;
give up separate organization, and win, 152;
triumph of, 153.
Fremont, John C. (Gen.), nominated for President, 126;
sketch of, 126 ff;
declares martial law, and emancipation of slaves in Missouri, 248;
emancipation measure of set aside by Lincoln, results of incident, 249.
Fugitive slave law, demanded by South, 85;
resisted in North, dissatisfaction over, 91.
_Galveston Bulletin_, view of reconstruction in, 267.
Garfield, James A., in House, 284, 331.
Garrison, Wm. Lloyd, becomes interested in emancipation, 39;
early experiences, founds _Liberator_, principles, 40;
founds New England Anti-Slavery Society, 44;
fight of against slavery, 51 ff;
aims and methods of, 52, 53;
followers of divided, 54;
personality of, 54;
mobbed, 55;
scorns Republican party, 127;
propagandism of inflames North and South, 207;
declares all war unchristian, 210;
favors disunion, 217, 228.
Geary, John W., governor of Kansas, 117, 121.
_Genius of Universal Emancipation_, founded, 38, 39.
Georgia, demands representation in Congress based on slave numbers, 11;
refuses to join Union if slave trade forbidden, 12;
forbids entry of free negroes into State, forbids circulation of
insurrectionary pamphlets, 41;
citizens of characterized, 137;
becomes pivotal point of Southern politics, 138;
considers secession (1860), 221, 225;
secedes, 226;
emancipation in, 260;
provisional govt. formed, 275;
signs of promise in during reconstruction period, 301;
rights of negro conserved in, 302;
readmitted, relative number of negro voters in, 311;
Democrats regain control in, 323;
discrimination against negro suffrage in, 384.
Giddings, Joshua, in "Free Soil" convention, 82.
Godkin, E. L., 327.
Gold, at premium of 250, 264.
Gorman bill to limit suffrage, defeated (1905), 383, note.
Grand Army of the Republic, chooses negro commander in Mass., 406.
Grant, Ulysses S. (Gen.), votes for Buchanan, 130;
refuses to exchange prisoners, 246;
report of on conditions in South after war, 286;
on proper policy toward South, 302;
against exclusion clauses of 14th amendment, 310;
nominated for President, elected, 314;
problems of administration, displays lack of statesmanship, 324 ff;
defeats inflation policy, 325;
personal honesty of, 326;
strong opposition to develops, 327;
prominent men and events of second term, 331 ff;
growth of independence of, 332;
recommends State govt. of Arkansas be declared illegal, 344;
favors "Force bill," 345;
disinclination of to further interference in South, 345;
attitude of in disputed States in 1876, 349;
remarks of to Lee on surrender, 354.
Greeley, Horace, votes for Taylor, 82;
helps prolong Whig organization in N. Y., 115;
sketch of, 140;
opposes Seward in Republican convention. (1860), 191;
criticises Lincoln, Lincoln's reply to, 255;
supports Independ. Repub. movement, nominated for President, 328;
nomination of indorsed by Democrats, weakness of as candidate,
generous sentiment of toward South, 329;
bitter opposition to, defeat and death of, 330.
Grimes, Senator, votes to acquit President Johnson, 312.
Hale, Edward Everett, in New Eng. Emigrant Aid Society, 116.
Hale, Eugene, in House, 331.
Hale, John P., nominated for President, 93.
Hamlin, Hannibal, nominated for Vice-President, 192.
Hampton, Wade, nominated for governor of So. Carolina; violence
of campaign, 333;
claims governorship, 348;
governor, 353.
Hampton Institute, founded, 362;
work at begun, success and growth of, 363 ff;
work of, 377.
Harper's Ferry, raid on, by John Brown, 162 ff.
_Harper's Weekly_, opposes Greeley, 330.
Harrison, Mrs. Burton, personal reminiscences of Virginia before
the war, 100.
Harrison, William H., campaign of, 74.
Hart, Albert Bushnell, gives estimate of wealth of negroes, 375.
Harvard College, awards class oratorship to negro (Bruce of Miss.), 407.
Hawley, Joseph R. (Gen.), in House, 331.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 242.
Hayes, Rutherford B., in House, 284;
nominated for President, 347;
election of claimed, 348 ff;
declared elected, 352;
ends military interference in South, inaugurates new régime, 353.
Hayne, Robert, debate of with Webster, 33.
Hedrick, Prof., driven from North Carolina for anti-slavery
sentiments, 129.
Helper, Hinton R., publishes _The Impending Crisis_, 109, 154;
driven from N. C., 157.
Henderson, Senator, votes to acquit Pres. Johnson, 312.
Henry, Patrick, 8; views of on slavery, 19.
Herndon, William H., Lincoln's partner and friend, 179, 180.
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, supports John Brown, 160.
Hilo (Hawaii) Manual School, 360.
Hoar, George F., characterizes Sumner, 282;
describes polit. methods of Henry Wilson, 283;
in House, 331;
on Louisiana investigation committee, 343.
Hoar, Samuel, driven from So. Carolina, 73;
joins "Free Soil" party, 81.
Holt, Joseph, Secy. of War, 224.
Holtzclaw, William, story of, 378.
Hopkins, John H. (Bishop), 141.
Hopkins, Mark, as president of Williams College, 356.
Hopkins, Samuel (Dr.), denounces slave trade, 9.
Howard, O. O. (Gen.), chief of Freedmen's Bureau, 289.
Howard University, 358.
Howe, S. G. (Dr.), supports John Brown, 160, 168.
Hunter, David (Gen.), attempts partial emancipation as war measure, 253.
ILLINOIS, admitted as free State, 23;
attempt to introduce slavery in, 34;
anti-slavery rioting in, 74;
Abolitionists in, ally themselves with Republicans; Lincoln the
central figure at first State convention, 179.
_Impending Crisis, The_, 109;
resumé of, 154 ff;
effects of, 157.
_Independent, The_, criticises Lincoln, 254.
Indiana, admitted as free State, 23.
Indians, unfitness of for slavery, 5.
Jackson, Andrew, characteristics, administration, 29;
denounces nullification, 33;
opposes circulation of anti-slavery literature through U. S. mails, 72.
Jackson, Stonewall, 135.
Jefferson, Thomas, 8;
denounces slave trade in first draft of Decl. of Independ.;
plans of for gradual emancipation, 9, 17-18,
and for exclusion of slavery from unorganized territory, 9;
polit. ideals, views on slavery, 17;
unskillful as President, 21;
fears of for Union; sympathies with slave States, jealous of
State rights, 25, 250;
on dangers of slavery, 391.
Jenkins, Charles J. (Gov.), pleads for negro rights in inaugural, 301.
Jerry, fugitive slave, rescued, 91.
Johnson, Andrew, in Senate, 214;
early life and character of, becomes President, 273;
retains Lincoln's cabinet, Seward's influence on, 274;
issues proclamation of amnesty; appoints provisional governors
in South, 275;
favors qualified negro suffrage, 276;
message (1865), 281;
policy of reconstruction of opposed in Congress, 285 ff;
supported by Democrats, 286;
vetoes Freedmen's Bureau bill, 294, 296;
loses support of party; undignified speech of strengthens
opposition to, 295;
vetoes Civil Rights bill, 297;
strong opposition to reconstruction policy of, 303;
undignified conduct of during tour of North, 304;
impeachment and trial of, 311 ff;
acquitted; in Senate; place of in history, 312.
Johnson, Herschel V., nominated for Vice-President, 188;
opposes immediate secession, 225.
Johnson, Oliver, 44.
Johnson, Reverdy, in U. S. Senate, 284.
Jones, C. C. (Rev.), on condition of slaves, 49.
Kansas, struggle for, 116 ff;
stringent slavery laws in, 117;
forms issue of Repub. party's first campaign, 127;
Walker appointed governor of; struggle in, 150 ff;
admitted to Union, 152.
Kansas-Nebraska bill, 112;
effects of on election (1854), 115;
results of, 116.
Kealing, H. T., 379.
Keitt, Lawrence, with Brooks in assault on Sumner, 122.
Kellogg, William P., in government of Louisiana, 341.
Kemble, Fanny, describes slavery in "A Residence on a Georgia
Plantation," 103 ff.
Kendall, Amos, 72.
Kentucky, attempt to establish as free State, 22;
refuses to consider secession, but promises to aid South if
invaded, 227;
remains in Union, 235;
Lincoln tries to bind faster to Union, 252;
rejects 13th amendment, 262, 276;
rejects 15th amendment, 315;
law in to prohibit co-education of races, 385.
Kerr, Michael C., speaker of House, 346.
Key, David M., Postmaster-General under Hayes, 353.
"Kitchen Cabinet" of Gen. Grant, 325.
Knapp, Isaac, partner of Garrison, 40.
"Know-nothings," 115;
nominate ex-President Fillmore (1856); platform; seceders from
nominate Banks, 129.
Ku Klux Klan, 322, 326, 327.
Lane, Joseph, nominated for Vice-President, 188.
Lane Seminary, trouble at, over anti-slavery movement, 37.
Lanier, Sidney, 410.
Lawrence, Kansas, founded, 116;
attack on, 119.
Leavitt, Joshua, 44.
Lecompton constitution framed, scouted by free State men, 150;
urged by Buchanan administration, 151;
defeated, 152.
LeConte, Joseph, reminiscences of slavery, 49.
Lee, Fitzhugh, 410.
Lee, Robert E. (Gen.), 95, 135;
captures John Brown, 163;
opposes secession, 227;
chief hero of Confederacy, 263;
surrenders, 270, 354;
becomes president of Washington Univ., 355.
_Liberator_, The, founded, 40.
Liberia, colony estab., 22.
Liberty, Washington's conception of, 3.
Liberty party, 75 ff;
becomes "Free Soil" party, 81.
Lincoln, Abraham, views on Dred Scott decision, 149;
nominated for Senator, defeated, 153;
on endurance of Union, 153;
early life and characteristics of, 172 ff;
political career begins, 177;
attitude of on slavery, 178, 181;
central figure in Ills. Republican convention, 179;
debates with Douglas, 180;
Cooper Inst. address of; proves right of Congress to control slavery in
the Territories; shows stand Republicans must take, 182;
schemes of friends for in Repub. convention (1860), 190;
states principles, 191;
nominated for President, 192;
elected, 194;
answers secessionist arguments, 215;
personal interest of in slavery, 217;
immediate results of election of, 221;
pronounces inaugural, 231;
forms cabinet, difficulties, 233;
sends aid to Ft. Sumter, 234;
issues call for militia, 235;
attitude of toward emancipation, 249, 252, 253, 255;
tact and shrewdness of, 249, 256, 257;
in close touch with people, 249;
his conception of his mission, 249;
difficulties of administration, 249, 251;
his detestation of slavery, 250;
scheme of for compensated emancipation, 252;
announces his power as Commander-in-chief to emancipate slaves
as war measure, 253;
criticism of, 253 ff;
replies to Greeley's criticisms, 255;
lays emancipation proclamation before cabinet, 256;
adopts Seward's advice, to delay promulgation of, 257;
reintroduces to cabinet after McClellan's victory, 258;
issues prelim. proclamation; embodies views on emancipation in
message to Congress, 259;
administration of repudiated in election of 1862, 261;
re-elected, 262, 265;
delivers second inaugural, 266;
offers amnesty to Confederates, 268;
invites return of seceded States; leaves reconstruction bill (1864)
unsigned, 269;
plans of opposed in Congress, 270;
makes public statement of views on reconstruction, 271;
assassination of, 271;
summary of political achievements of, 272.
Literature, growth of Southern, 380 ff.
Longfellow, Henry W., work of, 145.
Longstreet, Gen., advises acceptance of inevitable, acts with
Republicans, denounced and ostracized, 318.
Louisiana, admitted as free State, 23;
secedes, 226;
emancipation in, 260;
new Constitution and State govt. in, 271;
provisional govt. established in, 269, 275;
applies for admission of U. S. Senators (1864-5), 270;
reconstructed, 310;
negro votes in majority in, 311;
Presidential vote of contested (1876), 348 ff;
State vote of contested, 349;
"carpet-bag" rule in, 341 ff;
"Conservatives" organize opposition in, struggle over governorship
in, 341;
cruelty and corruption in, 342;
Federal intervention in, 343;
legal limitation of suffrage in, 83.
Louisiana purchase, 2, 24.
Lovejoy, Elijah P., 74.
Lowell, attacks slavery and war in "Biglow Papers," 77;
labors of for freedom; edits _Atlantic_, 144;
upbraids Lincoln in "Biglow Papers," 254;
war poems of, 265.
Lundy, Benjamin, sketch of, 38 ff.
Lynch, John R., speaker of the House, 336.
Lyon, Mary, founds Mt. Holyoke Seminary, 362.
McClellan, George B. (Gen.), leader of Conservatives, warns Lincoln
not to move against slavery, 255;
success of against Lee, 258;
Democrats nominate for President.
McCrary, George W., Secy. of War under Hayes, 353.
McEnery, John, claims governorship of Louisiana, 341, 342.
McLean, Justice, dissents from Dred Scott decision, 148.
Madison, James, against strengthening slave power, 11;
as President, 21.
Mails, U. S., circulation of anti-slavery documents through, 72.
Marcy, William L., Secretary of State, 128.
Maryland, forbids importation of slaves, 9;
stops importation, 20;
elects anti-slavery members to House of Delegates, 36;
irregular secession convention in, 227;
remains in Union, 235;
Lincoln tries to bind faster to Union, 252;
rejects amendment against negro suffrage (1905), 383 note;
rejects 15th amendment, 385.
Mason, George, opposes strengthening of slave power, 11, 12.
Mason, James M., 89;
with Buchanan and Soulé issues Ostend manifesto, 128.
Massachusetts, slaves freed in, 9;
negroes granted suffrage in, number of negroes in, 1780; in
slave trade, 9;
aids extreme South to prolong slave trade, 13;
indifferent to slave trade, 20;
"Know-nothings" carry election of 1854 in, 115;
leads North in opposing secession, 229;
Republicans in fail to indorse Pres. Johnson, 276.
May, Samuel J. (Rev.), 44;
conversation with Dr. Channing on anti-slavery, 61 ff.
Mexico, war with, 76 ff;
ends, 79;
proposal to annex, Calif. taken from, 79.
Middle States, in slave trade, 9;
slavery abolished in, 20.
Mississippi, admitted as slave State, 23;
considers secession (1860), 221;
secedes, 225;
emancipation in, 260;
gives qualified assent to 13th amendment, 262;
provisional gov't formed in, 275;
delays her return to Union, 310;
negro voters outnumber white in, 311;
under martial law, 316;
"carpet-bag" rule in, 333 ff;
statistics on misgovernment in, 334 ff;
misgovt. and corruption in exaggerated, 338;
Democrats organize opposition and practice intimidation in, 339 ff;
legal limitation of suffrage in, 383.
Missouri, bill to organize as State, 23;
geographical relation of to free States, 24;
debate on admission, 24 ff;
Compromise, 25 ff;
admitted as slave State, 27;
mobs form in struggle for Kansas, 116;
votes not to secede, 227;
remains in Union, 235;
Lincoln tries to bind faster to Union; Republican party breaks
up in, 327.
Morgan, Edwin P. (ex-Gov.), supports Pres. Johnson, 204.
Morton, Oliver P., party leader, 331;
favors "Force bill" in Senate, 345;
Presidential candidate, 346.
Moses, F. J., Jr., governor of So. Carolina, 332.
Mott, Lucretia, 56.
Mount Holyoke Seminary, founded, plan for students to earn expenses
fails at, 362.
Murphy, Edgar G., "The Present South," 388;
on negro problem, 408.
Nashville convention, to promote interests of South, 90, 138.
_Nation_, The, supports Independent Republicans, 327;
refuses to support Greeley, 329.
Nat Turner insurrection, 41.
Nebraska, 112.
Negroes (see also SLAVES, SLAVERY, EDUCATION),
superiority of over Indians as slaves, 5;
advantages and disadvantages of slavery to, 5;
granted suffrage in Mass. and other States, 9;
number of in Mass. in 1780, 9;
number of in other States, see SLAVES;
condition of in North before the war, 37;
(for condition of in South, see SLAVERY, SLAVES);
proposed college for, 37;
violence against in North, 74;
status of in America defined by Dred Scott decision, 147, 148;
citizenship rights of declared in New York, 149;
U. S. army and navy opened to enlistment of, 260;
enlist in Union armies, martial qualities of, 261;
good qualities of displayed in war, 263;
Pres. Johnson favors qualified suffrage for, 276;
Henry Ward Beecher's views on suffrage for, 278;
education of urged by Beecher, 279;
South's estimate of after war, 280, 287;
behavior of after emancipation, 287;
repressive laws against, following war, 287, 288;
their misconception of freedom, 289;
laws governing labor of after war, 290 ff;
law against association of whites with, 290;
abuse of by Southern whites, 292;
their necessities force them to labor, 293;
leaders in Georgia plead for rights of, 301;
suffrage for in South the central feature of Reconstruction bill, 308;
suffrage for favored by North, 308, 309;
broad conception of, 309;
number of voters among in Southern States compared to white
voters, 311;
many Northern States refuse suffrage to, 314;
unfitness of in South for suffrage, choose delegates to const.
conventions, 317;
sudden political power of doubtful benefit to, 318;
as a body lack independence; affiliate with Republican party; become
estranged from old masters, 319;
in high political offices, 321, 333, 336;
not guilty of physical violence, 323;
national education of neglected, 325, 326;
manner of toward whites, 338;
organized resistance to voting of in South, 340;
intimidated at polls, 352;
problem of disposition of, 355;
views on in North and South, 356;
condition and needs of after war, 357, 358;
beginnings of higher education for, 358;
religion of, 359;
Gen. Armstrong's labors in behalf of, see ARMSTRONG, SAMUEL;
problem of disappears as central feature in national politics, 371;
polit. preponderance of in South ended, 371;
suffrage of practically nullified in South, but large degree of civil
rights secured to, 372;
Southern whites undertake education of with energy and success, 373;
refused social equality at South, and often at North, 373 ff;
improved social conditions, and increased numbers of, 374 ff;
present wealth, skill, intelligence, and moral status of, 375 ff;
development of leadership among, 376 ff., 379;
legal limitation of suffrage of in South, 382 ff;
practical disfranchisement of, 384, 388;
threatened narrowing of industrial opportunities the greatest
danger to, 385;
unfortunate social position of, 386;
hopes of future betterment, 387;
estimated amt. paid out for education of to date; better industrial
education for, 388;
necessity for all to face the problem of; great responsibility on
leaders of, 392 ff;
present phase of problem, necessity of abolishing caste spirit, 393;
industrial position of, 394 ff;
attitude of trade unions toward, 385, 395;
dangers consequent upon exclusion from unions, 396;
need of higher education for, 398;
present polit. status of, 400;
attitude of toward suffrage, 401;
should have fair share of public offices, 403;
government aid in education advocated, 404;
growing recognition of in North, 406 ff;
results of social ostracism on, suggested means to avoid, 408.
_Negro Problem_, The, by Booker Washington and others, 379;
New England (See also NORTH, MASSACHUSETTS,)
Washington's opinion of, 2;
slave labor unprofitable in; industries in, 6;
negroes granted suffrage in, 9;
aids extreme South in extension of slave trade, 13.
New England Anti-slavery Society, founded, 44.
New England Emigrant Aid Society, formed, 116.
New Hampshire, number of slaves in in 1790, 9;
slavery abolished in, 21.
New Haven, labors in for negroes, 36.
New Jersey, votes against extension of slave trade, 13;
passes emancipation law, 22;
counted as free State, 23;
declares for emancipation, 35;
rejects 15th amendment, 315.
New Mexico, South demands permission of slavery in, 84.
New Orleans, riot in, 303.
New York _Evening Post_, supports Independent Republicans, 327;
refuses support to Greeley, 329.
New York _Herald_, 141, 164, 193.
New York _Times_, 141, 347.
New York _Tribune_, influence of, 140, 141;
against forcible repression of secession movement, 228;
criticises Lincoln, 255;
supports Independent Republicans, 328;
unearths Hayes-Tilden telegrams, 352.
New York State, number of slaves in in 1790, 9;
passes emancipation law, 22;
counted as free State, 23;
delegation of to "Free Soil" convention (1848), 82;
declares right of citizenship for negroes, 149.
Nicholls, Francis T., claims governorship of Louisiana, 349;
becomes governor, 353.
North, the (see also NEW ENGLAND),
slavery unprofitable in, 5;
aids extreme South in extending slave trade, 13;
slavery abolished in, 20;
surpasses South in population and wealth; increased representation
in House, 24;
its economic advantages over South, 69 ff;
violence against negroes in, 74;
disputes with South over new territory, 80;
dissatisfaction in over Compromise measures of 1850; passes "Personal
Liberty Laws," 91;
outstrips South in industrial, literary, and religious growth,
advantages of South over, 94;
growth of anti-slavery feeling in, 113 ff;
best intelligence of in early Republican party, 127;
resents polit. aggression of South more than slavery, 128;
leaders of (1850-60), 132;
leaders of, 140 ff;
attitude of clergy in toward slavery, 141;
economic conditions in compared with those of South, 156;
John Brown's raid intensifies conviction against slavery in, 167;
growing distrust of South in, 169;
position of on secession, etc., 200 ff;
underlying divergences from South in sentiment and character
of, 205 ff;
religious life in, 206;
inflamed against South;
sources of misunderstanding, 207;
varied occupations in, 208;
secession movement causes consternation in, 209;
strongly inclined to peace; disbelieves in Southern courage, 210;
grounds for resistance of secession in; impatient of Southern
political dominance, 212;
reasons for failure of disunion movement in, 218 ff;
disinclination in to use force against secession movement, 228;
Mass. becomes leader in, 229;
united in resistance to secession, 235;
views on Civil war in, 237;
bitter feeling against South in, 241;
moral effect of war on, 244;
Unionism the absorbing issue in, 248;
party divisions in, 253;
growing sentiment in against slavery, 254;
courage of in war, 262;
advantages of over South, 264;
joy in over prospect of success, 268;
opposes Johnson's reconstruction plans, 288;
current opinion in on cause of secession, 300;
hatred of Jefferson Davis in, 301;
general temper in hostile to Pres. Johnson, 312;
feeling of relief in after Grant's election, 315;
resumption of business in, 316;
immigration from into South, 319;
growing tendency in to accord social equality to negroes, 373 ff, 406.
North Carolina, emancipation favored in, 36;
right of free speech vindicated in, 129;
votes against secession convention, 229;
secedes, 235;
emancipation in, 260;
provisional govt. formed in, 275;
reconstructed, 310;
relative number of negro voters in, 311;
Democrats regain, 323;
legal limitation of suffrage in, 383.
Northwestern Territory, slavery prohibited in, 10.
Nullification, So. Carolina claims right of, 32;
denounced by Jackson, 33;
opposed in "Force bill" of 1833, 33;
question dropped, 34, 214.
Oberlin College, becomes anti-slavery stronghold, 37;
plan for students to earn expenses fails at, 362.
O'Conor, Charles, nominated for President, 329.
Ohio, admitted as free State, 23;
declares for emancipation, 35.
Olmsted, Frederic Law, on condition of slaves in South before
the war, 49;
volumes of travels in the slave States, 107 ff.
Ordinance of 1784, fails to limit slave territory, 10.
Ordinance of 1787, limits slave territory, 10.
Oregon, boundary dispute, 80;
rejects 15th amendment, 315;
double returns from in Hayes-Tilden election, 351.
Ostend manifesto, 128.
Packard, S. B., in govt. of Louisiana, 341;
claims governorship, 349.
Paine, Thomas, 8.
Parker, Theodore, influence of in church and state, 143;
supports John Brown, 160, 168.
Peace Congress, proposed, to find means to preserve the Union, 228.
Pendleton, George H., candidate for Presidential nomination, 313.
Pennsylvania, number of slaves in in 1790, 9;
votes against extension of slave trade, 13;
passes emancipation law, 21;
counted as free State, 23;
declares for emancipation, 35;
Republicans fail to indorse Pres. Johnson, 276.
Peonage cases, prosecution of, 388.
Personal Liberty Laws, passed in North, 91.
Petigru, James L., 223.
Petitions to Congress, anti-slavery, 71 ff.
Pettus, Gov., of Mississippi, 221.
Philadelphia, convention in behalf of Pres. Johnson at, 303.
Phillips, Wendell, becomes ally of Garrison, 54;
scorns Republican party, 127;
declares all war un-Christian, 210;
favors disunion, 217, 228;
abuses Lincoln, 254.
Pierce, Franklin, nominated for, and elected President, 93;
recognizes usurpers in Kansas struggle, 117.
Pierce, Henry L., in House, 331;
vote of in Hayes-Tilden contest, 352.
Pinckneys, Charles and Thomas, demand freedom of slave trade, 12 ff.
Pittsburg, counter convention at, 303.
Platte country, the, 112.
Polk, James K., nominated for President, 75;
elected;
declares war with Mexico, 76.
Poor whites, evil effects of slavery on, 110.
"Present South, The," by E. G. Murphy, 388, 408.
Pottawatomie massacre, 120;
results of, 121.
Presbyterian church, condemns slavery, 35.
Prisons, military, terrors of, 245 ff.
Protection. See TARIFF, PROTECTIVE.
Quakers, relation of to slavery, 7.
Randall, Samuel J., in House, 284;
speaker, 346.
Randolph, John, his opinion of slavery, 47.
Randolph, Thos. Jefferson, his scheme of emancipation, 43.
Rankin, John, 38.
Rantoul, Robert, joins "Free Soil" party, 81.
Raymond, Henry J., 141;
in House, 284;
supports Pres. Johnson's plan of reconstruction, 285, 303.
Reconstruction, 267 ff;
Lincoln's plans for and views on, 268 ff;
congressional bill (1864), rejected by Lincoln, 269;
Lincoln's plans for opposed by Congress, 270;
first Congressional plan of, 274 ff;
President Johnson's plan of, 275;
Henry Ward Beecher's plan of, 277 ff;
John A. Andrew's plan of, 280;
both latter plans too advanced for the time, 280;
action taken on by Congress (1865-6), 281 ff;
Pres. Johnson's plan of opposed in Congress, 285;
second Congressional plan of, 294 ff;
difficulties of question increased by lack of statesmen to handle, 302;
two policies of before the country, South indorses Pres. Johnson's
plan of, 303;
final plan of, 306 ff; bill passed, 306;
results of bill, 307, 310;
verdict of country on work of, 312 ff;
the working out of, 316 ff;
the last act, 344 ff.
"Reconstruction and the Constitution," by Prof. J. W. Burgess, 290.
Reeder, Governor, of Kansas, 117.
Republican party (see also REPUBLICANS),
beginnings of, 114 ff;
components of, 115;
first Presidential convention of, 124 ff;
principles, leaders, constituency, successes, and failures of in first
(1856) campaign of, 127;
opposition to in first campaign, 128;
weakness of in South, 129;
composition of opposition to, and causes of defeat of in first
campaign, 130;
stand of on negro question (1860), 186;
origin of protectionist character of, 190;
geographical lines of in 1860 campaign, 192;
denounced in 1860 campaign, 193 ff;
restriction of slavery the supreme principle of, 212;
Sumner's belief in, 319;
freedmen instinctively turn to, 319;
leaders of in Grant's second term, 331.
Republicans, hold first (1856) Presidential convention, 124 ff;
nominate John C. Fremont for President, 126;
Wm. L. Dayton for Vice-President, 129;
platform, 126;
denounce Ostend manifesto, 129;
dissent from Dred Scott decision, 148, 149;
gain in numbers, name Lincoln for U. S. Senator, 153;
first Illinois convention of, 179;
campaign, 180 ff;
not in John Brown's raid, 183;
hold convention (1860), 189 ff;
platform, 190;
struggle bet. Seward and Lincoln men in, 190, 191;
nominate Lincoln and Hamlin, 192;
elect candidates (1860), 194;
results of success of, 221;
oppose secession, 223, 224, 225;
oppose schemes for extension of slavery, 228;
vainly concede many points to South, 229;
divide over war questions, 253;
reaction against in elections of 1862, 261;
success of in 1864, 262, 265;
indorse President Johnson, 276;
assert right of Congress to direct reconstruction, leaders oppose
Pres. Johnson's plan of, 286;
opinion of turns against Johnson, 294;
increased strength of in Congress (1866-7), 306;
in Senate vote to acquit Pres. Johnson, 312;
adopt moderate platform, nominate and elect Grant (1868), 314;
in temporary control of South, 323, 327;
change attitude tword South, independent movement among, 327;
Independents hold convention (1872), 328;
in gov't of South, 332 ff;
lose heavily in Congressional elections of 1874, suspected of
maladministration, 344;
many oppose Force bill of 1875, 345;
hold convention (1876), 346;
nominate Hayes, campaign, 347;
claim election of Hayes, 348 ff.
"Residence on a Georgia Plantation, A.", 103.
Rhett, Senator, proposes secession, 89.
Rhode Island, in slave trade, 9;
passes emancipation law, 21.
Rhodes, "History of the U. S.," quoted, 301, 302.
Robinson, Chas. S., gov. of Kansas, 117 ff;
his house burned, 119.
Roosevelt, President, South criticises for entertainment of Booker
Washington, 386.
Ross, Senator, votes to acquit Pres. Johnson, 312.
Sanborn, Franklin B., supports John Brown, 160.
San Domingo, proposed annexation of, 328.
"Scalawags," the, 318.
Schurz, Carl, on conditions in South after war, 286 ff, 292;
favors negro suffrage, 309;
in Republican convention (1868), 314;
leads Independent Republicans in Missouri, 327;
in U. S. Senate, 328;
Sec'y of Interior under Hayes, 353;
on peonage cases in South, 388;
on future of negro question, 389.
Scott, R. K., governor of S. Carolina, 332.
Scott, Winfield (Gen.), nominated for President, 92;
against armed repression of secession, 228.
Secession, Clay denies right of, 86;
Webster declares impossible with peace, 87;
threats of in Congress denounced by Taylor and Clay, 89;
open threats of in South, 193;
not taken seriously at North, 194;
denounced by Douglas, 194;
Southern position on defined, 197 ff;
Northern position on defined, 200 ff;
slavery question the real basis of 211;
grounds for resistance of at North, 212;
extreme abolitionists not opposed to, 212;
arguments for and against, 212 ff, 226;
reasons for success of movement in South and failure of in
North, 218 ff;
sources of movement in South, 219;
action of Southern States on following Lincoln's election, 221 ff;
discussed in Congress (1860), 223;
advised by Southern leaders in Congress, 225;
triumph of movement, 226;
movement halts, 227;
various Southern States take action on;
general sentiment in South against armed
repression of, 227;
disinclination in North to use force against, 228;
West strongly against movement, 228;
Mass. takes strong stand against, 229 ff;
plea of Lincoln against, 232;
current Northern opinion of causes of, 300.
Secessionists (see SECESSION),
propose disunion, and formation of Southern Confederacy, 215.
Seelye, Julius H., vote of in Hayes-Tilden contest, 352.
Senate, State representation in determined, 11;
South strives to keep up numbers in, 24;
stronghold of South, 81.
Sewall, Samuel, protests against slavery, 7.
Seward, William H., votes for Taylor, 82;
influence and strength of, 82;
his plan of emancipation, 83;
speaks in Senate against extension of slavery, 89 ff;
helps prolong Whig organization in New York, 115;
in Republican party, 127;
opinion of on Dred Scott decision, 149;
opinion of on future labor conditions in Union, 154;
logical candidate for Presidency (1860), 190;
in Lincoln's cabinet, 233, 249;
Lincoln adopts advice of to delay issuance of emancipation
proclamation, 257;
in Johnson's cabinet, his influence on the President, 274;
supports Pres. Johnson, 303.
Seymour, Horatio, nominated for President, characterized, 313;
defeated, States carried by, 314.
Shadrach, fugitive slave, rescued, 91.
Shaffer, President, urges admission of capable negroes to trade
unions, 395.
Shannon, Wilson, gov. of Kansas, 117.
Shaw, Robert Gould, 264.
Shellabarger, Samuel, in House, 284, 286.
Sheridan, Gen'l, sent to investigate Louisiana election scandals, 343.
Sherman, John, in U. S. Senate, 283, 285;
endeavors to stem tide against Pres. Johnson, 296;
defeats Stevens's reconstruction bill, 306;
superiority of over Blaine, 307;
Sec'y of Treasury under Hayes, 353.
Sherman, William T. (Gen.), his opinion of war, 244, 245.
Slaveholders, numbers of, characteristics, 95.
_Slave Laws_, compiled and published by Stroud, 110.
Slavery. (See also SLAVES, SLAVE TRADE.)
Washington's opinion of, 3;
origin, growth, regulation and defense of, 3 ff;
legally recognized in Judea, Greece, and Rome, by Jesus and the
early church, 4;
supplants free peasantry in Italy, 4;
influence of Christianity on, 4;
absolute, abolished throughout Christendom, supplanted by serfdom, 4;
recrudescence of in 17th and 18th centuries, 4;
economic conditions determine location of in America, 5;
unprofitable in North, 5, 6;
need of in South, 5;
casuistical defense of by church, 5;
advantages and disadvantages of to negro, 5;
responsibility for denied by North and South, 6;
commercial demand for overrides humanity, 6;
unprofitable in New England, 6;
social conscience unawakened to enormity of, 7;
Sewall and Woolman protest against, 7;
relation of Quakers to, 7;
awakening to wrongs of, 8;
abolished in Mass., 9;
Jefferson strives to limit territory of, 9;
limited, 10;
impossible for convention of 1787 to prohibit, 14;
compromised, 14 ff;
views of Washington and other leaders on, 15;
Patrick Henry's views on, Franklin labors against, 19;
early anti-slavery sentiment, 20;
abol. in Northern and Middle States, 20;
question temporarily eclipsed, 21;
estab. in Kentucky, abol. in Spanish America, 22;
question again to the front (1819), 23;
defended in Congress, all ideas of abolishing dropped in South, growth
of sentiment against in North, 24;
Jefferson supports, 25;
Clay supports, 26; growth of question from 1832, 28;
South fully accepts and defends, 46 ff;
views of Jos. LeConte, Frederic Law Olmsted, and C. C. Jones on, 49;
theory of adopted by slave-holders, 50;
abolished in West Indies, 51;
Garrison's fight against, 51 ff;
defense of strengthened in South, 54;
underlying principles of;
tide of public opinion sets against, 70;
question grows in prominence, 71 ff;
freedom of speech on denied in South, 73;
Calhoun's claim for nationalization of, 80;
excluded from new territory acquired by purchase, 80;
opposition of Seward and Chase to, 83;
as it was, depicted by Mrs. Burton Harrison, 100;
depicted in biography of Thomas Dabney, 100 ff;
described by Fanny Kemble, 103 ff;
pictured by Frederic Law Olmsted, 107 ff;
Harriet Beecher Stowe's opinion of embodied in "Uncle Tom's
Cabin," 109;
general view of in South, 133;
attitude of clergy toward, 141;
hostility toward in South, 170;
the great cause of difference between North and South, 207, 211;
restriction of the supreme principle of Republican party, 212;
measures upon during Civil war, 249, 250;
Lincoln's attitude toward, 250;
abolished in Dist. of Columbia, 251;
finally and forever abolished in U. S., 276.
Slaves (See also NEGROES, SLAVERY, SOUTH, SLAVE TRADE),
Africa source of, 5;
indolence and unthrift of, 5;
Virginia taxes, 6;
foundation of aristocracy in Virginia and Carolinas, 6;
unprofitable as laborers in New Eng., 6;
Virginia and Maryland forbid importation of, 9;
Jefferson proposes plan for gradual emancipation of, 9;
Virginia passes law regulating manumission of, 9;
numbers of in various States in 1790, 9;
counted in determining representation in Congress, 11, 12;
Jefferson's schemes for emancipation and disposition of, 17 ff;
value of increased by invention of cotton gin, 23;
fugitive, overtures made to England for treaty on, 28;
instruction of denied in Virginia, 44;
physical and moral condition of, 48.
Slave States, 23.
Slave trade, begun by Europe, brutality of, 5;
maintained by Eng. trading companies, colonists attempt to check, 5;
New Eng. in, 6;
Virginia remonstrates against, 8;
clause in Declaration of Independence denouncing, suppressed;
Mass., R. I., and Middle States in;
denounced by Dr. Hopkins, 9;
Congress refused power to forbid until 1808; North aids extreme South
in fight to prolong;
champions of defend only as necessary evil, 13;
stopped in Virginia and Maryland, 20;
made piracy by Congress (1800), 22;
revival of between Africa and Cuba, 158;
checked, 159.
Slave-trading companies, English, 5;
oppose tax on slaves, 6.
Smith, Caleb B., supports Lincoln, 191.
Smith, Gerritt, characterized by Andrew D. White, 55 ff;
supports John Brown, 160, 168.
Smith, Wilfred H., 379.
Soulé, Pierre, in Congress, 89;
with Buchanan and Mason issues Ostend manifesto, 128.
"Souls of Black Folk, The," an appeal for higher education of negro, 398.
South. (See also VIRGINIA, etc., SLAVERY, etc.)
Economic conditions in favor slavery, 5;
demands Congress be refused right to forbid slave trade, 12;
all ideas of abolishing slave trade dropped in, 24;
aggrieved by protective tariff, 32;
leadership of passes to So. Carolina, 44, 229;
fully accepts slavery as estab. institution, 46 ff;
strengthens defense of slavery, 54;
economic disadvantages of, 69 ff;
disputes new territory with North, attempts to nationalize slavery, 80;
opposes admission of Calif. as free State, demands allowance of
slavery in Utah and New Mexico, 84;
demands fugitive slave law, 85;
leaders of in Congress (1850), threatens disunion, 89;
denounces "Personal Liberty Laws," 91;
North outstrips in industrial growth;
advantages of over North, 94;
master class in analyzed by Fanny Kemble, 105 ff;
surprised by Kansas-Nebraska bill, 113;
anti-slavery sentiment completely ostracized in, 129;
suppression of free speech in, 130;
leaders of (1850-60), 132;
magnifies State rights;
general view of slavery in, 133;
apprehensive of growing hostility in North, 134;
clergy in united in defense of slavery, 141;
economic conditions in compared with North in _Impending Crisis_, 156;
hostility in toward North increased by Brown's raid, 167, 169-70;
misconceived by abolitionists, 168;
renewed outbreaks in against anti-slavery men, 169;
antagonism toward slave power in, 170;
solidarity against North created by Brown's raid, 170;
presents ultimatum in Senate (1859), 184;
demands protection of slave-holding right in all territories, 185;
power of in democracy and state, 185;
growing hostility in, expulsion of anti-slavery men, 186;
extreme, breaks up Democratic party, conjectural reasons for move, 187;
Alex. H. Stephens explains move, 189;
open threats of secession in, 193;
position of on secession, etc., defined, 197 ff;
underlying divergences North in sentiment and character, 205 ff;
ideal of society in, 205;
religious life and literature in, 206;
inflamed against North, sources of misunderstanding, 207;
plantation life in at best, 208;
concentration of interest in on national politics, 208;
concentrates on secession movement, 209;
duelling and street affrays common in, 209;
men of in Texas, in Mexican war, and as "filibusters," 209-10;
believes all war-spirit extinct in North, 210;
causes of united action in, 211;
North impatient of political dominance of, 212;
patriotic sentiment still powerful in, 214;
disunion sentiment strongest in Gulf and Cotton States, 214;
reasons for success of secession movement in, 218 ff;
leaders of resign from Buchanan's cabinet, 224;
leaders of in Congress favor secession, last formal presentation of
ultimatum of in Senate, 225;
general sentiment in against armed repression of secession, 227;
So. Carolina leader of, 229;
views on Civil war in, 237;
bitterness against North in, 241;
moral effect of war on, 244;
courage of in war, 262;
advantages of North over, 264;
social conditions in after war, 275;
State legislatures and conventions resumed in, 275, 276;
13th amendment ratified in 276;
Senators from refused admission to Congress, 218;
reports of Gen. Grant and Carl Schurz on conditions in after
war, 286 ff;
views of on negro labor, 287;
laws governing negro labor in after war, association of whites and
negroes forbidden in, 290;
Congressional represent. of conditioned on negro suffrage by 14th
amendment, 298;
proposed to refuse suffrage to leaders of, 299;
mistake of such course, 301;
excepting Tennessee, rejects 14th amendment, 304;
reconstruction of, see Reconstruction; government of under
reconstruction bill begins, 307, 310;
number of negro voters in various States of, 311;
trials and struggles of under new conditions, under martial law,
restored to self-government, 316;
unfitness of negroes in for suffrage, whites refuse to vote,
constitutional conventions held and negro delegates chosen, 317;
typical attitude of whites in;
under "carpet bag" rule, 318, 332;
Northern immigration into, 319;
Northern teachers insulted or disdained in; Northerners in politics in;
legislation in during reconstruction, 320;
extravagance, waste and corruption in under Republican governments;
exaggeration of, 321;
negro rule in, 319, 321;
resumption of white leadership in, 322 ff;
continued interference of Congress in, 326;
growth of Republican opposition to Federal interference in;
repudiation in, 332;
Democrats organize resistance to Republican rule in and practice
intimidation, 339 ff;
Federal troops withdrawn from, 353;
regeneration of, 354;
whites in driven to labor, 355;
end of Federal interference in, 371, 402;
negro suffrage practically nullified in, civil rights secured to
negroes, 372, 382, 388;
refuses social equality to negro, 373, 407-8;
fear of race mixture in, 374, 407;
development of industrial democracy in, 379;
present condition of politics in, 379 ff;
why "solid," 380;
life in diversifying, growth of literature in, 380;
growth of standard of education in, 381;
widening gulf between the races in, 382;
legal and practical limitation of suffrage in, 382 ff, 388;
efforts in to restrict negro education, 385;
negro still has industrial freedom in, 385, 395;
pronounced attitude of on social inferiority of negro, 386;
hopes for better conditions, growth of good-will and confidence
in, 389;
amount spent by for negro education, 397;
educational and industrial problems of, 397 ff;
suffrage laws in, 400;
politics in, no longer a struggle between whites and blacks, 401;
scheme to reduce representation of under 14th amendment, 403;
government aid to education in advocated, 404;
disproportionate share of national expense borne by, 405;
problem of social equal. of races in, 406 ff.
South Carolina (see also CAROLINAS, THE),
demands representation based on slave numbers, 11;
refuses to join Union if slave trade forbidden, 12;
revolts over tariff, claims right of nullification, 32;
passes law against negro seamen, 73;
considers secession, 221;
passes ordinance of secession, 223;
occupies Ft. Moultrie and Castle Pinckney, 224;
leads South, 229;
emancipation in, 260;
provisional government formed in, 275;
reconstructed, 310;
negro voters in majority in, 311;
under "carpet-bag," rule, 332 ff;
Presidential and State vote of contested (1876), 348 ff;
legal limitation of suffrage in, 383.
Southern Democracy, asserts universal right of slave-holding, 186.
"Southern Planter, A," 100.
"Southern Statesmen of the Old
Régime," 137.
Speed, Joshua F., 178; resigns
from cabinet, 303.
Springfield _Republican_, 124 and note, 127;
its opinion of John Brown, 162;
state's issue between Democrats and Republicans in 1864, 265;
favors educational test for suffrage, 308, 310;
prophesies slave-holding class will regain power, 322;
supports Independent Republicans, 328;
on Hayes-Tilden contest, 351.
Stanton, Edwin M., Attorney-General, 224;
in Lincoln's cabinet, 249;
attitude of on emancipation proclamation, 257;
in Johnson's cabinet, 274;
supports Johnson in reconstruction plans, 276;
becomes bitterly opposed to Johnson, 303;
removed by Johnson, 311.
"Star of the West," sent with supplies to Anderson, driven from
Charleston harbor, 224.
State rights, theory of, 133.
States, relative power of in Congress determined, 11.
Stearns, George L., supports John Brown, 160.
Stephens, Alexander H., sketch of his life and views, 137 ff;
political activity of, 138;
in Congress, and Vice-President of Confederacy, 139, 227;
explains defection of Southern Democrats, 189;
supports Douglas in 1860 campaign, 193;
opposes secession, 211, 215;
labors against secession, 219, 221, 225;
Vice-President of Southern Confederacy, 227;
pleads for negro rights, 302.
Stevens, Thaddeus, Republican leader in Penn., 276;
leader of House, 281;
sketch of, 282;
opposes Pres. Johnson's reconstruction plan, 285;
his drastic reconstruction bill defeated, 306;
House prosecutor of Johnson, 311;
death of, 331.
Story, Judge, on taxes in Miss., 336.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, publishes "Uncle Tom's Cabin," 97;
her views of slavery as pictured therein, 109;
publishes "Dred," 123.
Suffrage, manhood, adopted, 21;
equal, without test passed in North, 308;
negro, representation of South conditioned on, 298;
proposal to refuse to leaders of South, 299
see also AMENDMENTS, CONSTITUTIONAL;
Springfield _Republican_ favors educational test for, 308, 310;
unfitness of negroes in South for after war, 317;
of negroes practically nullified in South, 372;
legal limitation of in South, 382 ff; 388.
Sumner, Charles, opinion of abolitionists, 54;
joins "Free Soil" party, 81;
in Senate, 92;
denounces slavery in Congress, assaulted by Brooks, 122;
in Republican party, 127;
opposes admission of Senators from Confederate States, 270;
Lincoln refuses to quarrel with, 270;
Republican leader in Mass., 276;
sketch of, 282;
in Senate, 284;
opposes Pres. Johnson's reconstruction plan, 286;
belief of in Republican party, 309;
quarrels with Grant, 328;
death of, 331.
Sumner, Colonel, in Kansas, 118.
Taney, Chief Justice, in Dred Scott case, 147.
Tappan, Arthur, 40, 44.
Tappan, Lewis, 44.
Tariff, of abominations, 32;
protective, 31 ff;
compromise on, 33 ff;
supported in Georgia, 21;
adopted by Republican party, 190;
burden of to South, 405.
Taylor, Zachary (Gen.), 76;
nominated by Whigs, 81;
elected, 82;
denounces threats of disunion as treason, 89;
favors admission of Calif. as free State, 90;
death of, 90;
in North, 208.
Tennessee, added as slave State, 23;
votes against holding secession convention, 227;
secedes, 235;
provisional govt. estab. in, 267, 275;
rights of negro conserved in, 302;
readmitted under 14th amendment, 303.
Tenure of office law, passed; Pres. Johnson accused of violating, 311.
Territories, power of Congress over, 149.
Texas, annexation of, 74 ff;
slavery re-estab. in, 75;
becomes a state, 76;
emancipation in, 260;
silent on 13th amendment, 262;
provisional govt. of, 275;
reconstructed, 310;
relative number of negro voters in, 311;
under martial law, 316;
becomes Democratic, 323.
Thayer, Eli, originates New Eng. Emigrant Aid Society, 116.
Thomas, Lorenzo (Gen.), Sec'y of War, 311.
Thompson, George, aids Garrison, 51.
Thompson, Richard W., Sec'y of Navy under Hayes, 353.
Tilden, Samuel J., leader of Democrats, 313;
nominated for President;
characterized; apparently elected, 347;
election contested, 348 ff.
Tomlinson, Reuben, Repub. candidate for governor of S. Carolina, 332.
Toombs, Robert, sketch of, 136 ff;
political activity of, 138;
gives moral support to Preston Brooks, 138;
in Confederate cabinet and army, 139, 227;
supports Breckinridge in 1860 campaign, 193;
advocates secession in Georgia legislature, 211;
supports secession movement, 221;
states South's ultimatum in Congress, 225;
in Confederate cabinet, 227.
Trade unions, attitude of toward negroes, 385, 395;
danger of excluding negroes from, 396.
Trumbull, Lyman, elected Senator, 177;
favors admission of Senators from Louisiana, 270;
in Senate, 283, 284, 285;
favors Freedmen's Bureau bill, 294;
votes to acquit Pres. Johnson, 312;
in opposition to administration, 331.
Tuskegee Institute, 378; function of, 398.
Truth, Sojourner, 96.
"Twenty Years of Congress," Blaine's, quoted, 307, 310.
Tyler, John, becomes President, 71.
"Uncle Tom's Cabin," 97 ff;
reception, 98;
"Key to," 99;
criticism of, 99.
Underground railroad, the, 85.
Unionism, spirit of strong in white laboring class of South, 214;
strength of at North, 218, 248.
Unitarians, 143.
"Up from Slavery," Booker Washington's personal story told in, 378.
Utah, South demands permission of slavery in, 84.
Van Buren, Martin, 30;
becomes President, 71;
receives "Free Soil" nomination, 82.
Van Winkle, Senator, votes to acquit Pres. Johnson, 312.
Vardaman, Gov., of Mississippi, 388.
Virginia, tries to discourage slave trade by tax;
slave labor foundation of aristocracy in, 6;
remonstrates against continuance of slave trade, 8;
forbids importation of slaves, passes law regarding manumission of
slaves, number of slaves in 1790, 9;
against strengthening the slave power, 11;
protests against restraint of Congress to forbid slave trade, 12;
consents (1778) to abolish slave trade, 18;
stops importing slaves, 20;
convention for revis. of constitution, 41;
general emancipation debated, 42 ff;
plans for fail, 43;
passes severe laws against incitement to rebel, instruction of slaves,
etc., loses leadership of South, 44;
Mrs. Burton Harrison's personal reminiscences of before the war, 100;
calls convention to consider secession, 222;
calls peace congress, 228;
secedes, 235;
emancipation in, 260;
loyal State govt. in recognized, 275;
delays her final restoration to Union, 310;
relative number of negro voters in, 311;
under martial law, 316: Democrats regain, 323;
legal limitation of suffrage in, 383;
co-operation of whites and negroes for good govt. in, 401.
Wade, Benjamin, in Senate, 114;
in Republican party, 127;
favors radical reconstruction, 270;
in U. S. Senate, 283, 285.
Walker, Boston negro, issues Appeal, 41.
Walker, Robert J., 117;
appointed governor of Kansas, 150;
defeats fraud in ballot, and is deserted by Buchanan, 152.
War, terrors of. See CIVIL WAR, 237 ff.
"War Between the States," by Alex. H. Stephens, 189.
"War Democrats," 194, 253.
Warmouth, Henry C., in govt. of Louisiana, 341.
Warner, Col., in govt. of Miss., 336.
Warren, Henry W., in govt. of Miss., 336, 337;
on conditions and experiences in Miss. during reconstruction, 337 ff.
Washburn, Israel, Jr., helps organize Republican party, 114.
Washington, city of, threatened by Confederates, 237.
Washington, George, 2;
opinion of New Englanders, 2;
conception of liberty and of slavery, 3;
favors Revolution, 8;
against strengthening slave power, 11;
views of on slavery, 15;
private life and character of, 15 ff;
his treatment of his slaves, frees them, 16;
on necessity of abolishing slavery, 391.
Washington, Booker T., pupil of and successor to Gen. Armstrong;
his aims and methods;
personal story of, 378;
entertained by Pres. Roosevelt, 386.
Watterson, Henry, in Hayes-Tilden contest, 352.
Webster, Daniel, defends protective tariff, 32;
debate with Hayne, 33;
his public life characterized, 64 ff;
7th of March speech on slavery questions, 87;
defects of speech, 88;
political and moral characteristics of, 88;
in Fillmore's cabinet, 90;
allied with upper classes, 92;
as Pres. candidate defeated in Whig convention (1852), 92;
death of, 93.
Weed, Thurlow, votes for Taylor, 82;
helps prolong Whig organization in N. Y., 115;
supports Pres. Johnson, 303.
Weld, Theodore D., 37.
Whig party (see also WHIGS),
beginnings of, 31;
on verge of dissolution, 93;
end of, 153.
Whigs, nominate Clay, 75;
gain majority in House, 79;
nominate Taylor, 81;
nominate Gen. Winfield Scott;
defeated by combined Democrats and "Free Soilers," 92;
vote against Kansas-Nebraska bill, 114;
unite with "Free Soilers" to form Republican party;
organization prolonged in N. Y., 115;
in Republican party, 127.
Whitman, Walt, volunteer nurse, pen picture of war, 247.
Whitney, Eli, 23.
Whittier, John G., joins anti-slavery movement, 44, 56;
criticises Webster in poem "Ichabod," 88;
poem on settlement of West, 116;
in first Republican campaign, 130;
his labors for freedom, 144.
Wilmot proviso, 80.
Wilson, Henry, joins "Free Soil" party, 81;
elected Senator, 115; sketch of, 283;
opposes Pres. Johnson's plan of reconstruction, 286;
against exclusion clauses in 14th amendment, 302.
Wilson, Woodrow, "History of the American People," criticised, 334.
Wise, Henry A., opinion of John Brown, 164.
Wise, John S., shows effects of John Brown's raid in South, 169;
criticises Bourbonism in Southern politics, 388.
Women's rights, 56;
cause advanced, 94.
Wood, Fernando, 352.
Woolman, John, protests against slavery, 7.
Woolsey, Theodore D., 36.
Wright, Elizur, 44.
THE END
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