Part 4

A summary of Lincoln's conduct, while there was yet peace in the land, brings out in startling relief the facts: that he dared at the behest of pampered privilege greedy for revenue, and partisan rancor thirsting for blood, without precedent, or the support of either of the other branches of the government, to place his own private interpretation upon a statute, in effect repealed, and thereby to make war on six millions of his fellow-citizens, whom he refused a right of opinion sustained by abundant authority and precedent and by some of his own acts and utterances. The idol of the "higher law" fanatics, the chief of whom he placed in his cabinet--nominated on a platform which denounced the Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case as "a dangerous political heresy, revolutionary in its tendency and subversive of the peace and harmony of the country"--elected by States, many of which defied Federal authority attempting to execute the fugitive slave law, and none of which supported such authority, except New Jersey and California--and having never publicly or privately condemned the nullification of their constitutional obligations (Article IV, section 2, clause 3) by the States of Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Michigan, Maine, Wisconsin, Kansas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania--he still proclaimed that his only motive in taking up the sword was to assert the paramount authority of Federal law!

His political campaign of 1864 was fought upon a platform which pledged its supporters to "bring to punishment due their crimes the rebels and traitors arrayed against the Government"; and be it remembered by all posterity that at the end of that campaign, almost at the close of a successful war, and in spite of military interference at the polls, one million eight hundred and eight thousand seven hundred and twenty-five citizens of his own section voted to condemn him, and endorsed a platform which declared that "under pretense of a military necessity for a war power higher than the Constitution, the Constitution itself has been disregarded in every part" by him, and that "justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view to an ultimate convention of all the States; * * * that peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union of all the States," * * * that the aim of their party was "to preserve the Federal Union and the rights of all the States unimpaired," and that they considered "the administrative usurpations of extraordinary and dangerous powers not granted by the Constitution * * * as calculated to prevent a restoration of the Union; that the shameful disregard of the administration of its duty to our fellow-citizens, * * * prisoners of war, deserves the severest reprobation."

As at the beginning, so at the end of the war, a vast majority of our nation was opposed to Lincoln's policy of coercion and blood; for his total vote, with the army and navy to back him, was only about four hundred thousand in excess of McClellan's, and this would have been far more than offset by the Southern vote.

The immediate cause of Lincoln's death was a sentence in his speech of April 11, 1865: "If universal amnesty is granted to the insurgents I cannot see how I can avoid exacting, in return, universal suffrage, or, at least, suffrage on a basis of intelligence and military service." "That means nigger citizenship," said his slayer to a witness. "Now, by God, I'll put him through!"--_Life of Lincoln_, by Herndon and Weik, Vol. III, p. 579.

It was a singular decree of Providence that, according to his own forebodings, Lincoln should have perished by the hand of violence, and that too on the fatal 15th of April, the anniversary of his proclamation for the seventy-five thousand volunteers to begin the dance of death. "He that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword."

Let us be as thankful as we can that we are still one nation, that African slavery has ceased, and that the safeguards of liberty may be still sufficient if we are vigilant, unselfish, and brave.

The world has long respected the courage of the South; when the whole truth shall be well told it will equally respect her cause. One obvious effect of the civil war, clearly foreseen and foretold by Southern statesmen, was to Europeanize American institutions. This was a fearful price to pay even for keeping the sections under one government.

Let us hope that the present war with Spain may destroy the stock-in-trade of the speculator in past patriotism.

* * * * *

An unoccupied field of investigation for a future historian is the part which Great Britain played in dissension, disunion, and war between the States, the sections, and the political parties. Her purpose has been accomplished. She has annihilated our foreign ocean-carrying trade--once threatening her own supremacy--and has thereby made us a third-rate naval power, for seamen, rather than ships, make a navy.

"Will your people divide?" General Clingman was frequently asked while in England in 1860. Never once was he asked if slavery would be abolished. The form of the question, in a land where abolition took its rise, struck him forcibly. Hear its explanation: "In this connection I remember a statement made to me by the late American Minister at Paris, Mr. Mason. He spoke of having had a conversation with one whose name I do not feel at liberty to mention, but whose influence on the opinion of continental Europe is considerable, who declared to him that if the Union of our States continued at no distant day we should control the world; and, therefore, as an European, he felt it to be his duty to press anti-slavery views as the only chance to divide us. I have many reasons to know that the monarchies of Europe, threatened with downfall from revolutionary movements, seek, through such channels as they control, to make similar impressions."--_Speeches and Writings of T. L. Clingman_, pp. 482, 483: extract from speech in United States Senate, delivered January 16, 1860.

To prove that democracy is a failure is among the chief aims of European monarchs.

Lloyd Garrison seems to have been a sincere fanatic, but all the better may have served British policy. Listen to a group of facts about him, appearing at random in a friendly encyclopedia: "In 1833" [the year the stars fell] "he visited Great Britain, and on his return organized 'The American Anti-slavery Society.' He visited England again in 1846, 1848, and 1867, in which last year he was publicly breakfasted in St. James' Hall."

An extract from the _London Telegraph_ of 1856 contains food for thought: "The aggressive spirit of the people of the United States requires an humbling, and it is for us to perform the task. England's mission is to complete the great work commenced by her in 1834, when she liberated her slaves. There are now over three million human beings in cruel bondage in the United States. If, therefore, the United States Government deny, and is resolved to question the right of Great Britain to her Central American possessions, we, the people of the British empire, are resolved to strike off the shackles from the feet of her three million slaves."

The _London News_, also of about the same time, encouraging its people against the possibility of rupture between England and this country, said: "However strong is the unprincipled appeal at present made to the anti-British feeling of the Northern States, that feeling is counterbalanced by another which has grown up within the last quarter of a century. _The abolitionists would be with us to a man. The best of them are so now._"

In 1798 the federalistic school of tax-gatherers, under the guidance of their founders, Rufus King and Hamilton, once actually lifted their eyes from the plunder of their own countrymen long enough to adopt an aggressive foreign policy, but it was a conspiracy with England, called the "Mirandy Plot," by which they sought to despoil our late allies in our war for independence, the French people, of their territory beyond the Mississippi, the honest and honorable purchase of which by Jefferson, a few years later, this school denounced as unconstitutional and void.

Better than any American statesman, General Clingman seems to have understood the motives and interests of Great Britain in fomenting the slavery agitation and the estrangement of the sections. Hear him, in his address to the people of the Eighth Congressional District of North Carolina, March 16, 1856: "The United States is the great republic of the earth, and the example of our free institutions was shaking the foundations of the monarchical and aristocratic governments of Europe. This was especially the case as respects the political system of Great Britain, owing to our common language, literature, and extended commercial intercourse. The aristocracy there hold the mass of the people in subjection, and under a condition so oppressive that large numbers of white men of their own race are liable to perish miserably by famine in years of scarcity. A knowledge of the successful working of our institutions was increasing the discontent of the common people, and, fearing the loss of its sway, the aristocracy, which controls the entire power of the government, began a crusade for the abolition of slavery in the United States. They expected, in the first place, by affected sympathy for the negroes here, to divert the minds of the people at home, to some extent, from the consideration of their own sufferings, and to create the impression that other laborers were much worse off than their own. And should they succeed in breaking up our system they would exultingly point to it as an evidence against the durability of free institutions.

"With a view, therefore, to effect these objects, more than twenty years ago the British press, and book-makers generally were stimulated to embark in a systematic war against negro slavery in the United States. Abolition lecturers were sent over and money furnished to establish papers and circulate pamphlets to inflame the minds of the citizens of the Northern States.

"Looking far ahead, they sought to incorporate their doctrines into the school-books and publications best calculated to influence the minds of the young and ignorant. Their views were most readily received in Massachusetts, where British influence has, for the last half century, been greatest. From this State these doctrines were gradually diffused to a great extent throughout the North."

At the time that the British politicians were taking so much interest in the slavery question of America, and deprecating with many crocodile tears our treatment of the negroes they had sold us, the _Edinburgh Review_ of January, 1856, charges the British Government with collecting rents and taxes from its subjects in India by means of the thumb-screw and other tortures as devilish as ingenuity could devise. See _Speeches and Writings of T. L. Clingman_.

According to some New England testimony, the work of the British emissaries who had been sent out to divide the Union was uphill at first. Hear the words of Representative Isaac Hill, from New Hampshire, speaking in Congress in 1836: "I have said the people of the North were more united in their opposition to the plans of the advocates of anti-slavery than on any other subject. This opposition is confined to no political party. It pervades every class of the community. They deprecate all interference with the subject of slavery because they believe such interference may involve the existence and welfare of the Union itself, and because they understand the obligations which the non-slaveholding States owe to the slaveholding States by the compact of confederation. It is the strong desire to perpetuate the Union; it is the determination which every patriotic and virtuous citizen has made in no event to abandon the 'ark of our safety' that now impels the united North to take its stand against the agitators of the anti-slavery project. So effectually has the strong public sentiment put down that agitation in New England that it is now kept alive only by the power of money which the agitators have collected and apply in the hiring of agents and in the issue from presses that are kept in their employ.

"The anti-slavery movement which brings in petitions from various parts of the country, asking Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, originates with a few persons who have been in the habit of making charitable religious institutions subservient to political purposes, and who have even controlled some of those charitable associations.

"Many of the clergymen who have been the instruments of the agitators have been such from no bad motive. Some of them, discovering the purpose of the agitators, discovering that their labors were calculated to make the condition of the slave worse, and to create animosity between the people of the North and the South, have paused in their course and desisted from the further application of a mistaken philanthropy."

Even if it be admitted that, as early as the year 1836, the strongest elements in New England were united against the South, it is by no means true that they were then unanimous in selecting slavery as the most advantageous ground of battle. A cry of distress arose from Great Britain at the way some of the distributors of her secret service money were being treated; a paragraph from an English newspaper, the _Leeds Mercury_, read on the floor of the House of Representatives by Mr. King, of Georgia, in corroboration of what Mr. Hill had said, will serve as an illustration: "Letters of the most distressing nature have been received from Mr. George Thompson, the zealous and devoted missionary of slave emancipation, who has gone from this country to the United States, and who writes from Boston. He says that 'the North (that is, New England, where slavery does not exist) has universally sympathized with the South in opposition to the abolitionists; that the North has let fall the mask; that the merchants and mechanics, priests and politicians have alike stood forth the defenders of Southern despots and the furious denouncers of Northern philanthropy'; that all parties of politics, especially the supporters of the two rival candidates for the Presidential office (Van Buren and Webster) vie with each other in denouncing the abolitionists; and that even religious men shun them, except when the abolitionists can fairly gain a hearing from them. With regard to himself he speaks as follows: 'Rewards are offered for my abduction and assassination; and, in every direction, I meet with those who believe they would be doing God and their country service by depriving me of life. I have appeared in public, and some of my escapes from the hands of my foes have been truly providential. On Friday last I narrowly escaped losing my life in Concord, New Hampshire.' 'Boston, September 11.--This morning a short gallows was found standing opposite the door of my house, 23 Bay street, in this city, now occupied by Garrison. Two halters hung from the beam, with the words above them: By Order of Judge Lynch!'"

Responding to this, the New Hampshire Representative (Hill) said: "The present agitation in the North is kept up by the application of money; it is a state of things altogether forced. Agents are hired, disguised in the character of ministers of the gospel, to preach abolition of slavery where slavery does not exist; and presses are kept in constant employment to scatter abolition publications through the country."

Yes, and this constant "application" of money finally overcame the Yankee. The love of it has been the root of much evil with him. Then, too, eventually, his politicians and manufacturers found that the best use they could make of the negro was to hold him betwixt them and the fire of Southern indignation, kindled by their cupidity.

To show the dangerous reciprocity of feeling between old and New England long before it was intensified as it now is by the community of interest in untold millions of investments, the words uttered by John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States, fall with the weight of state's evidence: "That their object (_i. e._ that of the New England States) was, and had been for several years, a dissolution of the Union and the establishment of a separate confederation, he knew from unequivocal evidence, although not provable in a court of law; and that in case of a civil war the aid of Great Britain to effect that purpose would as assuredly be resorted to as it would be indispensably necessary to their design."--_Adams' letter in reply to Harrison Gray Otis and others_, December 28, 1828, quoted by Raphael Semmes in his _Memoirs of Service Afloat_, p. 43. This attachment to British interests was so pronounced in 1812 that the New England States refused to furnish their quota of troops to help conduct our defense; and, while the nation was locked in deadly conflict with the ruthless invader, these States actually held a convention at Hartford looking to secession. The Governor of Massachusetts proclaimed a public fast day for deploring a war against a nation which had long been "the bulwark of the religion we profess"; its Supreme Court decided that neither the President nor Congress could control its State troops in time of war, and the Legislature declared the war to be unholy, and urged its people to do what they could to thwart it. These States forced a treaty of peace in which Great Britain was not even required to cease the outrages on account of which the war was undertaken--outrages which might have been begun again but for Jackson's victory with the Southern soldiers at New Orleans. Jefferson, in a letter to Lafayette, says: "During that war four of the Eastern States were only attached to the Union like so many inanimate bodies to living men."

That will be the saddest chapter of American history which faithfully compares the treasonable obstruction of these States to this war with their Cain-like swiftness to shed their brothers' blood because of an alleged difference of opinion on a question of constitutional law. It will be remembered, in this connection, that these States had their troops mobilized and waiting for the President's call before Fort Sumter was fired on. In four days after the call the troops of Massachusetts (the most protected State save one) had invaded the State of Maryland and were shooting down the astonished and outraged citizens of Baltimore.

The next saddest chapter of our national history will show that the section which has been greediest to gain power from the States and revenues from the people has been the readiest to use these powers and revenues against those from whom they were stolen, and the most reluctant to use them to defend the nation against foreign aggressions. "It is a principle of human nature," remarks Tacitus, "to hate those we have injured more than those who have injured us."

And who, now, but the beneficiaries of implied powers (which they fought a civil war to preserve and maintain in all their latitude), under real or affected dread of a foreign war, are zealous for the late proposed bondholders' treaty with England? As though that nation could afford to kill or even injure the goose which lays the golden egg in the shape of four hundred million dollars annual interest on British investments in this country! The sole purpose of this treaty is that this egg shall be _golden_ and not _bimetallic_; and instead of preventing, it may be the cause of war, as soon as the people resume control of their government and feel the effects of an arbitration judgment on the financial question. I pause to remark, in this connection, that many well-meaning people who petitioned the Senate for the confirmation of this treaty had not read it with sufficient care to observe that it delegated to a commission, composed partly of foreigners and to a majority of the Senate, powers which have heretofore been only exercised by two-thirds of the Senate, as the Constitution provides. And this apparently slight though subtle change in the conduct of our government was sought to be inaugurated in the name of peace!

What a Southern statesman exclaimed, arguing against the adoption of the Federal Constitution, in 1787, may be appositely repeated here: "But the character of the partners (meaning the Northern States) causes me more alarm than the terms of the partnership." England's partnership with Australia, South Africa, and India has spread such a pall of universal indebtedness over the fairest portions of the globe that we may well hesitate before we make more permanent the stipulations in the "bond" of her blighting friendship.

Undoubtedly the seeds of the War of 1812 were sown by the treaty of 1794, negotiated by John Jay, who took "a mild and conciliatory part in the Revolutionary war," and by Lord Grenville, the son of the author of the Stamp Act. The "Jay treaty," as it was called, provided for the shameful curtailment of the American ocean-carrying trade, and for the free navigation of the Mississippi for Great Britain. And if the proposed arbitration treaty is not finally rejected by the Senate, the prominence given to the present British Minister at McKinley's inauguration, accidental though it may have been, will serve as a fine prototype of British influence in the administration of our government.

"Woe to the nation that trusts England's friendship," exclaimed the thoughtful Pettigrew, after studying her national character on the narrow island where it grew. What he says, given under the sketch of him in this book, is a valuable side-light upon the suggestion that her influence more than any other (except original sin) has changed the half of our nation nearest to her into a race of "dollar-hunters and breeders of dollar-hunters." The way to make England our ally is to show her that we are able to take care of ourselves. Her government fears nothing so much as the democratic spirit of America, and would fain bind that down by treaty; but when it serves her purposes, Old England, like New England, finds a "higher law" than a contract. Unity of interest and of purpose unites peoples--compacts often unite governments in a conspiracy to plunder.

In dwelling specially upon the main cause of our civil war, because of attempts to ignore it, I do not mean to encourage the student to neglect the other causes: the control by the Confederacy of the lower Mississippi--the ocean outlet of its headwater States; the fear of protected labor that the slaves would learn to manufacture, and reduce wages; the jealousy and friction in the newly-settled West, caused by the actual contact of the two systems of labor (for slavery was a practical and serious question there); the belief that slavery was at the bottom of the forty-four years of sectional political wrangling, and that this must cease or the Union be dissolved; the honest and the prejudiced opposition to the institution itself; the zeal and ambition of machine politicians, in both sections, anxious to get in "on the ground floor" of personal advantage--these together, acted on by the main cause, and reacting on each other, constitute the causes of the war.