CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

The inhabitants of the English colonies in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are all of the same race, language, religion, and institutions of government. Such homogeneousness, as has long been recognized, works powerfully for the political coalescence of separate communities. With the adjacent ones of the colonies just mentioned there has always been trend to such coalescence, as is impressively illustrated by the recent establishment of the Australian Federation. The thirteen colonies out of which the United States developed were likewise English, and there was the same homogeneousness in their population, which made in due time, and also maintained for a few generations, a union of them all--a continental union. But there had crept in a heterogeneity, overlooked for many years, during which time it acquired such force that it at last overcame the homogeneousness just emphasized and carried a part of the inhabitants of the United States out of the continental union. African slavery dying out in the north, but prospering in the south, was this heterogeneity. By a most natural course the south grew into a nation--the Confederate States--whose end and purpose was to protect slavery, which had become its fundamental economical interest, against the north standing by the original union, and which having gained control of the federal government was about to use its powers to extirpate slavery. The continental or Pan-American nation--the American union, as we most generally think of it--could not brook dismemberment, nor tolerate a continental rival, and consequently it warred upon and denationalized the Confederate States. The last two sentences tell how the brothers' war was caused, what was its stake on each side, and the true result. This compendious summary is to serve as a proposition, the proof of which we now purpose to outline.

Our first step is to emphasize how the free-labor system which prevailed in the north, and the slave-labor system which prevailed in the south, were utterly incompatible. Free labor is far cheaper and more efficient than slave labor. It had consequently superseded slavery in the entire enlightened world. But certain exceptional peculiarities of climate, soil, and products planted made slavery profitable in the south.

To maintain the market value of the slaves two things were needed: (1) the competition of free labor and the import of cheap slaves must be rigorously prevented; (2) a vast reserve of virgin soil, both to replace the plantations rapidly wearing out and to afford more land for the multiplying slaves. The fact last mentioned made it vital to the south to appropriate such parts of the soil of the Territories as suited her cotton and other staples. Therefore whenever she made such an appropriation she turned it into a slave State; for thus the competition of free labor would be effectually excluded therefrom. The much more rapid increase of her population made appropriation of lands in the Territories likewise vital to the north. Hers were all free-labor interests, as the south's were all slave-labor interests; and whenever the former appropriated any of the Territories, she made a State prohibiting slavery in order to protect her free-labor interests. The north was not excluded by nature from any part of the public domain as the other section was. Her free labor could be made productive everywhere in it, and she really needed the whole.

Thus the brothers of the north and the brothers of the south commenced to strive with one another over dividing their great inheritance. The former wanted lands for themselves, their sons, and daughters in all the Territories possible made into States protecting their free-labor system; the latter wanted all of the Territories suiting them made into States protecting their slave-labor system. What ought especially to be recognized by us now is that this contention was between good, honest, industrious, plain, free-labor people on one side, and good, honest, industrious, plain, slave-labor people on the other, those on each side doing their best, as is the most common thing in the world, to gain and keep the advantage of those of the other. It was natural, it was right, it was most laudable that every householder, whether northerner or southerner, should do his utmost to get free land for himself and family. This fact--which is really the central, foundation, and cardinal one of all the facts which brought the brothers' war--must be thoroughly understood, otherwise the longer one contemplates this exciting theme the further astray from fact and reasonableness he gets.

The foregoing shows in brief how there came an eager contention for the public lands between parents, capitalists, workers, employers, manufacturers, and so forth, bred to free labor and hostile to slavery on the one side--that is, in the northern States; and the same classes bred to slavery and hostile to free labor on the other side--that is, in the southern States. The contention grew to a grapple. As this waxed hotter the combating brothers became more and more angry, called one another names more and more opprobrious; and at last each side, in the height of righteous indignation, denounced their opponents as enemies of country, morality, and religion. Here the root-and-branch abolitionist and the fire-eater begin their several careers, and get more and more excited audience, the former in the north and the other in the south. Both were emissaries of the fates who had decreed that there must be a brothers' war, to the end that slavery, the only peril to the American union, be cast out.

Under the necessity of defending slavery against free labor there came early an involuntary concretion of the southern States. This was very plainly discernible when the epoch-making convention was in session. It was the beginning of a process which has been well-named nation-making. After a while--say just before Toombs takes the southern lead from Calhoun--it had developed, as we can now see, from concretion into nationalization--not nationality, yet--of the south. It was bound, if slavery was denied expansion over the suitable soil of the Territories and the restoration of its runaways, to cause in the ripeness of time secession and the founding of the Confederate States. But there was another nationalization, older, of much deeper root and wider scope--what we have already mentioned as the continental or Pan-American. Its origin was in an involuntary concretion of all the colonies--both the northern and the southern--antedating the commencement of the southern concretion mentioned a moment ago. While southern nationalization was the guardian of the social fabric, the property, the occupations, the means of subsistence of the southern people, the greater nationalization was not only the guardian of the same interests of the northern people, but it had a higher office. This was in due time to give the whole continent everlasting immunity from war and all its prospective, direct, and consequential evils, by federating its different States under one democratic government--this higher office was to perpetuate the American union. This continental nationalization had probably ripened into at least the inchoate American nation by 1776. It was this nation, as I am confident the historical evidence rightly read shows, that made the declaration of independence and the articles of confederation, carried the Revolutionary war on to the grandest success ever achieved for real democracy, and then drafted and adopted the federal constitution. The constitution was not the creator of this nation, as lawyers and lawyer-bred statesmen hold, but the union and the constitution are both its creatures. This nation is constantly evolving, and as it does it modifies and unmakes the constitution and system of government of the United States, and the same of each State, as best suits itself. Why do we not trace our history from the first colonial settlements down to the present, and learn that the nation develops in both substance and form, in territory, in aims and purposes, not under the leading hand of conventions, congress, president, State authority, of even the fully decisive conquest of seceding States by the armies of the rest, but by the guidance of powers in the unseen, which we generally think of as the laws of evolution? To illustrate: For some time after I had got home from Appomattox I was disheartened, as many others were, at the menace of centralization. A vision of Caleb Cushing's man on horseback--the coming American Cæsar--seared my eyeballs for a few years. But after the south had been actually reconstructed I was cheered to note that the evolutionary forces maintaining and developing local self-government were holding their own with those maintaining and developing union. To-day, you see the people of different localities all over the north--in many cities, in a few States--driven forward by a power which they do not understand, in a struggle which will never end till they have rescued their liberties from the party machine wielded everywhere by the public-service corporations.

To resume what we were saying just before this short excursion. Of course when the drifting of the south toward secession became decided and strong, Pan-American nationalization set all of its forces in opposing array. As soon as the southern confederacy was a fact, the brothers' war began. I emphasize it specially here that this war was mortal rencounter between two different nations.

The successive stages by which her nationalization impelled the south to secession are roughly these:

1. The concretion mentioned above probably passes into the beginning of nationalization when the south was aroused by the resistance of the free-labor States to the admission of Missouri as a slave State. With a most rude shock of surprise she was made to contemplate secession. Although there was much angry discussion and the crisis was grave, you ought to note that the root-and-branch abolitionist and fire-eater had not come. That crisis over, which ended the first stage, there was apparently profound peace between the free-labor communities and the slave-labor communities for some while.

2. The south rises against the tariff which taxes, as she believes, her slave-grown staples for the profit of free-labor manufacturers. Here the next stage begins. Perhaps the advent of nullification, proposed and advocated by Calhoun as a union weapon with which a State might defend itself against federal aggression, signalizes this stage more than anything else.

3. The second gives place to the third stage, when the congressional debate over anti-slavery petitions opens. It is in this stage that the root-and-branch abolitionist and the fire-eater begin their really effective careers. Opposition to the restoration of fugitive slaves was spreading through the north and steadily strengthening. It ought to be realized by one who would understand these times that this actual encouragement of the slaves to escape was a direct attack upon slavery in the southern States, becoming stronger and more formidable as the root-and-branch abolitionists became more zealous and influential, and increased in numbers, and the slaveholder was bound to recognize what it all portended to him. It was natural that when he had these root-and-branch abolitionists before himself in mind, he should say of them:

"The lands of the Territories suiting slave labor are much less in area than the due of the south therein. She will soon need all these lands, as the slaves are multiplying rapidly, and the virgin soil of her older States is going fast. With an excess of slaves and a lack of fit land soon to come, if we are barred from the Territories our property must depreciate until it is utterly worthless. But these abolitionists attempt a further injury. They instigate our slaves to fly into the north, and then encourage the north not to give them up when we reclaim them. They deny our property the expansion into what is really our part of the Territories which it ought to have in order to maintain its value; and further they try to steal as many of our slaves from us in the States as they can."

This was the double peril, as it were, which gathered in full view against the south.

I cannot emphasize it enough that the hot indignation of such as Garrison against slavery as a hideous wrong was not excited before the competition between north and south over the public lands had become eager and all-absorbing. It is nearly always the case that such excitement does not appear until long after an actual menace by a rival to the personal or selfish interest of another has shown itself. It is not until the menace becomes serious that the latter wakes up to discover that the former is violating some capital article of the decalogue. This was true of the root-and-branch abolitionist. And his high-flown morality was made still more Quixotic by his conscientiously assuming that the negro slave was in all respects just such a human being as his white master.

This third stage extends from about January, 1836, until the country was alarmed as never before by the controversy of 1849-50 over the admission of California, in southern latitude, with an anti-slavery constitution. At its end the southern leadership of Calhoun standing upon nullification, a remedy that contemplated remaining in the union, is displaced by that of Toombs, who begins to feel strongly, if not to see clearly, that the south cannot preserve slavery in the union.

4. The fourth stage begins with the compromise of 1850. Afterwards during the same year was an occurrence which cannot be overrated in importance by the student of these times. That was the consideration of the pending question in Georgia, and action upon it by a convention of delegates elected for that special purpose. The Georgia Platform, promulgated by that convention, is as follows:

"To the end that the position of this State may be clearly apprehended by her confederates of the south and of the north, and that she may be blameless of all future consequences, _Be it resolved by the people of Georgia in convention assembled_, _First_, that we hold the American union secondary in importance only to the rights and principles it was designed to perpetuate. That past associations, present fruition, and future prospects, will bind us to it so long as it continues to be the safeguard of these rights and principles.

_Second._ That if the thirteen original parties to the compact, bordering the Atlantic in a narrow belt, while their separate interests were in embryo, their peculiar tendencies scarcely developed, their Revolutionary trials and triumphs still green in memory, found union impossible without compromise, the thirty-one of this day may well yield somewhat in the conflict of opinion and policy, to preserve that union which has extended the sway of republican government over a vast wilderness to another ocean, and proportionally advanced their civilization and national greatness.

_Third._ That in this spirit the State of Georgia has considered the action of congress, embracing a series of measures for the admission of California into the union, the organization of territorial governments for Utah and New Mexico, the establishment of a boundary between the latter and the State of Texas, the suppression of the slave-trade in the District of Columbia, and the extradition of fugitive slaves, and (connected with them) the rejection of propositions to exclude slavery from the Mexican Territories, and to abolish it in the District of Columbia; and, whilst she does not wholly approve, will abide by it as a permanent adjustment of this sectional controversy.

_Fourth._ That the State of Georgia, in the judgment of this convention, will and ought to resist, even--as a last resort--to a disruption of every tie which binds her to the union, any future act of congress abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, without the consent and petition of the slaveholders thereof, or any act abolishing slavery in places within the slaveholding States, purchased by the United States for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other like purposes; or any act suppressing the slave-trade between slaveholding States; or any refusal to admit as a State any Territory applying, because of the existence of slavery therein; or any act prohibiting the introduction of slaves into the Territories of Utah and New Mexico; or any act repealing or materially modifying the laws now in force for the recovery of fugitive slaves.

_Fifth._ That it is the deliberate opinion of this convention, that upon the faithful execution of the fugitive slave bill by the proper authorities depends the preservation of our much loved union."

This platform was the work of statesmen who had added to the wisdom of the fathers, making the declaration of independence, articles of confederation, and the great constitution, worthy wisdom of their own from a far more varied experience and better training in government. These statesmen came indiscriminately from all parties. The people in the State, from the highest in authority through every intermediate circle down to the humblest citizen, deliberately, without excitement or passion, endorsed this platform with practical unanimity. And all parties stood upon it to the end. This was not an ignorant, debased, corrupt, unrighteous people; but it was even better in everything that makes a people great and good than the former generation which had given the country Washington and Jefferson.

Especially should the student meditate what this solemn declaration shows was the sentiment of the people of the State at that time towards the American union. Every one of the five planks contains its own most convincing proof of deepest devotion. Think of the child who at last resolves to fly from the home which had been inexpressibly sweet until the stepmother came; of the father whose conscience commands him to save the mother's life by killing the assailing son; of what the true Othello felt when he had to execute the precious Desdemona for what he believed to be her falseness--think of these examples, if you would realize the agony of the better classes of the southern people when they at last discovered that the union had changed from being their best friend into their most fell enemy.

The Georgia Platform was actually drafted, I believe, by A. H. Stephens, then a whig. It was probably moulded in its substance--especially in the fourth and fifth planks--more by Toombs, also a whig, than any other. Howell Cobb, a democrat, approved, and was elected governor upon it the next year, receiving the ardent support of Toombs and Stephens. Toombs was just forty, Stephens a year or two, and Cobb some six or seven years, less than forty. These three were the leading authors. Note how much younger they were than Calhoun, who had a few months before died in his sixty-ninth year. The platform indicates the new sentiment, not only of Georgia but of the entire south. When its contents are compared with the doctrine of nullification, it clearly shows as the production of a new era in the history of southern nationalization; for it marks what we may somewhat metaphorically distinguish as the close of the pro-union and opening of the anti-union defence of slavery. The proclivity to secession uninterruptedly increases from this point on.

I would have it noted that the tactics of this fourth stage are unaggressive. The Georgia Platform was no more than most grave and serious warning against being driven to the wall. It did not bully nor hector. The threat of what must be done in case certain menaced blows to slavery were struck was so calmly, deprecatingly, and decorously made, that one wonders it was not heeded. He ceases to wonder only when history reveals to him that fate had become adverse to the good cause of this noble people.

5. A change of tactics characterizes the fifth stage. The faster growing population of the north, furnishing settlers in far greater number than that of the south, was sweeping away all chance of new slave States. The situation commanded that the defence of the south change to the aggressive, just as Stoessel was constrained the other day to take the offensive against 203 Meter Hill. In the first sortie the south got the Missouri compromise repealed. Then she tried to make a slave State of Kansas. She failed. When she had lost Kansas--like California in southern latitude--she could not help recognizing that the outlook for slavery in the union had become desperate. My northern countrymen, if you were as free from the surviving influence of the old intersectional quarrel as we all ought to be, you would applaud the ability and valor with which the south had fought this losing fight for the welfare and comfort of her people; and especially would you admire her supreme effort in behalf both of that people, and also of the union which she loved next to the cause of her people. Not quailing before odds incalculable, she was as brave and self-sustained as Miltiades, coming forth with his little ten thousand to fight the host of Mardonius hand-to-hand. The only thing for her now was new aggression, to make a demand never seriously urged before. That was that congress protect the master's property in every Territory until it became a State. If this were done, she could, perhaps, keep slavery in some of the Territories long enough for it to strike root permanently. If it could not be done she must choose between her own cause and the union. Her persistence in the demand mentioned--and she was obliged to persist--split the democratic party, which had until this time been her main upholder in the union. The north refused her demand by electing Lincoln. This was the end of the fifth stage. Her nationality had become fully ripe. She seceded into the Confederate States, her only opportunity of conserving the property and occupation interests of her people. Of course she expected to get her part of the public domain, and to enforce extradition of her fugitive slaves.

The foregoing is the barest outline of the rise and conflict between the two nationalizations. The subject has been neglected too long. There begins to be some faint understanding of the greater nationalization, but that understanding is far short of completeness. There is hardly a suspicion of the other. And yet as to our own special subject it is really the more important, for in it is the initiative of the brothers' war. There has been made by nobody any investigation at all of the main parts of that train of events which I designate as southern nationalization. Not Wilson's "The Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in the United States," nor any book by a partisan of either side in the struggle, gives any help towards this investigation. The historical sources have never been studied at all; such as the colonial records now publishing, the records and papers of the probate court in some of the older and more important counties of the south--especially the returns of administrators, executors, and guardians, and files of newspapers advertising their citations. Here can be found the prevailing prices of slaves, their rate of multiplication, all details of their management, from the very beginning. The trial and equity courts contain records of litigation about slaves; of advice of chancellors to trustees seeking to make or change investment; of wills manumitting slaves; and a thousand other relevant matters. The course of legislation as to slaves from the first to the end is also important. From these, from local literature such as "Georgia Scenes," "Simon Suggs," biography, and various pamphlets, and other original sources,--far better historical evidence than any which is now generally invoked,--can be learned the real facts as to the growth of slavery; and especially how in its economic potency consequent upon the invention of the gin it supplanted or made dependent upon itself all other property, and became the solitary foundation of every kind of production and mode of making a living; so that even by 1820 to abolish slavery would have been almost to beggar the southern people for two or three generations. It is to be hoped that Professor Brown, finding the opportunity which he desires, may yet exhaust not only the sources I have mentioned, but also important ones that I have not even thought of, and give the true ante-bellum history of the lower south. Some such work is necessary to explain the active principle, the _raison d'etre_ of southern nationalization.

How north and south were sundered by the different nationalizations is yet to be told in full detail without any censure of the people of either. Practically every American was born into an occupation or way of life connected with or founded upon either slave or free labor interests, and so was born into one or the other of these two nationalizations, and his conscience coerced him to stay with it. These nationalizations made two different publics and two different countries in the United States. After the slavery agitation had become active the masses in either public knew but little of the other, and cared for it less; and when war broke out between the two countries every man, woman, and child was ready to die, if there was need, for his own. When the history of the times has been impartially and adequately written the world will recognize that the patriotism and moral worth of neither side excels that of the other, and it will crown both.

The evolution indicated above produced not only the two hostile peoples, but also their leaders and representatives of every class. I have taken pains in a relevant chapter to show how the fire-eaters and the root-and-branch abolitionists were at last brought upon the stage. Every fierce controversy in history has had their like on each side. Their coming is late. The antagonists have become excited. The intelligence guiding evolution deceives them as to the parts they must play. They believe that their mission is to arouse the public conscience in order to right some alleged moral wrong. Their real mission is to excite to angry action. Cicero condemns the Peripatetics for asserting that proneness to anger has been usefully given by nature.[2] He overlooked the fact that the outbreak of the passion is intended to spur us into doing something important for our own protection; and that it is therefore an indispensable weapon in our self-defensive armory. These fanatics, as we often call them, instigated north and south to quarrel more and more fiercely, and finally to fight. The purpose of the powers in the unseen in causing the fight has already been stated.

What especially concerns us here is that we avoid adhering to the mistakes of these partisans which still have injurious effect upon opinion. Thus the fire-eater could see no good whatever in the yankees, as he called them, denying them honesty, trustworthiness, and other elementary virtues; accusing them of robbing us by the tariff and other measures, and hating us for the prosperity and comfort which the slavery system had blessed us with. Other of his false charges are still lodged in the memory of some influential southerners. But the fire-eater's predictions were all completely falsified by the result of the war; and he has become so much discredited as an authority, there is no very great need for consuming much time and effort in correcting his misstatements. On the other hand the decisive success of their side has kept thousands at the north fully believing the wildest fabrications of the root-and-branch abolitionists. The latter believed that the African slave of the south was just such a human being, ready for liberty and self-government in all particulars, as civilized and enlightened whites. They believed that the condition of his immediate ancestors in West Africa was one of high physical, mental, moral, and social development, and that if there was in him now any inferiority to his master it was entirely due to the sinister influence of American slavery. They also believed that the system was fraught with such cruelties as frequent separation of man and wife and of mother and young children, under- feeding and clothing, and grinding overwork,--that, in short, the average slave was daily exposed to something like the torture of the Inquisition. All this was invention. American slavery found the negro gabbling inarticulately and gave him English; it found him a cannibal and fetishist and gave him the Christian religion; it found him a slave to whom his savage master allowed no rights at all, and it gave him an enlightened master bound by law to accord him the most precious human rights; it found him an inveterate idler and gave him the work habit; it found him promiscuous in the horde and gave him the benign beginning of the monogamic family,--in short, as now appears very strongly probable, American slavery gave him his sole opportunity to rise above the barbarism of West Africa.

These tremendous mistakes of fact, after knitting the north in solid phalanx against dividing the Territories with the south and restoring fugitive slaves and thus hasting forward the war, prompted that folly of follies the fifteenth amendment, and have ever since kept the north from understanding the race question.

I am sure that it is high time that we of each section should school ourselves into impartially appreciating the civil leaders of the other side. The south has made more progress towards this than the north. Certain causes have operated to help her onward. One of these is that practically all of us recognize it is far better for the section that the union side won. Another is that the great mass have learned that slavery both effeminated and paralyzed the whites and was a smothering incubus upon our due social and material development. It is natural that although we give our pro-slavery political leaders and the confederate soldiers increasing love, we should more and more commend the pro-union and anti-slavery activity of the northern statesmen. Nothing like this has led the north to revise the reprobation which in the heat and passion of the conflict it bestowed upon the public men of the south. If I ever read a good word from a northern writer as to them, it is for something in their careers disconnected with the southern cause. Even Mr. Rhodes, the ablest and most impartial of northern historians of the times, finds in Calhoun only a closet spinner of utterly impractical theories. Further, I could hardly believe it when I read it--and it is hard for me to believe it yet--that, citing some flippant words of Parton in which a slander of contemporary politics is toothsomely repeated as his voucher, he flatly charges the lion-hearted knight of the south with playing the coward in the most heroic episode of his grand career. My faith is strong that this mode of treating the good and great southern leaders will soon go out of fashion.

I am greatly in earnest to vindicate these leaders--especially Calhoun, Toombs, and Davis. Much of the public life of each one was concerned with matters of national interest. To this I give special attention, for I want my northern readers to know what true Americans they all were. Without this they cannot have their full glory. And their justification is that of their people. Such effective leaders are always representative. It is a misnomer to call them leaders. They were really followers of their constituents who were struggling for the subsistence of themselves and their dear ones. During this time Calhoun, Toombs, and Davis, had they not labored in every way to protect this great cause--the cause of their own country--as they did, would have been as recreant as the confederate soldier, skulking away from the line defending home and fireside. When our country is in peril the unseen lords of its destiny do not take any one of us, from the greatest to the humblest, into their confidence as to the event. Every man of us must support in politics and on the field the cause of our people. If that must go down it will make defeat glorious to go down with it, as contentedly and bravely as did Demosthenes, Cicero, and Davis.

Whoever diligently studies the facts will be convinced that southern nationalization, with a power superior to human resistance, carried the southern people into secession, and that their so-called leaders were carried with them. He will discern that the parts of the latter were merely to serve as floats to mark the course of the current beneath. Therefore be just to these leaders for justice' sake. Further, you brothers and sisters of the north ought to bethink yourselves and keep in mind how we regard them. The reputation of these our civil champions and their graves are as dear to us as those of our mothers. If you adopted an orphan, you would feel it to be unpardonable to speak slightingly to him of his parents. Cleopatra, her conqueror sending her word to study on what fair demands she would have, answered:

"That majesty to keep decorum, must No less beg than a kingdom."

Let those who wore the blue and their descendants think over it long enough to realize how unspeakably low and treacherous it would be in us to abet any condemnation whatever of these men for their anti-union acts--these men whom we or our fathers voted for and supported because of these acts. If you deny justification to them, how can we keep decorum in accepting it ourselves?

I would say one more word, where perhaps I am a little over-earnest. These southern leaders have contributed richly to the treasures of American history. Their moral worth,--nay, moral grandeur,--their great natural parts, their statesmanly ability, their eloquence, their heroic fidelity to their people,--by these each has won indefeasible title to the best of renown. Whenever the north has made real study of them, she will give them as generous admiration as she now does to the charge of Pickett. I have done my utmost to present Calhoun, Toombs, and Davis faithfully, using, as I believe, all the main facts which are relevant and incontrovertible. I am sure that every northerner who reads them, after he has laid aside all prejudice, will admit that I did not claim too much when I was recounting their merits a moment ago.

I invite close consideration of all that I say of Webster. The purpose of providence, bestowing birthplace, early environment, training, and career as preparation for a paramount mission, shows more conspicuously in him than in any other of America's great, with the solitary exception of Washington. How the names of detracting agitators and mere politicians written over his in the temple of fame are now fading off, and how the invincible and lovable champion of the brother's union looms larger upon us every year!

I am painfully conscious of how certain omissions, unavoidable in my limited space, mar the symmetry of my ground-plan. The average reader will probably think that I ought to have sketched Lincoln, Grant, and Lee. I was convinced that the public had already become reasonably instructed as to them.

John Q. Adams is one of the most conspicuous men of his day. Standing aloof from parties, completely self-reliant, opulently endowed with every high power of moderation, insight, and effective presentation, his good genius gave him the championship in congress of the free-labor cause during the critical years that it was preparing for the decisive meeting with the slave-labor cause. In this time it seems to me that single-handed he achieved more for the latter than all its other champions. A pleasant parallel between him and Lee occurs to me. Each had filled the proudest place in the chosen avocation of his life. Adams had been the chief magistrate of the great republic, elected by the votes of a continent. Lee had been the foremost general of the bravest and most puissant nation that ever lost its existence by war. Each one of the two passed from power down into what is usually a condition of inaction and accumulating rust till the end of life, and to each was most kindly granted the achievement of new fame and glory. In the national house of representatives, Adams, during the last twelve years of his life,--1836-48,--did the great deeds which we have just lauded. In the last years of his life Lee, as the head of an humble institution of learning, showed not only the youth in his charge, but all of his stricken people, how to conquer direst adversity with such grand success in an example of unmurmuring endurance that every future generation of men will give it more loving appreciation.

John Q. Adams, as I have tried to explain, is almost an American epoch of himself; but I could not give him the chapter that is his due.

I felt that it would have been well to pair Stephen A. Douglas of the north with Alexander H. Stephens of the south. They are in nearly exact antithetical contrast. The former clung to the south, the other to the union, until the clock struck the dread hour of separation. How they loved each other and each other's people! They most strikingly exemplify the adamantine grip which each one of the two nationalizations kept upon its greatest and best.

Wendell Phillips and William L. Yancey should be contrasted. Each one was the very prince of sectional agitators, helping with great efficiency to make the public opinion that carried forward Seward and Lincoln, the actual leaders of the north, and Toombs, the actual leader of the south. It is my strong conviction that Phillips and Yancey were the most gifted, eloquent, and influential stump speakers in America since Patrick Henry.

Chase steadily rises in my estimate. His solid parts, his consistent, conscientious, and able anti-slavery career, and especially that decisive speech in the Peace Congress,--these, and other relevancies that can be mentioned, drew me powerfully. The firm candor with which he avowed in that memorable speech that the north had decided against the expansion of slavery, demonstrates the clearness of his vision. The part of it which recurs to me most frequently is that in which he impressively recounts the intersectional dissension over the fugitive slave law,--the south believing slavery right, the north believing it wrong,--and proposes that in place of the remedy given by that law the master be paid the value of his slave. "Instead of judgment for rendition," he said, "let there be judgment for compensation determined by the true value of the services, and let the same judgment assure freedom to the fugitive. The cost to the national treasury would be as nothing in comparison with the evils of discord and strife. All parties would be gainers."

Calhoun devised to restrain the sections from mutual aggression by endowing each with an absolute veto against the other. Webster fondly believed that if he could be president he would bring back the wrangling brothers to love one another again as much as he loved them all. Chase also had his pet impracticable project. Each one of the three recoiled and racked all of his invention to save his country from the huge fraternal slaughter that his divining soul whispered to him was near.

The south will cherish the memory of Chase more and more fondly as she learns better how he firmly stood for civil law against military rule, and that he was heart and soul for universal amnesty.

It was all I could do to deny a chapter to William H. Seward. He seems to me to have been the only northern man whose foresight of the coming convulsion equalled that of Calhoun. He did not become a Jeremiah as the other did, for his section was not, after it had just emerged from a gulf of blood, to be plunged and held for years in a gulf of poverty and disorder. He was far less serious and much more optimistic in his nature than Calhoun. Affectionate, sympathetic, rarely agreeable in his manners--how well Mrs. Davis depicts him in what is to me one of the pleasantest passages of her book.[3] He was spoils politician, able popular leader, and great statesman in rare combination. While his heart was extremely warm, his head was never turned by his feelings. Lincoln ardently believed in his soul what Choate calls "the glittering generalities" of the declaration of independence. But to Seward current illusions were the same as they were to Napoleon Bonaparte--he was to lead the masses with them just as far as possible, but not to deceive himself. Read in your closet his two epochal speeches, the "higher law" one of March 11, 1850, and that proclaiming the irrepressible conflict at Rochester, October 25, 1858, then read that of Chase at the Peace Congress, and you cannot avoid feeling that while Chase opposes slavery mainly because he conceives it to be a gross moral wrong, the other opposes because it is the belonging of an inferior civilization. In my opinion no man of that time had such a clear conception as Seward of the utter economical incompatibility of the free-labor system and the slave-labor system, and of the doom of the latter in their conflict then on. While he had this superior insight and wisdom it was the better way for him to follow the tide of morbid moral sentiment and unreasoning zeal carrying the country on to his goal. Following thus he proved a leader unsurpassed. The longer I contemplate Seward the stronger becomes my conviction that he is the most entertaining subject and the most delightful in variety of parts and traits of all American statesmen for the essayist portrait painter. To give a picture true to life demands the very best and highest art.

In my last two chapters I do all I can to clear up the race question, which is now densely beclouded with northern misunderstanding and southern prejudice. The negro has a nature that in some material particulars differs so widely from that of the Caucasian that it ought to be duly allowed for; and yet as people are so prone to think all others just like themselves, this is hardly ever done. Now, forty years after emancipation, we see that the promptings and consequences of his nature just emphasized in combination with the social forces operating upon him have caused changes in the situation, of the gravest import to him. His native idleness, coming back stronger and stronger the further he gets in time from the steady work of slavery, his lack of forecast, his vice, inveterate pauperism, increasing disease and insanity, on one side; the hostility excited against him by the inexpressibly unwise grant to him of equal political rights, and the rapid invasion by white labor since the early nineties of the province which he appropriated during the years when the whites had not recovered from the paralyzing shock and surprise of emancipation, on the other side, example these changes. There has evolved a division of the southern negroes into two classes. One class, which I most roughly distinguish as the upper, contains all those who are not compelled by their circumstances to be unskilled laborers in country and town. It hardly amounts to one-twentieth of the whole. The millions are all in the other class, which I again most roughly distinguish as the lower. Ponder what I tell you of them, their helplessness, their accelerating degradation, their mounting death rate, their gloomy prospects. I try hard also to have the upper class well understood. To a southerner it is amazing how many outside people of education, intelligence, and fair-mindedness assume that the multitude in the lower class are the same in every material detail of character and ability as those few who by various favors of fortune have found place in the upper class. To stress here, in the beginning, a fact as its very great importance demands, nearly all the negroes who get high station are part white. Dumas, the father, was at least half white. The son Dumas was probably three-quarters white. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Anglo-African composer, is half white. Such as these are the samples by which nearly all the continent and England, and many northerners, estimate the capacity of the pure negroes of the south, grovelling in depths out of which one climbs only now and then by a miracle. The men just mentioned are not real negroes. It is the same with nearly all the so-called negroes of America, from Douglass to Dr. Washington, who have become famous. They are but examples of what whites can do against adversity. The coal-black equalling these in achievement would be as rare among his fellows as Hans, the Berlin thinker, is among horses. This palpable distinction between men who are largely, if not nearly all, Caucasian, and men who are purely West African in descent, is utterly overlooked by many most conscientious and earnest ones of the north, like Mr. Louis F. Post, who is always telling us of the south what the negro is--not, and how we should treat him, magisterially reading us lessons in A B C democracy.

There will be fewer and fewer part-white negroes in the south by reason of the steadily increasing hostility of each race to mixed procreation. This upper class has long shown a drift northward. Under the expulsion of many of its members from certain occupations by white competition, lately commenced and fast increasing, this drift now gathers strength. From what I see every day it seems to me that the destiny of much the greater part of this upper class is disappearance partly by absorption and partly by euthanasy.

It is the millions of the lower class that should be our deepest concern. If they be left where their utopian emancipators and enfranchisers have placed them, it is almost certain that nearly the whole will go into the jaws of destruction, now opening wide before them and sucking them in. Such a result of the three amendments--that is, to have annihilated hosts upon hosts of pure negroes in order to make just a few part-whites all-white--would be a fit monument to the statesmanship of the maddest visionaries in all history. We must come resolutely and lovingly to the help of these wretched creatures. I tell you at large how it is our duty to give the black man his own State in our union, and supervise him in it even better than we are now doing for the Philippine.

I believe that the foregoing, re-enforced by a glance over the chapter-titles, will give a reader the preconception which he ought to get from an introduction to a book which he is about to begin. In dealing with the causes and some of the more important consequences of the brothers' war my method is rationale rather than narrative. My first purpose is to indicate how everything happened according to laws that with cosmic force reared two great economic powers, divided the whole land into a vast host standing up for one of the two in the south, and a still larger host standing up for the other in the north, and how these same laws were most faithfully served by all the actors on each side. I try to set out and explain what are the principles of evolution and the ways of human action, and especially the commanding view-points, which must be rightly attended to in their supreme importance before the greater one of the two critical American eras can have its fit history. The man who writes it will be entirely free from the monomania and orgiastic fury of both fire-eater and root-and-branch abolitionist, from their excessively emotional assumptions, their explosive and exclamatory argumentation; he will have the industry, the undisturbed vision, and the perfect fairness of the foremost sociologists of our time; he will show how each side was right from first to last in upholding its own separate country,--all belonging to it, statesmen, agitators, demagogues, fanatical fire-eaters and abolitionists, generals and soldiers. He will show that such things which in expedience ought not to have been done were unavoidable, and therefore to be excused. He will show what erroneous judgments of each section should now be challenged and kept from working injury. Especially do I emphasize it, he will convince every average reader that north and south were equally conscientious, honest, heroic, and lovable from beginning to end. Such a history will be even greater than that by which Thucydides realized his soaring ambition to give the world an everlasting possession; and it will become the bible of America, treasured and loved alike by the people both north and south.

This bible is coming, as many signs show. I will illustrate by examples from three northern authors, given not exactly in the order of time, but in that of their approximation to full attainment. After a circumstantial description of each one of the three days' fighting at Gettysburg, fair and impartial in the extreme, Mr. Vanderslice eulogizes both sides, without invidious distinction, for "their fidelity and gallantry, their fortitude and valor," and because there was nothing done by either "to tarnish their record as soldiers," and most becomingly emphasizes the "martial fame and glory" thereby won "for the American soldier." But just here he sounds a most unpleasantly discordant note by saying, "One was right and the other wrong."[4] He forgot that brothers who fight as those did at Gettysburg are all right, and that whenever one falls on either side flights of angels sing him to his rest.

In June, 1902, Mr. Charles F. Adams, making an academic address at Chicago, startled many of his auditors with this outspoken vindication of the south:

"Legally and technically,--_not morally_,-- ... and wholly irrespective of humanitarian considerations,--to which side did the weight of argument incline during the great debate which culminated in our civil war?... If we accept the judgment of some of the more modern students and investigators of history,--either wholly unprejudiced or with a distinct union bias,--it would seem as if the weight of argument falls into what I will term the confederate scale."[5]

Mr. Adams, having made further inquiry of his own, December 22 of the same year, announced a still more advanced conclusion. He had said at Chicago that the confederate scale preponderated; but now his vision having become more certain he said the scales hung even.[6] Note that in the passage just quoted from him I have italicized the two words "not morally." I do not understand that in the Charleston speech he meant to revoke the italicized words, and to say anything more than that each side was right in its own view of the nature of the government. Even with this reservation, the utterances of Mr. Adams evince a grateful improvement upon the dogmatism which characterizes nearly every other northerner or southerner who has treated the subject.

Professor Wendell sees clearly that both sides were morally right, and he is impartially just and equally loving to both. I feel that the quotations from a late work of his which I now make are the chief merits of this chapter. Considering the controversy between the sections, he says, with the truest insight, "The constitution of the United States was presenting itself more and more in the light of an agreement between two incompatible sets of economic institutions, assuming to each the right freely to exist within its own limits."[7]

In this next passage as to the same subject, rising above Mr. Adams to the high frankness which the facts demand, he says, "The truth is that an irrepressible social conflict was at hand, and that both sides were as honorable as were both sides during the American Revolution, or during the civil wars of England."[8]

How just to north and south each, and how fraternally compassionate towards the south is this: "Solemn enough to the uninvaded north, the war meant more than northern imagination has yet realized to those southern States into whose heart its horrors were slowly, surely carried. Such a time was too intense for much expression; it was a moment rather for heroic action; and in south and north alike it found armies of heroes. Of these there are few more stirring records than a simple ballad made by Dr. Ticknor, of Georgia, concerning a confederate soldier."[9] And then he quotes "Little Giffen" in full.

Professor Wendell reaches a still greater height when he decorates the Tyrtæus of the Confederate States and the supereminent anti-slavery lyricist of the north with equal homage and admiration. He says:

"The civil war brought forth no lines more fervent [than the concluding thirty-six of Timrod's 'The Cotton Boll,' which are set out], and few whose fervor rises to such lyric height. In the days of conflict, north regarded south, and south north, as the incarnation of evil. Time, however, has begun its healing work; at last our country begins to understand itself better than ever before; and as our new patriotism strengthens, we cannot prize too highly such verses as Whittier's, honestly phrasing noble northern sentiment, or as Timrod's, who with equal honesty phrased the noble sentiment of the south. A literature which in the same years could produce work so utterly antagonistic in superficial sentiment, and yet so harmonious in their common sincerity and loftiness of feeling, is a literature from which riches may come."[10]

These words are more golden than I can tell. They parallel the elevation of Webster, showing the same love for South Carolina and Massachusetts, in the pertinent parts of the reply to Hayne, which since my boyhood I have cherished as a nonpareil. It is cheering to a faithful southerner to receive such sure proof that the day must soon come when all obloquy will be lifted from the fame of Calhoun, Toombs, and Davis. What a grand triumph of contrast, almost surpassing the best achievement of Shakspeare, it will be when some honest Griffith, having shown Webster, Lincoln, and Grant in all the worth which merited their unspeakably happy lot, each radiant with the victor's glory, places opposite the great civic heroes of the southern nation, their due renown at last fitly blazoned. That renown will be that they devoted the very greatest human powers and virtues all their lives, with never remitted effort and spotless fidelity, to save a doomed country,--the imperishable renown of grand failure in a cause which adverse fate cannot keep from being ever dear to all humanity.

My last word as to what I have just quoted from the three northern authors is that all of us--and especially the fast widening public of readers--ought to be forever in earnest to applaud such sentiments and chide every manifestation of excessive sectional bias or prejudice from either northerner or southerner. This has been my incessantly kept faith for years. As proof I refer to my article, "The Old and New South," nearly all of it written in the early part of 1875--thirty years ago--and which I published the next year. I give an exact copy of it in the Appendix. As you go through it remember these things of the author: The election of Lincoln made me believe, as it did thousands of other southerners, that secession was the only patriotic course. I therefore voted for secession delegates to the State convention. I served in the confederate army all the war, taking part in the First Manassas and many other battles; and when I had been surrendered and paroled at Appomattox I walked back to my home in Georgia. Ten years after this I had found full solace and comfort for the direful event to the south of the brothers' war; and I had learned that the brothers on each side had complete justification in conscience for their contrary parts as statesmen, public leaders, voters, and at the end as soldiers. I want my readers of each section to see that I have long practised what I am now preaching.

I beg attention to the article on another score. It shows that the opinions expressed in this book have not been formed in haste. Nearly all of the more important will be found therein, in embryo, at least; and the present book will show, I hope, that they have prosperously grown. There are passages in the article, such as those touching the relations of the races, the future of the negro, the maintenance by the decentralizing forces of the union of their balance with the counter ones, and also others, which I might now justly claim to have proved prophetic; and I do not believe that a serious misprediction can be found in the entire article. This is, I hope, such corroboration by after occurrences as indicates that even my early studies of the transcendently important theme were not unfruitful.

Further, the article serves in some sort to mark a definite stage in evolution. To give but one illustration: Although my close attention to planting interests at the time and for the seven or eight preceding years had kept me closely watching the negro, I had not then discovered even the beginning of that division of the race into two classes which is now so plain to me.

Possibly some readers may shy away from my book, deeming that its subject is hackneyed and worn out. They will exclaim, What can this author say that has not been said in the vast library of books already written upon the civil war? This will be asked, I am sure, only by the unobservant and unreflecting. If one but turn away from the assumptions, dogmas, and philippics, with which north and south cannonaded each other's morality with increasing fury from 1831 to 1861, to the _rerum causæ_, the play of resistless social forces, and the other actualities and great things indicated above, their huge stores of varied novelty, interest, romance, and wisdom will greatly embarass him--as has been my painful experience--both in making the best selection and in his felt inability to give what he does at last select its fit presentation.

As illustration I will say that every thoroughly impartial northern reader who meditates what I narrate as to Toombs will, I believe, be astonished to learn that one so prodigally gifted with supreme virtue and supreme genius, and who was of unexampled success in doing all the common and all the extraordinary duties of high place, has become worse than forgotten in almost his own day; and such a reader will suspect, as I do myself, that there is much more of value in his career that I have overlooked.

Perhaps this chapter is too long already. But I pray my reader to allow me to say a little more. We are upon the threshold of a new American era. Evidently because of our western coast we are to dominate the Pacific ocean commerce and to develop it into proportions so enormous as to be now almost inconceivable. That coast will soon outstrip the Atlantic in population and great cities. Our people, safe against wars on the continent, maintaining armies only of workers, taught better methods every year by practice and science, will soon be far in advance of their present enviable prosperity and comfort. Cheering as is the promise of their material progress, that of their progress in virtue and good government is still more cheering. Everywhere in the north--which was not impoverished, deprived of familiar modes of production, and paralyzed with a race question by the event of the brothers' war--the State electorates are rebelling successfully against the party machine, cashiering the boss, and subverting the corporation oligarchy. That in the last election the voters most intelligently split their tickets assures the early expulsion of spoilsmen, grafters, and public-service franchise-grabbers from the control of our politics, legislation, and administration of government, and the real and permanent elevation of the people to being their own absolute governors. In several States--one of these a southern--the vote was for the most democratic and anti-plutocratic president since Lincoln, while at the same time the anti-plutocratic State candidates, either of the other party or independent, were elected. Our population will soon outstrip all the world in average riches, comfort, virtue, and education. The special note to be made of this new American era now beginning is that we are to lead the nations into a war-abolishing United States of the world, which in the end will make and keep them our equals in solid welfare and happiness. With this prospect in view, the brighter and more enrapturing as I cannot keep from contrasting it with the black and hopeless future which settled around me at Appomattox, I would do all that I can to bring about that better understanding between north and south which befits the good time near at hand.