CHAPTER XV

THE BROTHERS ON EACH SIDE WERE TRUE PATRIOTS AND MORALLY RIGHT--BOTH THOSE WHO FOUGHT FOR THE UNION, AND THOSE WHO FOUGHT FOR THE CONFEDERACY

The proposition of the heading has really been demonstrated in the foregoing chapters. I feel that the demonstration should have impressive enforcement. It will surely be for the great good of our country if the brothers of each section be truly convinced that those of the other were morally right in the slavery struggle from beginning to end.

Let us begin by noting the ambiguity of the word "right." Something may be right in expediency, policy, or reason, and yet wrong ethically. Likewise something may be a mistake and wrong in policy while it is right in morals. General Sherman was a conspicuous example of the almost universal proneness to confound right in the sense first mentioned above with it in the other. The two are widely different--not merely in degree, but in kind. That which is right or wrong in expediency is decided by the understanding--by the head; that which is right or wrong ethically is decided for every human being by his own conscience--by his heart. To try with all my might to do a particular thing may be my highest moral duty; to try with all your might to keep me from doing it may be yours. The brothers who set up the southern confederacy and defended it, the brothers who warred upon it and overturned it--they were on each side sublimely conscientious; for every one--to use the high word of Lincoln--was doing the right as God gave him to see it. No people ever waged a war with deeper and more solemn conviction of duty than did our northern brothers. Rome, rising unvanquished from every great victory of Hannibal, much as she has been most justly lauded by foremost historians, fell behind them in supreme effort--in undaunted perseverance in spite of disaster after disaster until the difficulty insuperable was overcome. We of the south should be proud of this unparalleled achievement of our brothers. Most of all should we be proud of the complete self-abnegation and unwavering obedience to conscience with which they waded a sea of blood, for the welfare of future generations rather than their own. I am glad to observe that many who most affectionately remember the lost cause have come at last to concede without qualification that the restoration of the union by force of arms was morally right. But I note that as yet only a few at the north--men like Dr. Lyman Abbott, Mr. Charles F. Adams, and Professor Wendell--have learned that the south, in all that she did in "The Great War,"[144] was likewise morally right. To show that the confederates were exemplary champions of a legitimate government, I need not repeat what I have said above when I told how southern nationalization had given them a country of their own as dear to them and as much mistress of their consciences as the union was to the northern people. If there are those who cannot bring themselves to allow the all-potent coercion of the nationalization mentioned as justification, and who still think of us as traitors and rebels, I beg them to give due consideration to the feelings with which the southerner now looks back upon his life in the confederate army. I call a most convincing witness to testify. I do not know a man who ever followed what his conscience pronounced right more faithfully, who was truer to the better traditions of the old south, and who was a more devoted soldier in the brothers' war, nor do I know another who now draws from every class in his community more respect for real manhood and honesty. All who know him will believe his word against an oracle or an angel. Here is what he said thirty-seven years after the close of the war:

"That period of my life is the one with which I am the most nearly satisfied. A persistent, steady effort to do my duty--an effort persevered in in the midst of privation, hardship, and danger. If ever I was unselfish, it was then. If ever I was capable of self-denial, it was then. If ever I was able to trample on self-indulgence, it was then. If ever I was strong to make sacrifices, even unto death, it was in those days; and if I were called upon to say on the peril of my soul, when it lived its highest life, when it was least faithless to true manhood, when it was most loyal to the best part of man's nature, I would answer, 'It was when I followed a battle-torn flag through its shifting fortune of victory and defeat.'

My comrades, how easy it is to name the word that characterizes and strikes the keynote of that time and should explain our pride to all the world--self sacrifice--that spirit and that conduct which raise poor mortals nearest to divinity. Oh, God in heaven, what sacrifices did we not make! How our very heart strings were torn as we turned from our home, our parents, our children!... How poor we were! How ragged! How hungry! When I recall the light-heartedness, the courage, the cheerfulness, the fidelity to duty which lived and flourished under such circumstances, from the bottom of my heart I thank God that for four long years I wore, if not brilliantly, at least faithfully and steadfastly, in camp and bivouac, in advance and retreat, on the march and on the battlefield, the uniform of a confederate soldier."[145]

The passage just quoted most truly expresses the feelings with which the southern people stood by their cause and now look back upon the support which they gave it. In this matter their word will be taken by everybody. Their actions before, during, and ever since the war speak louder than their word. There can be no doubt that in founding the Confederate States and waging the resulting war everything they did was counselled by the most tender and enlightened conscience. Bear in mind how they clung to Davis and how they still remember him, winning the precious eulogy

"--he that can endure To follow with allegiance a fallen lord Does conquer him that did his master conquer, And earns a place i' the story."

Bear in mind how truly they keep Memorial Day. The love which the south gives Davis and her dead soldiers protests to all the earth and heaven the righteousness of her lost cause. Calmly, serenely, confidently she awaits future judgment upon her love. It needs that all the north appreciate this fealty as the height of heaven-climbing virtue.

The real soldiers of each section--those who--to use a confederate saying--were "in the bullet department," and fighting every day, learned great regard for their foes; and when the war ended they became at once advocates of speedy reconciliation. And the non-combatants on each side felt far less resentment towards the actual fighters of the other than they did towards its political leaders. It is a common error to overrate the accomplishment of potent and ambitious men in tumultuous times. As the world long ascribed meteorological phenomena to the mutations of the moon, conspicuous above all things else as the apparent cause, so most people now believe that revolutions are caused by the men who appear to be leading. We have explained above that the only effective leaders--even of revolutions--are those who are the most completely led by the people. To lead, the leader must keep on the tide and let it lead him. If he makes serious effort to balk it, he is at once stranded as a piece of drift thrown out of the current. All of us--both those north and those south of Mason and Dixon's line--ought to learn this truth thoroughly. The former should correct their false judgments as to Calhoun, Toombs, Yancey, and Davis; the latter as to Sumner, Garrison, and Phillips. It was but to be expected that these false judgments would be cherished all through what we may call the era of civil fury. That begins with the excitement over the admission of California and extends to the time after the war when the project of giving a negro constituency the balance of political power in each southern State was abandoned. But now as the brothers can look back upon those evil days with at least the beginning of dispassionate calmness, the task of convincing the whole people of each section that the more prominent figures of the other in the era mentioned were all true men and patriots, should be pushed forward with his whole might by every one who loves his country. It is not demanded that we claim too much for them. To begin illustrating: Toombs's Tremont Temple lecture on slavery is such an able and powerful defence of the south that its reputation must forever increase. Yet as we consider it now we see that what he believed with all his heart to be the perpetual pillar and weal of his community was in fact its woe and ruin. We see, as to Calhoun, that if he had but given the resources of southern slavery against the implacable oppugnancy of free labor, roused for decisive combat, the sure and marvellous vision with which he searched the innermost nature of money, he would have had to acknowledge that the proud structure of southern society was wholly builded upon sands. The rains descended and the floods beat, and we saw the great fall. Of course we must admit that had our leaders been endowed with unerring prescience they ought to have warned us, and striven heart and soul for compensated emancipation. I need merely allude to State sovereignty, treated fully above. We of the south now see that though in advocating it we showed that the fathers were with us, and thus got the better of the argument, yet that the north was right in historical fact, and right also as to the true interest and welfare of America. Thus I have indicated some important acknowledgments which we of the south must make to our brothers of the north. Now I must state some that they must make to us.

The root-and-branch abolitionists and many following their lead interpreted the statement in the declaration of independence that all men are created equal and with inalienable liberty as both intentional and actual condemnation of the slavery then existing in our country. They shut their eyes to the significant fact that the same document published to the world, as one of the causes justifying the solemn act therein proclaimed, that the king had "excited domestic insurrections amongst us"; which means he had instigated the slaves to rise against their masters. Many of the signers owned slaves then and to the end of their lives afterwards. Palpably the declaration did not mean to say that the negroes in America were unjustly held in slavery, but did mean to say that inciting them--as John Brown with the approval of Phillips, Garrison, and such, afterwards sought to do--to gain their liberty by insurrection was inhuman and atrocious. These root-and-branch abolitionists confidently alleged that slavery in America was proscribed by the christian religion. Yet Jesus, the founder, who definitely reprehended every particular sin, never once denounced slavery. Paul, or some one else, whom the canon accepts as speaking with the authority of Jesus, says: "All who are in the position of slaves should regard their masters as deserving of the greatest respect, so that the name of God, and our teaching may not be maligned. Those who have christian masters should not think less of them because they are brothers, but on the contrary they should serve them all the better, because those who are to benefit by their good work are dear to them as their fellow-christians. Those are the things to insist upon in your teaching. Any one who teaches otherwise, and refuses his assent to sound instruction--_the instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ_--and to the teaching of religion, is puffed up with conceit, not really knowing anything, but having a morbid craving for discussions and arguments."[146]

The passage last quoted--to which several others from the new testament, almost as strong, can be added--demonstrates that christianity did not disapprove of slavery. Further, as I have already suggested, the slavery not rebuked by Jesus and his apostles was mainly that of kin in blood and race, of those who had been in a measure free themselves or descendants of the free. The slaves of the south were far remote in blood, and their native condition so bad that American slavery was for them elevation and great improvement.

The new testament, the declaration of independence, and the federal constitution--surely three very respectable authorities, in America at least--stand together in solid phalanx. They clearly demonstrate that the charge that southern slavery was heinously wrong in itself, and that the masters were wicked man-stealers and kidnappers, made for a long while in every corner of the north, was mere opprobrium and abuse. Both sections ought to learn that there was nothing in negro slavery to shock the moral sense, but that on the contrary it was in its general effect of the utmost beneficence to the slave. Both ought to learn also that the white-hot zeal with which the institution was fought was due mainly to these things:

1. Free labor had long been in an uncompromising hand-to-hand struggle with slave labor. Years before this commenced the employing class had subconsciously divined it was far more profitable to hire the laborer only when his work was needed, and then let him go until he was needed again. The worker with the advance of democracy had become more and more hostile to a system coercing his labor and denying him all political and civil rights. The co-operation of employer and laborer had expelled slavery of white men from Europe. The feeling towards slavery had become one of decided opposition.

2. In America the opposition to slavery was powerfully re-enforced, first, by the new cause the latter gave in competing with free labor for the unsettled public domain, and then in its operation to nationalize the south into a separate federation. With this combined the growing conception among the northern people of the negro as a man who had reached the stage of development characterizing the typical white. This huge mistake, hugged to their bosoms and championed with unflagging zeal by the ablest and most influential root-and-branch abolitionists, had a prodigious propagandic effect. It identified the cause of the negro slave, whom evolution had not yet made ready for liberty, with that of the oppressed European who had been long ready for it; and consequently that cause was continuously advocated with the passion which the French revolution had started against human inequality. The root-and-branch abolitionists at last excited a pseudo-moral paroxysm among thousands at the north and kept it increasing for a long while.

Facts which cannot now be gainsaid plainly justify me in denying that conscientious conviction was the real primary motive. The northern and southern churches split, all the wisest and best of the former standing against, all those of the latter for slavery. You must see that their moral convictions were secondary, not primary motives; that some superior power had given to one side to regard slavery as wrong and to the other to regard it as right; that it really had given the two sides differing consciences. If you but invoke the universal history of mankind this fact now under consideration will cease to appear marvellous. You will find it to be the rule that the struggle for existence develops in every community an instinct which resistlessly prompts to the maintenance of its great economic interest. This instinct is the special preserver of the family, of the neighborhood, of the country. It is not strange that that which gives sustenance and comfort to one's family, and what he sees all the best of his neighbors using as he does, will seem unquestionably right to him. It is not strange that, in such a serious conflict of interest as the intersectional one of dividing a vast empire between such fell competitors as free labor and slave labor, each side will differ diametrically in conscience as to right and wrong. Also it is not strange that they should lose temper, shower abuse upon their opponents, and fill the land with mutual accusations of heinous moral offences.

It is just as far wrong to regard the controversy between anti- and pro-slavery men--which was at bottom but a quarrel between north and south at first over the division of the Territories between the free labor system and the slave labor system, and later over the other question whether a slave republic should divide the continent with the United States--as a contest over a moral question, as it would be to make either the American or the French revolution such a contest. All three--the intersectional struggle as to slavery and the two revolutions--were mainly impelled by a desire of each side in every one to better or hold on to its material resources--that is, the leading impulsion was economic. Of course the combatants on each side claimed that they themselves were right and their adversaries wrong in morals. The rencounter between free labor and slave labor was very much like that now on between capitalists and labor organizations. Note how each side denounces the conduct of the other, alleging it to be against moral justice. The most superficial observer discerns that the real cause of difference between them is not one of conscience, but one of interest. We ought to understand that the crimination of the root-and-branch abolitionist and the recrimination of the fire-eater were each but stage thunder. The southern master must be wholly exonerated from the charge that in working his slave he committed moral offence against the dearest American rights; the claim for the African, who was in a far lower circle of development, of equal civil and political privileges with the white must be disallowed; and it be fully conceded that the southern people, leaders and all, were but doing their conscience-commanded duty throughout. Also we of the south must learn that the root-and-branch abolitionist, even in his wildest moments--Sumner refusing in the United States senate to show respect to Butler's gray hairs, Wendell Phillips degrading Washington below Toussaint, Garrison denouncing the slavery-protecting constitution as a covenant with death and an agreement with hell, John Brown's raid into Virginia--was just as conscientious as Robert Lee was when he was defending the soil of his native State. They were each irresistibly constrained by the powers working to save the union to think his particular action right and the highest patriotism.

When the quarrel is over, when the broil and the feud have been fought out and the survivors have shaken hands, when the lawsuit has become a thing of the past and the litigants have renewed their old relations, no wise and good man keeps repeating the accusations of bad faith and of unrighteous conduct which he passionately hurled against his adversary during the variance. Rather he confesses to himself, "I wronged him when I said those hot words;" and his repentance does not bring complete peace until he has found his brother and taken all of them back.

If it only could be, the nation ought to have a great reunion, a feast of reconcilement, where, with proper solemnities, the people of each section, with their forefathers and leaders, should be fully and finally exculpated as to everything done for or against slavery by the people of the other section. It is plain that both ought to forget and forgive. They ought to do still more. They ought to compete each in utmost effort to vindicate the favorites and loved ones of the other the more intelligently, and to admire and praise them the more enthusiastically. This would be to bring the millennium nearer, and give our country "a nobleness in record upon" all others. It only needs for this consummation to cast aside the remnant of greatly diminished prejudice, and make a brief study of a small volume of material evidence and of the ordinary principles which guide the conduct of the good citizen. Such study will show that southerner and northerner throughout their fell encounter have each the very highest claims to the respect and love of the entire nation.

What a golden deed it was of President McKinley when, December 14, 1898, fully using a rare opportunity, he spake in his high place to the members of the Georgia legislature this message of reunion:

"Sectional lines no longer mar the map of the United States. Sectional feeling no longer holds back the love we bear each other. Fraternity is the national anthem, sung by a chorus of forty-five States and our Territories at home and beyond the seas. The union is once more the common altar of our love and loyalty, our devotion and sacrifice. The old flag again waves over us in peace with new glories, which your sons and ours have this year added to its sacred folds. What cause we have for rejoicing, saddened only because so many of our brave men fell on the field or sickened and died from hardship and exposure, and others returning bring wounds and disease from which they will long suffer. The memory of the dead will be a precious legacy, and the disabled will be the nation's care.

Every soldier's grave made during our unfortunate civil war is a tribute to American valor. And while when those graves were made we differed widely about the nature of this government, these differences have been settled by the arbitrament of arms. The time has now come, in the evolution of sentiment and feeling, under the providence of God, when in the spirit of fraternity we should share with you the care of the graves of the confederate soldiers. The cordial feeling now happily existing between the north and south prompts this gracious act. If it needs further justification, it is found in the gallant loyalty to the union and the flag so conspicuously shown in the year just passed by the sons and grandsons of these heroic dead."

By the favor given Fitzhugh Lee, Joe Wheeler, and other old confederates, and his earnest and successful efforts for universal amnesty to all who had helped our cause, Mr. McKinley had already won the hearts of the southern people. This speech increased our love a hundred fold. We repeated the "soft words" over and over, companioning them with

"O they banish our anger forever When they laurel the graves of our dead."

On each one of our three subsequent Memorial Days during his life he was thought of as tenderly as the precious dead. And since the death of Jefferson Davis there has been no sorrow of the south equal to that over his assassination. This is the age of funerals that crown with supreme popular honor the doers of high deeds for country and race. The imposing obsequies given the president, the demonstrations in his own section, and those in foreign lands, have rarely been outdone. But he had a greater glory. It was the genuine lamentation over him that day by reconciled brothers and sisters in every southern household. You that know history better, tell me when and where a whiter and sweeter flower was ever laid upon a coffin.

Let all of us on each side of the old dividing line strive without ceasing to give the good work which the great peacemaker begun so well its fit consummation.

And replacing hate and anger with love, fiction with fact, and false doctrine with true, let the people of the north and the people of the south join heads, consciences, and hearts to ascertain what is our duty both to negro and white, and then join hands and do that duty.