CHAPTER XII

THE ATTITUDE OF THE BORDER STATES

With the secession of Virginia on the seventeenth of April, 1861, there came a final end to all hope of finding a way out. The active border states did not immediately declare their secession indeed, but that was a foregone conclusion so far as Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee were concerned, and military proceedings did not wait for the formal act. That came on the sixth of May, in Arkansas, on the twentieth of May in North Carolina, and on the eighth of June in Tennessee. Kentucky and Missouri were so divided in sentiment that no united action for or against the Union could be secured.

Kentucky officially assumed an attitude of neutrality to which neither side paid the smallest attention then or later. That indeed was the most impossible of all conceivable attitudes. It assumed to the state all the independent right of action that secession itself implied, without asserting a claim to the right of secession. It proclaimed Kentucky to be so far out of the Union as to demand respect for its neutrality and so far in the Union as to exercise its full voice in Congress. It warned the armies of both sides to avoid trespass upon Kentucky's territory, a warning which, if Kentucky had undertaken to enforce, it would have involved that state in immediate war with both the combatants at one and the same time. The thing was ridiculous from the beginning, absurd in conception and a ludicrous failure in execution. There was later a pretense of secession by a so-called convention in that state, but it was not taken seriously on either side, and in the end the state furnished volunteers to both the contending armies in substantially equal numbers.

Tennessee did much the same thing but in a different fashion. That state's adoption of an ordinance of secession was quite regular in form. It had all the validity that the like ordinance adopted by any other state had or could have. But it did not and could not command the obedience of Tennessee's people in anything like the degree in which secession ordinances in other states had commanded the obedience of the people of those states. The advocates of secession had secured a majority vote in Tennessee, but it was not a very pronounced majority. Still more important, the division of sentiment there was mainly geographical. In the mountainous eastern part of the state and in the adjacent mountains of North Carolina where slavery scarcely at all existed and where little mountain farms and hunters' log cabins stood in the place of plantations and stately mansions, the sentiment was overwhelmingly in favor of the Union. This was perhaps scarcely more largely due to a feeling of loyalty to the Union, though that was strong, than to a still more active sentiment of hostility and antagonism to the wealth and social pretensions of the cotton and tobacco planters whose more fruitful fields lay farther to the west.

The often illiterate but shrewdly intelligent mountaineers, to whom education had offered few and very meager advantages and with whom fortune had dealt rather harshly, were very naturally jealous of their better educated, better fed, and altogether more prosperous neighbors. It is hard for the man who trudges afoot or rides astride an underfed mule for which his forage supply is scant, to entertain kindly feelings toward the man who goes about in his carriage drawn by sleek and negro-groomed horses. It is not easy for the man who houses his family in a mud-daubed log hut and feeds his half-clad wife and children upon corn pone and an often uncertain ration of bacon or salt pork, to avoid sentiments of discontent when he realizes how much easier and more luxurious is the lot of those who "wear purple and fine linen and fare sumptuously every day."

So, in the mountain regions of Tennessee, among the stalwart six-footers who were inured to hardship, and who knew all there was to know about using a rifle with effect, there was a very general impulse to join the Union armies and fight against the slave-holding class, whom they regarded as hereditary enemies.

In the region a little farther west this class antagonism was intensified by a closer contact and one often more exasperating. Between these two classes there was instinctive and implacable war already; and when the time came for the poorer Tennesseans to choose on which side they would fight, they very generally elected to fight against and not for an institution which they believed to be the source and origin and ultimate cause of that social inferiority which so galled and irritated and angered them.

Let us not misunderstand. These people had no theories on the subject of slavery. The few of them who could in any wise come into the ownership of a negro held to that property possession as resolutely as they would have held to the ownership of a mule or an ox. They were not troubled by any scruples of conscience concerning the ownership of human beings or beset in their minds by any abstractions as to human rights. They no more regarded the negro as the equal of the white man than did their plantation owning neighbors. A negro was in their eyes a "nigger," to be worked to his utmost capacity and mercilessly lashed when guilty of any insolence. They were even less ready than their wealthier neighbors to tolerate any assumption of equality on the part of a negro. They were quicker even than the planters to see and resent such assumptions because their own social status as the superiors of black men was less marked and less secure than that of the planters. A very small concession on that point would have obliterated the only social distinction that these poor cabin dwellers enjoyed.[3]

[3] The author had occasion closely to note a like attitude of mind on the part of the cabin dwellers of the Virginia mountains, with whom he was brought into close and constant contact during the war. No rich planter in all the land could have been more insistent than they were upon the social distinction between a white man and a negro or readier than they to resent negro assumption.

But these mountain dwellers--these children of poverty and hardship--saw no reason why they should fight for a system which they resented with every impulse of their minds; a system which somehow--they could not reason out how--created the disparity of fortune and social status and personal comfort which existed between themselves and their plantation-owning neighbors.

In Missouri the situation was different. There too the population was divided in sentiment but not upon strictly geographical lines, in any pronounced way at least. In Missouri more than anywhere else, the war took on the character of a true civil war. There was a pretense of secession there also, but it represented only a part of the population and amounted only to a declaration in favor of the South by what may or may not have been a majority of the people. It led instantly to war, but it did not distinctly place Missouri either in the list of seceding states or in that of states that adhered to the Union.

Thus the issue was made up. Eleven states, namely, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee and Florida, had formally seceded. Kentucky had absurdly and futilely declared an impossible neutrality, Missouri had entered upon a program of civil war within her own borders. Maryland adhered to the Union but sent the flower of her young manhood into the rival camps with an almost equal hand. Delaware, though nominally a slave state, was so situated as to be out of the reckoning of secession. The rest of the states adhered to the Union and were prepared to support its cause with unnumbered men and unstinted means.

It is true nevertheless that in most of the Northern States there was a strongly hostile and pro-Southern sentiment that must be reckoned with, and in New York and some other states the reckoning was a difficult one, but in no state did that sentiment at any time during the war so far secure control of affairs as to produce disastrous results to the Federal arms or cause.

Yet how dangerously and threateningly strong that sentiment was, is easily illustrated by statistics. In the presidential election of November, 1864, after the war had been in active and very bloody progress for more than three years and a half, and after the power of the Confederates to resist had been enormously reduced by battle, by blockade and by the wearing lapse of time, there was a comparatively narrow majority of votes cast in the Northern States in behalf of the Union cause.

McClellan was the Democratic candidate for president. He was running upon a platform the dominant note of which was a declaration that the war for the restoration of the Union had proved itself a failure and should be brought to an end. This could mean only that the United States Government should recognize the Confederate Government as a separate, independent and equal power, and make peace with it on such terms as could be secured. There is no other construction possible that would be accepted anywhere outside the pages of _Alice in Wonderland_. It was a distinct and definite proposal that the United States Government should give up all its contentions, withdraw its armies from the South, raise its blockade, admit that its efforts had failed, recognize the independent sovereignty of the Confederate States, and make the best peace it could with that Republic as a conquering power. Yet so strong was the anti-war sentiment at the North that, with only the people of the Northern States voting, the Democratic candidate received no less than 1,808,795 votes against 2,216,067 for his adversary. In other words the proposal to abandon the struggle, recognize Confederate independence and acknowledge the United States beaten after three and a half years of strenuous, costly and very bloody war, was defeated by only 407,349 votes in the Northern States, in a total vote in those states of no less than 4,024,865.

This is a fact of the utmost historical significance which may perhaps be better appreciated if put in another form. This was an election in which only the Northern States participated. The Union cause was supported by all of Mr. Lincoln's personal popularity; by all the influence of an administration in possession and with the whole patronage of the Government at its disposal; by all the sentiment of the army and the fathers and brothers of the men in the army; by every influence in short--personal, political and patriotic--that could be brought to bear. Yet the declaration that the war for the Union was a failure and the proposal to abandon all that had been fought for, was defeated by a majority of scarcely more than ten per cent. of the total vote cast in the states that remained professedly loyal to the Union cause.

The interpretation of this fact is unescapable. It means that from beginning to end of the war the Federal Government had not one but two enemies to fight--the Confederacy with its splendidly robust and enterprising armies, in the front, and the hostility of very nearly one-half the population of the Northern States as an enemy in the rear.

In estimating the comparative resources and the relative opportunities of the contending forces it is only fair that the student of history should reckon this as some offset to the fact that the North enlisted 2,700,000 soldiers against the South's 600,000; that it had a navy with which to shut the South off from the outer world while itself drawing freely upon every land for supplies and men and money; and that its resources in the matters of food, machinery, arms, equipments, medicines and all sanitary supplies and equipments were immeasurably superior to those of the South. How far the one fact really offsets the other is a matter of which each reader must judge for himself. But it is a fact worthy of observation that if the Southern States had been permitted to participate in that election of 1864 there would have been a stupendously overwhelming majority of the people in behalf of the proposition that the war had been a failure and in favor of the proposal to end it by the recognition of Confederate independence. Of course the Confederates, in the attitude they had deliberately chosen to assume, were in no remotest way entitled to cast their votes in that election--nor did they think of claiming that privilege--but the arithmetical calculation serves to show how easily the conservatives of the two sections might have controlled the situation and saved the country from a devastating war had they resolutely acted together at the beginning against the intemperate radicals on both sides, the self-regardful politicians and the seekers after shoulder straps and gold-laced uniforms. It serves also to show something of the difficulties with which those were beset who had charge of the Union cause.

These things are perhaps tedious to the reader. But their just consideration is absolutely necessary to any really impartial inquiry into the history of the war, such as this work is intended to be.