CHAPTER XI

THE SECTIONAL DIVISION

Once more it becomes necessary to recognize the division of our country into sections, as in the days before the Revolution welded it into one nation. The time was fast coming when there should be division in good earnest, when there should be even overt separation; and to understand the effects and tendencies of this time among the women of America it is needful that we take into fuller consideration than we have yet done the differences of custom and thought that existed between the women of the South and the women of the North. For though these met upon common ground and blended in a society which saw but little variation in the types presented to it, there had been constantly growing, since the time of the first amalgamation of the colonies into one nation, differences between the Northern and the Southern cultures that were little less than radical in their ultimate nature and expressions.

The distinctiveness of type had come about gradually; but it had always existed as a possibility, even in the youngest days of the republic. The conditions of civilization North and South were in themselves divergent, and they were sure to produce an ever-increasing effect. The North was the land of affairs; the South was the home of luxury. The North worked for itself and won its sustenance by the labor of its own hands or brain; the South watched its wealth accumulate by the toil of its slaves, and thus had time and to spare for the cultivation of the graces which come of leisure. Up to the inception of the Civil War it cannot be denied that the South was preeminently the fountain of American society. Even as Virginia was the Mother of Presidents, so was the whole South the parent of the most charming, the most refined, the most cultured of the dames and damsels who held society aloft upon their lovely shoulders. The superiority was not of kind, for in this the North steadily held its own, as was but natural; it was of numbers. For every recognized ornament to society sent by the North to grace the circles of Washington, the South sent two.

When the century passed its meridian and turned to the descending road there had come about a practical division of the country into two sections once more. Not only in feeling,--which, however, was subdued and hardly expressed save by the more bitter partisans, at least among the women,--but in nature. While the higher ideals of the woman of the North and her of the South were the same, they differed in nearly everything that made for progress toward the goal they sought. The tendency toward aristocratic ideas had taken unwonted shape toward the end of the first half of the nineteenth century. According to the false ideal which had come to take the place of the higher one of earlier days, the Southern woman was par _excellence_ the aristocrat of America. She was lapped in luxury; she was surrounded by every refinement; she was waited upon by hosts of servants; she was the representative in many ways of the feudal chatelaine of olden times in England, with added refinements of culture and luxury. But all this was bought, though she did not then see the truth, at a terrible price. The Southern conditions, brought about by the institution of slavery, bore most heavily in effect upon the men of that section; but the women also were in danger of forgetting the strength of their womanhood in the idleness of untroubled days and in the lack of power that results from the transfer of all burdens to the shoulders of others.

The life of the typical Virginia lady of those luxurious days was an unending round of social pleasures, and this life in its turn was typical of that of the Southern woman of refinement in all sections, though presenting that life in its most enlarged and broadened aspects. She had her responsibilities, and she recognized them; she was the queen of a vast estate, on which many souls looked to her for comfort and help, and, as a rule, she responded to their call with all alacrity. To her slaves, at least as far as the house servants were concerned, she was friend rather than mistress, acknowledging them as part of her family and caring for them almost as for her own children. But the trouble was that she generally did these things vicariously; she delegated her powers, seeing to it, indeed, that they were administered as she would have them, but herself doing little. She was given over, for her own part, to the demands of society and to the requirements of hospitality; and Southern hospitality is proverbial, and the courtly welcome and gracious attentions of the hostess of the plantation mansion in the ante-bellum days were among the most agreeable and vivid impressions of her guests. Nor with all the social distinction of the southern household was there a sacrifice of a single charm of home life. Every important domestic event was attended with becoming ceremony. The arrival of the newborn, the home gatherings of later years, and the wedding,--these were occasions to be celebrated by all; occasions when the tenderest family sentiment was manifested. At such times, it may be remarked, the system of domestic slavery appealed rather as a virtue than as a stain, for the household slaves were interested sharers in the joys of the family. In this connection, one is reminded of the Georgia negress who, on being asked if she were the slave of a certain person, replied: "Yes, I belong to them, and they belong to me."

In her home the typical Virginia lady did little with her own hands; she directed, but she would have thought it shame to labor even in such a cause. Her hands were too delicate to work, her feet too dainty to press the ground; she never walked where she could ride, and carriages were always at her command. Her winters, if she lived on her plantation, were passed in a round of pleasures, of balls and minor social functions; her summers she spent at the famous "Springs," whither she drove in her cumbrous but comfortable carriage,--in which way, indeed, some of the more enthusiastic lovers of those "Springs" came even from the southernmost bournes of the land. A friend of the writer, for instance, once told him how she had often travelled in this manner from New Orleans to the Greenbrier White Sulphur Springs in those halcyon days "before the war."

The Northern dame, she of New York or Boston or of those dwelling in the rural districts, knew little of such luxuries as these. Between the Southern lady and the Northern there was one radical point of difference in those days which was more effective to separate their ideas and ideals than might be thought: the former was a dweller in the country, the latter in cities. Type is here spoken of. The typical Southern lady was found on the plantation, the typical Northern lady in the heart of the city. This condition was imposed upon the wealthiest and most cultured of each section by the variant conditions under which they lived; it was in her own home that the Southern woman found the most power for her wealth, in the city that the Northern woman alone found avenues for her money to buy for her the best things of culture, material or mental. And this severance made for certain results. The Southern woman held to isolation of rule as the best that she knew; the Northern woman believed that in segregation and community of interests alone came hope of the best. These theories were unrecognized; but they were inherent and dominant.

Moreover, there still existed in the North, especially in the further removed sections, a strong leaven of the old Puritan spirit; and this could neither understand nor tolerate the spirit of luxury that reigned in the South. Each section misunderstood and unjustly contemned the other. To the Northern woman, she of the South was a pampered aristocrat of the most ignoble kind, caring for nothing but the gratification of her luxurious tastes, battening on the sufferings of a humanity which she bought and sold as cattle, an Augusta in her luxuries and love of self; to the Southern woman, she of the North was cold, hard, uncultured, unrefined, plebeian in tastes and existence, and generally on a lower plane than the daughter of the Cavaliers. The Southern woman despised her sister of the North; the Northern woman hated her sister of the South. Where there was meeting and blending on the contiguous limits of the sections there was more of understanding and therefore of toleration for the points of severance of ideas; but even here there was cause of strife in the heated politics which had for some time been appealing to the passions of our statesmen. With the quick enthusiasm in such matters that is an attribute of their sex and which blinds women even more than men to the calmer suggestions of reason, the women of the country became divided into two bitterly hostile camps because of the matters which their husbands and brothers discussed in the councils of the nation. It is true that in this case the main question at issue had unwonted appeal to the women themselves; for she of the South saw her wealth and luxury threatened by the Abolitionists, while she of the North made herself a part of the cause of ill-treated humanity, as she deemed it. Had the men been able to restrain the passions which at this time stirred them almost to frenzy, the women would not have permitted the glowing embers to become extinguished without being fanned into red flame.

That the women of our country were largely instrumental in bringing about the fratricidal strife which shook that country to its centre cannot be denied. Even such firebrands as Phillips and Garrison did not incite so bitter a spirit as did the many women who espoused their cause. It was a time of fanaticism in the North and fury in the South; and both these feelings reached their culmination in the women of the sections. One of the most powerful influences for the making of discord was from the hand of a woman, when Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ and thereby led much of the thought and prejudices of both sections into utterly false channels. The South, and especially its women, saw in the book a vile libel upon its culture, a base slander of its most representative institutions; the North, especially its women, accepted the book as literal fact and looked upon their brothers and sisters of the South as slave-drivers and cruel task-mistresses, building the structure of their wealth and luxury upon the crushed bodies of their weaker and more degraded fellows and careless of the bitter moans of the oppressed. The acceptance by the North of the book as fact embittered the South, conscious of the injustice of the thing, to the last degree, while the North upon that utterly inadequate authority reviled the South for the imaginary crimes which were rife in its midst.

The question of the limitation of slavery had been long before the country and had produced much bitterness of feeling on both sides; but the idea of the sudden abolishment of the institution, "peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must," was of new growth in the decade preceding the war, at least in any coherent and prominent form. In the South were many women as well as men who, while they accepted and tried to make the best of the institution which had been handed down to them by their ancestors, were at heart as eager Abolitionists as any of the North; but they knew that such a radical change must be brought about by gradual steps or it would open the way to yet greater evils, of which the sudden impoverishment of the section was not the greatest. In the North were men and women who held themselves aloof from the rabid fanaticism of their day, and while they heartily desired the eradication of the taint of slavery from the country which boasted of its freedom, yet were willing to trust to time and the growth of principle for the result which they desired. But on both sides these conservatives were unfortunately in the minority and their influence was of no avail; on both sides they were looked upon as traitors to the cause which they loved best and most wisely of all.

There might have been hope of compromise; the fanatics were still in the minority among the men who governed the destinies of the nation, and while there was bitterness and even hatred rife among these men, there was yet stronger dread of open separation, so that there might have been reached some conclusion which would have been productive of results satisfactory in the main to both sides, though not in full measure; but the women would not have it so. They flung themselves into politics with a fervor that was fatal to all the interests of peace; for those of the North could not understand any toleration of "the accursed thing," while they of the South demanded that their husbands and lovers should resent the insult which had been imposed upon Southern womanhood in the vile slanders which were freely circulated in Abolitionist circles. That these slanders were the voice of fanaticism and not of mere hatred was not understood; that they were reprobated by the better elements of the North was not believed.

In both sections an appeal to arms was talked of if secession were adopted and resisted. At first this was but idle menace; but it gradually grew to the proportions of stern determination at least in one of the sections, and by none was it so eagerly welcomed and fanned as by the women. "The peace of them that make peace" was not for the American woman of that time; all the natural militancy of the feminine nature was aroused to its highest pitch, and it was more at the instigation of hatred than as an appeal to justice that the thought of war was dear to the women of our riven country. Riven it was already in spirit, though not as yet in fact; the shadow of coming strife lay heavy on the land long before it took substance. There were still those, chiefly among the men, who believed that from all this lurid smoke there would result nothing worse than smouldering embers, which would eventually perish unharmful; that thus it could not be was owing in greatest part to the influence of those who in the bitter days to come were to bear the brunt of the suffering and agony of war, the women of America.

It is grateful to turn for a moment to look upon the last days of Washington society under the old regime. Buchanan was the last of the old-time presidents, and under his administration Washington society went its normal way of gaiety, though disturbed in its enjoyment by the thickening cloud that hung over the land and gathered most darkly at the capital. President Buchanan was a bachelor; but his mansion did not lack female rule, for his niece, Harriet Lane, took upon herself the onerous duties of mistress of the White House, and never were they more gracefully fulfilled. Young as she was, she had few rivals and no superiors in knowledge of the requirements of her position and ability to meet those requirements; never was the White House ruled in more dignified and gracious manner than by this young woman. She had had excellent training for her dignities; when her uncle, in 1852, was sent as Minister to the Court of Saint James, she accompanied him thither, and her beauty and accomplishments won instantaneous recognition and admiration from the most prejudiced of English critics in these matters. Her character was as admirable and admired as was her beauty, and she was in all ways fitted to grace a court, hether that court were royal or republican.

During the four years of her uncle's stormy administration she ruled the social world of Washington as of right and title, and her rule was on all sides acknowledged to be worthy of allegiance. It was the last day of old-time American society, and it died in splendor. No more courteous and cultured gentleman than James Buchanan ever occupied the White House as its master, even though as a statesman he was sadly lacking in the qualities which were demanded by the circumstances of his times; no more gracious lady than Harriet Lane ever presided over the social destinies of the presidential mansion, and with her there is no need of limiting statement in modification of the praise bestowed.

When the time came for Buchanan to surrender into the hands of a stronger man the reins of government, Miss Lane retired with him to Wheatland, his country seat, where the pair spent together the stormy years of the Civil War. In 1866, Miss Lane married Henry Elliott Johnston, of Baltimore, who died in 1884, his two sons, all that were born of the marriage, having preceded him to the grave. Thus Mrs. Johnston was left alone; and thus she still lives on, the sole remaining link between the White House of the days before the Civil War and the present time. She alone, of all who ruled as social queen of the country in the time when this meant far more than now, is left to us; and she lives in the same quiet dignity with which she once placed the stamp of her individuality upon the social functions of the presidential mansion and made them truly noteworthy. Upon the accession of Edward VII. of England, that king, who had been elaborately entertained by Miss Lane and her uncle at the White House during his visit to this country in 1860, sent to Mrs. Johnston a personal invitation to be present at his approaching coronation; and his cordial letter showed in what high esteem he held the gracious lady whose kindness to him in his youth had dwelt so long in his memory. It was a deserved recognition of the charm that had made notable the last lady ruler of the White House in its days of social eminence, and the act was as graceful as deserved.

So, in Harriet Lane Johnston, we find the last surviving memory of the court society of the elder days of our country. With her exit from the White House went also the traditions of the social past, and with her exit from life will go also the last of a line of acknowledged rulers, little less than regal in their dignities, of the social world of America.

It is now necessary to turn again to the subject of the war between the sections. Darker and darker grew the threatening cloud, until it was rent by a bolt which fell with fatal effect and set the whole land in a blaze. This was the famous insurrection of John Brown, which knew its inception and inglorious end at Harper's Ferry. It is not easy for us at this time to appreciate the aspects of "John Brown's raid," as it presented itself to the North and the South, and the aspect which it especially bore to the women of the latter section has never been given its full importance at the hands of chroniclers. Brown's acknowledged and boasted purpose to set free the slaves and arm them against their masters in insurrection was looked upon by every Southern woman as a direct threat--of which the carrying out was averted only by the hand of an over-ruling Providence--against that which her womanhood most prized. She knew what would have been the effect of the loosing upon the community of a horde of semi-savages, mad with the lust of blood and rapine, drunk with the liberty which they would look upon as unbridled license; for such, as she well knew, would the majority of the slaves become under conditions which would appeal to their worst side and would in their novelty lead to all excess. The narrow view which sees in the burning anger of the South toward this attempt only dread of loss of property is utterly false; it was the personal aspect of the matter which appealed to every Southern woman, and, because of this, to every Southern man. Even the partial success of such an attempt would have meant ruined and dishonored homes throughout the Southern land; the honor of its women, that most precious of all possessions, was in peril in such enterprise, and it was the threat against this that set the Southland aflame with rage against the would-be perpetrators of such an atrocity. It was not the menace to property or even to life; it was

"the unutterable shame That turns the coward's heart to steel, the sluggard's blood to flame."

For the South knew the negro, his bad qualities as well as his good; and, while the women of the South knew that their elder house-servants would protect them with their lives, if necessary, they also knew that the horde of fieldhands, intoxicated by a liberty whose nature they could not understand, would turn at once to the gratification of the savage nature which slept chained within them and would make of the land an offense to heaven.

This was bad enough; but worse yet, since the attempt had miserably failed, was the fact that the North saw none of these things. It did not, seemingly could not, understand. Where the woman of the South saw in John Brown only the brutal assailer of all that womanhood held most precious, she of the North,--who could she have realized the peril in which her Southern sister stood, would have stirred the North with her cry,--saw in him only the martyr to the cause of freedom, the man who gave his life in the attempt to bring from bondage an oppressed and ill-treated race; and so completely had prejudice and fanaticism clouded the conscience that when Wendell Phillips made of this man a certain blasphemous comparison she was not shocked, but, carried away by her enthusiasm, hailed the words as true and deserved. This does not apply to all the daughters of the North; there were some who saw clearly and were not blinded by the simoom of fanaticism which swept over that section; but there was a minority which dared not lift its voice against the clamor of the masses. The most fatal of all causes of strife had fallen upon the North: it did not understand.

But this in turn the Southern woman could not comprehend. She could not see that the peril to her honor, so plain to her, was beyond the scope of Northern vision. Therefore she in her wrath accused her sisters of the North of carelessness of her honor in their enthusiasm for the cause of a race which would put that honor in peril; she held them indifferent to the preservation of the crown of her womanhood, so that a few blacks might be given a freedom which they would turn to the worst account. She laid it all to sectional hatred, to the cherished anger of the Puritan against the Cavalier; she was intolerant--and who can blame her, seeing as she did?--of the canonization of John Brown, which was chiefly the work of her Northern sisters, to whose enthusiasm that of the men, even of such fanatics as Phillips, was as nothing. So, begun and fostered in mutual misunderstanding, grew the breach between the sections; and of all the hands that digged the grave of Peace, the most eager and rapid were those of the women of our land.

Where shall we place the blame? Each side saw the other in utter distortion, each twisted to its own understanding the acts and utterances of the other, and each was justly incensed according to its own view. In her ignorance of the certain results of the attempt whose failure she deplored, the Northern woman saw in the rejoicing of Southern womanhood over the failure and fate of John Brown only a savage and unwomanly exultation over the martyrdom of one who had sacrificed himself that others might live in freedom, the heritage of every American, and who, in pursuit of his noble ideal, had of necessity attacked the wealth of the South, which wealth was ill-gotten and ill-held. The Southern woman looked upon the attempt to give power over her honor to a lower race, civilized only in certain aspects and with all the worst of barbarism sleeping like a tiger within it, and occasionally displaying itself in aspect of terror, as the expression of the feeling of the North, the ultimate goal of the fanaticism which was rising higher and higher as the Abolitionists grew in power. To both, John Brown represented the dominant spirit of the North; but each translated his aspect in different ways. Each was bitterly unjust; each was utterly in the wrong; and each was convinced with a perfect conviction of the righteousness of her own stand and of her thought of the other. When such position is taken, peace is doomed.

Society was disrupted. It had maintained a certain cohesion where the sections mingled; it had been shaken, but not overthrown. But the hanging of John Brown gave American society, as comprising all parts of the country and devoid of sectional aspects, its death-blow. Another society of like aspects was later to arise, perhaps never again to be overthrown, so that we can again talk of American society in the larger sense; but this which we know is not that which held its chief fortalice in Washington before the capital was yielded to the perils of the centre of strife. The daughters of even such closely contiguous States as Pennsylvania and Virginia could not meet in social function when each believed the other to be the representative of the most evil of civilizations, when every interest which either most cherished was inimical to every interest most dear to the other. Rapidly the representatives of Southern society forsook the capital, going to their own country, where they hoped soon to form another and yet more brilliant circle than that which had given to the centre of our republicanism much of the glitter and all the _prestige_ of a royal court. The result of the presidential campaign would decide the future of the South; but that there would be separation of the sections, for a time or permanently, few doubted. The chief question that remained to be decided was whether the separation would be peaceful or won at the point of the bayonet.

Perhaps, had they foreseen the consequences of their enthusiasm, the women of both sides would have been more moderate in their advocacy of their respective creeds; but women rarely look to the end, and the feminine enthusiasts of those days were no exception to the rule. With all their strength, and whether for good or evil, there is none greater in effect, they urged their husbands and lovers and brothers, the one side to wipe out in blood, if need and opportunity were, the insult to their womanhood; the other to free the oppressed from bondage and from the tyranny shown by Southern women as well as men. The actions and utterances of each were plain to the other; the standpoints which dictated those acts and words were hidden by the dense mist of prejudice. Thus by woman's influence was precipitated the conflict which had already become almost inevitable.