CHAPTER XXIII

WHY THEY FOUGHT

Now, when the issue was about to be joined, let it be noted that Secession based itself, in profession and in reality, wholly on the question of slavery. There lay the grievance, and for that alone a remedy was to be had even at the price of sundering the Union. Later, when actual war broke out, other considerations than slavery came into play. To unite and animate the South came the doctrine of State rights, the sympathy of neighborhood, and the primal human impulse of self-defense. But the critical movement, the action which first sundered the Union and so led to war,—was inspired wholly and solely by the defense and maintenance of slavery. The proposition is almost too plain for argument. But it receives illustration from the great debate in the Georgia Legislature, when Toombs advocated Secession and Stephens opposed it. Toombs, evidently unwilling to rest the case wholly on slavery, alleged three other grievances at the hands of the North—the fishery bounties, the navigation laws, and the protective tariff. Stephens easily brushed aside the bounties and navigation laws as bygone or unimportant. As to the tariff, he showed that the last tariff law, enacted in 1857, was supported by every Massachusetts member of Congress and every Georgia member, including Toombs himself. What further he said belongs to a later chapter. But he was unquestionably right, and all rational history confirms it, that the one force impelling the South to Secession was the imperilled interest of slavery.

But the resistance which Secession encountered from the North was from the outset other and wider than hostility to slavery. Anti-slavery feeling was indeed strong in the Northern heart; the restriction of slavery was the supreme principle of the Republican party; the resentment that the national bond should be menaced in the interest of slavery gave force to the opposition which Secession instantly aroused. But, on the one hand, the extreme opponents of slavery, Garrison and his followers, were now, as they had always been, willing and more than willing that the South should go off and take slavery with it. And on the other hand, the anti-secessionists of the nation included a multitude, North and South, who were either friendly to slavery or indifferent to it. Even of the Republican party the mass were more concerned for the rights of the white man than of the black man. They were impatient of the dominance of the government by the South, and meant to unseat the Southern oligarchy from the place of power at Washington.

They intended that the territories should be kept for the free immigrant, who should not be degraded by slaves at work in the next field. Only a minority of the party,—though a minority likely in the long run to lead it—looked with hope and purpose to ultimate emancipation. And when the question of Secession was at issue by the people's votes and voice, and had not yet come to the clash of arms, the rights and interests of the slave fell into the background. The supreme question of the time was felt to be the unity or the division of the nation.

The Secessionists' plea was in two clauses; that their States were aggrieved by Northern action, and that they had a legal right to leave the Union without let or hindrance. A double answer met them, from their fellow-Southerners that it was impolitic to secede, and from the North that secession was illegal, unpermissible, and to be resisted at all costs.

The Secessionists were fluent in argument that the framers of the Constitution intended only a partnership of States, dissoluble by any at will. However difficult to prove that the original builders purposed only such a temporary edifice, there was at least ground for maintaining that they gave no authority for coercing a State into obedience or submission, and indeed rejected a proposal to give such authority. If there were no legal or rightful authority to keep a State in the Union by force, then for all practical purposes its right to go out of the Union was established. But against that right, as ever contemplated by the fathers, or allowable under the Constitution, there was strong contention on legal and historic grounds.

But deeper than all forensic or academic controversy was the substantial and tremendous fact, that the American people had grown into a nation, organic and vital. That unity was felt in millions of breasts, cherished by countless firesides, recognized among the peoples of the earth.

There had developed that mysterious and mighty sentiment, the love of country. It rested in part on the recognition of material benefits. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Lakes to the Gulf, the tides of commerce flowed free, unvexed by a single custom-house. The Mississippi with its traffic united the Northern prairies and the Louisiana delta like a great artery. Safety to person and property under the laws, protection by an authority strong enough to curb riot or faction at home, and with a shielding arm that reached wherever an American traveler might wander,—these benefits rooted patriotism deep in the soil of homely usefulness. And the tree branched and blossomed in the upper air of generous feeling. Man's sympathy expands in widening spheres, and his being enlarges as he comes into vital union, first with wife and children, then successively with neighborhood, community, country, and at last with humanity. The Russian peasant, in his ignorance and poverty, or facing the foe in war, is sublimated by his devotion to the White Czar and Holy Russia. Still more inspiring and profound is the patriotism of a citizen whose nation is founded on equal brotherhood. Deeper than analysis can probe is this passion of patriotism. Gladstone characterized it well, when, writing in August, 1861, he recognized among the motives sustaining the Union cause, "last and best of all, the strong instinct of national life, and the abhorrence of Nature itself toward all severance of an organized body."

This sentiment, though strained and weakened in the South, was still powerful even in that section. This was especially true of the border States, where slavery was of less account than in the Gulf and Cotton States. The spirit of Clay was still strong in Kentucky, and was represented by the venerable John J. Crittenden in the Senate. Of a like temper was John Bell of Tennessee, Presidential candidate of the Union and Constitutional party in 1860. From the same State Andrew Johnson, in the Senate, stood for the sturdy and fierce Unionism of the white laboring class. Virginia was strongly bound to the Union by her great historical traditions. North Carolina, Missouri, and Arkansas were, until the war broke out, attached to the Union rather than the Southern cause. It was in the belt of States from South Carolina to Texas, in which the planter class was altogether dominant, that the interest of slavery, and the pride of class and of State, had gradually loosened the bonds of affection and allegiance to the national idea. Calhoun himself had been an ardent lover of the Union. The clash between the national and sectional interests had been to him a tragedy. Nullification was his device for perpetuating the Union while allowing its members relief from possible oppression,—but nullification had failed, in fact as in logic.

Now the Secessionists went further than Calhoun had ever found occasion to go. They proposed to break up the nation, at first by the withdrawal of their separate States, to be followed by the organization of a Southern Confederacy. Their grievance was the restriction of their industrial system, and its threatened destruction, and the failure of the Union to serve its proper ends of justice and fraternity. But they wholly disclaimed any revolutionary action. They maintained that the withdrawal of their States was an exercise of their strictly legal and constitutional right. This is the plea which is insistently and strenuously urged by their defenders. Their foremost actors in the drama, Davis and Stephens, became at a later day its historians, not so much to record its events, as to plead with elaboration and reiteration that Secession was a constitutional right. But all their fine-spun reasoning ran dead against a force which it could no more overcome than King Canute's words could halt the tide,—the fact of American unity, as realized in the hearts of the American people.

The mass of men live not by logic, but by primal instincts and passions. Where one man could explain why the nation was an indestructible organism rather than a partnership dissoluble at will, a thousand men could and would fight to prevent the nation from being dissolved. But here and there on this planet is a man who must think things through to the end, and have a solid reason for what he does. Such a man was Abraham Lincoln. He never could rest contented till he had worked the problem out clearly in his own head, and then had stated the answer in words that the common man could understand. Such an answer to the whole Secessionist argument, quite apart from the slavery question, he gave in one brief paragraph of his inaugural. "There is no alternative for continuing the government but acquiescence on the one side or the other. If the minority in such a case will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which in turn will ruin and divide them; for a minority of their own will secede from them, whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such a minority. For instance, why not any portion of a new Confederacy, a year or so hence, arbitrarily secede again, precisely as portions of the present Union now claim to secede from it? All who cherish disunion sentiments are now being educated to the exact temper of doing this. Is there such perfect identity of interests among the States to compose a new Union as to produce harmony only, and prevent renewed Secession? Plainly, the central idea of Secession is the essence of anarchy." That was the key-word of the situation, in the court of reason and conscience,—"the central idea of Secession is the essence of anarchy."

The system which the Secessionists proposed to break up had a part of its highest value in that very division of authority between State and nation which gave them their pretext for a separation. The Federal plan was the special contribution of America to the evolution of popular self-government. Until that step had been taken, not only did the practical difficulties of democracy increase enormously with the increase of area and population, but a vast centralized democracy was liable to be itself an oppressive despotism, as France has learned at bitter cost. The Federal plan, like most other great advances, came not as the conception of an ingenious brain, but from the growth of social facts. The thirteen colonies started and grew as individual offshoots from Great Britain. Under a common impulse they broke loose from the mother-country; then, by a common necessity, they bound themselves together in a governmental Union, each member retaining jurisdiction in such affairs as were its special concern. The resulting Federal Union was a combination of strength and freedom such as the world had never seen. With this for its organic form, with its spiritual lineage drawn from the Puritan, the Quaker and the Cavalier, with Anglo-Saxon stock for its core, yet with open doors and assimilating power for all races, and with a continent for its field of expansion,—the American people became the leader and the hope of humanity. This was the nation which the Secessionists proposed to rend asunder.

All government implies a principle of authority, and requires the occasional sacrifice of the individual's pleasure. The national bond has one strand in mutual good-will, but another strand is personal sacrifice, and another is stern command. The Union required some sacrifices, not only of material price,—as when a man pays just taxes, or acquiesces in a fiscal system which he considers unjust,—but sacrifices sometimes even of moral sentiment. Lincoln, explaining his position in 1855 to his old friend Speed, of Kentucky, repelled the suggestion that he had no personal interest in slavery. He says that whenever he crosses the border he sees manacled slaves or some similar sight which is a torment to him. "You ought to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings in order to maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and the Union."

That acquiescence,—a costly sacrifice to the higher good; and the typical attitude of the Republicans and the moderate anti-slavery men,—seemed to Garrison and Phillips and their school a sinful compliance with evil. The extreme Abolitionists, as much as the extremists of the South, were opposed to the Union. They had no comprehension of the interests and principles involved in the preservation of the national life. One of the pleasant traits told of Garrison's private life is this: He was fond of music, especially religious music, but had little cultivation in that direction; and he would sit at the piano and pick out the air of the good old hymn-tunes with one hand, not knowing how to play the bass which makes a harmony. That was typical of his mental attitude,—he knew and loved the melody of freedom, but the harmony blended of freedom and national unity he did not comprehend.

The Southern disunionists finally carried their section, but the Abolition disunionists never made the slightest approach to converting the North. It was not merely that many at the North were indifferent to slavery, while to the whole community its interest was remote compared to what it was to the South. There was another reason for the failure of the Northern disunionists. Among the class to whom the appeal for freedom came closest home, the idealists, the men of moral conviction and enthusiasm, were many to whose ideality and enthusiasm American unity also spoke with powerful voice. Patriotism was more to them than a material interest, more than an enlarged and glowing sentiment of neighborhood and kinship,—it was devotion to moral interests of which the national organism was the symbol and the agent. They saw, as Webster saw, that "America is inseparably connected, fast bound up, in future and by fate, with these great interests,"—of free representative government, entire religious liberty, improved systems of national intercourse, the spirit of free inquiry, and the general diffusion of knowledge. They looked still higher than this,—they saw that America rightly tended toward universal personal liberty, and full opportunity and encouragement to man as man, of whatever race or class. That was what America stood for to those moral enthusiasts whose sanity matched their ardor. They saw that this ideal was still in the future, and that progress might be slow and difficult, but they were pledged in their souls to pursue it. And, with that purpose at heart, they were ready to maintain the national unity at whatever cost.

This was the composite and mighty force against which the Secessionists unwittingly set themselves,—the love of country, strong alike in the common people and the leaders, a love rooted in material interest and flowering in generous sentiment; and beyond that the moral ideals which, born in prophets and men of genius, had permeated the best part of the nation. With this, too, went the preponderance of physical resources which free labor had been steadily winning for the North. Judging even in the interest of slavery, was it not wise to acquiesce in the election, to remain under the safeguards with which the Constitution surrounded slavery in the States, to have patience, and to make the best terms possible with the forces of nature and society? So urged the wisest counselors, like Stephens of Georgia. But men rarely act on a deliberate and rational calculation of their interests. They are swayed by impulse and passion, and especially by the temper and habit which have become a second nature. The leaders in Secession acted in a spirit generated by the very nature of slavery, and fostered by their long defense of slavery. That genesis of the movement is all the more impressive when we recognize the high personal character of its leaders, and acquit them of conscious motives of personal ambition. Slavery was their undoing. The habit of absolute control over slaves bred the habit of mastery whenever it could be successfully asserted. There grew up a caste, its members equal and cordial among themselves, but self-assertive and haughty to all besides. They brooked no opposition at home, and resented all criticism abroad. They misread history and present facts, misconceived their place in the order of things, and set themselves against both the finest and the strongest forces of the time. When the political party which had been their most effective tool became difficult to handle, they broke it in two. When they could no longer rule the nation, they set out to sunder it.

Thus, after forty-five years, we try to trace the springs of action,—action which at the time moved swiftly, in cloud and storm and seeming chaos. We have endeavored to see a little of how the men of the North and of the South thought and felt. Now let us see what they did.



CHAPTER XXIV

ON NIAGARA'S BRINK—AND OVER

The election of Lincoln in November, 1860, found South Carolina expectant and ready for action. The Legislature was in session, and immediately ordered an election to be held December 6 for a convention to meet December 17, and pass on the question of Secession. The action of the convention was in no doubt.

Governor Pettus of Mississippi summoned a group of leading men to consider the question of immediate Secession. In the conclave the principal opponent of instant action was Jefferson Davis. His grounds were prudential; he knew that the arsenals, foundries, and military supplies were chiefly at the North; he foresaw a long and bloody war; he advised that further efforts be made at compromise, or at least that united action of the South be insured. This counsel prevailed, and the convention was deferred until mid-January.

In the Georgia Legislature it was proposed that the question of Secession be at once submitted to a popular vote. Toombs and Stephens threw each his whole weight respectively for and against Secession. Stephens has preserved his own speech in full. He emphasized the gravity of the South's grievances, and the need of redress from the North if the Union was to permanently endure. But he denied that the danger was so pressing as to justify immediate Secession. He pointed out that Lincoln would be confronted by a hostile majority in the Senate, the House and the Supreme Court, and could not even appoint his Cabinet officers except with the approval of a Senate in which his opponents outnumbered his friends. He urged that it was wise to wait for some overt aggression on the President's part before seceding. He dwelt on the immense advantages the Union had brought to all sections. He showed (as in our last chapter) that Toombs could allege no injuries except such as affected slavery. Georgia's wealth had doubled between 1850 and 1860. "I look upon this country," he said, "with our institutions, as the Eden of the world, the paradise of the universe. It may be that out of it we may become greater and more prosperous, but I am candid and sincere in telling you that I fear if we yield to passion, and without sufficient cause shall take that step, that instead of becoming greater or more peaceful, prosperous and happy,—instead of becoming gods we will become demons, and at no distant day commence cutting one another's throats."

Stephen's counsel was that the State should hold a convention, that with the other Southern States it should draw up a formal bill of complaint as to the personal liberty laws and the like, and if the North then refused redress, secede. But whatever the State should do, he would accept its decision, since the only alternative was civil war within the State. He succeeded in having the convention deferred till January, and the other Gulf States took similar action, while Virginia called a convention for February 13.

With the tide of secession rising swiftly in the South, and surprise, consternation, and perplexity at the North, Congress met in early December. President Buchanan, in his message, following the advice of his attorney-general, Jeremiah S. Black of Pennsylvania,—both of them honest and patriotic men, but legalists rather than statesmen—argued that Secession was wholly against the Constitution, but its forcible repression was equally against the Constitution. Thus encouraged, the Southern leaders confronted the Republicans in Congress,—how far would they recede, how much would they yield, to avert Secession? Naturally, the Republicans were not willing to undo the victory they had just won, or to concede the very principle for which they had fought. But in both Houses large committees were appointed and the whole situation was earnestly discussed. On all sides violence was deprecated; there was general dread of disruption of the Union, general doubt of the feasibility of maintaining it by force, and the wide wish and effort to find some practicable compromise.

But there was no hesitation on South Carolina's part. Her convention passed, December 20, an Ordinance of Secession; a clear and impressive statement of her complaints and the remedy she adopts. The Federal compact has been broken; the personal liberty laws violate the Constitution; the Northern people have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have elected a man who has declared that "this government cannot permanently endure half slave and half free"; they are about to exclude Southern institutions from the territories, and to make the Supreme Court sectional. "All hope of redress is rendered vain by the fact that public opinion at the North has invested a great political error with the sanction of a more erroneous religious belief." So, from a partnership of which the letter has been broken and the spirit destroyed, South Carolina withdraws.

The State was, at least on the surface, almost unanimous,—in Charleston only the venerable James L. Petigru ventured to call himself a Unionist,—and was in high heart and hope for its new venture. But, facing the palmetto flags so gayly unfurled to the breeze, still floated the Stars and Stripes over a little garrison in Fort Moultrie, commanded by Major Anderson. His supplies were low; should aid be sent him? No, said Buchanan timidly; and thereat Cass withdrew indignantly from the Cabinet, to be replaced as Secretary of State by Black, while the vigorous Edwin M. Stanton took Black's former place; and Buchanan's courage rose a little. At the request of the South Carolina authorities, Floyd, the Secretary of War, had ordered Anderson to act strictly on the defensive. Finding himself at the mercy of his opponents on the mainland, he quietly withdrew his handful of men, on the night of December 26, to Fort Sumter, whose position on an island gave comparative security. The South Carolinians instantly occupied Fort Moultrie and Castle Pinckney, and took possession of the custom-house and post-office. They cried out against Anderson's maneuver as a breach of good faith, and Secretary Floyd resigned, in sympathy with the Carolinians. The President, heartened by his new counselors, dispatched the steamer Star of the West with supplies for Anderson, but she was fired on by the South Carolinians and turned back, January 9. Resenting the President's act, Thompson of Mississippi and Thomas of Maryland left his cabinet. The President brought in General Dix of New York; Joseph Holt, now Secretary of War, was a Southern loyalist, and in its last months Buchanan's Cabinet was thoroughly Unionist. But in him there was no leadership.

Leadership was not wanting to the Secessionists. A movement like theirs, once begun and in a congenial atmosphere, advances like a glacier by its own weight, but with the pace not of the glacier but of the torrent. In the country at large and at Washington there was confusion of counsels. There was manifest disposition among the Republicans to go a long way in conciliation. Of forcible resistance to Secession there was but little talk. But that the Republicans should disown and reverse the entire principles on which their party was founded was out of the question. On the night of January 5 there met in a room at the Capitol the Senators from Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. They agreed on a common program, and telegraphed to their homes that Secession was advisable at the January conventions and that a common convention was to be held at Montgomery, Ala., in mid-February, for the organization of the Southern Confederacy. Meantime, all United States officials were to resign, and the Federal forts, arsenals and custom-houses were to be seized.

A last formal presentation of the Southern ultimatum was made by Toombs in the Senate. It was the familiar demand—slavery in the territories; slavery under Federal protection everywhere except in the free States; fugitives to be returned; offenders against State laws to be surrendered to justice in those States; inter-State invasion and insurrection to be prohibited and punished by Congress. No partial concessions would answer: this, or nothing! "Nothing be it then!" was the answer of the Republicans: and Toombs, Davis, and their associates bade a stern and sad farewell to their fellow-congressmen and went home to organize the Confederacy. Congress took up fresh plans for reconciliation and reunion.

Mississippi, through its convention, seceded January 9, 1861. Florida followed, January 10, and Alabama, January 11. Then, in the great "keystone State" of Georgia, came deliberation and momentous debate. Against immediate Secession, the policy of patience, of conference with the other Southern States including the new "independent republics," and a united remonstrance to the North, of which the rejection would justify Secession,—this policy was embodied in a resolution presented by Herschel V. Johnson and supported by all the eloquence and persuasiveness of Stephens. Against him was the strong personal influence of Howell Cobb, and the argument—which Stephens says was decisive,—"we can make better terms out of the Union than in it." The test vote was 164 to 133 for immediate Secession. On the motion of Stephens the action was made unanimous. This accession of Georgia marked the triumph of the Secessionists' cause; and most fitly, in a speech on the evening of the same day, Stephens declared the fundamental idea of that cause. Jefferson, he said, and the leading statesmen of his day, "believed slavery wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically ... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the storm came and the wind blew. Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the white race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."

The Louisiana convention voted to secede January 26, and Texas February 1. The seven seceded States sent delegates to a convention which met at Montgomery, February 4. They quickly organized the Confederate States of America, with a Constitution closely resembling that of the United States. One article forbade the foreign slave trade, except that with "the United States of America," which was left subject to Congress. Davis was elected President, by general agreement. He was clearly marked for the place by ability, by civil and military experience, by unblemished character, and by his record as a firm but not extreme champion of the Secessionist cause. He disclaimed any desire for the office, preferring the position which Mississippi had given him as commander of her forces, but when the summons came to him at his plantation home he promptly accepted. Stephens was chosen Vice-President, in spite of his late and half-hearted adherence, to conciliate Georgia and the old Whigs. In the Cabinet the leading figures were Toombs of Georgia and Benjamin of Louisiana.

With this purposeful, swift, and effective action, Secession seemed to have reached its limit. The other Southern States held back. Among the plain folk, not over-heated about politics, there was wide disinclination to any such extreme measure as disunion. It was well represented by Robert E. Lee, in whom the best blood and worthiest tradition of Virginia found fit exemplar. He wrote to his son, January 23: "Secession is nothing but revolution. The framers of our Constitution never expended so much labor, wisdom and forbearance, in its formation, and surrounded it with so many guards and securities, if it was intended to be broken by every member of the Confederacy at will."

North Carolina voted against a convention by 1,000 majority. Tennessee voted against it by 92,000 to 25,000. Arkansas postponed action till August. Missouri held a convention which voted not to secede. In Maryland the governor would not convene the Legislature, and an irregular convention took no decisive action. Delaware did nothing. Virginia held a convention, which was not ready for Secession, but remained in session watching the course of events. The Kentucky Legislature refused to call a convention, but pledged assistance to the South in case of invasion.

This last declaration illustrated the second line of defense, behind the Secessionist advance. The sentiment was general throughout the South, even among Unionists, that there must be no armed repression of Secession. It rested partly on the theory of State Sovereignty, and partly on the sympathy of neighborhood and of common institutions. Even at the North there was wide disinclination to the use of force against the Secessionists. The venerable General Scott, chief of the Federal Army, gave it as his personal opinion that the wise course was to say, "Wayward sisters, depart in peace." The New York Tribune, foremost of Republican newspapers, declared: "If the cotton States wish to withdraw from the Union, they should be allowed to do so." "Any attempt to compel them to remain by force would be contrary to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and to the fundamental ideas upon which human liberty is based." And again: "We hope never to live in a Republic whereof one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets." Such expressions were not uncommon among Republicans, and very frequent among Democrats. Garrison and Phillips were loud in welcoming a separation. But there were leaders like Wade of Ohio and Chandler of Michigan, whose temper was very different, and ominous that the West would never consent to a disruption of the nation.

The governor of Virginia invited all the States to send delegates to a Peace congress to find means to save the Union. Almost all sent delegates, and the congress held long sessions, while the Senate and House were essaying the same task. Little result came in either body, because neither party would accept the other's concessions. The favorite measure was that known as the Crittendon compromise, framed by the Kentucky senator, of which the central feature was the extension of the old Missouri compromise line of 36 degrees 30 minutes to the Pacific, with express provision that all territory north of this should be free and all south should be slave. To this the Republicans would not consent, but they went far toward it by agreeing to a plan proposed by Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts,—that New Mexico (including all present territory south of 36 degrees 30 minutes except the Indian territory), be admitted as a State with slavery if its people should so vote. They offered also to admit Colorado, Nevada, and Dakota as territories, with no express exclusion of slavery. But neither side would leave to the other the possible future extension to the South—in Mexico and Cuba. Further, the Republicans showed a willingness to amend the Personal Liberty laws, so far as they might be unconstitutional, and to provide for governmental payment for fugitives who were not returned. They expressed entire readiness to unite in a national convention for the revision of the Constitution. And finally there was not only proposed, but actually passed by the Senate and House, by two-thirds majorities, at the very end of the session, a constitutional amendment prohibiting any future amendment that should authorize Congress to interfere with slavery in the States where it existed.

In vain, all,—in vain for the Republicans to hold out the olive branch, to mutilate their own principles, and to bar the door against any ultimate constitutional abolition of slavery. Even the slave States still in the Union were not to be satisfied by all this, and the Confederacy gave it no heed. And now, in the background, was visible a rising force, in which the temper was far other than compromise. The most significant voice came from Massachusetts. After all the old antagonism of Massachusetts and South Carolina,—after the clash of Calhoun and Hayne with Webster, the expulsion of Samuel Hoar, the assault of Brooks on Sumner,—the two commonwealths stood forth, each the leader of its own section. It was a hostility which sprung from no accident, and no remembrance of old feuds, but from the opposition of two types of society, the oligarchic idea most fully developed in South Carolina, the industrial democracy in Massachusetts. The new Governor of the State was John A. Andrew, a man of clear convictions, a great heart, and a magnanimous temper. His New Year's message to the Legislature opened with a businesslike discussion of the State's finances and other materialities. Thence he passed to national affairs; he defended the Personal Liberty law, of which his more conservative predecessor, Governor Banks, had advised the repeal, but which Andrew justified as a legitimate defense against kidnapping; while suggesting that whatever slaves South Carolina had lost from this cause were offset by Massachusetts black seamen enslaved in her ports. Then he took up the matter of disunion. "The question now is, Shall a reactionary spirit, unfriendly to liberty, be permitted to subvert democratic republican government organized under constitutional forms?... The men who own and till the soil, who drive the mills, and hammer out their own iron and leather on their own anvils and lapstones ... are honest, intelligent, patriotic, independent, and brave. They know that simple defeat in an election is no cause for the disruption of a government. They know that those who declare that they will not live peaceably within the Union do not mean to live peaceably out of it. They know that the people of all sections have a right, which they intend to maintain, of free access from the interior to both oceans, and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, and of the free use of all the lakes and rivers and highways of commerce, North, South, East and West. They know that the Union means peace and unfettered commercial intercourse from sea to sea and from shore to shore; that it secures us against the unfriendly presence or possible dictation of any foreign power, and commands respect for our flag and security for our trade. And they do not intend, nor will they ever consent, to be excluded from these rights which they have so long enjoyed, nor to abandon the prospect of the benefits which humanity claims for itself by means of their continued enjoyment in the future. Neither will they consent that the continent shall be overrun by the victims of a remorseless cupidity, and the elements of danger increased by the barbarizing influences which accompany the African slave trade. Inspired by the ideas and emotions which commanded the fraternization of Jackson and Webster on another great occasion of public danger, the people of Massachusetts, confiding in the patriotism of their brethren in other States, accept this issue, and respond in the words of Jackson, 'The Federal Union, it must be preserved.'... We cannot turn aside, and we will not turn back."

The crowded, anxious, hurrying months, brought the 4th of March, and Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as President. His speeches on his way to the capital,—pacific, reassuring, but firm for national unity and liberty,—had in a degree brought him into touch with the mass of the people. But when his gaunt and homely form rose to deliver the inaugural address, it was as a little-known and untried man that he was heard. That speech gave signal that the man for the hour had come. No words could better describe its quality than "sweet reasonableness";—that, and unflinching purpose. He began by earnest reassurances as to the fidelity to the Constitution of himself and the party behind him. He suggested the means and temper by which mutual grievances might be approached. Then in his clear, logical fashion, and in the plain speech of the common man, he showed that the Union is in its nature indissoluble, older than the Constitution, unaffected by any attempted Secession. His own official, inevitable duty is to maintain the Union. But there need be no bloodshed or violence. "The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and collect the duties and imports; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere." If resident citizens will not hold Federal offices, there is to be no intrusion of obnoxious strangers. The mails will be furnished wherever they are wanted. "So far as possible the people everywhere shall have that sense of perfect security which is most favorable to calm thought and reflection." This will be his course unless events shall compel a change. And then follows a most calm, rational, moving plea against sacrificing a great, popular, orderly self-government, to individual caprice or fancied wrongs; a demonstration, irresistible as mathematics, that "the central idea of Secession is anarchy." "Unanimity is impossible, the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left." In the address there is not one word of heat or bitterness; it is all in the spirit of his words spoken in private, "I shall do nothing maliciously,—the interests I deal with are too vast for malicious dealings."

He does not belittle the complaints of the South, but pleads for mutual forbearance. If there are defects in the organic framework of the nation, let them be discussed and amended if necessary in a constitutional convention. No justice can be done to this inaugural in a condensation; it should be studied line by line; it is one of the great classics of American literature and history. Thus he ended: "I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot's grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

Through the weeks that followed, Lincoln was plunged in a sea of perplexities, while the nation seemed weltering in chaos, with nothing clear but the steady purpose of the Confederate leaders to maintain their position and achieve complete independence by the shortest road. Lincoln had formed a Cabinet including some very able and some ordinary men, with one—Seward—of highest promise and at first of most disappointing performance. He regarded himself as the real power in the administration; he underrated alike the gravity of the situation and the President's ability to cope with it; he trusted to conciliation and smooth assurance; and he tried to take the reins of control into his own hands—an attempt which Lincoln quietly foiled. The President and his Cabinet were as yet strangers to each other. In the Senate (the House was not in session), Douglas assailed the President's position, and declared three courses to be open: Constitutional redress of the South's grievances; the acceptance of Secession; or its forcible repression,—the first the best, the last the worst. Three commissioners of the Confederacy were in Washington, refused official recognition, but holding some indirect intercourse with Seward, which they apparently misunderstood and exaggerated. A swarm of office-seekers, like Egyptian locusts, beset the President amid his heavy cares. The border States, trembling in the balance, called for the wisest handling. Heaviest and most pressing was the problem what to do with Fort Sumter. Closely beleaguered, with failing supplies, it must soon fall unless relieved. Almost impossible to relieve or save it, said the army officers; easy to slip in supplies, contradicted the naval officers. Leave Sumter to fall and you dishearten the North, urged Chase and Blair in the Cabinet; answered Seward, Reinforce it, and you provoke instant war.

Lincoln answered the question in his own way. He was true to the principle he had laid down in his inaugural,—to maintain the essential rights of the national government, but with the least possible exercise of force. He would "hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and collect the duties and imports"—that and nothing more. Practically the only "property and places" now left to the government at the South were Forts Sumter and Pickens. To yield them without effort was to renounce the minimum of self-assertion he had reserved to the nation.

As to the means of supply, he had recourse to the best instrument that offered,—a scheme proposed by Captain Fox, an energetic naval officer, who planned a relief expedition of five vessels to be privately dispatched from New York and try to run past the batteries. The expedition was quickly fitted out and sent, in early April. According to promise, in case of any such action, notice was telegraphed to the Governor of South Carolina. He communicated with the Confederate government at Montgomery. That government was bent on maintaining, without further debate, its full sovereignty over the coasts and waters within its jurisdiction. There is no need to impute a deliberate purpose to rouse and unite the South by bloodshed, any more than there is reason to impute to Lincoln a crafty purpose to inveigle the South into striking the first blow. Each acted straight in the line of their open and avowed purpose,—Lincoln, to retain the remaining vestige of national authority at the South; the Confederacy, to make full and prompt assertion of its entire independence.

Orders were telegraphed from Montgomery, and General Beauregard, commanding the Charleston forces, sent to Major Anderson a summons to surrender. It was rejected; and the circle of forts opened fire and Sumter fired back. The roar of those guns flashed by telegraph over the country. In every town and hamlet men watched and waited with a tension which cannot be described. All the accumulated feeling of months and years flashed into a lightning stroke of emotion. All day Friday and Saturday, April 12, 13, men watched the bulletins, and talked in brief phrases, and were conscious of a passion surging through millions of hearts. Saturday evening came the word,—the fort had yielded. After a thirty-four hours' fight, overmatched, the expected relief storm-delayed, his ammunition spent, his works on fire, Anderson had capitulated.

There was a Sunday of intense brooding all over the land. Next morning, April 15, came a proclamation from the President. The laws of the United States, it declared, were opposed and their execution obstructed in seven States, by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings; and the militia of the States, to the number of 75,000 were called to arms for three months to suppress the combinations and cause the laws to be duly executed.

The North rose as one man to the call. Party divisions were forgotten. Douglas went to the President and pledged his support. Regiments from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts hurried to the capital. Every Northern State hastened to fill its assigned quota of militia. No less promptly the South rallied to defend the seceding States from invasion. The Virginia convention voted Secession two days after the President's proclamation, and the people's vote ratified it by six to one. North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas joined the Confederacy. Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, wavered and were distracted, but as State organizations remained in the Union, while their populations divided.

Constitutional logic, argumentation, distinctions between holding the national property and invasion, all vanished in the fierce breath of war. Between union and disunion, argument was exhausted, and the issue was to be tried out by force. In a day a great peaceful people resolved itself into two hostile armies.



CHAPTER XXV

THE CIVIL WAR

At the outbreak of war, what the Northerner saw confronting him was an organized attempt to overthrow the government and break up the nation in the interest of slavery. This as the essential fact took form in the circle of fire let loose on a beleaguered fort, and the Stars and Stripes lowered before an overwhelming force. Close following came the menace against the national capital, for Washington was believed to be in imminent peril. A Massachusetts regiment marching to its relief was assailed by the populace of Baltimore; communication was cut; and the city which was the centre and symbol of the national life seemed stretching her hands in appeal to the country's faithful sons. To the conscience, the heart, the imagination of the North, it was a war of national self-defense,—a holy war.

What the Southerner saw was an attempt to crush by force a legitimate exercise of the right of sovereign States to an independent existence. The typical Southerner, whether he had thought Secession expedient or not, believed that each State was the rightful judge of its own course, that the citizen's first allegiance was due to his State; and that the attempt at coercion was as tyrannical as the refusal by Great Britain of independence to the American colonies. And, apart from all political theories, there instantly loomed on the horizon the armies of the North, bearing down with fire and sword on the people of the Southern States. The instinct of self-defense, and the irresistible sympathy of neighborhood and community, prompted to resistance. Beyond doubt, the typical Southern volunteer could say in all sincerity, as one of them has expressed it: "With me is right, before me is duty, behind me is home."

So natural and profound was the motive on each side, when the war began. Wholly different from the moral responsibility of those who initiated Secession, is the case of those who afterward fought for what to each side was the cause of home and country. But, driven though both parties felt themselves to war, none the less terrible was the war in itself. There are difficulties from which the only escape is through disaster. John Morley writes: "It is one of the commonest of all cheap misjudgments in human affairs, to start by assuming that there is always some good way out of a bad case. Alas for us all, this is not so. Situations arise, alike for individuals, for parties, and for States, from which no good way out exists, but only choice between bad way out and worse." For the American people, in the situation into which by sins of commission and omission they had been brought, the only way out was one of the worst ways that human feet can travel.

It does not belong to this work to give a history of the Civil War. But a truthful history might be written in a very different vein from the accepted and popular narratives. These for the most part describe the conflict in terms resembling partly a game of chess and partly a football match. We read of grand strategic combinations, of masterly plans of attack and admirable counter-strokes of defense. On the battlefield we hear of gallant charges, superb rushes of cavalry, indomitable resistance. Our military historians largely give us the impression of man in battle as in the exercise of his highest powers, and war as something glorious in the experience and heart-thrilling in the contemplation.

But a succinct account of the whole business would be to say that for four years the flower of the country's population were engaged in killing each other. All other industries were overshadowed by the occupation of human slaughter. Shop and farm, church and college, school and home, all were subsidiary to the battlefield.

The battlefield itself is not easily conceived by the civilian, even with the aid of poets and story-tellers from Homer to Kipling. The reader, who has perhaps never seen a shot fired in anger, may have chanced to witness a man struck down in the street by a falling beam or trampled by a runaway horse. Or, as a better illustration, he may remember in his own case some hour of sudden and extreme suffering,—a hand caught by a falling window, a foot drenched by scalding water. Intensify that experience, extend it through days, for the home couch and the nursing of mother or wife put the bare ground and the onrush of hostile men,—and you have the nucleus, the constituent atom, of a battle. Multiply it by hundreds or thousands; give to each sufferer the background of waiting parents, wife, children, at home; give to a part death, swift or agonizing; to another part lifelong infirmity or irritation,—and you begin to get the reality of war.

It was Wellington who said that the worst sight on earth, next to the field of defeat, was the field of victory. It was Lee who wrote from Mexico to his son: "You have no idea what a horrible sight a battle-field is." And he said that the strongest memory left from his first battle was the plaintive tone of a little Mexican girl whom he found leaning over a wounded drummer-boy.

Men not only witness such carnage but inflict it, in the excitement of battle, because animated by feelings of which only a part can rightly be called heroic. Honor indeed is due to the subordination of personal fear to the sense of duty and comradeship,—yes, high honor; and the appeal of the soldier to the imagination, as a type of self-sacrifice and nobility, has its element of truth. But the ordinary courage of the battle-field is largely an excitement half-animal, half-contagious, running often into savagery and insensate fury. In that situation the highest and lowest elements in man come into play. For the most part only the highest is portrayed for us by the historians and romancers,—they keep the wild beast and the devil out of sight. Only in these later days, when mankind begins to scrutinize its boasted glories more closely, do Tolstoi in literature and Verestchagin in art give us glimpses of the grim reality.

An industry which has murder for its main output will have some by-products to match. In the armies of both sides the human stuff was of mixed character and motive. Some enlisted from pure patriotism,—for Union, State, or Confederacy; some from thirst of adventure; others for ambition; others for the bounty or under compulsion of the conscription officer; many from the mere contagious excitement. Army life always brings to many of its participants a great demoralization. Take away the restriction of public opinion in a well-ordered community, take from men the society of good women, and there will be a tendency to barbarism. A civilized army has indeed a code and public opinion of its own, which counts for some sterling qualities, but it is lax and ineffective for much that goes to complete manhood. Just as the war left a host of maimed and crippled, so it left a multitude of moral cripples. At the reunion, around the "camp fire," with the reminiscences of stirring times and the renewal of good comradeship runs a vein of comment which the newspapers do not relate. "What's become of A.?" "Drank himself to death." "And where is X.?" "Never got back the character he lost in New Orleans,—went to the dogs." It is a chronicle not recorded on the monuments, but remembered in many a blighted household. The financial debt the war left behind it was not the heaviest part of the after-cost.

Nor must there be forgotten the temper which war begets, of mutual hate between whole peoples. Forty years later we bring ourselves,—some of us, and in a measure,—to see that our opponents of either side had some justification or some excuse; that they perhaps were honest as we. But little room was there for such mutual forbearance of judgment while the fight was on. For the average man, for most men, to fight means also to hate. While the contest lasted, Northerners habitually spoke of their foes as "the rebels,"—not in contumely, but as matter-of-fact description. They were "rebels" in common speech, and when one warmed a little they were "traitors." Good men said that now for the first time they saw why the imprecatory Psalms were written,—theirs was the only cursing strong enough for the country's enemies. Quite as hearty was the South's detestation of the Yankee invaders and despots,—the fanatics and their hired minions. The Southern feeling took the keener edge, because sharpened by the bitter fact of invasion and the hardships it brought. With them the home suffered, not only as at the North, by the departure of father or son to danger or death; the Southern homes often saw the foes in their midst, and sometimes suffered ravage and spoil. "How can you expect me to be well reconstructed," asked a Virginian after the war, "When I remember the family vaults in which the silver plates were wrenched from the coffins by your soldiers?" When the fighting was over, the life of the reunited nation had to work its way for a generation,—and the end is not yet,—against the hostilities, the rancors, the misunderstandings, generated in those four years of strife.

The reality of war where it fell heaviest,—in the border States, where neighborhoods and families were divided, and both armies marched and fought,—is touched by the graphic pen of a woman, Mrs. Rebecca Harding Davis, who saw and felt a part of it: "The histories which we have of the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute. Even on the border, your farm was a waste, all your horses or cows were seized by one army or the other, or your shop or manufactory was closed, your trade ruined. You had no money; you drank coffee made of roasted parsnips for breakfast, and ate only potatoes for dinner. Your nearest kinsfolk and friends passed you on the street silent and scowling; if you said what you thought you were liable to be dragged to the county jail and left there for months. The subject of the war was never broached in your home where opinions differed; but one morning the boys were missing. No one said a word, but one gray head was bent, and the happy light died out of the old eyes and never came to them again. Below all the squalor and discomfort was the agony of suspense or the certainty of death. But the parsnip coffee and the empty purse certainly did give a sting to the great overwhelming misery, like gnats tormenting a wounded man."

Visiting in war-time the sages of Concord, she saw the difference between war as viewed by visionaries at a distance and the reality: "I remember listening during one long summer morning to Louisa Alcott's father as he chanted paeans to the war, the 'armed angel which was wakening the nation to a lofty life unknown before.' We were in the little parlor of the Wayside, Mr. Hawthorne's house in Concord. Mr. Alcott stood in front of the fire-place, his long gray hair streaming over his collar, his pale eyes turning quickly from one listener to another to hold them quiet, his hands waving to keep time with the orotund sentences which had a stale, familiar ring as if often repeated before. Mr. Emerson stood listening, his head sunk on his breast, with profound submissive attention, but Hawthorne sat astride of a chair, his arms folded on the back, his chin dropped on them, and his laughing, sagacious eyes watching us, full of mockery.

"I had come up from the border where I had seen the actual war; the filthy spewings of it; the political jobbery in Union and Confederate camps; the malignant personal hatreds wearing patriotic masks, and glutted by burning homes and outraged women; the chances in it, well improved on both sides, for brutish men to grow more brutish, and for honorable gentlemen to degenerate into thieves and sots. War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums. This would-be seer who was talking of it, and the real seer who listened, knew no more of war as it was, than I had done in my cherry-tree time, when I dreamed of bannered legions of crusaders debouching in the misty fields."

The youth who reads may ask in wonder, "And was then the war to which we have been used to look back with exultation and pride,—was it but a horror and a crime?" No; it was something other and more than that; it had its aspects of moral grandeur and of gain for humanity; it was a field for noble self-sacrifice, for utmost striving of men and deepest tenderness of women, it had its heroes and martyrs and saints; it was in the large view the tremendous price of national unity and universal freedom. But in the exaltation of these better aspects, we have as a people too much forgotten the other and awful side. That is what we need now to be reminded of. For among our present dangers none is greater than the false glorification of war. Against such glorifications stands Sherman's word, "War is hell." And on that grand tomb with which our greatest city crowns its proudest height is inscribed, as the one word by which Grant forever speaks to his countrymen, "Let us have peace."

The nobler side of the war is told and will be told in many a history and biography, romance and poem. In the broad view, the grandest fact was that a multitude of men and women felt and acted as never before for a cause greater than any personal gain. Under the discipline of sacrifice and suffering, and with the personal horizon widened to take in nations and races, a multitude on the field and at home grew to loftier stature. The hardships and perils which wrecked some strengthened others. The development of energy and resource was beyond measure. The North created armies and navies; it organized a new system of finance; it transformed a peaceful industrial community into an irresistible military force; and all the while it carried on its productive industries with scarcely visible shrinkage; farm and mill, school and college, kept on with their work. The South made itself into a solid army of resistance; cut off from its accustomed sources of supply, it developed for itself all the essentials of material life; it showed an ingenuity and resourcefulness beyond all expectation; and the fidelity of its slaves supplied its armies with food while keeping its homes secure. In peace haunted always by latent dread of insurrection, in war the South found its servants its best friends. So, in both sections, wonders were wrought and deeds never dreamed of were achieved.

In justly viewing the evil and the good of war, we must compare it with other disturbances and catastrophes. The finest traits and highest efficiency of men come out under disasters which yet it must be our habitual effort to avert. It is the ship on the rocks, the theater on fire, that shows the hero. But what should we think of one who ran a ship on shore, or set fire to a theater, in order to call out heroism? Exactly so are we to regard those who glorify war as in itself a fine and admirable thing, a proper school and arena of manhood. The refutation of such talk comes not so well from men of the church or closet as from those who have drunk deepest of war's reality. A man of exuberant vitality, whose personal delight in physical strife colors his statesmanship, and who is exhilarated by the memory of a skirmish or two in Cuba, may talk exultantly of "glory enough to go round," and preach soldiering as a splendid manifestation of the strenuous life. But the grim old warrior whose genius and resolution split the Confederacy like a wedge, General Sherman, in the very midst of his task wrote to a friend: "I confess without shame that I am sick and tired of the war. Its glory is all moonshine. Even success, the most brilliant, is over dead and mangled bodies, the anguish and lamentation of distant families appealing to me for missing sons, husbands, and fathers. It is only those who have not heard a shot, nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded and lacerated (friend or foe), that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation."

One glance we here may give at the traits which against this dark background shone with the light which redeems humanity. The worst scenes of all were not on the battlefield but in the military prisons. At Andersonville, and other points, thousands of Northern prisoners were crowded together, with insufficient supply of unnutritious food, with scanty and foul water; surrounded by harsh guards, quick to shoot if the "dead line" was crossed by a foot; harassed by petty tyranny; starved, homesick, diseased, dying like infected sheep. It is a black, black page,—but let its blackness be mainly charged to war itself, and what war always breeds. In Northern prisons, the rate of mortality was nearly as high as in Southern; the work of hunger in the one was matched by cold in the other. "All things considered," says J. F. Rhodes in his impartial History of the United States, "the statistics show no reason why the North should reproach the South. If we add to one side of the account the refusal to exchange the prisoners"—a refusal based by Grant at one time on the military disadvantage of restoring the Southern prisoners to active service—"and the greater resources, and to the other the distress of the Confederacy; the balance struck will not be far from even." Enough for our present purpose that the Andersonville prison-pen was a hell. Well, after a time the Union armies were recruited by negroes, and the Confederates in resentment refused to consider these when captured as prisoners of war, and would not include them in the exchanges. Thereupon the Federal Government declared that its negro soldiers must receive equal rights with the whites, and until this was conceded there should be no exchange at all. Then some of the Andersonville prisoners drew up a petition, and signed and sent it to Washington, praying the government to hasten their release, and if necessary to hold the question of negro prisoners for negotiation, while pressing forward the liberation of its faithful and suffering white soldiers. But promptly by others in the prison-pen a counter petition was started, signed, and sent on. It ran in substance thus: "We are in evil case, and we earnestly desire that you hasten our deliverance by every means consistent with right and honor. But—honor first! Let the nation's plighted faith to its black soldiers be kept, at whatever cost to us. We ask you to still refuse all exchange of prisoners, until the Osame treatment can be secured for black and white." Was ever a braver deed than that?

One picture more. In a military hospital at Washington, Walt Whitman was engaged as a volunteer nurse. In a letter to a friend, he depicted in a few sentences the tragedy of it all, and yet the triumph of the spirit over the body and over death itself. He wrote of a Northern hospital, but the like might be seen on Southern soil, as to-day among Russians or Japanese,—it is the tragedy and triumph of humanity. "These thousands, and tens and twenties of thousands, of American young men, badly wounded ... operated on, pallid with diarrhoea, languishing, dying with fever, pneumonia, etc., open a new world somehow to me, giving closer insights, ... showing our humanity ... tried by terrible, fearful tests, probed deepest, the living souls, the body's tragedies, bursting the petty bonds of art. To these, what are your dreams and poems, even the oldest and the tearfulest?... For here I see, not at intervals, but quite always, how certain man, our American man,—how he holds himself cool and unquestioned master above all pains and bloody mutilation.... This, then, what frightened us all so long! Why, it is put to flight with ignominy—a mere stuffed scarecrow of the fields. Oh, death, where is thy sting? Oh, grave, where is thy victory?"



CHAPTER XXVI

EMANCIPATION BEGUN

When the war began, the absorbing issue at the North was the maintenance of the Union. The supreme, uniting purpose was the restoration of the national authority. Slavery had fallen into the background. But it soon began to come again to the front. Two tendencies existed at the North; one, to seek the restoration of the old state of things unchanged; the other, to seize the opportunity of war to put an end to slavery.

The pressure of events raised special questions which must be met. As soon as Northern armies were on Southern soil, slaves began to take refuge in the camps, and their masters, loyal in fact or in profession, followed with a demand for their return. Law seemed on the master's side; but the use of the army, engaged in such a war, to send slaves back to bondage, was most repugnant. At first some commanders took one course, some another. General Butler, a volunteer from Massachusetts, hit on a happy solution; he declared that slaves, being available to the enemy for hostile purposes, were like arms, gunpowder, etc., "contraband of war," and could not be reclaimed. The stroke was welcomed with cheers and laughter; and "contraband" became a catchword. Congress, in March, 1862, forbade the army and navy to return fugitives.

General Fremont was in command in Missouri. He was ardent and uncompromising, and in August, 1861, he issued a drastic proclamation, declaring the State under martial law, threatening death to all taken with arms in their hands, and giving freedom to the slaves of all rebels. The President remonstrated by letter against this too heroic surgery, and when Fremont declined to modify his order, used his authority to cancel it. The public reception of the incident marked and heightened the growing division of sentiment; the conservatives and especially the border State men, were alarmed and indignant at Fremont's action, while he became at once a favorite of the strong anti-slavery men.

This divergence among his own supporters added another to the complications which beset Lincoln and taxed him to the utmost. He had extraordinary tact and shrewdness in managing men, and in dealing with tangled situations. He showed this power toward his Cabinet officers, who included the most various material,—Seward, accomplished, resourceful, somewhat superficial, but thoroughly loyal to his chief after he knew him, managing the foreign relations with admirable skill, and somewhat conservative in his views; Chase, very able as a financier and jurist, but intensely ambitious of the Presidency, regarded as a radical as to slavery; Stanton, a great war minister but of harsh and intractable temper. These men and their colleagues Lincoln handled so skilfully as to get the best each had to contribute, and keep them and the political elements they represented in working harmony. No less successfully did he deal with Congress, guiding it to a great extent, but acquiescing in occasional defeats and disappointments so patiently that he disarmed hostility. He kept in closest touch with the common people; he was accessible to every one, listened to each man's grievance, remonstrance, or advice; and acquired an instinctive knowledge of what was in the hearts and minds of the millions.

In his own conduct, his guiding principle was fidelity to his official duty as he read it in the Constitution and the laws. He felt the specific, supreme task laid upon him to be the restoration and maintenance of the Union. And to succeed in that, he knew he must rightly interpret and enforce the general sentiment and desire of the loyal people. If he let them become so divided as to no longer act together, the cause was lost. And to follow any personal opinion or conviction of his own, in disregard of his official duty, or in defiance of the popular will, was to betray his trust.

It was under these conditions that Lincoln dealt with slavery. No man more than he detested the institution, or desired its removal. But he felt that he had no right to touch it, except as empowered by the Constitution and the laws, or as guided by the supreme necessity of saving the nation's life. Beyond that he had no authority. Beyond that, his position toward slavery must be like that of a President toward, for example, a system of religion which he believed to be false and injurious. Be he intensely orthodox, believing infidelity to be the road to hell,—yet he must not as President, put a straw across the path of the free-thinker. Be he as heretical as Thomas Jefferson, he must not as President, any more than did Jefferson, lay a finger on the churches. Just so did Lincoln feel himself restricted as to slavery,—he could not touch it, except as the civil laws brought it within his province, or unless as supreme military commander the laws and necessities of war brought it within his authority.

Congress soon proceeded to discuss questions about slavery. Sumner, the foremost leader of the radicals, proposed resolutions, in February, 1862, declaring that the seceded States had by their acts extinguished their State organizations and relapsed into a territorial condition, subject only to Congress; and that slavery within them, existing only by a local authority now defunct, was thus abolished. Congress would take no such ground as that. But, as within its proper sphere, it abolished slavery in the District of Columbia, in April, 1862, giving compensation to owners at a maximum rate of $300 for each slave. And in the following June, it abolished slavery in all the national territories,—thus giving full force to the cardinal doctrine of the Republican party up to the war. But the war had inevitably brought a more radical issue to the front,—the question of slavery in the States.

Under the name of a confiscation act, Congress passed a law, July 17, 1862, which declared freedom to all slaves of convicted rebels; to slaves of rebels escaping within the army lines, or captured, or deserted by their masters; and to all slaves of rebels found in places captured and occupied by the Union army. This came near to making the abolition of slavery follow exactly the progress of the Union arms. But, leaving untouched the slave property of loyalists, it spared the institution as a system.

Lincoln, in many ways a man of the people by his convictions and sympathies, in other aspects towered in solitude. He was almost unique in that he could fight—fight if need were to the death,—with no spark of hatred in his heart. In the midst of war he was a devoted peace-lover. To an old friend, though a political opponent, Congressman D. W. Voorhees, of Indiana, who called on him at the White House, he said with a pathetic look of anxious pain: "Voorhees, doesn't it seem strange that I should be here—I, a man who couldn't cut a chicken's head off,—with blood running all around me?" While he was overseeing campaigns, selecting and rejecting generals, learning the business of a commander, keeping touch with all the great matters of administration, besieged by office-seekers, importuned by people in all manner of private troubles,—he found intervals in which to devise ways out of the horrid business of war, ways that might lead both to peace and freedom.

The key of the situation he thought lay largely with the border States,—Maryland, Missouri and Kentucky,—all of them formally in the Union, but their population divided, sending recruits to both armies, and with hopes in the Confederacy that they might be entirely won over. If they could be bound faster to the Union, if at the same time they could be helped to make themselves free States,—then might the Union cause be mightily helped, and at the same time the work of emancipation be begun. Aiming at this result, Lincoln sent a message to Congress, March 6, 1862, proposing this resolution: "That the United States ought to co-operate with any State which may adopt gradual abolishment of slavery, giving to such State pecuniary aid, to be used by such State, in its discretion, to compensate for the inconveniences, public and private, produced by such change of system." He urged this with special reference to its application in the border States; and, inviting the Congressional members of these States in a body to the White House, he pleaded with them earnestly to support the resolution, and apply the plan. They listened, but were non-committal. Congress received the plan coolly. The Radicals were little in the humor of compensating slaveholders, and the Conservatives apprehended a progressive attack on slavery. But the President's influence triumphed; the resolution passed in mid-April; and the nation pledged itself to assist compensated emancipation in any State that would adopt it.

Nothing came of it. The border States did not move. Three months later, July 12, their delegations were again invited to the White House. The situation was at the gravest; McClellan's army had been baffled in the desperate seven-days' fight; factions at the North were growing hot. Lincoln pleaded reasonably, movingly, that they would bring decisive help to the national cause, by committing their States to emancipation, with help from the nation, gradually if they pleased, with colonization if they desired—peace, union, freedom, all lay that way! Two days they took to make answer, and then of the twenty-nine members only nine were favorable; the rest with one accord began to make excuse,—and that hope failed.

Events were forcing on the question of slavery. In the previous May, General David Hunter, in South Carolina, finding himself with 10,000 fugitives in his camps, whom the laws forbade him to return to their masters and did not permit him to hold as slaves, met the difficulty by a proclamation, declaring that the martial law of the United States was incompatible with slavery, and the slaves in his military district—South Carolina, Georgia and Florida,—were set free. Again the President overruled his subordinate, but in the proclamation he distinctly said that the question of emancipation as a military necessity belonged to himself as commander-in-chief. It was a note of warning. Twenty years before, John Quincy Adams had written,—and the words came from a conservative statesman of the highest standing: "I say that the military authority takes for the time the place of all municipal institutions, and slavery among the rest"; and had elaborated and reiterated the doctrine that in case of war slavery might be abolished by the commander. These statements had lately been recalled; the action of Fremont and Hunter had given life to the idea; and Lincoln now intimated that he might yet assume this authority.

Party divisions had soon reappeared at the North. The Democrats were not harmonious; a part called themselves "War Democrats," and a part were ready to let the South go, or went as near that as they prudently could; now one and now the other faction controlled the party according to time and locality. The Republicans were more united, yet among them was a cleavage between conservatives and radicals; the one taking for their watchword, "the Constitution as it is and the Union as it was"; the other eager to see the war turned against slavery; and both claiming the President, and jealously watching any leaning on his part toward their rivals.

There was developing at the North a profound sentiment for attacking slavery. The war was protracted beyond all early expectation; it was costly, bitter, woeful. What was to be at last the recompense for all this blood and tears? Was there, if victory came at last, to be with it no advance, nothing but the old Union, half slave and half free? For nothing better than this were sons, fathers, brothers, husbands to be sacrificed? Was the nation crossing a Red Sea of anguish only to emerge into the old bondage? Rather, let us fight at once for union and for liberty!

Those who voiced this cry could not always see the difficulties that beset the President. Many of them failed to realize that at heart he was as true to freedom as they. Even Lowell, in the later Biglow Papers, which pleaded with deeper pathos and power than before for freedom—even he could write of "hoisting your captain's heart up with a derrick." Wendell Phillips on one occasion, impatient of Lincoln's attitude toward the fugitive slave law, called him "the slave-hound from Illinois." Beecher,—who did great service, especially by his speeches in England,—wrote in the Independent a series of articles, to spur the President to more pronounced action. Some one gave the articles to Lincoln; he sat down and read them all, then rose to his feet exclaiming, "Am I a dog?"

All this time the conservatives were no less urgent that the President must make no move against slavery. Among their spokesmen was General McClellan. On him rested the chief hope of the North for military success during the year following the disaster of Bull Run. He was an admirable organizer and a good theoretical strategist; his care for his men won their affection; and sometimes in the field he struck heavy and effective blows. But he was always prone to overrate the enemy's resources and underrate his own; he was slow to follow up a success; and he lacked the bulldog grip by which Grant won. Right on the heels of his failure in the seven-days' fight in the Peninsula, he wrote a letter to the President, from Harrison's Landing, July 7, 1862, lecturing him severely as to the errors he must avoid. Nothing must be done or said looking to confiscation, forcible abolition, or territorial organization of the States. "Until the principles governing the future conduct of our struggle shall be made known and approved, the effort to obtain requisite forces will be almost hopeless. A declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our armies." This letter was given to the public, and on this platform McClellan began to loom up as an opposition candidate for the Presidency.

So Lincoln was buffeted on the right hand and on the left. In this summer of 1862, Greeley wrote in the Tribune, August 20, an open letter to the President, upbraiding him for his slackness against slavery. Lincoln replied, August 22, in a letter which startled many of his friends, and to this day bewilders those who do not understand the man himself or the position in which he stood. He wrote: "I would save the Union, I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution.... My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that." In fact, the last was the course which he eventually took.

This letter stated with full sincerity Lincoln's basal principle. It was not necessary to add that the purpose was growing within him to save the Union by freeing the slaves in the seceded States. The very growth of that purpose made it necessary for him to freshly bind to himself the conservatives whose only care was for the Union and not for emancipation. Nothing could serve this purpose better than the declaration in this letter to Greeley. In Lincoln, sincerity and shrewdness were thoroughly blended.

At a later day he told the artist Frank Carpenter, when he was to paint "The Signing of the Emancipation Proclamation": "It had got to be mid-summer, 1862. Things had gone on from bad to worse, until I felt that we had reached the end of our rope on the plan we had been pursuing; that we had about played our last card, and must change our tactics or lose the game. I now determined upon the adoption of the emancipation policy; and without consultation with, or the knowledge of, the Cabinet, I prepared the original draft of the proclamation, and after much anxious thought, called a Cabinet meeting upon the subject.... I said to the Cabinet that I had resolved upon this step, and had not called them together to ask their advice, but to lay the subject-matter of a proclamation before them, suggestions as to which would be in order after they had heard it read." This proclamation—the first sketch—set forth that at the next meeting of Congress, four months later, the President designs to again recommend a practical measure for tendering pecuniary aid to any State then recognizing the authority of the United States, which should have adopted, or should thereafter adopt, gradual abolishment of slavery; that the object of this is to promote the restoration of constitutional relations between the general government and all the States; and finally, as commander-in-chief, the President declares that from the first of January next all slaves in States still rejecting the national authority shall then and forever be free.

The Cabinet were amazed—and divided. Only Stanton and Bates were for immediate promulgation. Chase thought it would be better to leave the matter to district commanders, but would support the proclamation as better than inaction. Blair opposed it as likely to be unpopular and lose the Fall election. All this Lincoln had weighed beforehand. But now came a suggestion from Seward, that the immediate time was inopportune, because just after military reverses (McClellan's Peninsula defeat) it would seem like a desperate cry for help,—"our last shriek on the retreat," as Lincoln phrased it. His judgment welcomed this as a wise suggestion, and he put the draft of the proclamation aside and waited for victory. Among the elements which entered into his decisions was a subtle instinct as to when and how far he could command the support of the various elements on whom success depended. His rare capacity as a listener, and his keen sagacity, enabled him to divine that the hour was at hand when a decisive move against slavery would attract more support than it would repel. Seward's suggestion gave the final shape to his purpose.

This happened July 22, 1862; and when the President made his calm reply to Greeley's onslaught a month later, the unsigned proclamation lay in his desk, and he was still waiting for a victory before he issued it.



CHAPTER XXVII

EMANCIPATION ACHIEVED

Instead of victory came defeat. Pope, taking the command after McClellan's failure, was beaten and driven back in the second battle of Bull Run, and matters were at the worst. McClellan was recalled; his genius for organization rehabilitated the demoralized army; the soldiers' confidence in their old chief gave them new courage. When Lee, after a year on the defensive, took the offensive and entered Maryland, he was beaten and turned back at Antietam.

Then Lincoln summoned his cabinet again, September 22, 1862. Before he spoke the momentous word, he freshened himself in his own way,—he said that Artemus Ward had sent him his book, and he would read them a chapter which he thought very funny; and read it he did, with great enjoyment; the secretaries also laughing as in duty bound—all except Stanton! Then the President became grave enough—he told them that he had been thinking a great deal about the proclamation he had read them two months before; that victory seemed to have brought a favorable occasion; that when the rebel army was at Fredericksburg he determined as soon as it was driven out of Maryland to proclaim emancipation. He went on: "I said nothing to any one, but I made the promise to myself, and,"—hesitating a little—"to my Maker." So now, he tells them, he fulfills that promise. One last word,—some other might do better than he; he would surrender his place to a better man if he saw the way; he believes that he has not so much of the confidence of the people as he once had, but on the whole he does not know that any one has more, and at any rate there is no way for him to give place to any other. "I am here; I must do the best I can, and bear the responsibility of taking the course which I feel I ought to take." It is the counterpart of Luther's "Here stand I; I cannot do otherwise; God help me!"