But even if we leave other practical difficulties out of sight, what chance of stability is there for a confederacy whose very foundation is the principle that any member of it may withdraw at the first discontent? If they could contrive to establish a free trade treaty with their chief customer, England, would she consent to gratify Louisiana with an exception in favor of sugar? Some of the leaders of the secession movement have already become aware of this difficulty, and accordingly propose the abolition of all State lines,—the first step toward a military despotism; for, if our present system have one advantage greater than another, it is the neutralization of numberless individual ambitions by adequate opportunities of provincial distinction. Even now the merits of the Napoleonic system are put forward by some of the theorists of Alabama and Mississippi, who doubtless have as good a stomach to be emperors as ever Bottom had to a bottle of hay, when his head was temporarily transformed to the likeness of theirs,—and who, were they subjects of the government that looks so nice across the Atlantic, would, ere this, have been on their way to Cayenne, a spot where such red-peppery temperaments would find themselves at home.

The absurdities with which the telegraphic column of the newspapers has been daily crowded, since the vagaries of South Carolina finally settled down into unmistakable insanity, would give us but a poor opinion of the general intelligence of the country, did we not know that they were due to the necessities of "Our Own Correspondent." At one time, it is Fort Sumter that is to be bombarded with floating batteries mounted on rafts behind a rampart of cotton-bales; at another, it is Mr. Barrett, Mayor of Washington, announcing his intention that the President-elect shall be inaugurated, or Mr. Buchanan declaring that he shall cheerfully assent to it. Indeed! and who gave them any choice in the matter? Yesterday, it was General Scott who would not abandon the flag which he had illustrated with the devotion of a lifetime; to-day, it is General Harney or Commodore Kearney who has concluded to be true to the country whose livery he has worn and whose bread he has eaten for half a century; to-morrow, it will be Ensign Stebbins who has been magnanimous enough not to throw up his commission. What are we to make of the extraordinary confusion of ideas which such things indicate? In what other country would it be considered creditable to an officer that he merely did not turn traitor at the first opportunity? There can be no doubt of the honor both of the army and navy, and of their loyalty to their country. They will do their duty, if we do ours in saving them a country to which they can be loyal.

We have been so long habituated to a kind of local independence in the management of our affairs, and the central government has fortunately had so little occasion for making itself felt at home and in the domestic concerns of the States, that the idea of its relation to us as a power, except for protection from without, has gradually become vague and alien to our ordinary habits of thought. We have so long heard the principle admitted, and seen it acted on with advantage to the general weal, that the people are sovereign in their own affairs, that we must recover our presence of mind before we see the fallacy of the assumption, that the people, or a bare majority of them, in a single State, can exercise their right of sovereignty as against the will of the nation legitimately expressed. When such a contingency arises, it is for a moment difficult to get rid of our habitual associations, and to feel that we are not a mere partnership, dissolvable whether by mutual consent or on the demand of one or more of its members, but a nation, which can never abdicate its right, and can never surrender it while virtue enough is left in the people to make it worth retaining. It would seem to be the will of God that from time to time the manhood of nations, like that of individuals, should be tried by great dangers or by great opportunities. If the manhood be there, it makes the great opportunity out of the great danger; if it be not there, then the great danger out of the great opportunity. The occasion is offered us now of trying whether a conscious nationality and a timely concentration of the popular will for its maintenance be possible in a democracy, or whether it is only despotisms that are capable of the sudden and selfish energy of protecting themselves from destruction.

The Republican party has thus far borne itself with firmness and moderation, and the great body of the Democratic party in the Free States is gradually being forced into an alliance with it. Let us not be misled by any sophisms about conciliation and compromise. Discontented citizens may be conciliated and compromised with, but never open rebels with arms in their hands. If there be any concessions which justice may demand on the one hand and honor make on the other, let us try if we can adjust them with the Border Slave States; but a government has already signed its own death-warrant, when it consents to make terms with law-breakers. First re-establish the supremacy of order, and then it will be time to discuss terms; but do not call it a compromise, when you give up your purse with a pistol at your head. This is no time for sentimentalisms about the empty chair at the national hearth; all the chairs would be empty soon enough, if one of the children is to amuse itself with setting the house on fire, whenever it can find a match. Since the election of Mr. Lincoln, not one of the arguments has lost its force, not a cipher of the statistics has been proved mistaken, on which the judgment of the people was made up. Nobody proposes, or has proposed, to interfere with any existing rights of property; the majority have not assumed to decide upon any question of the righteousness or policy of certain social arrangements existing in any part of the Confederacy; they have not undertaken to constitute themselves the conscience of their neighbors; they have simply endeavored to do their duty to their own posterity, and to protect them from a system which, as ample experience has shown, and that of our present difficulty were enough to show, fosters a sense of irresponsibleness to all obligation in the governing class, and in the governed an ignorance and a prejudice which may be misled at any moment to the peril of the whole country.

But the present question is one altogether transcending all limits of party and all theories of party policy. It is a question of national existence; it is a question whether Americans shall govern America, or whether a disappointed clique shall nullify all government now, and render a stable government difficult hereafter; it is a question, not whether we shall have civil war under certain contingencies, but whether we shall prevent it under any. It is idle, and worse than idle, to talk about Central Republics that can never be formed. We want neither Central Republics nor Northern Republics, but our own Republic and that of our fathers, destined one day to gather the whole continent under a flag that shall be the most august in the world. Having once known what it was to be members of a grand and peaceful constellation, we shall not believe, without further proof, that the laws of our gravitation are to be abolished, and we flung forth into chaos, a hurlyburly of jostling and splintering stars, whenever Robert Toombs or Robert Rhett, or any other Bob of the secession kite, may give a flirt of self-importance. The first and greatest benefit of government is that it keeps the peace, that it insures every man his right, and not only that, but the permanence of it. In order to this, its first requisite is stability; and this once firmly settled, the greater the extent of conterminous territory that can be subjected to one system and one language and inspired by one patriotism, the better. That there should be some diversity of interests is perhaps an advantage, since the necessity of legislating equitably for all gives legislation its needful safeguards of caution and largeness of view. A single empire embracing the whole world, and controlling, without extinguishing, local organizations and nationalities, has been not only the dream of conquerors, but the ideal of speculative philanthropists. Our own dominion is of such extent and power, that it may, so far as this continent is concerned, be looked upon as something like an approach to the realization of such an ideal. But for slavery, it might have succeeded in realizing it; and in spite of slavery, it may. One language, one law, one citizenship over thousands of miles, and a government on the whole so good that we seem to have forgotten what government means,—these are things not to be spoken of with levity, privileges not to be surrendered without a struggle. And yet while Germany and Italy, taught by the bloody and bitter and servile experience of centuries, are striving toward unity as the blessing above all others desirable, we are to allow a Union, that for almost eighty years has been the source and the safeguard of incalculable advantages, to be shattered by the caprice of a rabble that has out-run the intention of its leaders, while we are making up our minds what coercion means! Ask the first constable, and he will tell you that it is the force necessary for executing the laws. To avoid the danger of what men who have seized upon forts, arsenals, and other property of the United States, and continue to hold them by military force, may choose to call civil war, we are allowing a state of things to gather head which will make real civil war the occupation of the whole country for years to come, and establish it as a permanent institution. There is no such antipathy between the North and the South as men ambitious of a consideration in the new republic, which their talents and character have failed to secure them in the old, would fain call into existence by asserting that it exists. The misunderstanding and dislike between them is not so great as they were within living memory between England and Scotland, as they are now between England and Ireland. There is no difference of race, language, or religion. Yet, after a dissatisfaction of near a century and two rebellions, there is no part of the British dominion more loyal than Scotland, no British subjects who would be more loath to part with the substantial advantages of their imperial connection than the Scotch; and even in Ireland, after a longer and more deadly feud, there is no sane man who would consent to see his country irrevocably cut off from power and consideration to obtain an independence which would be nothing but Donnybrook Fair multiplied by every city, town, and village in the island. The same considerations of policy and advantage which render the union of Scotland and Ireland with England a necessity apply with even more force to the several States of our Union. To let one, or two, or half a dozen of them break away in a freak of anger or unjust suspicion, or, still worse, from mistaken notions of sectional advantage, would be to fail in our duty to ourselves and our country, would be a fatal blindness to the lessons which immemorial history has been tracing on the earth's surface, either with the beneficent furrow of the plough, or, when that was unheeded, the fruitless gash of the cannon ball.

When we speak of coercion, we do not mean violence, but only the assertion of constituted and acknowledged authority. Even if seceding States could be conquered back again, they would not be worth the conquest. We ask only for the assertion of a principle which shall give the friends of order in the discontented quarters a hope to rally round, and the assurance of the support they have a right to expect. There is probably a majority, and certainly a powerful minority, in the seceding States, who are loyal to the Union; and these should have that support which the prestige of the General Government can alone give them. It is not to the North nor to the Republican party that the malcontents are called on to submit, but to the laws and to the benign intentions of the Constitution, as they were understood by its framers. What the country wants is a permanent settlement; and it has learned, by repeated trial, that compromise is not a cement, but a wedge. The Government did not hesitate to protect the doubtful right of property of a Virginian in Anthony Burns by the exercise of coercion, and the loyalty of Massachusetts was such that her own militia could be used to enforce an obligation abhorrent, and, as there is reason to believe, made purposely abhorrent, to her dearest convictions and most venerable traditions; and yet the same Government tampers with armed treason, and lets I dare not wait upon I would, when it is a question of protecting the acknowledged property of the Union, and of sustaining, nay, preserving even, a gallant officer whose only fault is that he has been too true to his flag. While we write, the newspapers bring us the correspondence between Mr. Buchanan and the South Carolina "Commissioners;" and surely never did a government stoop so low as ours has done, not only in consenting to receive these ambassadors from Nowhere, but in suggesting that a soldier deserves court-martial who has done all he could to maintain himself in a forlorn hope, with rebellion in his front and treachery in his rear. Our Revolutionary heroes had old-fashioned notions about rebels, suitable to the straightforward times in which they lived,—times when blood was as freely shed to secure our national existence as milk-and-water is now to destroy it. Mr. Buchanan might have profited by the example of men who knew nothing of the modern arts of Constitutional interpretation, but saw clearly the distinction between right and wrong. When a party of the Shays rebels came to the house of General Pomeroy, in Northampton, and asked if he could accommodate them,—the old soldier, seeing the green sprigs in their hats, the badges of their treason, shouted to his son, "Fetch me my hanger, and I'll accommodate the scoundrels!" General Jackson, we suspect, would have accommodated rebel commissioners in the same peremptory style.

While our Government, like Giles in the old rhyme, is wondering whether it is a government or not, emissaries of treason are cunningly working upon the fears and passions of the Border States, whose true interests are infinitely more on the side of the Union than of slavery. They are luring the ambitious with visionary promises of Southern grandeur and prosperity, and deceiving the ignorant into the belief that the principles and practice of the Free States were truly represented by John Brown. All this might have been prevented, had Mr. Buchanan in his Message thought of the interests of his country instead of those of his party. It is not too late to check and neutralize it now. A decisively national and patriotic policy is all that can prevent excited men from involving themselves so deeply that they will find "returning as tedious as go o'er," and be more afraid of cowardice than of consequences.

Slavery is no longer the matter in debate, and we must beware of being led off upon that side-issue. The matter now in hand is the reestablishment of order, the reaffirmation of national unity, and the settling once for all whether there can be such a thing as a government without the right to use its power in self-defence. The Republican party has done all it could lawfully do in limiting slavery once more to the States in which it exists, and in relieving the Free States from forced complicity with an odious system. They can be patient, as Providence is often patient, till natural causes work that conviction which conscience has been unable to effect. They believe that the violent abolition of slavery, which would be sure to follow sooner or later the disruption of our Confederacy, would not compensate for the evil that would be entailed upon both races by the abolition of our nationality and the bloody confusion that would follow it. More than this, they believe that there can be no permanent settlement except in the definite establishment of the principle, that this Government, like all others, rests upon the everlasting foundations of just Authority,—that that authority, once delegated by the people, becomes a common stock of Power to be wielded for the common protection, and from which no minority or majority of partners can withdraw its contribution under any conditions,—that this power is what makes us a nation, and implies a corresponding duty of submission, or, if that be refused, then a necessary right of self-vindication. We are citizens, when we make laws; we become subjects, when we attempt to break them after they are made. Lynch-law maybe better than no law in new and half-organized communities, but we cannot tolerate its application in the affairs of government. The necessity of suppressing rebellion by force may be a terrible one, but its consequences, whatever they may be, do not weigh a feather in comparison with those that would follow from admitting the principle that there is no social compact binding on any body of men too numerous to be arrested by a United States marshal.

As we are writing these sentences, the news comes to us that South Carolina has taken the initiative, and chosen the arbitrament of war. She has done it because her position was desperate, and because she hoped thereby to unite the Cotton States by a complicity in blood, as they are already committed by a unanimity in bravado. Major Anderson deserves more than ever the thanks of his country for his wise forbearance. The foxes in Charleston, who have already lost their tails in the trap of Secession, wished to throw upon him the responsibility of that second blow which begins a quarrel, and the silence of his guns has balked them. Nothing would have pleased them so much as to have one of his thirty-two-pound shot give a taste of real war to the boys who are playing soldier at Morris's Island. But he has shown the discretion of a brave man. South Carolina will soon learn how much she has undervalued the people of the Free States. Because they prefer law to bowie-knives and revolvers, she has too lightly reckoned on their caution and timidity. She will find that, though slow to kindle, they are as slow to yield, and that they are willing to risk their lives for the defence of law, though not for the breach of it. They are beginning to question the value of a peace that is forced on them at the point of the bayonet, and is to be obtained only by an abandonment of rights and duties.

When we speak of the courage and power of the Free States, we do not wish to be understood as descending to the vulgar level of meeting brag with brag. We speak of them only as among the elements to be gravely considered by the fanatics who may render it necessary for those who value the continued existence of this Confederacy as it deserves to be valued to kindle a back-fire, and to use the desperate means which God has put into their hands to be employed in the last extremity of free institutions. And when we use the term coercion, nothing is farther from our thoughts than the carrying of blood and fire among those whom we still consider our brethren of South Carolina. These civilized communities of ours have interests too serious to be risked on a childish wager of courage,—a quality that can always be bought cheaper than day-labor on a railway-embankment. We wish to see the Government strong enough for the maintenance of law, and for the protection, if need be, of the unfortunate Governor Pickens from the anarchy he has allowed himself to be made a tool of by evoking. Let the power of the Union be used for any other purpose than that of shutting and barring the door against the return of misguided men to their allegiance. At the same time we think legitimate and responsible force prudently exerted safer than the submission, without a struggle, to unlawful and irresponsible violence.

Peace is the greatest of blessings, when it is won and kept by manhood and wisdom; but it is a blessing that will not long be the housemate of cowardice. It is God alone who is powerful enough to let His authority slumber; it is only His laws that are strong enough to protect and avenge themselves. Every human government is bound to make its laws so far resemble His that they shall be uniform, certain, and unquestionable in their operation; and this it can do only by a timely show of power, and by an appeal to that authority which is of divine right, inasmuch as its office is to maintain that order which is the single attribute of the Infinite Reason that we can clearly apprehend and of which we have hourly example.



THE PICKENS-AND-STEALIN'S REBELLION

1861

Had any one ventured to prophesy on the Fourth of March that the immediate prospect of Civil War would be hailed by the people of the Free States with a unanimous shout of enthusiasm, he would have been thought a madman. Yet the prophecy would have been verified by what we now see and hear in every city, town, and hamlet from Maine to Kansas. With the advantage of three months' active connivance in the cabinet of Mr. Buchanan, with an empty treasury at Washington, and that reluctance to assume responsibility and to inaugurate a decided policy, the common vice of our politicians, who endeavor to divine and to follow popular sentiment rather than to lead it, it seemed as if Disunion were inevitable, and the only open question were the line of separation. So assured seemed the event that English journalists moralized gravely on the inherent weakness of Democracy. While the leaders of the Southern Rebellion did not dare to expose their treason to the risk of a popular vote in any one of the seceding States, The Saturday Review, one of the ablest of British journals, solemnly warned its countrymen to learn by our example the dangers of an extended suffrage.

Meanwhile, the conduct of the people of the Free States, during all these trying and perilous months, had proved, if it proved anything, the essential conservatism of a population in which every grown man has a direct interest in the stability of the national government. So abstinent are they by habit and principle from any abnormal intervention with the machine of administration, so almost superstitious in adherence to constitutional forms, as to be for a moment staggered by the claim to a right of secession set up by all the Cotton States, admitted by the Border Slave States, which had the effrontery to deliberate between their plain allegiance and their supposed interest, and but feebly denied by the Administration then in power. The usual panacea of palaver was tried; Congress did its best to add to the general confusion of thought; and, as if that were not enough, a Convention of Notables was called simultaneously to thresh the straw of debate anew, and to convince thoughtful persons that men do not grow wiser as they grow older. So in the two Congresses the notables talked,—in the one those who ought to be shelved, in the other those who were shelved already,—while those who were too thoroughly shelved for a seat in either addressed Great Union Meetings at home. Not a man of them but had a compromise in his pocket, adhesive as Spalding's glue, warranted to stick the shattered Confederacy together so firmly that, if it ever broke again, it must be in a new place, which was a great consolation. If these gentlemen gave nothing very valuable to the people of the Free States, they were giving the Secessionists what was of inestimable value to them,—Time. The latter went on seizing forts, navy-yards, and deposits of Federal money, erecting batteries, and raising and arming men at their leisure; above all, they acquired a prestige, and accustomed men's minds to the thought of disunion, not only as possible, but actual. They began to grow insolent, and, while compelling absolute submission to their rebellious usurpation at home, decried any exercise of legitimate authority on the part of the General Government as Coercion,—a new term, by which it was sought to be established as a principle of constitutional law, that it is always the Northern bull that has gored the Southern ox.

During all this time, the Border Slave States, and especially Virginia, were playing a part at once cowardly and selfish. They assumed the right to stand neutral between the government and rebellion, to contract a kind of morganatic marriage with Treason, by which they could enjoy the pleasant sin without the tedious responsibility, and to be traitors in everything but the vulgar contingency of hemp. Doubtless the aim of the political managers in these States was to keep the North amused with schemes of arbitration, reconstruction, and whatever other fine words would serve the purpose of hiding the real issue, till the new government of Secessia should have so far consolidated itself as to be able to demand with some show of reason a recognition from foreign powers, and to render it politic for the United States to consent to peaceable separation. They counted on the self-interest of England and the supineness of the North. As to the former, they were not wholly without justification,—for nearly all the English discussions of the "American Crisis" which we have seen have shown far more of the shop-keeping spirit than of interest in the maintenance of free institutions; but in regard to the latter they made the fatal mistake of believing our Buchanans, Cushings, and Touceys to be representative men. They were not aware how utterly the Democratic party had divorced itself from the moral sense of the Free States, nor had they any conception of the tremendous recoil of which the long-repressed convictions, traditions, and instincts of a people are capable.

Never was a nation so in want of a leader; never was it more plain that, without a head, the people "bluster abroad as beasts," with plenty of the iron of purpose, but purpose without coherence, and with no cunning smith of circumstance to edge it with plan and helve it with direction. What the country was waiting for showed itself in the universal thrill of satisfaction when Major Anderson took the extraordinary responsibility of doing his duty. But such was the general uncertainty, so doubtful seemed the loyalty of the Democratic party as represented by its spokesmen at the North, so irresolute was the tone of many Republican leaders and journals, that a powerful and wealthy community of twenty millions of people gave a sigh of relief when they had been permitted to install the Chief Magistrate of their choice in their own National Capital. Even after the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln, it was confidently announced that Jefferson Davis, the Burr of the Southern conspiracy, would be in Washington before the month was out; and so great was the Northern despondency that the chances of such an event were seriously discussed. While the nation was falling to pieces, there were newspapers and "distinguished statesmen" of the party so lately and so long in power base enough to be willing to make political capital out of the common danger, and to lose their country, if they could only find their profit. There was even one man found in Massachusetts, who, measuring the moral standard of his party by his own, had the unhappy audacity to declare publicly that there were friends enough of the South in his native State to prevent the march of any troops thence to sustain that Constitution to which he had sworn fealty in Heaven knows how many offices, the rewards of almost as many turnings of his political coat. There was one journal in New York which had the insolence to speak of President Davis and Mister Lincoln in the same paragraph. No wonder the "dirt-eaters" of the Carolinas could be taught to despise a race among whom creatures might be found to do that by choice which they themselves were driven to do by misery.

Thus far the Secessionists had the game all their own way, for their dice were loaded with Northern lead. They framed their sham constitution, appointed themselves to their sham offices, issued their sham commissions, endeavored to bribe England with a sham offer of low duties and Virginia with a sham prohibition of the slave-trade, advertised their proposals for a sham loan which was to be taken up under intimidation, and levied real taxes on the people in the name of the people whom they had never allowed to vote directly on their enormous swindle. With money stolen from the Government, they raised troops whom they equipped with stolen arms, and beleaguered national fortresses with cannon stolen from national arsenals. They sent out secret agents to Europe, they had their secret allies in the Free States, their conventions transacted all important business in secret session;—there was but one exception to the shrinking delicacy becoming a maiden government, and that was the openness of the stealing. We had always thought a high sense of personal honor an essential element of chivalry; but among the Romanic races, by which, as the wonderful ethnologist of De Bow's Review tells us, the Southern States where settled, and from which they derive a close entail of chivalric characteristics, to the exclusion of the vulgar Saxons of the North, such is by no means the case. For the first time in history the deliberate treachery of a general is deemed worthy of a civic ovation, and Virginia has the honor of being the first State claiming to be civilized that has decreed the honors of a triumph to a cabinet officer who had contrived to gild a treason that did not endanger his life with a peculation that could not further damage his reputation. Rebellion, even in a bad cause, may have its romantic side; treason, which had not been such but for being on the losing side, may challenge admiration; but nothing can sweeten larceny or disinfect perjury. A rebellion inaugurated with theft, and which has effected its entry into national fortresses, not over broken walls, but by breaches of trust, should take Jonathan Wild for its patron saint, with the run of Mr. Buchanan's cabinet for a choice of sponsors,—godfathers we should not dare to call them.

Mr. Lincoln's Inaugural Speech was of the kind usually called "firm, but conciliatory,"—a policy doubtful in troublous times, since it commonly argues weakness, and more than doubtful in a crisis like ours, since it left the course which the Administration meant to take ambiguous, and, while it weakened the Government by exciting the distrust of all who wished for vigorous measures, really strengthened the enemy by encouraging the conspirators in the Border States. There might be a question as to whether this or that attitude were expedient for the Republican party; there could be none as to the only safe and dignified one for the Government of the Nation. Treason was as much treason in the beginning of March as in the middle of April; and it seems certain now, as it seemed probable to many then, that the country would have sooner rallied to the support of the Government, if the Government had shown an earlier confidence in the loyalty of the people. Though the President talked of "repossessing" the stolen forts, arsenals, and custom-houses, yet close upon this declaration followed the disheartening intelligence that the cabinet were discussing the propriety of evacuating not only Fort Sumter, which was of no strategic importance, but Fort Pickens, which was the key to the Gulf of Mexico, and to abandon which was almost to acknowledge the independence of the Rebel States. Thus far the Free States had waited with commendable patience for some symptom of vitality in the new Administration, something that should distinguish it from the piteous helplessness of its predecessor. But now their pride was too deeply outraged for endurance; indignant remonstrances were heard from all quarters, and the Government seemed for the first time fairly to comprehend that it had twenty millions of freemen at its back, and that forts might be taken and held by honest men as well as by knaves and traitors. The nettle had been stroked long enough; it was time to try a firm grip. Still the Administration seemed inclined to temporize, so thoroughly was it possessed by the notion of conciliating the Border States. In point of fact, the side which those States might take in the struggle between Law and Anarchy was of vastly more import to them than to us. They could bring no considerable reinforcement of money, credit, or arms to the rebels; they could at best but add so many mouths to an army whose commissariat was already dangerously embarrassed. They could not even, except temporarily, keep the war away from the territory of the seceding States, every one of which had a sea-door open to the invasion of an enemy who controlled the entire navy and shipping of the country. The position assumed by Eastern Virginia and Maryland was of consequence only so far as it might facilitate a sudden raid on Washington, and the policy of both these States was to amuse the Government by imaginary negotiations till the plans of the conspirators were ripe. In both States men were actively recruited and enrolled to assist in attacking the capital. With them, as with the more openly rebellious States, the new theory of "Coercion" was ingeniously arranged like a valve, yielding at the slightest impulse to the passage of forces for the subversion of legitimate authority, closing imperviously, so that no drop of power could ooze through in the opposite direction. Lord De Roos, long suspected of cheating at cards, would never have been convicted but for the resolution of an adversary, who, pinning his hand to the table with a fork, said to him blandly, "My Lord, if the ace of spades is not under your Lordship's hand, why, then, I beg your pardon!" It seems to us that a timely treatment of Governor Letcher in the same energetic way would have saved the disasters of Harper's Ferry and Norfolk,—for disasters they were, though six months of temporizing had so lowered the public sense of what was due to the national dignity that people were glad to see the Government active at length, even if only in setting fire to its own house.

We are by no means inclined to criticise the Administration, even if this were the proper time for it; but we cannot help thinking that there was great wisdom in Napoleon's recipe for saving life in dealing with a mob,—"First fire grape-shot into them; after that, over their heads as much as you like." The position of Mr. Lincoln was already embarrassed when he entered upon office, by what we believe to have been a political blunder in the leaders of the Republican party. Instead of keeping closely to the real point, and the only point, at issue, namely, the claim of a minority to a right of rebellion when displeased with the result of an election, the bare question of Secession, pure and simple, they allowed their party to become divided, and to waste themselves in discussing terms of compromise and guaranties of slavery which had nothing to do with the business in hand. Unless they were ready to admit that popular government was at an end, those were matters already settled by the Constitution and the last election. Compromise was out of the question with men who had gone through the motions, at least, of establishing a government and electing an anti-president. The way to insure the loyalty of the Border States, as the event has shown, was to convince them that disloyalty was dangerous. That revolutions never go backward is one of those compact generalizations which the world is so ready to accept because they save the trouble of thinking; but, however it may be with revolutions, it is certain that rebellions most commonly go backward with disastrous rapidity, and it was of the gravest moment, as respected its moral influence, that Secession should not have time allowed it to assume the proportions and the dignity of revolution; in other words, of a rebellion too powerful to be crushed. The secret friends of the secession treason in the Free States have done their best to bewilder the public mind and to give factitious prestige to a conspiracy against free government and civilization by talking about the right of revolution, as if it were some acknowledged principle of the Law of Nations. There is a right and sometimes a duty of rebellion, as there is also a right and sometimes a duty of hanging men for it; but rebellion continues to be rebellion until it has accomplished its object and secured the acknowledgment of it from the other party to the quarrel, and from the world at large. The Republican Party in the November elections had really effected a peaceful revolution, had emancipated the country from the tyranny of an oligarchy which had abused the functions of the Government almost from the time of its establishment, to the advancement of their own selfish aims and interests; and it was this legitimate change of rulers and of national policy by constitutional means which the Secessionists intended to prevent. To put the matter in plain English, they resolved to treat the people of the United States, in the exercise of their undoubted and lawful authority, as rebels, and resorted to their usual policy of intimidation in order to subdue them. Either this magnificent empire should be their plantation, or it should perish. This was the view even of what were called the moderate slaveholders of the Border States; and all the so-called compromises and plans of reconstruction that were thrown into the caldron where the hell-broth of anarchy was brewing had this extent, no more,—What terms of submission would the people make with their natural masters? Whatever other result may have come of the long debates in Congress and elsewhere, they have at least convinced the people of the Free States that there can be no such thing as a moderate slaveholder,—that moderation and slavery can no more coexist than Floyd and honesty, or Anderson and treason.

We believe, then, that conciliation was from the first impossible,—that to attempt it was unwise, because it put the party of law and loyalty in the wrong,—and that, if it was done as a mere matter of policy in order to gain time, it was a still greater mistake, because it was the rebels only who could profit by it in consolidating their organization, while the seeming gain of a few days or weeks was a loss to the Government, whose great advantage was in an administrative system thoroughly established, and, above all, in the vast power of the national idea, a power weakened by every day's delay. This is so true that already men began to talk of the rival governments at Montgomery and Washington, and Canadian journals to recommend a strict neutrality, as if the independence and legitimacy of the mushroom despotism of New Ashantee were an acknowledged fact, and the name of the United States of America had no more authority than that of Jefferson Davis and Company, dealers in all kinds of repudiation and anarchy. For more than a month after the inauguration of President Lincoln there seemed to be a kind of interregnum, during which the confusion of ideas in the Border States as to their rights and duties as members of the "old" Union, as it began to be called, became positively chaotic. Virginia, still professing neutrality, prepared to seize the arsenal at Harper's Ferry and the navy-yard at Norfolk; she would prevent the passage of the United States' forces "with a serried phalanx of her gallant sons," two regiments of whom stood looking on while a file of marines took seven wounded men in an engine-house for them; she would do everything but her duty,—the gallant Ancient Pistol of a commonwealth. She "resumed her sovereignty," whatever that meant; her Convention passed an ordinance of secession, concluded a league offensive and defensive with the rebel Confederacy, appointed Jefferson Davis commander-in-chief of her land-forces and somebody else of the fleet she meant to steal at Norfolk, and then coolly referred the whole matter back to the people to vote three weeks afterwards whether they would secede three weeks before. Wherever the doctrine of Secession has penetrated, it seems to have obliterated every notion of law and precedent.

The country had come to the conclusion that Mr. Lincoln and his cabinet were mainly employed in packing their trunks to leave Washington, when the "venerable Edward Ruffin of Virginia" fired that first gun at Fort Sumter which brought all the Free States to their feet as one man. That shot is destined to be the most memorable one ever fired on this continent since the Concord fowling-pieces said, "That bridge is ours, and we mean to go across it," eighty-seven Aprils ago. As these began a conflict which gave us independence, so that began another which is to give us nationality. It was certainly a great piece of good-luck for the Government that they had a fort which it was so profitable to lose. The people were weary of a masterly inactivity which seemed to consist mainly in submitting to be kicked. We know very well the difficulties that surrounded the new Administration; we appreciate their reluctance to begin a war the responsibility of which was as great as its consequences seemed doubtful; but we cannot understand how it was hoped to evade war, except by concessions vastly more disastrous than war itself. War has no evil comparable in its effect on national character to that of a craven submission to manifest wrong, the postponement of moral to material interests. There is no prosperity so great as courage. We do not believe that any amount of forbearance would have conciliated the South so long as they thought us pusillanimous. The only way to retain the Border States was by showing that we had the will and the power to do without them. The little Bopeep policy of

"Let them alone, and they'll all come home Wagging their tails behind them"

was certainly tried long enough with conspirators who had shown unmistakably that they desired nothing so much as the continuance of peace, especially when it was all on one side, and who would never have given the Government the great advantage of being attacked in Fort Sumter, had they not supposed they were dealing with men who could not be cuffed into resistance. The lesson we have to teach them now is, that we are thoroughly and terribly in earnest. Mr. Stephens's theories are to be put to a speedier and sterner test than he expected, and we are to prove which is stronger,—an oligarchy built on men, or a commonwealth built of them. Our structure is alive in every part with defensive and recuperative energies; woe to theirs, if that vaunted corner-stone which they believe patient and enduring as marble should begin to writhe with intelligent life!

We have no doubt of the issue. We believe that the strongest battalions are always on the side of God. The Southern army will be fighting for Jefferson Davis, or at most for the liberty of self-misgovernment, while we go forth for the defence of principles which alone make government august and civil society possible. It is the very life of the nation that is at stake. There is no question here of dynasties, races, religions, but simply whether we will consent to include in our Bill of Rights—not merely as of equal validity with all other rights, whether natural or acquired, but by its very nature transcending and abrogating them all—the Right of Anarchy. We must convince men that treason against the ballot-box is as dangerous as treason against a throne, and that, if they play so desperate a game, they must stake their lives on the hazard. The one lesson that remained for us to teach the political theorists of the Old World was, that we are as strong to suppress intestine disorder as foreign aggression, and we must teach it decisively and thoroughly. The economy of war is to be tested by the value of the object to be gained by it. A ten years' war would be cheap that gave us a country to be proud of, and a flag that should command the respect of the world because it was the symbol of the enthusiastic unity of a great nation.

The Government, however slow it may have been to accept the war which Mr. Buchanan's supineness left them, is acting now with all energy and determination. What they have a right to claim is the confidence of the people, and that depends in good measure on the discretion of the press. Only let us have no more weakness under the plausible name of Conciliation. We need not discuss the probabilities of an acknowledgment of the Confederated States by England and France; we have only to say, "Acknowledge them at your peril." But there is no chance of the recognition of the Confederacy by any foreign governments, so long as it is without the confidence of the brokers. There is no question on which side the strength lies. The whole tone of the Southern journals, so far as we are able to judge, shows the inherent folly and weakness of the secession movement. Men who feel strong in the justice of their cause, or confident in their powers, do not waste breath in childish boasts of their own superiority and querulous depreciation of their antagonists. They are weak, and they know it. And not only are they weak in comparison with the Free States, but we believe they are without the moral support of whatever deserves the name of public opinion at home. If not, why does their Congress, as they call it, hold council always with closed doors, like a knot of conspirators? The first tap of the Northern drum dispelled many illusions, and we need no better proof of which ship is sinking than that Mr. Caleb Cushing should have made such haste to come over to the old Constitution, with the stars and stripes at her mast-head.

We cannot think that the war we are entering on can end without some radical change in the system of African slavery. Whether it be doomed to a sudden extinction, or to a gradual abolition through economical causes, this war will not leave it where it was before. As a power in the state, its reign is already over. The fiery tongues of the batteries in Charleston harbor accomplished in one day a conversion which the constancy of Garrison and the eloquence of Phillips had failed to bring about in thirty years. And whatever other result this war is destined to produce, it has already won for us a blessing worth everything to us as a nation in emancipating the public opinion of the North.



GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT

1864

We can conceive of no object capable of rousing deeper sympathy than a defeated commander. Though the first movement of popular feeling may be one of wrathful injustice, yet, when the ebb of depression has once fairly run out, and confidence begins to set back, hiding again that muddy bed of human nature which such neap-tides are apt to lay bare, there is a kindly instinct which leads all generous minds to seek every possible ground of extenuation, to look for excuses in misfortune rather than incapacity, and to allow personal gallantry to make up, as far as may be, for want of military genius. There is no other kind of failure which comes so directly home to us, none which appeals to so many of the most deeply rooted sentiments at once. Want of success in any other shape is comparatively a personal misfortune to the man himself who fails; but how many hopes, prides, sacrifices, and heroisms are centred in him who wields the embattled manhood of his country! An army is too multitudinous to call forth that personal enthusiasm which is a necessity of the heart. The imagination needs a single figure which it can invest with all those attributes of admiration that become vague and pointless when divided among a host. Accordingly, we impersonate in the general, not only the army he leads, but whatever qualities we are proud of in the nation itself. He becomes for the moment the ideal of all masculine virtues, and the people are eager to lavish their admiration on him. His position gives him at a bound what other men must spend their lives in winning or vainly striving to win. If he gain a battle, he flatters that pride of prowess which, though it may be a fault of character in the individual man, is the noblest of passions in a people. If he lose one, we are all beaten with him, we all fall down with our Caesar, and the grief glistens in every eye, the shame burns on every cheek. Moralize as we may about the victories of peace and the superiority of the goose-quill over the sword, there is no achievement of human genius on which a country so prides itself as on success in war, no disgrace over which it broods so inconsolably as military disaster.



There is nothing more touching than the sight of a nation in search of its great man, nothing more beautiful than its readiness to accept a hero on trust. Nor is this a feeble sentimentality. It is much rather a noble yearning of what is best in us, for it is only in these splendid figures which now and then sum up all the higher attributes of character that the multitude of men can ever hope to find their blind instinct of excellence realized and satisfied. Not without reason are nations always symbolized as women, for there is something truly feminine in the devotion with which they are willing to give all for and to their ideal man, and the zeal with which they drape some improvised Agamemnon with all the outward shows of royalty from the property-room of imagination. This eagerness of loyalty toward first-rate character is one of the conditions of mastery in every sphere of human activity, for it is the stuff that genius works in. Heroes, to be sure, cannot be made to order, yet with a man of the right fibre, who has the stuff for greatness in him, the popular enthusiasm would go far toward making him in fact what he is in fancy. No commander ever had more of this paid-up capital of fortune, this fame in advance, this success before succeeding, than General McClellan. That dear old domestic bird, the Public, which lays the golden eggs out of which greenbacks are hatched, was sure she had brooded out an eagle-chick at last. How we all waited to see him stoop on the dove-cote of Richmond! Never did nation give such an example of faith and patience as while the Army of the Potomac lay during all those weary months before Washington. Every excuse was invented, every palliation suggested, except the true one, that our chicken was no eagle, after all. He was hardening his seres, he was waiting for his wings to grow, he was whetting his beak; we should see him soar at last and shake the thunder from his wings. But do what we could, hope what we might, it became daily clearer that, whatever other excellent qualities he might have, this of being aquiline was wanting.

Disguise and soften it as we may, the campaign of the Peninsula was a disastrous failure,—a failure months long, like a bad novel in weekly instalments, with "To be continued" grimly ominous at the end of every part. So far was it from ending in the capture of Richmond that nothing but the gallantry of General Pope and his little army hindered the Rebels from taking Washington. And now comes Major-General George B. McClellan, and makes affidavit in one volume[1] octavo that he is a great military genius, after all. It should seem that this genius is of two varieties. The first finds the enemy, and beats him; the second finds him, and succeeds in getting away. General McClellan is now attempting a change of base in the face of public opinion, and is endeavoring to escape the consequences of having escaped from the Peninsula. For a year his reputation flared upward like a rocket, culminated, burst, and now, after as long an interval, the burnt-out case comes down to us in this Report.

[1] Letter of the Secretary of War, transmitting Report on the Organization of the Army of the Potomac, and of the Campaigns in Virginia and Maryland under the Command of Major-General George B. McClellan, from July 26, 1861, to November 7, 1862. Washington: Government Printing-Office. 1864. 8vo, pp. 242.

There is something ludicrously tragic, as our politics are managed, in seeing an Administration compelled to print a campaign document (for such is General McClellan's Report in a double sense) directed against itself. Yet in the present case, had it been possible to escape the penance, it had been unwise, for we think that no unprejudiced person can read the volume without a melancholy feeling that General McClellan has foiled himself even more completely than the Rebels were able to do. He should have been more careful of his communications, for a line two hundred and forty-two pages long is likely to have its weak points. The volume before us is rather the plea of an advocate retained to defend the General's professional character and expound his political opinions than the curt, colorless, unimpassioned statement of facts which is usually so refreshing in the official papers of military men, and has much more the air of being addressed to a jury than to the War Department at Washington. It is, in short, a letter to the people of the United States, under cover to the Secretary of War. General McClellan puts himself upon the country, and, after taking as much time to make up his mind as when he wearied and imperilled the nation in his camp on the Potomac, endeavors to win back from public opinion the victory which nothing but his own over-caution enabled the Rebels to snatch from him before Richmond. He cannot give us back our lost time or our squandered legions; but how nice it would be if we would give him back his reputation, which has never been of any great use to us, and yet would be so convenient for him! It was made for him, and accordingly fits him better than it would any one else. But it is altogether too late. There is no argument for the soldier but success, no wisdom for the man but to acknowledge defeat and be silent under it. The Great Captain on his sofa at Longwood may demonstrate how the Russian expedition might, could, would, and should have ended otherwise; but meanwhile its results are not to be reasoned with,—the Bourbons are at the Tuileries, and he at St. Helena. There is hardly anything that may not be made out of history by a skilful manipulator. Characters may be white-washed, bigotry made over into zeal, timidity into prudence, want of conviction into toleration, obstinacy into firmness; but the one thing that cannot be theorized out of existence, or made to look like anything else, is a lost campaign.

We have had other unsuccessful generals, but not one of them has ever been tempted into the indecorum of endeavoring to turn a defeat in the field to political advantage. Not one has thought of defending himself by imputations on his superiors. Early in the war General McDowell set an example of silence under slanderous reproach that won for him the sympathy and respect of whoever could be touched by self-reliant manliness. It is because General McClellan has seen fit to overstep the bounds of a proper official reserve, because, after more than a year for reflection, he has repeated charges of the grossest kind against those under whose orders he was acting, and all this from a political motive, that we think his Report deserving of more than usual attention. It will be no fault of his if he be not put in nomination for the Presidency, and accordingly it becomes worth our while to consider such evidences of character and capacity as his words and deeds afford us.

We believe that General McClellan has been ruined, like another general whose name began with Mac, by the "All hail hereafter" of certain political witches, who took his fortunes into their keeping after his campaign in Western Virginia. He had shown both ability and decision in handling a small force, and he might with experience have shown similar qualities in directing the operations of a great army, had not the promise of the Presidency made him responsible to other masters than military duty and unselfish patriotism. Thenceforward the soldier was lost in the politician. He thought more of the effect to be produced by his strategy on the voters behind him than on the enemy in his front. What should have been his single object—the suppression of the rebellion for the sake of the country—was now divided with the desire of merely ending it by some plan that should be wholly of his own contrivance, and should redound solely to his own credit and advancement. He became giddy and presumptuous, and lost that sense of present realities, so essential to a commander, in contemplating the mirage that floated the White House before his eyes. At an age considerably beyond that of General Bonaparte when he had triumphantly closed his first Italian campaign, he was nick-named "the young Napoleon," and from that time forth seems honestly to have endeavored, like Toepffer's Albert, to resemble the ideal portrait which had been drawn for him by those who put him forward as their stalking-horse. And it must be admitted that these last managed matters cleverly, if a little coarsely. They went to work deliberately to Barnumize their prospective candidate. No prima donna was ever more thoroughly exploited by her Hebrew impresario. The papers swarmed with anecdotes, incidents, sayings. Nothing was too unimportant, and the new commander-in-chief pulled on his boots by telegram from Maine to California, and picked his teeth by special despatch to the Associated Press. We had him warm for supper in the very latest with three exclamation marks, and cold for breakfast in last evening's telegraphic news with none. Nothing but a patent pill was ever so suddenly famous.

We are far from blaming General McClellan for all this. He probably looked upon it as one of the inevitable discomforts of distinction in America. But we think that it insensibly affected his judgment, led him to regard himself as the representative of certain opinions, rather than as a general whose whole duty was limited to the army under his command, and brought him at last to a temper of mind most unfortunate for the public interests, in which he could believe the administration personally hostile to himself because opposed to the political principles of those who wished to profit by his "availability." It was only natural, too, that he should gradually come to think himself what his partisans constantly affirmed that he was,—the sole depositary of the country's destiny. We form our judgment of General McClellan solely from his own Report; we believe him to be honest in his opinions, and patriotic so far as those opinions will allow him to be; we know him to be capable of attaching those about him in a warm personal friendship, and we reject with the contempt they deserve the imputations on his courage and his military honor; but at the same time we consider him a man like other men, with a head liable to be turned by a fame too easily won. His great misfortune was that he began his first important campaign with a reputation to save instead of to earn, so that he was hampered by the crowning disadvantage of age in a general without the experience which might neutralize it. Nay, what was still worse, he had two reputations to keep from damage, the one as soldier, the other as politician.

He seems very early to have misapprehended the true relation in which he stood to the government. By the operation of natural causes, as politicians would call them, he had become heir presumptive to the chair of state, and felt called on to exert an influence on the policy of the war, or at least to express an opinion that might go upon record for future convenience. He plunged into that Dismal Swamp of constitutional hermeneutics, in which the wheels of government were stalled at the outbreak of our rebellion, and from which every untrained explorer rises with a mouth too full of mud to be intelligible to Christian men. He appears to have thought it within the sphere of his duty to take charge of the statesmanship of the President no less than of the movements of the army, nor was it long before there were unmistakable symptoms that he began to consider himself quite as much the chief of an opposition who could dictate terms as the military subordinate who was to obey orders. Whatever might have been his capacity as a soldier, this divided allegiance could not fail of disastrous consequences to the public service, for no mistress exacts so jealously the entire devotion of her servants as war. A mind distracted with calculations of future political contingencies was not to be relied on in the conduct of movements which above all others demand the constant presence, the undivided energy, of all the faculties, and the concentration of every personal interest on the one object of immediate success. A general who is conscious that he has an army of one hundred and fifty thousand voters at his back will be always weakened by those personal considerations which are the worst consequence of the elective system. General McClellan's motions were encumbered in every direction by a huge train of political baggage. This misconception of his own position, or rather his confounding the two characters of possible candidate and actual general, forced the growth of whatever egotism was latent in his nature. He began erelong to look at everything from a personal point of view, to judge men and measures by their presumed relation to his own interests, and at length fairly persuaded himself that the inevitable results of his own want of initiative were due to the hostile combination against him of Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Stanton, and General Halleck. Regarding himself too much in considering the advantages of success, he regards others too little in awarding the responsibility of failure.

The intense self-consciousness of General McClellan and a certain aim at effect for ulterior and unmilitary purposes show themselves early. In October, 1861, addressing a memorial to Mr. Cameron, then Secretary of War, he does not forget the important constituency of Buncombe. "The unity of this nation," he says, "the preservation of our institutions, are so dear to me that I have willingly sacrificed my private happiness with the single object of doing my duty to my country. When the task is accomplished, I shall be glad to retire to the obscurity from which events have drawn me. Whatever the determination of the government may be, I will do the best I can with the Army of the Potomac, and will share its fate, whatever may be the task imposed upon me." Not to speak of taste, the utter blindness to the true relations of things shown in such language is startling. What sacrifice had General McClellan made which had not been equally made by every one of the hundred and fifty thousand men of his army? Educated at the expense of the country, his services were a debt due on demand. And what was the sacrifice of which a soldier speaks so pathetically? To be raised from the management of a railway to one of the most conspicuous and inspiring positions of modern times, to an opportunity such as comes rarely to any man, and then only as the reward of transcendent ability transcendently displayed! To step from a captaincy of engineers to the command in chief of a great nation on fire with angry enthusiasm, spendthrift of men, money, devotion, to be the chosen champion of order, freedom, and civilization,—this is indeed a sacrifice such as few men have been called upon to make by their native land! And of what is General McClellan thinking when he talks of returning to obscurity? Of what are men commonly thinking when they talk thus? The newspapers would soon grow rich, if everybody should take to advertising what he did not want. And, moreover, to what kind of obscurity can a successful general return? An obscurity made up of the gratitude and admiration of his countrymen, a strange obscurity of glory! Nor is this the only occasion on which the General speaks of his willingness to share the fate of his army. What corporal could do less? No man thoroughly in earnest, and with the fate of his country in his hands and no thought but of that, could have any place in his mind for such footlight phrases as these.

General McClellan's theory from the first seems to have been that a large army would make a great general, though all history shows that the genius, decision, and confidence of a leader are the most powerful reinforcement of the troops under his command, and that an able captain makes a small army powerful by recruiting it with his own vigor and enthusiasm. From the time of his taking the command till his removal, he was constantly asking for more men, constantly receiving them, and constantly unable to begin anything with them after he got them. He could not move without one hundred and fifty thousand pairs of legs, and when his force had long reached that number, the President was obliged by the overtaxed impatience of the country to pry him up from his encampment on the Potomac with a special order. What the army really needed was an addition of one man, and that at the head of it; for a general, like an orator, must be moved himself before he can move others. The larger his army, the more helpless was General McClellan. Like the magician's famulus, who rashly undertook to play the part of master, and who could evoke powers that he could not control, he was swamped in his own supplies. With every reinforcement sent him on the Peninsula, his estimate of the numbers opposed to him increased. His own imagination faced him in superior numbers at every turn. Since Don Quixote's enumeration of the armies of the Emperor Alifanfaron and King Pentapolin of the Naked Arm, there has been nothing like our General's vision of the Rebel forces, with their ever-lengthening list of leaders, gathered for the defence of Richmond. His anxiety swells their muster-roll at last to two hundred thousand. We say his anxiety, for no man of ordinary judgment can believe that with that number of men the Rebel leaders would not have divided their forces, with one army occupying General McClellan, while they attempted the capital he had left uncovered with the other.

The first plan proposed by General McClellan covered operations extending from Virginia to Texas. With a main army of two hundred and seventy-three thousand he proposes "not only to drive the enemy out of Virginia and occupy Richmond, but to occupy Charleston, Savannah, Montgomery, Pensacola, Mobile, and New Orleans; in other words, to move into the heart of the enemy's country and crush the rebellion in its very heart." We do not say that General McClellan's ambition to be the one man who should crush the rebellion was an unworthy one, but that his theory that this was possible, and in the way he proposed, shows him better fitted to state the abstract problems than to apprehend the complex details of their solution when they lie before him as practical difficulties. For when we consider the necessary detachments from this force to guard his communications through an enemy's country, as he wishes the President to do, in order to justify the largeness of the force required, we cannot help asking how soon the army for active operations would be reduced to a hundred and fifty thousand. And how long would a general be in reaching New Orleans, if he is six months in making up his mind to advance with an army of that strength on the insignificant fortifications of Manassas, manned, according to the best information, with forty thousand troops? At the same time General McClellan assigns twenty thousand as a force adequate for opening the Mississippi. This plan, to be sure, was soon abandoned, but it is an illustration of the want of precision and forethought which characterizes the mind of its author. A man so vague in his conceptions is apt to be timid in action, for the same haziness of mind may, according to circumstances, either soften and obscure the objects of thought, or make them loom with purely fantastic exaggeration. There is a vast difference between clearness of head on demand and the power of framing abstract schemes of action, beautiful in their correctness of outline and apparent simplicity. It is a perception of this truth, we believe, which leads practical men always to suspect plans supported by statistics too exquisitely conclusive.

It was on precisely such a specious basis of definite misinformation that General McClellan's next proposal for the campaign by way of the Peninsula rested,—precise facts before he sets out turning to something like precise no-facts when he gets there,—beautiful completeness of conception ending in hesitation, confusion, and failure. Before starting, "the roads are passable at all seasons of the year, the country much more favorable for offensive operations than that in front of Washington, much more level, the woods less dense, the soil more sandy" (p. 47). After arriving, we find "the roads impassable," "very dense and extensive forests, the clearings being small and few;" and "the comparative flatness of the country and the alertness of the enemy, everywhere in force, rendered thorough reconnoissances slow, dangerous, and difficult" (p. 79). General McClellan's mental constitution would seem to be one of those, easily elated and easily depressed, that exaggerate distant advantages and dangers near at hand,—minds stronger in conception than perception, and accordingly, as such always are, wanting that faculty of swift decision which, catching inspiration from danger, makes opportunity success. Add to this a kind of adhesiveness (we can hardly call it obstinacy or pertinacity) of temper, which can make no allowance for change of circumstances, and we think we have a tolerably clear notion of the causes of General McClellan's disasters. He can compose a good campaign beforehand, but he cannot improvise one out of the events of the moment, as is the wont of great generals. Occasion seldom offers her forelock twice to the grasp of the same man, and yet General McClellan, by the admission of the Rebels themselves, had Richmond at his mercy more than once.

He seems to attribute his misfortunes mainly to the withdrawal of General McDowell's division, and its consequent failure to cooperate with his own forces. But the fact is patent that the campaign was lost by his sitting down in front of Yorktown, and wasting a whole month in a series of approaches whose scientific propriety would have delighted Uncle Toby, to reduce a garrison of eight thousand men. Without that delay, which gave the Rebels time to send Jackson into the Shenandoah valley, General McDowell's army would have been enabled to come to his assistance. General McClellan, it is true, complains that it was not sent round by water, as he wished; but even if it had been, it could only have been an addition of helplessness to an army already too unwieldy for its commander; for he really made the Rebel force double his own (as he always fancied it) by never bringing more than a quarter of his army into action at once. Yet during the whole campaign he was calling for more men, and getting them, till his force reached the highest limit he himself had ever set. When every available man, and more, had been sent him, he writes from Harrison's Bar to Mr. Stanton, "To accomplish the great task of capturing Richmond and putting an end to this rebellion, reinforcements should be sent to me rather much over than less than one hundred thousand men." This letter General McClellan has not seen fit to include in his Report. Was the government to be blamed for pouring no more water into a sieve like this?

It certainly was a great mistake on Mr. Lincoln's part to order General McDowell off on a wild-goose chase after Jackson. The cooperation of this force might have enabled General McClellan even then to retrieve his campaign, and we do not in the least blame him for feeling bitterly the disappointment of wanting it. But it seems to us that it was mainly his own fault that there was anything to retrieve, and the true occasion to recover his lost ground was offered him after his bloody repulse of the enemy at Malvern Hill, though he did not turn it to account. For his retreat we think he would deserve all credit, had he not been under the necessity of making it. It was conducted with great judgment and ability, and we do not love that partisan narrowness of mind that would grudge him the praise so fairly earned. But at the same time it is not ungenerous to say that the obstinate valor shown by his army under all the depression of a backward movement, while it proves how much General McClellan had done to make it an effective force, makes us regret all the more that he should have wanted the decision to try its quality under the inspiration of attack. It is impossible that the spirit of the army should not have been affected by the doubt and indecision of their general. They fought nobly, but they were always on the defensive. Had General McClellan put them at once on the aggressive, we believe his campaign would have been a triumphant one. With truly great generals resolve is instinctive, a deduction from premises supplied by the eye, not the memory, and men find out the science of their achievements afterwards, like the mathematical law in the Greek column. The stiffness rather than firmness of mind, the surrender of all spontaneous action in the strait-waistcoat of a preconceived plan, to which we have before alluded, unfitted him for that rapid change of combinations on the great chess-board of battle which enabled General Rosecrans at Murfreesboro to turn defeat into victory, an achievement without parallel in the history of the war.

General McClellan seems to have considered the President too careful of the safety of the capital; but he should measure the value of Washington by what he himself thought of the importance of taking Richmond. That, no doubt, would be a great advantage, but the loss of a recognized seat of government, with its diplomatic and other traditions, would have been of vastly more fatal consequence to us than the capture of their provisional perch in Virginia would have been to the Rebel authorities. It would have brought foreign recognition to the Rebels, and thrown Maryland certainly, and probably Kentucky, into the scale against us. So long as we held Washington, we had on our side the two powerful sentiments of permanence and tradition, some insensible portions of which the Rebels were winning from us with every day of repose allowed them by General McClellan. It was a clear sense of this that both excited and justified the impatience of the people, who saw that the insurrection was gaining the coherence and prestige of an established power,—an element of much strength at home and abroad. That this popular instinct was not at fault, we have the witness of General Kirby Smith, who told Colonel Fremantle "that McClellan might probably have destroyed the Southern army with the greatest ease during the first winter, and without much risk to himself, as the Southerners were so much over-elated by their easy triumph at Manassas, and their army had dwindled away."

We have said that General McClellan's volume is rather a plea in abatement of judgment than a report. It was perfectly proper that he should endeavor to put everything in its true light, and he would be sure of the sympathy of all right-minded men in so doing; but an ex parte statement at once rouses and justifies adverse criticism. He has omitted many documents essential to the formation of a just opinion; and it is only when we have read these also, in the Report of the Committee on the Conduct of the War, that we feel the full weight of the cumulative evidence going to show the hearty support in men and confidence that he received from the Administration, and, when there were no more men to be sent, and confidence began to yield before irresistible facts, the prolonged forbearance with which he was still favored. Nothing can be kinder or more cordial than the despatches and letters both of the President and Mr. Stanton, down to the time when General McClellan wrote the following sentences at the end of an official communication addressed to the latter: "If I save this army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you, or to any other persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this army." (28th June, 1862.) We shall seek no epithet to characterize language like this. All but the most bigoted partisans will qualify it as it deserves. We have here a glaring example of that warping of good sense and good feeling which the consciousness of having a political stake at risk will produce in a gallant soldier and a courteous gentleman. Can General McClellan, after a year to grow cool in, either himself believe, or expect any one else to believe, that the President and the Secretary of War would "do their best to sacrifice" an army of a hundred and fifty thousand brave men, in order to lessen his possible chances as a candidate for the Presidency? It was of vastly more importance to them than to him that he should succeed. The dignified good temper of Mr. Lincoln's answer to this wanton insult does him honor: "I have not said you were ungenerous for saying you needed reinforcements; I thought you were ungenerous in assuming that I did not send them as fast as I could. I feel any misfortune to you and your army quite as keenly as you feel it yourself." Mr. Stanton could only be silent; and whatever criticisms may be made on some traits of his character, he is quite safe in leaving the rebuke of such an imputation to whoever feels that earnestness, devotion, and unflagging purpose are high qualities in a public officer.

If General McClellan had been as prompt in attacking the enemy as he showed himself in this assault on his superiors, we think his campaign in the Peninsula would have ended more satisfactorily. We have no doubt that he would conduct a siege or a defence with all the science and all the proprieties of warfare, but we think he has proved himself singularly wanting in the qualities which distinguish the natural leaders of men. He had every theoretic qualification, but no ardor, no leap, no inspiration. A defensive general is an earthen redoubt, not an ensign to rally enthusiasm and inspire devotion. Caution will never make an army, though it may sometimes save one. We think General McClellan reduced the efficiency and lowered the tone of his soldiers by his six months' dose of prudence. With every day he gave the enemy, he lessened his chances of success, and added months to the duration of the war. He never knew how to find opportunity, much less to make it. He was an accomplished soldier, but lacked that downright common sense which is only another name for genius with its coat off for actual work in hand.

Were General McClellan's Report nothing more than a report, were the General himself nothing more than an officer endeavoring to palliate a failure, we should not have felt called on to notice his plea, unless to add publicity to any new facts he might be able to bring forward. But the Report is a political manifesto, and not only that, but an attack on the administration which appointed him to the command, supported him with all its resources, and whose only fault it was not sooner to discover his incapacity to conduct aggressive movements. General McClellan is a candidate for the Presidency, and as he has had no opportunity to show his capacity in any civil function, his claim must rest on one of two grounds,—either the ability he has shown as a general, or the specific principles of policy he is supposed to represent. Whatever may be the success of our operations in the field, our Chief Magistracy for the next four years will demand a person of great experience and ability. Questions cannot fail to arise taxing prudence of the longest forecast and decision of the firmest quality. How far is General McClellan likely to fulfill these conditions? What are the qualities of mind of which both his career and his Report give the most irrefragable evidence?

General McClellan's mind seems to be equally incapable of appreciating the value of time as the material of action, and its power in changing the relations of facts, and thus modifying the basis of opinion. He is a good maker of almanacs, but no good judge of the weather. Judging by the political counsel which he more than once felt called upon to offer the President, and which, as he has included it in his Report, we must presume to represent his present opinions, he does not seem even yet to appreciate the fact that this is not a war between two nations, but an attempt at revolution within ourselves, which can be adequately met only by revolutionary measures. And yet, if he were at this moment elevated to the conduct of our affairs, he would find himself controlled by the same necessities which have guided Mr. Lincoln, and must either adopt his measures, or submit to a peace dictated by the South. No side issue as to how the war shall be conducted is any longer possible. The naked question is one of war or submission, for compromise means surrender; and if the choice be war, we cannot afford to give the enemy fifty in the game, by standing upon scruples which he would be the last to appreciate or to act upon. It is one of the most terrible features of war that it must be inexorable by its very nature.

Great statesmanship and great generalship have been more than once shown by the same man, and, naturally enough, because they both result from the same qualities of mind, an instant apprehension of the demand of the moment, and a self-confidence that can as instantly meet it, so that every energy of the man is gathered to one intense focus. It is the faculty of being a present man, instead of a prospective one; of being ready, instead of getting ready. Though we think great injustice has been done by the public to General McClellan's really high merits as an officer, yet it seems to us that those very merits show precisely the character of intellect to unfit him for the task just now demanded of a statesman. His capacity for organization may be conspicuous; but, be it what it may, it is one thing to bring order out of the confusion of mere inexperience, and quite another to retrieve it from a chaos of elements mutually hostile, which is the problem sure to present itself to the next administration. This will constantly require precisely that judgment on the nail, and not to be drawn for at three days' sight, of which General McClellan has shown least.

Is our path to be so smooth for the next four years that a man whose leading characteristic is an exaggeration of difficulties is likely to be our surest guide? If the war is still to be carried on,—and surely the nation has shown no symptoms of slackening in its purpose,—what modifications of it would General McClellan introduce? The only information that is vouchsafed us is, that he is to be the "conservative" candidate, a phrase that may mean too little or too much. As well as we can understand it, it is the convenient formula by which to express the average want of opinions of all who are out of place, out of humor, or dislike the dust which blinds and chokes whoever is behind the times. Sometimes it is used as the rallying-cry of an amiable class of men, who still believe, in a vague sort of way, that the rebels can be conciliated by offering them a ruler more comme il faut than Mr. Lincoln, a country where a flatboat-man may rise to the top, by virtue of mere manhood, being hardly the place for people of truly refined sensibilities. Or does it really mean nothing more nor less than that we are to try to put slavery back again where it was before (only that it is not quite convenient just now to say so), on the theory that teleologically the pot of ointment was made to conserve the dead fly?

In the providence of God the first thoughtless enthusiasm of the nation has settled to deep purpose, their anger has been purified by trial into a conviction of duty, and they are face to face with one of those rare occasions where duty and advantage are identical. The man who is fit for the office of President in these times should be one who knows how to advance, an art which General McClellan has never learned. He must be one who comprehends that three years of war have made vast changes in the relative values of things. He must be one who feels to the very marrow of his bones that this is a war, not to conserve the forms, but the essence, of free institutions. He must be willing to sacrifice everything to the single consideration of success, because success means truth and honor; to use every means, though they may alarm the fears of men who are loyal with a reservation, or shock the prejudices of would-be traitors. No middle course is safe in troubled times, and the only way to escape the dangers of revolution is by directing its forces and giving it useful work to do.



THE REBELLION: ITS CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES

1864

In spite of the popular theory that nothing is so fallacious as circumstantial evidence, there is no man of observation who would not deem it more trustworthy than any human testimony, however honest, which was made up from personal recollection. The actors in great affairs are seldom to be depended on as witnesses, either to the order of events or their bearing upon results; for even where selfish interest is not to be taken into account, the mythic instinct erelong begins to shape things as they ought to have been, rather than as they were. This is true even of subjects in which we have no personal interest, and not only do no two men describe the same street-scene in the same way, but the same man, unless prosaic to a degree below the freezing-point of Tupper, will never do it twice in the same way. Few men, looking into their old diaries, but are astonished at the contrast, sometimes even the absolute unlikeness, between the matters of fact recorded there and their own recollection of them. Shortly after the battle of Lexington it was the interest of the Colonies to make the British troops not only wanton, but unresisted, aggressors; and if primitive Christians could be manufactured by affidavit, so large a body of them ready to turn the other cheek also was never gathered as in the minute-men before the meeting-house on the 19th of April, 1775. The Anglo-Saxon could not fight comfortably without the law on his side. But later, when the battle became a matter of local pride, the muskets that had been fired at the Redcoats under Pitcairn almost rivalled in number the pieces of furniture that came over in the Mayflower. Indeed, whoever has talked much with Revolutionary pensioners knows that those honored veterans were no less remarkable for imagination than for patriotism. It should seem that there is, perhaps, nothing on which so little reliance is to be placed as facts, especially when related by one who saw them. It is no slight help to our charity to recollect that, in disputable matters, every man sees according to his prejudices, and is stone-blind to whatever he did not expect or did not mean to see. Even where no personal bias can be suspected, contemporary and popular evidence is to be taken with great caution, so exceedingly careless are men as to exact truth, and such poor observers, for the most part, of what goes on under their eyes. The ballad which was hawked about the streets at the execution of Captain Kidd, and which was still to be bought at street-stalls within a few years, affirms three times in a single stanza that the pirate's name was Robert. Yet he was commissioned, indicted, convicted, and hanged as William Kidd. Nor was he, as is generally supposed, convicted of piracy, but of murder. The marvels of Spiritualism are supernatural to the average observer, who is willing to pay for that dulness from another world which he might have for nothing in this, while they seem mere legerdemain, and not of the highest quality, to the trained organs of scientific men.

History, we are told, is philosophy teaching by example. But how if the example does not apply? Le Verrier discovers Neptune when, according to his own calculations, the planet should not have been in the place where his telescope found it. Does the example redound to the credit of luck or of mathematics? The historian may give a thoroughly false view of an event by simply assuming that after means in consequence of, or even by the felicitous turn of a sentence. Style will find readers and shape convictions, while mere truth only gathers dust on the shelf. The memory first, and by degrees the judgment, is enslaved by the epigrams of Tacitus or Michelet. Our conception of scenes and men is outlined and colored for us by the pictorial imagination of Carlyle. Indeed, after reading history, one can only turn round, with Montaigne, and say, What know I? There was a time when the reputation of Judas might have been thought past mending, but a German has whitewashed him as thoroughly as Malone did Shakespeare's bust, and an English poet made him the hero of a tragedy, as the one among the disciples who believed too much. Call no one happy till he is dead? Rather call no one safe, whether in good repute or evil, after he has been dead long enough to have his effigy done in historical wax-work. Only get the real clothes, that is, only be careful to envelop him in a sufficiently probable dressing of facts, and the public will be entirely satisfied. What's Hecuba to us, or we to Hecuba? Or is Thackeray's way any nearer the truth, who strips Louis the Great of all his stage-properties, and shows him to us the miserable forked radish of decrepitude?

There are many ways of writing what is called history. The earliest and simplest was to record in the form of annals, without investigating, whatever the writer could lay hold of, the only thread of connection being the order of time, so that events have no more relation to each other than so many beads on a string. Higher then this, because more picturesque, and because living men take the place of mere names, are the better class of chronicles, like Froissart's, in which the scenes sometimes have the minute vividness of illumination, and the page seems to take life and motion as we read. The annalist still survives, a kind of literary dodo, in the "standard" historian, respectable, immitigable,—with his philosophy of history, and his stereotyped phrase, his one Amurath succeeding another, so very dead, so unlike anything but historical characters, that we can scarce believe they ever lived,—and only differing from his ancient congener of the monastery by his skill in making ten words do the duty of one. His are the fatal books without which no gentleman's library can be complete; his the storied pages which ingenuous youth is invited to turn, and is apt to turn four or five together. With him something is still always sure to transpire in the course of these negotiations, still the traditional door is opened to the inroad of democratic innovation, still it is impossible to interpret the motives which inspired the conduct of so-and-so in this particular emergency. So little does he himself conceive of any possible past or future life in his characters that he periphrases death into a disappearance from the page of history, as if they were bodiless and soulless creatures of pen and ink; mere names, not things. Picturesqueness he sternly avoids as the Delilah of the philosophic mind, liveliness as a snare of the careless investigator; and so, stopping both ears, he slips safely by those Sirens, keeping safe that sobriety of style which his fellow-men call by another name. Unhappy books, which we know by heart before we read them, and which a mysterious superstition yet compels many unoffending persons to read! What has not the benevolent reader had to suffer at the hands of the so-called impartial historian, who, wholly disinterested and disinteresting, writes with as mechanic an industry and as little emotion as he would have brought to the weaving of calico or the digging of potatoes, under other circumstances! Far truer, at least to nature and to some conceivable theory of an immortal soul in man, is the method of the poet, who makes his personages luminous from within by an instinctive sympathy with human motives of action, and a conception of the essential unity of character through every change of fate.

Of late years men have begun to question the prescriptive right of this "great gyant Asdryasdust, who has choked many men," to choke them also because he had worked his wicked will on their fathers. It occurred to an inquiring mind here and there that if the representation of men's action and passion on the theatre could be made interesting, there was no good reason why the great drama of history should be dull as a miracle-play. Need philosophy teaching by example be so tiresome that the pupils would rather burst in ignorance than go within earshot of the pedagogue? Hence the historical romance, sometimes honestly called so, and limited by custom in number of volumes; sometimes not called so, and without any such limitation. This latter variety admits several styles of treatment. Sometimes a special epoch is chosen, where one heroic figure may serve as a centre round which events and subordinate characters group themselves, with no more sacrifice of truth than is absolutely demanded by artistic keeping. This may be called the epic style, of which Carlyle is the acknowledged master. Sometimes a period is selected, where the facts, by coloring and arrangement, may be made to support the views of a party, and history becomes a political pamphlet indefinitely prolonged. Here point is the one thing needful,—to be attained at all hazards, whether by the turn of a sentence or the twisting of a motive. Macaulay is preeminent in this kind, and woe to the party or the man that comes between him and his epigrammatic necessity! Again, there is the new light, or perhaps, more properly, the forlorn-hope method, where the author accepts a brief against the advocatus diaboli, and strives to win a reverse of judgment, as Mr. Froude has done in the case of Henry VIII. The latest fashion of all is the a priori, in which a certain dominant principle is taken for granted, and everything is deduced from x, instead of serving to prove what x may really be. The weakness of this heroic treatment, it seems to us, is in allowing too little to human nature as an element in the problem. This would be a fine world, if facts would only be as subservient to theory in real life as in the author's inkstand. Mr. Buckle stands at the head of this school, and has just found a worthy disciple in M. Taine, who, in his Histoire de la Litterature Anglaise, having first assumed certain ethnological postulates, seems rather to shape the character of the literature to the race than to illustrate that of the race by the literature.