The writings of James Russell Lowell : in ten volumes

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THE WRITINGS

OF

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

IN TEN VOLUMES
VOLUME V.

POLITICAL ESSAYS

BY

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

I-

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

Copyright, 1871, 1888, 1890,
Br JAMES KUSSELL LOWELl.,.

All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Company.

CONTENTS

The American Tkact Society 1

The Election in November 17

E Plijribus Unum 45

The Pickens-and-Steaun's Rebellion ... 75

General McClellan's Report 92

The Rebellion: Its Causes and Consequences . 118

McClellan or Lincoln 153

Abraham Lincoln 177

Reconstruction 210

Scotch the Snake, or Kill it ? . . . . . 239

The President on the Stump 264

The Seward-Johnson Reactiow 283

POLITICAL ESSAYS

THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY

1858

There was no apologue more popular in the
Middle Ages than that of the hermit, who, musing
on the wickedness and tyranny of those whom the
inscrutable wisdom of Providence had intrusted
with the government of the world, fell asleep, and
awoke to find himself the very monarch whose
abject life and capricious violence had furnished
the subject of his moralizing. Endowed with
irresponsible power, tempted by passions whose
existence in himself he had never suspected, and
betrayed by the political necessities of his position,
he became gradually guilty of all the crimes and
the luxury which had seemed so hideous to him in
his hermitage over a dish of water-cresses.

The American Tract Society from small begin-
nings has risen to be the dispenser of a yearly
revenue of nearly half a millioUo It has become
a great establishment, with a traditional policy,
with the distrust of change and the dislike of dis-
turbing questions (especially of such as would
lessen its revenues) natural to great establishments.

2 THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY

It had been poor and weak; it has become rich
and powerful. The hermit has become king.

If the pious men who founded the American
Tract Society had been tokl that within forty years
they woidd be watchful of their publications, lest,
by inadvertence, anything disrespectful might be
spoken of the African Slave-trade, — that they
would consider it an ample equivalent for compul-
sory dumbness on the vices of Slavery, that their
colporteurs could awaken the minds of Southern
brethren to the horrors of St. Bartholomew, — that
they would hold their peace about the body of
Cuffee dancing to the music of the cart-whip, pro-
vided only they could save the soul of Sambo alive
by jjresenting him a pamphlet, which he could not
read, on the depravity of the double shuffle, — that
they would consent to be fellow members in the
Tract Society with him who sold their fellow mem-
bers in Christ on the auction block, if he agreed
with them in condemning Transubstantiation (and
it would not be difficult for a gentleman who ig-
nored the real presence of God in his brother man
to deny it in the sacramental wafer), — if those
excellent men had been told this, they would have
shrunk in horror, and exclaimed, " Are thy ser-
vants dogs, that they should do these things ? "

Yet this is precisely the present j^osition of the
Society.

There are two ways of evading the responsibility
of such inconsistency. The first is by an appeal to
the Society's Constitution, and by claiming to in-
terpret it strictly in accordance with the rules of

THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY 3

law as applied to contracts, whether between indi-
viduals or States. The second is by denying that
Slavery is opposed to the genius of Christianity,
and that any moral wrongs are the necessary re-
sults of it. We will not be so unjust to the Society
as to suppose that any of its members would rely
on this latter plea, and shall therefore confine
ourselves to a brief consideration of the other.

In order that the same rules of interpretation
should be considered applicable to the Constitution
of the Society and to that of the United States,
we must attribute to the former a solemnity and
importance which involve a palpable absurdity.
To claim for it the verbal accuracy and the legal
wariness of a mere contract is equally at war with
common sense and the facts of the case ; and even
were it not so, the party to a bond who should
attempt to escape its ethical obligation by a legal
quibble of construction would be put in Coventry
by all honest men. In point of fact, the Constitu-
tion was simply the miniates of an agreement among
certain gentlemen, to define the limits within which
they would accept trust funds, and the objects for
which they should expend them.

But if we accept the alternative offered by the
advocates of strict construction, we shall not find
that their case is strengthened. Claiming that
where the meaning of an instrument is doubtful,
it should be interpreted according to the contempo-
rary understanding of its framers, they argue that
it would be absurd to suppose that gentlemen from
the Southern States would have united to form a

4 THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY

society that included in its objects any discussion
of tlie moral duties arising from the institution ol
Slavery. Admitting the first part of their proposi-
tion, we deny the conclusion they seek to draw from
it. They are guilty of a glaring anachronism in
assuming the same opinions and prejudices to have
existed in 1825 which are undoubtedly influential
in 1858. The Anti-slavery agitation did not begin
until 1831, and the debates in the Virginia Conven-
tion prove conclusively that six years after the foun-
dation of the Tract Society, the leading men in that
State, men whose minds had been trained and whose
characters had been tempered in that school of ac-
tion and experience which was open to all dui'ing
the heroic period of our history, had not yet suf-
fered such distortion of the intellect through pas-
sion and such deadening of the conscience through
interest, as would have j^revented their discussing
either the moral or the political aspects of Slavery,
and precluded them from uniting in any effort to
make the relation between master and slave less
demoralizing to the one and less imbruting to the
other.

Again, it is claimed that the words of the Consti-
tution are conclusive, and that the declaration that
the publications of the Society shall be such as are
" satisfactory to all Evangelical Christians " for-
bids by implication the issuing of any tract which
could possibly offend the brethren in Slave States.
The Society, it is argued, can publish only on
topics about which all Evangelical Christians are
agreed, and must, therefore, avoid everything in

THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY 5

/which the qiiestion of politics is involved. But
what are the facts about matters other than Sla-
very ? Tracts have been issued and circulated in
which Dancing is condemned as sinful ; are all
Evangelical Christians agreed about this? On
the Temperance question, against Catholicism, —
have these topics never entered into our politics ?
The simple truth is that Slavery is the only subject
about which the Publishing Committee have felt
Constitutional scruples. Till this question arose,
they were like men in perfect health, never sus-
pecting that they had any constitution at all ; but
now, like hypochondriacs, they feel it in every pore,
at the least breath from the eastward.

If a strict construction of the words " all Evan-
gelical Christians " be insisted on, we are at a loss
to see where the committee could draw the dividing
line between what might be offensive and what
allowable. The Society publish tracts in which
the study of the Scriptures is enforced and their
denial to the laity by Romanist^ assailed. But
throughout the South it is criminal to teach a slave
to read ; throughout the South no book could be
distributed among the servile population more in-
cendiary than the Bible, if they could only read
it. Will not our Southern brethren take alarm ?
The Society is reduced to the dilemma of either
denying that the African has a soul to be saved,
or of consenting to the terrible mockery of assur-
ing him that the way of life is to be found only by
searching a book which he is forbidden to open.

If we carry out this doctrine of strict construe-

6 THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY

tion to its legitimate results, we shall J&nd that it
involves a logical absurdity. What is the number
of men whose outraged sensibilities may claim the
suppression of a tract ? Is the taboo of a thousand
valid ? Of a hundred ? Of ten ? Or are tracts to
be distributed only to those who will find their doc=
trine agreeable, and are the Society's colporteurs to
be instructed that a Temperance essay is the proper
thing for a total-abstinent infidel, and a sermon on
the Atonement for a distilling deacon ? If the aim
of the Society be only to convert men from sins
they have no mind to, and to convince them of er-
rors to which they have no temptation, they might
as well be spending their money to persuade school-
masters that two and two make four, or geometri-
cians that there cannot be two obtuse angles in a
triangle. If this be their notion of the way in
which the gospel is to be preached, we do not won-
der that they have found it necessary to pi-int a
tract upon the impropriety of sleeping in church.

But the Society are concluded by their own ac-
tion ; for in 1857 they unanimously adopted the fol-
lowing resolution : " That those moral duties which
grow out of the existence of Slavery, as well as those
moral evils and vices which it is known to promote
and which are condemned in Scripture, and so much
deplored by Evangelical Christians, undoubtedly
do fall within the province of this Society, and
©an and ought to be discussed in a fraternal and
Christian spirit." The Society saw clearly that it
was impossible to draw a Mason and Dixon's line
in the world of ethics, to divide Duty by a parallel

THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY 7

of latitude. The only line which Christ drew is
that which parts the sheep from the goats, that
great horizon-line of the moral nature of man, which
is the boundary between light and darkness. The
Society, by yielding (as they have done in 1858) to
what are pleasantly called the " objections " of the
South (objections of so forcible a nature that we are
told the colporteurs were " forced to flee ") virtually
exclude the black man, if born to the southward of
a certain arbitrary line, from the operation of God's
providence, and thereby do as great a wrong to the
Creator as the Episcopal Church did to the artist
when without public protest they allowed Ary
Scheffer's Ckristus Consolatory with the figure of
the slave left out, to be published in a Prayer-Book.
The Society is not asked to disseminate Anti-
slavery doctrines, but simply to be even-handed
between master and slave, and, since they have
recommended Sambo and Toney to be obedient to
Mr. Legree, to remind him in turn that he also has
duties toward the bodies and souls of his bondmen.
But we are told that the time has not yet arrived,
that at present the ears of our Southern brethren
are closed against all appeals, that God in his good
time will turn their hearts, and that then, and not
till then, will be the fitting occasion to do some-
thing in the premises. But if the Society is to
await this golden opportunity with such exemplary
patience in one case, why not in all? If it is to
decline any attempt at converting the sinner till
after God has converted him, will there be any
special necessity for a tract society at all ? Will
it not be a little presumptuous, as well as superflu-

8 THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY

ous, to undertake the doing over again of what He
has already done ? We fear that the studies of
Blackstone, upon which the gentlemen who argue
thus have entered in order to fit themselves for the
legal and constitutional argument of the question,
have confused their minds, and that they are mis-
led by some fancied analogy between a tract and
an action of trover, and conceive that the one, like
the other, cannot be employed till after an actual
conversion has taken place.

The resolutions reported by the Special Commit-
tee at the annual meeting of 1857, drawn up with
great caution and with a sincere desire to make
whole the breach in the Society, have had the usual
fate of all attempts to reconcile incompatibilities
by compromise. They express confidence in the
Publishing Committee, and at the same time im-
pliedly condemn them by recommending them to
do precisely what they had all along scrupulously
avoided doing. The result was just what might
have been expected. Both parties among the
Northern members of the Society, those who ap-
proved the former action of the Publishing Com-
mittee and those who approved the new policy rec-
ommended in the resolutions, those who favored
silence and those who favored speech on the sub-
ject of Slavery, claimed the victory, while the
Southern brethren, as usual, refused to be satisfied
with anything short of unconditional submission.
The word Compromise, as far as Slavery is con-
cerned, has always been of fatal augury. The con-
cessions of the South have been like the " With all

THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY 9

my worldly goods I thee endow " of a bankrupt
bridegroom, who thereby generously bestows all his
debts upon his wife, and as a small return for his
magnanimity consents to accept all her personal
and a life estate in all her real property. The
South is willing that the Tract Society should ex-
pend its money to convince the slave that he has a
soul to be saved so far as he is obedient to his mas-
ter, but not to persuade the master that he has a
soul to undergo a very different process so far as
he is unmerciful to his slave.

We Americans are very fond of this glue of
compromise. Like so many quack cements, it is
advertised to make the mended parts of the vessel
stronger than those which have never been broken,
but, like them, it will not stand hot water, — and
as the question of slavery is sure to plunge all who
approach it, even with the best intentions, into that
fatal element, the patched-up brotherhood, which
but yesterday was warranted to be better than new,
falls once more into a heap of incoherent frag-
ments. The last trial of the virtues of the Patent
Bedintegrator by the Special Committee of the
Tract Society has ended like all the rest, and as
all attempts to buy peace at too dear a rate must
end. Peace is an excellent thing, but principle
and pluck are better ; and the man who sacrifices
them to gain it finds at last that he has crouched
under the Caudine yoke to purchase only a con-
temptuous toleration, that leaves him at war with
his own self-respect and the invincible forces of his
higher nature.

10 THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY

But tlie peace which Christ promised to his fol-
lowers was not of this world ; the good gift he
brought them was not peace, but a sword. It was
no sword of territorial conquest, but that flaming
blade of conscience and self - conviction which
lightened between our first parents and their lost
Eden, — that sword of the Spirit that searcheth
all things, — which severs one by one the ties of
passion, of interest, of self-pride, that bind the
soul to earth, — whose implacable edge may divide
a man from family, from friends, from whatever
is nearest and dearest, — and which hovers before
him like the air-drawn dagger of Macbeth, beckon-
ing him, not to crime, but to the legitimate royal-
ties of self-denial and self-sacrifice, to the freedom
which is won only by surrender of the will. Chris-
tianity has never been concession, never peace ; it
is continual aggression ; one province of wrong
conquered, its pioneers are already in the heart
of another. The mile-stones of its onward march
down the ages have not been monuments of ma^
terial power, but the blackened stakes of martyrs,
trophies of individual fidelity to conviction. For
it is the only religion which is superior to all en-
dowment, to all authority, — which has a bishopric
and a cathedral wherever a single human soul has
surrendered itself to God. That very spirit of
doubt, inquiry, and fanaticism for private judgment,
with which Romanists reproach Protestantism, is
its stamp and token of authenticity, — the seal of
Christ, and not of the Fisherman.

We do not wonder at the division which has

THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY 11

taken place in the Tract Society, nor do we regret
it. The ideal life of a Christian is possible to very
few, but we naturally look for a nearer approach
to it in those who associate together to disseminate
the doctrines which they believe to be its formative
essentials, and there is nothing which the enemies
of religion seize on so gladly as any inconsistency
between the conduct and the professions of such
persons. Though utterly indifferent to the wrongs
of the slave, the scoffer would not fail to remark
upon the hollo wness of a Christianity which was
horror-stricken at a dance or a Sunday drive, while
it was blandly silent about the separation of fami-
lies, the putting asunder whom God had joined, the
selling Christian girls for Christian harems, and the
thousand horrors of a system which can lessen the
agonies it inflicts only by debasing the minds and
souls of the race on which it inflicts them. Is your
Christianity, then, he would say, a respecter of
persons, and does it condone the sin because the
sinner can contribute to your coffers ? Was there
ever a simony like this, — that does not sell, but
withholds, the gift of God for a price ?

The world naturally holds the Society to a
stricter accountability than it would insist upon in
ordinary cases. Were they only a club of gentle-
men associated for their own amusement, it would
be very natural and proper that they should exclude
all questions which would introduce controversy,
and that, however individually interested in certain
reforms, they should not force them upon others
who would consider them a bore. But a society of

12 THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY

professing Christians, united for the express pur-
pose of carrying both the theory and the practice
of the New Testament into every household in the
land, has voluntarily subjected itself to a graver
responsibility, and renounced all title to fall back
upon any reserved right of personal comfort or
convenience.

We say, then, that we are glad to see this divi-
sion in the Tract Society ; not glad because of the
division, but because it has sprung from an earnest
effort to relieve the Society of a reproach which
was not only impairing its usefulness, but doing
an injury to the cause of truth and sincerity every-
where. We have no desire to impugn the motives
of those who consider themselves conservative
members of the Society ; we believe them to be
honest in their convictions, or their want of them ;
but we think they have mistaken notions as to what
conservatism is, and that they are wrong in sup-
posing it to consist in refusing to wipe away the
film on their spectacle-glasses which prevents their
seeing the handwriting on the wall, or in conserv-
ing reverently the barnacles on their ship's bottom
and the dry-rot in its knees. We yield to none of
them in reverence for the Past ; it is there only
that the imagination can find repose and seclu-
sion ; there dwells that silent majority whose expe-
rience guides our action and whose wisdom shapes
our thought in spite of ourselves ; — but it is not
length of days that can make evil reverend, nor
persistence in inconsistency that can give it the
power or the claim of orderly precedent. Wrong,

THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY 13

though its title-deeds go back to the days of Sodom,
is by nature a thing of yesterday, — while the
right, of which we became conscious but an hour
ago, is more ancient than the stars, and of the
essence of Heaven. If it were proposed to estab-
lish Slavery to-morrow, should we have more
patience with its patriarchal argument than with
the parallel claim of Mormon ism? That Slavery
is old is but its greater condemnation ; that we
have tolerated it so long, the strongest plea for our
doing so no longer. There is one institution to
which we owe our first allegiance, one that is more
sacred and venerable than any other, — the soul
and conscience of Man.

What claim has Slavery to immunity from dis-
cussion? We are told that discussion is danger-
ous. Dangerous to what ? Truth invites it, courts
the point of the Ithuriel-spear, whose touch can
but reveal more clearly the grace and grandeur
of her angelic proportions. The advocates of
Slavery have taken refuge in the last covert of
desperate sophism, and affirm that their institution
is of Divine ordination, that its bases are laid in
the nature of man. Is anything, then, of God's
contriving endangered by inquiry? Was it the
system of the universe, or the monks, that trembled
at the telescope of Galileo ? Did the circulation
of the firmament stop in terror because Newton
laid his daring finger on its pulse ? But it is idle
to discuss a proposition so monstrous. There is
no right of sanctuary for a crime against humanity,
and they who drag an unclean thing to the horns

14 THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY

of the altar bring it to vengeance, and not to
safety.

Even granting that Slavery were all that its
apologists assume it to be, and that the relation of
master and slave were of God's appointing, would
not its abuses be just the thing which it was the
duty of Christian men to protest against, and, as
far as might be, to root out ? Would our courts
feel themselves debarred from interfering to rescue
a daughter from a parent who wished to make mer-
chandise of her purity, or a wife from a husband
who was brutal to her, by the plea that parental
authority and marriage were of Divine ordinance?
Would a police-justice discharge a drunkard who
pleaded the patriarchal precedent of Noah? or
would he not rather give him another month in the
House of Correction for his impudence ?

The Anti-slavery question is not one which the
Tract Society can exclude by triumphant majori-
ties, nor put to shame by a comparison of respecta-
bilities. Mixed though it has been with politics, it
is in no sense political, and springing naturally
from the principles of that religion which traces its
human pedigree to a manger, and whose first apos-
tles were twelve poor men against the whole world,
it can dispense with numbers and earthly respect.
The clergyman may ignore it in the pulpit, but it
confronts him in his study ; the church-member,
who has suppressed it in parish-meeting, opens it
with the pages of his Testament ; the merchant,
who has shut it out of his house and his heart,
finds it lying in wait for him, a gaunt fugitive, in

THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY 15

the hold of his ship ; the lawyer, who has declared
that it is no concern of his, finds it thrust upon
him in the brief of the slave-hunter ; the historian,
who had cautiously evaded it, stumbles over it at
Bunker Hill. And why ? Because it is not politi-
cal, but moral, — because it is not local, but na-
tional, — because it is not a test of party, but of
individual honesty and honor. The wrong which
we allow our nation to perpetrate we cannot local-
ize, if we would ; we cannot hem it within the lim-
its of Washington or Kansas ; sooner or later, it
will force itself into the conscience and sit by the
hearthstone of every citizen.

It is not partisanship, it is not fanaticism, that
has forced this matter of Anti-slavery upon the
American people ; it is the spirit of Christianity,
which appeals from prejudices and predilections to
the moral consciousness of the individual man ; that
spirit elastic as air, penetrative as heat, invulnerable
as sunshine, against which creed after creed and
institution after institution have measured their
strength and been confounded ; that restless spirit
which refuses to crystallize in any sect or form, but
persists, a Divinely commissioned radical and re-
constructor, in trying every generation with a new
dilemma between ease and interest on the one
hand, and duty on the other. Shall it be said that
its kingdom is not of this world ? In one sense,
and that the highest, it certainly is not ; but just
as certainly Christ never intended those words to
be used as a subterfuge by which to escape our
responsibilities in the life of business and politics.

16 THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY

Let the cross, the sword, and the arena answer,
whether the world, that then was, so understood its
first preachers and apostles. Caesar and Flamen
both instinctively dreaded it, not because it aimed
at riches or power, but because it strove to conquer
that other world in the moral nature of mankind,
where it could establish a throne against which
wealth and force would be weak and contemptible.
No human device has ever prevailed against it, no
array of majorities or respectabilities ; but neither
Caesar nor Flamen ever conceived a scheme so cun-
ningly adapted to neutralize its power as that
graceful compromise which accepts it with the lip
and denies it in the life, which marries it at the
altar and divorces it at the church-door.

THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER

1860

While all of us have been watching, with that
admiring sympathy which never fails to wait on
courage and magnanimity, the career of the new
Timoleon in Sicily ; while we have been reckoning,
with an interest scarcely less than in some affair
of personal concern, the chances and changes that
bear with furtherance or hindrance upon the for-
tune of united Italy, we are approaching, with a
quietness and composure which more than any-
thing else mark the essential difference between
our own form of democracy and any other yet
known in history, a crisis in our domestic policy
more momentous than any that has arisen since we
became a nation. Indeed, considering the vital
consequences for good or evil that will follow from
the popular decision in November, we might be
tempted to regard the remarkable moderation
which has thus far characterized the Presidential
canvass as a guilty indifference to the duty implied
in the privilege of suffrage, or a stolid unconscious-
ness of the result which may depend upon its exer-
cise in this particular election, did we not believe
that it arose chiefly from the general persuasion
that the success of the Republican party was a fore-
gone conclusion.

18 THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER

In a society like ours, where every man may
transmute his private thought into history and des-
tiny by dropping it into the baEot-box, a peculiar
responsibility rests upon the individual. Nothing
can absolve us from doing our best to look at all
public questions as citizens, and therefore in some
sort as administrators and rulers. For though
during its term of office the government be practi-
cally as independent of the popular will as that of
Russia, yet every fourth year the people are called
upon to pronounce upon the conduct of their af-
fairs. Theoretically, at least, to give democracy
any standing-ground for an argument with despot-
ism or oligarchy, a majority of the men composing
it should be statesmen arid thinkers. It is a prov-
erb, that to turn a radical into a conservative there
needs only to put him into office, because then the
license of speculation or sentiment is limited by
a sense of responsibility ; then for the first time
he becomes capable of that comparative view
which sees principles and measures, not in the nar-
row abstract, but in the full breadth of their rela-
tions to each other and to political consequences.
The theory of democracy presupposes something of
these results of official position in the individual
voter, since in exercising his right he becomes for
the moment an integral part of the governing
power.

How very far practice is from any likeness to
theory, a week's experience of our politics suf-
fices to convince us. The very government it-
self seems an organized scramble, and Congress

THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER 19

a boy's debating-club, with the disadvantage of
being reported. As our party-creeds are com-
monly represented less by ideas than by persons
(who are assumed, without too close a scrutiny,
to be the exponents of certain ideas) our politics
become personal and narrow to a degree never
paralleled, unless in ancient Athens or mediaeval
Florence. Our Congress debates and our news-
papers discuss, sometimes for day after day, not
questions of national interest, not what is wise
and right, but what the Honorable Lafayette
Skreemer said on the stump, or bad whiskey said
for him, half a dozen years ago. If that person-
age, outraged in all the finer sensibilities of our
common nature, by failing to get the contract
for supplying the District Court-House at Skree-
meropolisville City with revolvers, was led to dis-
parage the union of these States, it is seized on
as proof conclusive that the party to which he
belongs are so many Catalines, — for Congress
is unanimous only in misspelling the name of that
oft-invoked conspirator. The next Presidential
Election looms always in advance, so that we
seem never to have an actual Chief Magistrate, but
a prospective one, looking to the chances of re-
election, and mingling in all the dirty intrigues
of provincial politics with an unhappy talent for
making them dirtier. The cheating mirage of the
White House lures our public men away from
present duties and obligations; and if matters
go on as they have gone, we shall need a Com-
mittee of Congress to count the spoons in the

20 THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER

public plate-closet, whenever a President goes
out o£ office, — with a policeman to watch every
member of the Committee. We are kept normally
in that most unprofitable of predicaments, a state
of transition, and politicians measure their words
and deeds by a standard of immediate and tem-
porary expediency, — an expediency not as con-
cerning the nation, but which, if more than merely
personal, is no wider than the interests of party.

Is all this a result of the failure of demo-
cratic institutions? Rather of the fact that those
institutions have never yet had a fair trial, and
that for the last thirty years an abnormal ele-
ment has been acting adversely with continually
increasing strength. Whatever be the effect of
slavery upon the States where it exists, there can be
no doubt that its moral influence upon the North
has been most disastrous. It has compelled our
politicians into that first fatal compromise with
their moral instincts and hereditary principles
which makes all consequent ones easy ; it has accus-
tomed us to makeshifts instead of statesmanship,
to subterfuge instead of policy, to party-platforms
for opinions, and to a defiance of the public sen-
timent of the civilized world for patriotism. We
have been asked to admit, first, that it was a neces-
sary evil ; then that it was a good both to master
and slave ; then that it was the corner-stone of free
institutions ; then that it was a system divinely
instituted under the Old Law and sanctioned
under the New. With a representation, three
fifths of it based on the assumption that negroes

THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER 21

are men, the South turns upon us and insists on
our acknowledging that they are things. After
compelling her Northern allies to pronounce the
" free and equal " clause of the preamble to the
Declaration of Independence (because it stood
in the way of enslaving men) a manifest absurd-
ity, she has declared, through the Supreme Court
of the United States, that negroes are not men
in the ordinary meaning of the word. To eat
dirt is bad enough, but to find that we have eaten
more than was necessary may chance to give us
an indigestion. The slaveholding interest has
gone on step by step, forcing concession after
concession, till it needs but little to secure it
forever in the political supremacy of the country.
Yield to its latest demand, — let it mould the evil
destiny of the Territories, — and the thing is done
past recall. The next Presidential Election is to
say Yes or No.

But we should not regard the mere question
of political preponderancy as of vital consequence,
did it not involve a continually increasing moral
degradation on the part of the Non-slaveholding
States, — for Free States they could not be called
much longer. Sordid and materialistic views of
the true value and objects of society and govern-
ment are professed more and more openly by the
leaders of popular outcry, — for it cannot be called
public opinion. That side of human nature which
it has been the object of all lawgivers and moralists
to repress and subjugate is flattered and caressed ;
whatever is profitable is right; and already the

22 THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER

slave-trade, as yielding a greater return on the
capital invested than any other traffic, is lauded
as the highest achievement of human reason and
justice. Mr. Hammond has proclaimed the ac-
cession of King Cotton, but he seems to have
forgotten that history is not without examples of
kings who have lost their crowns through the
folly and false security of their ministers. It is
quite true that there is a large class of reasoners
who would weigh all questions of right and wrong
in the balance of trade ; but we cannot bring our-
selves to believe that it is a wise political econ-
omy which makes cotton by unmaking men, or a
far-seeing statesmanship which looks on an im-
mediate money-profit as a safe equivalent for a
beggared public sentiment. We think Mr. Ham-
mond even a little premature in proclaiming the new
Pretender. The election of November may prove
a Culloden. Whatever its result, it is to settle,
for many years to come, the question whether the
American idea is to govern this continent, whether
the Occidental or the Oriental theory of society
is to mould our future, whether we are to recede
from principles which eighteen Christian centuries
have been slowly establishing at the cost of so
many saintly lives at the stake and so many heroic
ones on the scaffold and the battle-field, in favor
of some fancied assimilation to the household ar-
rangements of Abraham, of which all that can
be said with certainty is that they did not add
to his domestic happiness.

We believe that this election is a turni^^g-point

THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER 23

in our history ; for, although there are four can-
didates, there are really, as everybody knows, but
two parties, and a single question that divides
them. The supporters of Messrs. Bell and Ever-
ett have adopted as their platform the Constitu-
tion, the Union, and the enforcement of the Laws.
This may be very convenient, but it is surely not
very explicit. The cardinal question on which the
whole policy of the country is to turn — a ques-
tion, too, which this very election must decide in
one way or the other — is the interpretation to
be put upon certain clauses of the Constitution.
All the other parties equally assert their loyalty
to that instrument. Indeed, it is quite the fashion.
The removers of all the ancient landmarks of our
policy, the violators of thrice-pledged faith, the
planners of new treachery to established compro-
mise, all take refuge in the Constitution, —

"Like tliieves that in a hemp-plot lie,
Secure against the hue and cry."

In the same way the first Bonaparte renewed his
profession of faith in the Revolution at every con-
venient opportunity ; and the second follows the
precedent of his uncle, though the uninitiated
fail to see any logical sequence from 1789 to 1815
or 1860. If Mr. Bell loves the Constitution, Mr.
Breckinridge is equally fond ; that Egeria of our
statesmen could be "happy with either, were
t' other dear charmer away." Mr. Douglas con-
fides the secret of his passion to the unloqua-
cious clams of Rhode Island, and the chief com-
plaint made against Mr. Lincoln by his opponents
is that he is too Constitutional.

24 THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER

Meanwhile, the only point in whicli voters are
interested is, What do they mean by the Constitu-
tion ? Mr. Breckinridge means the superiority of
a certain exceptional species of property over all
others ; nay, over man himself. Mr. Douglas, with a
different formula for expressing it, means practically
the same thing. Both of them mean that Labor
has no rights which Capital is bound to respect, —
that there is no higher law than human interest and
cupidity. Both of them represent not merely the
narrow principles of a section, but the still nar-
rower and more selfish ones of a caste. Both of
them, to be sure, have convenient phrases to be jug-
gled with before election, and which mean one thing
or another, or neither one thing nor another, as a
particular exigency may seem to require ; but since
both claim the regular Democratic nomination, we
have little difficulty in divining what their course
would be after the fourth of March, if they should
chance to be elected. We know too well what
regular Democracy is, to like either of the two faces
which each shows by turns under the same hood.
Everybody remembers Baron Grimm's story of the
Parisian showman, who in 1789 exhibited the royal
Bengal tiger under the new character of national,
as more in harmony with the changed order of
things. Could the animal have lived till 1848, he
would probably have found himself offered to the
discriminating public as the democratic and socicl
ornament of the jungle. The Pro-slavery party of
this country seeks the popular favor under even
more frequent and incongruous aliases : it is now

THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER 25

national, now conservative, now constitutional;
here it represents Squatter-Sovereignty, and there
the power of Congress over the Territories ; but, un-
der whatever name, its nature remains unchanged,
and its instincts are none the less predatory and
destructive.

Mr. Lincoln's position is set forth with sufficient
precision in the platform adopted by the Chicago
Convention ; but what are we to make of Messrs.
Bell and Everett ? Heirs of the stock in trade of
two defunct parties, the Whig and Know-Noth-
ing, do they hope to resuscitate them ? or are
they only like the inconsolable widows of Pere la
Chaise, who, with an eye to former customers, make
use of the late Andsoforth's gravestone to adver-
tise that they still carry on business at the old
stand? Mr. Everett, in his letter accepting the
nomination, gave us only a string of reasons why he
should not have accepted it at all ; and Mr. Bell
preserves a silence singularly at variance with his
patronymic. The only public demonstration of
principle that we have seen is an emblematic bell
drawn upon a wagon by a single horse, with a man
to lead him, and a boy to make a nuisance of the
tinkling symbol as it moves along. Are all the
figures in this melancholy procession equally em-
blematic ? If so, which of the two candidates is
typified in the unfortunate who leads the horse ? —
for we believe the only hope of the party is to get one
of them elected by some hocus-pocus in the House of
Representatives. The little boy, we suppose, is in-
tended to represent the party, which promises to be

26 THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER

so conveniently small that there will be an office for
every member of it, if its candidate should win. Did
not the bell convey a plain allusion to the leading
name on the ticket, we should conceive it an excel-
lent type of the hollowness of those fears for the
safety of the Union, in case of Mr. Lincoln's elec-
tion, whose changes are so loudly rung, — its noise
having once or twice given rise to false alarms of
fire, till people found out what it really was. What-
ever profound moral it be intended to convey, we
find in it a similitude that is not without signifi-
cance as regards the professed creed of the party.
The industrious youth who operates upon it has
evidently some notion of the measured and regular
motion that befits the tongues of well-disciplined
and conservative bells. He does his best to make
theory and practice coincide ; but with every jolt
on the road an involuntary variation is produced,
and the sonorous pulsation becomes rapid or slow
accordingly. We have observed that the Consti-
tution was liable to similar derangements, and we
very much doubt whether Mr. Bell himself (since,
after all, the Constitution would practically be
nothing else than his interpretation of it) would
keep the same measured tones that are so easy on
the smooth path of candidacy, when it came to con-
ducting the car of State over some of the rough
places in the highway of Manifest Destiny, and
some of those passages in our politics which, after
the fashion of new countries, are rather corduroy
in character.

But, fortunately, we are not left wholly in the

THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER 27

dark as to the aims of the self-styled Constitutional
party. One of its most distinguished members,
Governor Hunt of New York, has given us to un-
derstand that its prime object is the defeat at all
hazards of the Republican candidate. To achieve
so desirable an end, its leaders are ready to coa=
lesce, here with the Douglas, and there with the
Breckinridge faction of that very Democratic party
of whose violations of the Constitution, corruption,
and dangerous limberness of principle they have
been the lifelong denouncers. In point of fact,
then, it is perfectly plain that we have only two
parties in the field : those who favor the extension
of slavery, and those who oppose it, — in other
words, a Destructive and a Conservative party.

We know very well that the partisans of Mr.
Bell, Mr. Douglas, and Mr. Breckinridge all equally
claim the title of conservative : and the fact is a
very curious one, well worthy the consideration of
those foreign critics who argue that the inevitable
tendency of democracy is to compel larger and
larger concessions to a certain assumed communis-
tic propensity and hostility to the rights of property
on the part of the working classes. But the truth
is, that revolutionary ideas are promoted, not by
any unthinking hostility to the rights of property,
but by a well-founded jealousy of its usurpations |
and it is Privilege, and not Property, that is per-
plexed with fear of change. The conservative ef-
fect of ownership operates with as much force on
the man with a hundred doUars in an old stocking
as on his neighbor with a million in the funds.

28 THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER

During the Roman Revolution of '48, the beggars
who had funded their gains were among the stanch-
est reactionaries, and left Rome with the nobility.
No question of the abstract right of property has
ever entered directly into our politics, or ever will,
- — the point at issue being, whether a certain excep-
tional kind of property, already privileged beyond
all others, shall be entitled to still further privi-
leges at the expense of every other kind. The ex-
tension of slavery over new territory means just
this, — that this one kind of property, not recog-
nized as such by the Constitution, or it would never
have been allowed to enter into the basis of repre-
sentation, shall control the foreign and domestic
policy of the Republic.

A great deal is said, to be sure, about the rights
of the South; but has any such right been in-
fringed ? When a man invests money in any
species of property, he assumes the risks to which
it is liable. If he buy a house, it may be burned ;
if a ship, it may be wrecked ; if a horse or an ox,
it may die. Now the disadvantage of the Southern
kind of property is — how shall we say it so as not
to violate our Constitutional obligations ? — that it
is exceptional. When it leaves Virginia, it is a
thing ; when it arrives in Boston, it becomes a man,
speaks human language, appeals to the justice of
the same God whom we all acknowledge, weeps at
the memory of wife and children left behind, — in
short, hath the same organs and dimensions that
a Christian hath, and is not distinguishable from
ordinary Christians, except, perhaps, by a simpler

THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER 29

and more earnest faith. There are people at the
North who believe that, beside meum and tuum^
there is also such a thing as suum, — who are old-
fashioned enough, or weak enough, to have their
feelings touched by these things, to think that hu-
man nature is older and more sacred than any claim
of property whatever, and that it has rights at least
as much to be respected as any hypothetical one of
our Southern brethren. This, no doubt, makes it
harder to recover a fugitive chattel ; but the exist-
ence of human nature in a man here and there is
surely one of those accidents to be counted on at
least as often as fire, shipwreck, or the cattle-dis-
ease ; and the man who chooses to put his money
into these images of his Maker cut in ebony should
be content to take the incident risks along with the
advantages. We should be very sorry to deem this
risk capable of diminution ; for we think that the
claims of a common manhood upon us should be at
least as strong as those of Freemasonry, and that
those whom the law of man turns away should find
in the larger charity of the law of God and Nature
a readier welcome and surer sanctuary. We shall
continue to think the negro a man, and on South-
ern evidence, too, so long as he is counted in the
population represented on the floor of Congress, —
for three fifths of perfect manhood would be a high
average even among white men ; so long as he is
hanged or worse, as an example and terror to
others, — for we do not punish one animal for the
moral improvement of the rest ; so long as he is
considered capable of religious instruction, — for

30 THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER

we fancy the gorillas would make short work with
a missionary ; so long as there are fears of insur-
rection, — for we never heard of a combined effort
at revolt in a menagerie. Accordingly, we do not
see how the particular right of whose infringement
we hear so much is to be made safer by the election
of Mr. Bell, Mr. Breckinridge, or Mr. Douglas, —
there being quite as little chance that any of them
would abolish human nature as that Mr. Lincoln
would abolish slavery. The same generous instinct
that leads some among us to sympathize with the
sorrows of the bereaved master will always, we
fear, influence others to take part with the rescued
man.

But if our Constitutional Obligations, as we
like to call our constitutional timidity or indif-
ference, teach us that a particular divinity hedges
the Domestic Institution, they do not require us
to forget that we have institutions of our own,
worth maintaining and extending, and not with-
out a certain sacredness, whether we regard the
traditions of the fathers or the faith of the chil-
dren. It is high time that we should hear some-
thing of the rights of the Free States, and of the
duties consequent upon them. We also have our
prejudices to be respected, our theory of civiliza-
tion, of what constitutes the safety of a state and
insures its prosperity, to be applied wherever there
is soil enough for a human being to stand on and
thank God for making him a man. Is conserva-
tism applicable only to property, and not to jus-
tice, freedom, and public honor? Does it mean

THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER 31

merely drifting with the current of evil times and
pernicious coimsels, and carefully nursing the ills
we have, that they may, as their nature it is, grow
worse ?

To be told that we ought not to agitate the ques-
tion of Slavery, when it is that which is forever
agitating us, is like telling a man with the fever
and ague on him to stop shaking, and he will be
cured. The discussion of Slavery is said to be
dangerous, but dangerous to what? The manu-
facturers of the Free States constitute a more
numerous class than the slaveholders of the South:
suppose they should claim an equal sanctity for
the Protective System. Discussion is the very life
of free institutions, the fruitful mother of all polit-
ical and moral enlightenment, and yet the question
of all questions must be tabooed. The Swiss guide
enjoins silence in the region of avalanches, lest the
mere vibration of the voice should dislodge the
ruin clinging by frail roots of snow. But where
is our avalanche to fall? It is to overwhelm the
Union, we are told. The real danger to the Union
will come when the encroachments of the Slave-
Power and the concessions of the Trade-Power
shall have made it a burden instead of a bless-
ing. The real avalanche to be dreaded, — are we
to expect it from the ever-gathering mass of igno-
rant brute force, with the irresponsibility of ani-
mals and the passions of men, which is one of the
fatal necessities of slavery, or from the gradually
increasing consciousness of the non-slaveholding
population of the Slave States of the true cause

32 THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER

of their material impoverishment and political in-
feriority? From one or the other source its ruin-
ous forces will be fed, but in either event it is not
the Union that will be imperilled, but the privi-
leged Order who on every occasion of a thwarted
whim have menaced its disruption, and who wili
then find in it their only safety.

We believe that the " irrepressible conflict " — =
for we accept Mr. Seward's much-denounced phrase
in all the breadth of meaning he ever meant to
give it — is to take place in the South itself ; be-
cause the Slave System is one of those fearful
blunders in political economy which are sure,
sooner or later, to work their own retribution.
The inevitable tendency of slavery is to concen-
trate in a few hands the soil, the capital, and
the power of the countries where it exists, to re-
duce the non-slaveholding class to a continually
lower and lower level of property, intelligence,
and enterprise, — their increase in numbers add-
ing much to the economical hardship of their
position and nothing to their political weight in
the community. There is no home-encourage-
ment of varied agriculture, — for the wants of a
slave population are few in number and limited
in kind; none of inland trade, for that is devel-
oped only by communities where education in-
duces refinement, where facility of communica-
tion stimulates invention and variety of enterprise,
where newspapers make every man's improvement
in tools, machinery, or culture of the soil an in-
citement to all, and bring all the thinkers of the

THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER 33

world to teach in the cheap university of the
people. We do not, of course, mean to say that
slaveholding States may not and do not produce
fine men ; but they fail, by the inherent vice of
their constitution and its attendant consequences,
to create enlightened, powerftil, and advancing
communities of men, which is the true object of
aU political organizations, and is essential to the
prolonged existence of all those whose life and
spirit are derived directly from the people. Every
man who has dispassionately endeavored to en-
lighten himself in the matter cannot but see,
that, for the many, the course of things in slave-
holding States is substantially what we have
described, a downward one, more or less rapid,
in civilization and in all those results of mate-
rial prosperity which in a free country show
themselves in the general advancement for the
good of all, and give a real meaning to the word
Commonwealth. No matter how enormous the
wealth centred in the hands of a few, it has no
longer the conservative force or the beneficent in-
fluence which it exerts when equably distributed,
— even loses more of both where a system of
absenteeism prevails so largely as in the South.
In such communities the seeds of an "irrepres-
sible conflict " are surely if slowly ripening, and
signs are daily multiplying that the true peril to
their social organization is looked for, less in a
revolt of the owned labor than in an insurrec-
tion of intelligence in the labor that owns itself
and finds itself none the richer for it. To mul-
tiply such communities is to multiply weakness.

34 THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER

The election in November tui-ns on the single
and simple question, Whether we shall consent
to the indefinite multiplication of them ; and the
only party which stands plainly and unequivocally
pledged against such a policy, nay, which is not
either openly or impliedly in favor of it, — is
the Republican party. We are of those who at
first regretted that another candidate was not nomi-
nated at Chicago; but we confess that we have
ceased to regret it, for the magnanimity of Mr.
Seward since the result of the Convention was
known has been a greater ornament to him and
a greater honor to his party than his election to
the Presidency would have been. We should have
been pleased with Mr. Seward's nomination, for
the very reason we have seen assigned for passing
him by, — that he represented the most advanced
doctrines of his party. He, more than any other
man, combined in himself the moralist's oppug-
nancy to Slavery as a fact, the thinker's resent-
ment of it as a theory, and the statist's distrust
of it as a policy, — thus summing up the three
efficient causes that have chiefly aroused and
concentrated the antagonism of the Free States.
Not a brilliant man, he has that best gift of Na-
ture, which brilliant men commonly lack, of being
always able to do his best ; and the very misrep-
resentation of his opinions which was resorted to
in order to neutralize the effect of his speeches
in the Senate and elsewhere was the best testimony
to their power. Safe from the prevailing epi-
demic of Congressional eloquence as if he had

THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER 35

been inoculated for it early in his career, lie ad-
dresses himself to the reason, and what he says
sticks. It was assumed that his nomination would
have embittered the contest and tainted the Re-
publican creed with radicalism ; biit we doubt it.
We cannot think that a party gains by not hit-
ting its hardest, or by sugaring its opinions. Re-
publicanism is not a conspiracy to obtain office
under false pretences. It has a definite aim, an
earnest purpose, and the unflinching tenacity of
profound conviction. It was not called into being
by a desire to reform the pecuniary corruptions
of the party now in power. Mr. Bell or Mr.
Breckinridge would do that, for no one doubts
their honor or their honesty. It is not unani-
mous about the Tariff, about State-Rights, about
many other questions of policy. What unites
the Republicans is a common faith in the early
principles and practice of the Republic, a com-
mon persuasion that slavery, as it cannot but be
the natural foe of the one, has been the chief de-
baser of the other, and a common resolve to re-
sist its encroachments everywhen and everywhere.
They see no reason to fear that the Constitution,
which has shown such pliant tenacity under the
warps and twistings of a forty-years' pro-slavery
pressure, should be in danger of breaking, if
bent backward again gently to its original rec-
titude of fibre. " All forms of human govern-
ment," says Machiavelli, "have, like men, their
natural term, and those only are long-lived which
possess in themselves the power of returning to

36 THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER

the principles on which they were originally
founded."

It is in a moral aversion to slavery as a great
wrong that the chief strength of the Republican
party lies. They believe as everybody believed
sixty years ago ; and we are sorry to see what ap-
pears to be an inclination in some quarters to blink
this aspect of the case, lest the party be charged
with want of conservatism, or, what is worse, with
abolitionism. It is and will be charged with all
kinds of dreadful things, whatever it does, and it
has nothing to fear from an upright and downright
declaration of its faith. One part of the grateful
work it has to do is to deliver us from the curse of
perpetual concession for the sake of a peace that
never comes, and which, if it came, would not be
peace, but submission, — from that torpor and im-
becility of faith in God and man which have stolen
the respectable name of Conservatism. A question
which cuts so deep as that which now divides the
country cannot be debated, much less settled, with-
out excitement. Such excitement is healthy, and
is a sign that the ill humors of the body politic are
coming to the surface, where they are compara-
tively harmless. It is the tendency of all creeds,
opinions, and political dogmas that have once de-
fined themselves in institutions to become inoper-
ative. The vital and formative principle, which
was active during the process of crystallization into
sects, or schools of thought, or governments, ceases
to act ; and what was once a living emanation of
the Eternal Mind, organically operative in history,

THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER 37

becomes the dead formida on men's lips and the
dry topic of the annalist. It has been our good
fortune that a question has been thrust upon us
which has forced us to reconsider the primal prin-
ciples of government, which has appealed to con-
science as well as reason, and, by bringing the the-
ories of the Declaration of Independence to the
test of experience in our thought and life and ac-
tion, has realized a tradition of the memory into a
conviction of the understanding and the soul. It
will not do for the Republicans to confine them-
selves to the mere political argument, for the mat-
ter then becomes one of expediency, with two
defensible sides to it ; they must go deeper, to
the radical question of right and wrong, or they
surrender the chief advantage of their position.
What Spinoza says of laws is equally true of party
platforms, — that those are strong which appeal
to reason, but those are impregnable which compel
the assent both of reason and the common affec-
tions of mankind.

No man pretends that under the Constitution
there is any possibility of interference with the do-
mestic relations of the individual States ; no party
has ever remotely hinted at any such interference ;
but what the Republicans affirm is, that in every
contingency where the Constitution can be con-
strued in favor of freedom, it ought to be and shall
be so construed. It is idle to talk of sectionalism,
abolitionism, and hostility to the laws. The princi-
ples of liberty and humanity cannot, by virtue of
their very nature, be sectional, any more than light

38 THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER

and heat. Prevention is not abolition, and unjust
laws are tlie only serious enemies that Law ever had.
With history before us, it is no treason to question
the infallibility of a court ; for courts are never
wiser or more venerable than the men composing
them, and a decision that reverses precedent can-
not arrogate to itself any immunity from reversal.
Truth is the only unrepealable thing.

We are gravely requested to have no opinion,
or, having one, to suppress it, on the one topic that
has occupied caucuses, newspapers. Presidents'
messages, and Congress for the last dozen years,
lest we endanger the safety of the Union. The
true danger to popular forms of government be-
gins when public opinion ceases because the peo-
ple are incompetent or unwilling to think. In a
democracy it is the duty of every citizen to think ;
but unless the thinking result in a definite opinion,
and the opinion lead to considerate action, they
are nothing. If the people are assumed to be in-
capable of forming a judgment for themselves, the
men whose position enables them to guide the pub-
lic mind ought certainly to make good their want
of intelligence. But on this great question, the
wise solution of which, we are every day assured,
is essential to the permanence of the Union, Mr.
Bell has no opinion at all, Mr. Douglas says it is
of no consequence which opinion prevails, and Mr.
Breckinridge tells us vaguely that " all sections
have an equal right in the common Territories."
The parties which support these candidates, how-
ever, all agree in affirming that the election of its

THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER 39

special favorite is the one thing that can give back
peace to the distracted country. The distracted
country will continue to take care of itself, as it
has done hitherto, and the only question that needs
an answer is, What policy will secure the most
prosperous future to the helpless Territories, which
our decision is to make or mar for all coming
time ? What will save the country from a Senate
and Supreme Court where freedom shall be forever
at a disadvantage ?

There is always a fallacy in the argument of the
opponents of the Republican party. They affirm
that all the States and all the citizens of the States
ought to have equal rights in the Territories. Un-
doubtedly. But the difficulty is that they cannot.
The slaveholder moves into a new Territory with
his institution, and from that moment the free
white settler is virtually excluded. His institu-
tions he cannot take with him ; they refuse to root
themselves in soil that is cultivated by slave-labor.
Speech is no longer free; the post-office is Aus-
trianized ; the mere fact of Northern birth may be
enough to hang him. Even now in Texas, settlers
from the Free States are being driven out and mur-
dered for pretended complicity in a plot the evi-
dence for the existence of which has been obtained
by means without a parallel since the trial of the
Salem witches, and the stories about which are
as absurd and contradictory as the confessions of
Goodwife Corey. Kansas was saved, it is true ;
but it was the experience of Kansas that disgusted
the South with Mr. Douglas's panacea of " Squat-
ter Sovereignty."

40 THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER

The claim of equal riglits in tlie Territories is
a specious fallacy. Concede tlie demand of the
slavery-extensionists, and you give up every inch
of territory to slavery, to the absolute exclusion of
freedom. For what they ask (however they may
disguise it) is simply this, — that their local laio
he made the law of the land, and coextensive with
the limits of the General Government. The Con-
stitution acknowledges no unqualified or intermi-
nable right of property in the labor of another ;
and the plausible assertion, that " that is property
which the law makes property " (confounding a law
existing anywhere with the law which is binding
everywhere), can deceive only those who have
either never read the Constitution, or are ignorant
of the opinions and intentions of those who framed
it. It is true only of the States where slavery
already exists ; and it is because the propagandists
of slavery are well aware of this, that they are so
anxious to establish by positive enactment the seem-
ingly moderate title to a right of existence for their
institution in the Territories, — a title which they
do not possess, and the possession of which would
give them the oyster and the Eree States the shells.
Laws accordingly are asked for to protect South-
ern property in the Territories, — that is, to pro-
tect the inhabitants from deciding for themselves
what their frame of government shall be. Such
laws will be passed, and the fairest portion of our
national domain irrevocably closed to free labor, if
the Non-slaveholding States fail to do their duty
in the present crisis.

THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER 41

But will the election of Mr. Lincoln endanger
the Union ? It is not a little remarkable that, as
the prospect of his success increases, the menaces
of secession grow fainter and less frequent. Mr.
"W. L. Yancey, to be sure, threatens to secede ; but
the country can get along without him, and we wish
him a prosperous career in foreign parts. But Gov-
ernor Wise no longer proposes to seize the Treasury
at Washington, — perhaps because Mr. Buchanan
has left so little in it. The old Mumbo-Jumbo is
occasionally paraded at the North, but, however
many old women may be frightened, the pulse of
the stock-market remains provokingly calm. Gen-
eral Gushing, infringing the patent-right of the late
Mr. James, the novelist, has seen a solitary horse-
man on the edge of the horizon. The exegesis of
the vision has been various, some thinking that it
means a Military Despot, — though in that case
the force of cavalry would seem to be inadequate,
— and others the Pony Express. If it had been
one rider on two horses, the application would have
been more general and less obscure. In fact, the
old cry of Disunion has lost its terrors, if it ever
had any, at the North. The South itself seems to
have become alarmed at its own scarecrow, and
speakers there are beginning to assure their hearers
that the election of Mr. Lincoln will do them no
harm. We entirely agree with them, for it wiU
save them from themselves.

To believe any organized attempt by the Re-
publican party to disturb the existing internal pol-
icy of the Southern States possible presupposes a

42 THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER

manifest absurdity. Before anything of the kind
could take place, the country must be in a state of
forcible revolution. But there is no premonitory
symptom of any such conAoilsion, unless we except
Mr. Yancey, and that gentleman's throwing a soli-
tary somerset will hardly turn the continent head
over heels. The administration of Mr. Lincoln
will be conservative, because no government is ever
intentionally otherwise, and because power never
knowingly undermines the foundation on which it
rests. All that the Free States demand is that
influence in the councils of the nation to which
they are justly entitled by their population, wealth,
and intelligence. That these elements of prosperity
have increased more rapidly among them than in
communities otherwise organized, with greater ad-
vantages of soil, climate, and mineral productions,
is certainly no argument that they are incapable of
the duties of efficient and prudent administration,
however strong a one it may be for their endeavor-
ing to secure for the Territories the single supe-
riority that has made themselves what they are. The
object of the Republican party is not the abolition
of African slavery, but the utter extirpation of
dogmas which are the logical sequence of attempts
to establish its righteousness and wisdom, and which
would serve equally well to justify the enslavement
of every white man unable to protect himself. They
believe that slavery is a wrong morally, a mistake
politically, and a misfortune practically, wherever
it exists ; that it has nullified our influence abroad
and forced us to compromise with our better in-

THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER 43

stincts at home ; that it has perverted our govern-
ment from its legitimate objects, weakened the
respect for the laws by making them the tools of its
purposes, and sapped the faith of men in any
higher political morality than interest or any better
statesmanship than chicane. They mean in every
lawful way to hem it within its present limits.

We are persuaded that the election of Mr. Lin-
coln will do more than anything else to appease the
excitement of the country. He has proved both
his ability and his integrity ; he has had experience
enough in public affairs to make him a statesman,
and not enough to make him a politician. That he
has not had more will be no objection to him in the
eyes of those who have seen the administration of
the experienced public functionary whose term of
office is just drawing to a close. He represents a
party who know that true policy is gradual in its
advances, that it is conditional and not absolute,
that it must deal with facts and not with sentiments,
but who know also that it is wiser to stamp out evil
in the spark than to wait till there is no help but in
fighting fire with fire. They are the only conserva-
tive party, because they are the only one based on
an enduring principle, the only one that is not will-
ing to pawn to-morrow for the means to gamble with
to-day. They have no hostility to the South, but a
determined one to doctrines of whose ruinous ten-
dency every day more and more convinces them.

The encroachments of Slavery upon our national
policy have been like those of a glacier in a Swiss
valley. Inch by inch, the huge dragon with its

44 THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER

glittering scales and crests of ice coils itself onward,
an anachronism of summer, the relic of a by-gone
world where such monsters swarmed. But it has
its limit, the kindlier forces of Nature work against
it, and the silent arrows of the sun are still, as of
old, fatal to the frosty Python. Geology tells us
that such enormous devastators once covered the
face of the earth, but the benignant sunlight of
heaven touched them, and they faded silently, leav-
ing no trace, but here and there the scratches of their
talons, and the gnawed boulders scattered where
they made their lair. We have entire faith in the
benignant influence of Truth, the sunlight of the
moral world, and believe that slavery, like other
•worn-out systems, will melt gradually before it.
" All the earth cries out upon Truth, and the hea-
ven blesseth it ; ill works shake and tremble at it,
and with it is no unrighteous thing."

E PLUEIBUS UNUM
1861

We do not believe that any government — no,
not the Rump Parliament on its last legs — ever
showed such pitiful inadequacy as our own during
the past two months. Helpless beyond measure
in all the duties of practical statesmanship, its
members or their dependants have given proof of
remarkable energy in the single department of
peculation ; and there, not content with the slow
methods of the old-fashioned defaulter, who helped
himself only to what there was, they have contrived
to steal what there was going to be, and have pecu-
lated in advance by a kind of official post-obit. So
thoroughly has the credit of the most solvent nation
in the world been shaken, that an administration
which still talks of paying a hundred millions for
Cuba is unable to raise a loan of five millions for
the current expenses of government. Nor is this
the worst : the moral bankruptcy at Washington is
more complete and disastrous than the financial,
and for the first time in our history the Executive
is suspected of complicity in a treasonable plot
against the very life of the nation.

Our material prosperity for nearly half a century
has been so unparalleled that the minds of men have

46 E PLURIBUS UNUM

become gradually more and more absorbed in
matters of personal concern ; and our institutions
have practically worked so well and so easily that
we have learned to trust in our luck, and to take
the permanence of our government for granted.
The country has been divided on questions of tem-
porary policy, and the people have been drilled to
a wonderful discipline in the manoeuvres of party
tactics ; but no crisis has arisen to force upon them
a consideration of the fundamental principles of
our system, or to arouse in them a sense of national
unity, and make them feel that patriotism was any-
thing more than a jjleasant sentiment, — half Fourth
of July and half Eighth of January, — a feeble
reminiscence, rather than a living fact with a direct
bearing on the national well-being. We have had
long experience of that unmemorable felicity which
consists in having no history, so far as history is
made up of battles, revolutions, and changes of
dynasty ; but the present genei'ation has never
been called upon to learn that deepest lesson of
politics which is taught by a common danger,
throwing the people back on their national instincts,
and superseding party-leaders, the peddlers of
chicane, with men adequate to great occasions and
dealers in destiny. Such a crisis is now upon us ;
and if the virtue of the people make up for the
imbecility of the Executive, as we have little doubt
that it will, if the public spirit of the whole coun-
try be awakened in time by the common peril, the
present trial will leave the nation stronger than
ever, and more alive to its privileges and the duties

E PLURIBUS UNUM 47

they imply. We shall have learned what is meant
by a government of laws, and that allegiance to the
sober will of the majority, concentrated in estab-
lished forms and distributed by legitimate channels,
is all that renders democracy possible, is its only
conservative principle, the only thing that has
made and can keep us a powerful nation instead of
a brawling mob.

The theory that the best government is that
which governs least seems to have been accepted
literally by Mr. Buchanan, without considering the
qualifications to which all general propositions are
subject. His course of conduct has shown up its
absurdity, in cases where prompt action is required,
as effectually as Buckingham turned into ridicule
the famous verse, —

" My -wound is great, becaiise it is so small,"

by instantly adding, —

' ' Then it were greater, were it none at all.' '

Mr. Buchanan seems to have thought, that, if to
govern little was to govern well, then to do nothing
was the perfection of policy. But there is a vast
difference between letting well alone and allowing
bad to become worse by a want of firmness at the
outset. If Mr. Buchanan, instead of admitting
the right of secession, had declared it to be, as it
plainly is, rebellion, he would not only have re-
ceived the unanimous support of the Free States,
but would have given confidence to the loyal, re-
claimed the wavering, and disconcerted the plotters
of treason in the South.

48 E PLURIBUS UNUM

Either we have no government at all, or else the
very word implies the right, and therefore the duty,
in the governing power, of protecting itself from
destruction and its property from pillage. But for
Mr. Buchanan's acquiescence, the doctrine of the
right of secession would never for a moment have
bewildered the popular mind. It is simply mob-
law under a plausible name. Such a claim might
have been fairly enough urged under the old Con-
federation ; though even then it would have been
summarily dealt with, in the case of a Tory colony,
if the necessity had arisen. But the very fact that
we have a National Constitution, and legal methods
for testing, preventing, or punishing any infringe-
ment of its provisions, demonstrates the absurdity
of any such assumption of right now. When the
States surrendered their power to make war, did
they make the single exception of the United
States, and reserve the privilege of declaring war
against them at any moment ? If we are a conge-
ries of mediaeval Italian republics, why shoidd the
General Government have expended immense sums
in fortifying points whose strategic position is of
continental rather than local consequence ? Florida,
after having cost us nobody knows how many mil-
lions of dollars and thousands of lives to render
the holding of slaves possible to her, coolly pro-
poses to withdraw herself from the Union and take
with her one of the keys of the Mexican Gulf, on
the plea that her slave-property is rendered inse-
cure by the Union. Louisiana, which we bought
and paid for to secure the mouth of the Missis-

E PLURIBUS UNUM 49

sippi, claims the right to make her soil French or
Spanish, and to cork up the river again, whenever
the whim may take her. The United States are
not a German Confederation, but a unitary and in-
divisible nation, with a national life to protect, a
national power to maintain, and national rights to
defend against any and every assailant, at all haz-
ards. Our national existence is all that gives value
to American citizenship. Without the respect
which nothing but our consolidated character could
inspire, we might as well be citizens of the toy-
republic of San Marino, for all the protection it
would afford us. If our claim to a national exist-
ence was worth a seven years' war to establish, it
is worth maintaining at any cost ; and it is daily
becoming more apparent that the people, so soon
as they find that secession means anything serious,
will not allow themselves to be juggled out of their
rights, as members of one of the great powers of
the earth, by a mere quibble of Constitutional in-
terpretation.

We have been so much accustomed to the Bun-
combe style of oratory, to hearing men offer the
pledge of their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor on
the most trivial occasions, that we are apt to allow
a great latitude in such matters, and only smile to
think how small an advance any intelligent pawn-
broker would be likely to make on securities of this
description. The sporadic eloquence that breaks
out over the country on the eve of election, and
becomes a chronic disease in the two houses of
Congress, has so accustomed us to dissociate words

50 E PLURIBUS UNUM

and things, and to look upon strong language as
an evidence of weak purpose, that we attach no
meaning whatever to declamation. Our Southern
brethren have been especially given to these orgies
of loquacity, and have so often solemnly assured us
of their own courage, and of the warlike propen-
sities, power, wealth, and general superiority of
that part of the universe which is so happy as to
be represented by them, that, whatever other useful
impression they have made, they insure our never
forgetting the proverb about the woman who talks
of her virtue. South Carolina, in particular, if she
has hitherto failed in the application of her enter-
prise to manufacturing purposes of a more practical
kind, has always been able to match every yard
of printed cotton from the North with a yard of
printed fustian, the product of her own domestic
industry. We have thought no harm of this, so
long as no Act of Congress required the reading of
the " Congressional Globe," We submitted to the
general dispensation of long-windedness and short-
meaningness as to any other providental visitation,
endeavoring only to hold fast our faith in the divine
government of the world in the midst of so much
that was past understanding. But we lost sight of
the metaphysical truth, that, though men may fail
to convince others by a never so incessant repetition
of sonorous nonsense, they nevertheless gradually
persuade themselves, and impregnate their own
minds and characters with a belief in fallacies that
have been uncontradicted only because not worth
contradiction. Thus our Southern politicians, by

E PLURIBUS UNUM 51

dint of continued reiteration, have persuaded them-
selves to accept their own flimsy assumptions for
valid statistics, and at last actually believe them=
selves to be the enlightened gentlemen, and the
people of the Free States the peddlers and sneaks
they have so long been in the habit of fancying.
They have argued themselves into a kind of vague
faith that the wealth and power of the Republic
are south of Mason and Dixon's line ; and the
Northern people have been slow in arriving at the
conclusion that treasonable talk would lead to trea-
sonable action, because they could not conceive that
anybody should be so foolish as to think of rearing
an independent frame of government on so vision-
ary a basis. Moreover, the so often recurring
necessity, incident to our system, of obtaining a
favorable verdict from the people has fostered in
our public men the talents and habits of jury-
lawyers at the expense of statesmanlike qualities ;
and the people have been so long wonted to look
upon the utterances of popular leaders as intended
for immediate effect and having no reference to
principles, that there is scarcely a prominent man
in the country so independent in position and so
clear of any suspicion of personal or party motives
that they can put entire faith in what he says, and
accept him either as the leader or the exponent of
their thoughts and wishes. They have hardly been
able to judge with certainty from the debates in
Congress whether secession were a real danger, or
only one of those political feints of which they
have had such frequent experience.

62 E PLURIBUS UNUM

Events have been gradually convincing them that
the peril was actual and near. They begin to see
how unwise, if nothing worse, has been the weak
policy of the Executive in allowing men to play at
devolution till they learn to think the coarse reality
as easy and pretty as the vaudeville they have been
acting. They are fast coming to the conclusion
that the list of grievances put forward by the se-
cessionists is a sham and a pretence, the veil of a
long-matured plot against republican institutions.
And it is time the traitors of the South should
know that the Free States are becoming every
day more united in sentiment and more earnest in
resolve, and that, so soon as they are thoroughly
satisfied that secession is something more than
empty bluster, a public spirit will be aroused that
will be content with no half-measures, and which
no Executive, however unwilling, can resist.

The country is weary of being cheated with plays
upon words. The United States are a nation, and
not a mass-meeting; theirs is a government, and
not a caucus, — a government that was meant to be
capable, and is capable, of something more than the
helpless please dorCt of a village constable ; they
have executive and administrative officers that are
not mere puppet-figures to go through the motions
of an objectless activity, but arms and hands that
become supple to do the will of the people so soon
as that will becomes conscious and defines its pur-
pose. It is time that we turned up our definitions
in some more trustworthy dictionary than that of
avowed disunionists and their more dangerous

E PLURIBUS UNUM 53

because more timid and cunning accomplices.
Rebellion smells no sweeter because it is called
Secession, nor does Order lose its divine prece-
dence in Human affairs because a knave may nick-
name it Coercion. Secession means chaos, and
Coercion the exercise of legitimate authority. You
cannot dignify the one nor degrade the other by
any verbal charlatanism. The best testimony to
the virtue of coercion is the fact that no wrongdoer
ever thought well of it. The thief in jail, the
mob-leader in the hands of the police, and the
murderer on the drop will be unanimous in favor
of this new heresy of the unconstitutionality of
constitutions, with its Newgate Calendar of con-
fessors, martyrs, and saints. Falstaff's famous
regiment would have volunteered to a man for its
propagation or its defence. Henceforth let every
unsuccessful litigant have the right to pronounce
the verdict of a jury sectional, and to quash all
proceedings and retain the property in controversy
by seceding from the court-room. Let the planting
of hemp be made penal, because it squints toward
coercion. Why, the first great secessionist would
doubtless have preferred to divide heaven peace-
ably, would have been willing to send commis-
sioners, must have thought Michael's proceedings
injudicious, and could probably even now demon-
strate the illegality of hell-fire to any five-year-old
imp of average education and intelligence. What
a fine world we should have, if we could only come
quietly together in convention, and declare by
unanimous resolution, or even by a two-thirds

54 E PLURIBUS UNUM

vote, that edge-tools should hereafter cut every-
body's fingers but his that played with them ;
that, when two men ride on one horse, the hindmost
shall always sit in front ; and that, when a man
tries to thrust his partner out of bed and gets
kicked out himself, he shall be deemed to have
established his title to an equitable division, and
the bed shall be thenceforth his as of right, with-
out detriment to the other's privilege in the floor !

If secession be a right, then the moment of its
exercise is wholly optional with those possessing it.
Suppose, on the eve of a war with England, Michi-
gan should vote herself out of the Union and de^
clare herself annexed to Canada, what kind of a
reception would her commissioners be likely to
meet in Washington, and what scruples should we
feel about coercion ? Or, to take a case precisely
parallel to that of South Carolina, suppose that
Utah, after getting herself admitted to the Union,
should resume her sovereignty, as it is pleasantly
called, and block our path to the Pacific, under the
pretence that she did not consider her institutions
safe while the other States entertained such un-
scriptural prejudices against her special weakness
in the patriarchal line. Is the only result of our
admitting a Territory on Monday to be the giving
it a right to steal itself and go out again on Tues-
day? Or do only the original thirteen States possess
this precious privilege of suicide ? We shall need
something like a Fugitive Slave Law for runaway
republics, and must get a provision inserted in
our treaties with foreign powers, that they shall

E PLURIBUS UNUM 55

help us catch any delinquent who may take refuge
with them, as South Carolina has been trying to
do with England and France. It does not matter
to the argument, except so far as the good taste of
the proceeding is concerned, at what particular
time a State may make her territory foreign, thus
opening one gate of our national defences and of-
fering a bridge to invasion. The danger of the
thing is in her making her territory foreign under
any circumstances ; and it is a danger which the
government must prevent, if only for self-preser-
vation. Within the limits of the constitution two
sovereignties cannot exist ; and yet what practical
odds does it make, if a State may become sovereign
by simply declaring herself so? The legitimate
consequence of secession is, not that a State be-
comes sovereign, but that, so far as the general
government is concerned, she has outlawed herself,
nullijfied her own existence as a State, and become
an aggregate of riotous men who resist the execu-
tion of the laws.

We are told that coercion will be civil war ;
and so is a mob civil war, till it is put down. In
the present case, the only coercion called for is the
protection of the public property, and the collec-
tion of the federal revenues. If it be necessary to
send troops to do this, they will not be sectional, as
it is the fashion nowadays to call people who insist
on their own rights and the maintenance of the
laws, but federal troops, representing the will and
power of the whole Confederacy. A danger is
always great so long as we are afraid of it; and

66 E PLURIBUS UNUM

miscliief like that now gathering head in South
Carolina may soon become a clanger, if not swiftly
dealt with. Mr. Buchanan seems altogether too
wholesale a disciple of the laissez-faire doctrine,
and has allowed activity in mischief the same im-
munity from interference which is true policy only
in regard to enterprise wisely and profitably di-
rected. He has been naturally reluctant to employ
force, but has overlooked the difference between in-
decision and moderation, forgetting the lesson of all
experience, that firmness in the beginning saves the
need of force in the end, and that forcible mea-
sures applied too late may be made to seem violent
ones, and thus excite a mistaken sympathy with
the sufferers by their own misdoing. The feeling
of the country has been unmistakably expressed in
regard to Major Anderson, and that not merely
because he showed prudence and courage, but be-
cause he was the first man holding a position of
trust who did his duty to the nation. Public sen-
timent unmistakably demands that, in the case of
Anarchy vs. America, the cause of the defendant
shall not be suffered to go by default. The pro-
ceedings in South Carolina, parodying the sublime
initiative of our own Revolution with a Declaration
of Independence that hangs the franchise of hu-
man nature on the kink of a hair, and substitutes
for the visionary right of all men to the pursuit
of happiness the more practical privilege of some
men to pursue their own negro, — these proceed-
ings would be merely ludicrous, were it not for the
danger that the men engaged in them may so far

E PLURIBUS UNUM 57

commit themselves as to find the inconsistency of
a return to prudence too galling, and to prefer
the safety of their pride to that of their country.

It cannot be too distinctly stated or too often re-
peated that the discontent of South Carolina is not
one to be allayed by any concessions which the
Free States can make with dignity or even safety.
It is something more radical and of longer stand-
ing than distrust of the motives or probable policy
of the Republican party. It is neither more nor
less than a disbelief in the very principles on which
our government is founded. So long as they prac-
tically retained the government of the country, and
could use its power and patronage to their own
advantage, the plotters were willing to wait ; but
the moment they lost that control, by the break-
ing up of the Democratic party, and saw that their
chance of ever regaining it was hopeless, they
declared openly the principles on which they have
all along been secretly acting. Denying the con-
stitutionality of special protection to any other
species of property or branch of industry, and in
1832 threatening to break up the Union unless
their theory of the Constitution in this respect were
admitted, they went into the late Presidential con-
test with a claim for extraordinary protection to
a certain kind of property already the only one
endowed with special privileges and immunities.
Defeated overwhelmingly before the people, they
now question the right of the majority to govern,
except on their terms, and threaten violence in the
hope of extorting from the fears of the Free States

58

E PLURIBUS UNUM

what they failed to obtain from their conscience
and settled convictions of duty. Their quarrel is
not with the Republican party, but with the theory
of Democracy.

The South Carolina politicians have hitherto
shown themselves adroit managers, shrewd in de-
tecting and profiting by the weaknesses of men ;
but their experience has not been of a kind to give
them practical wisdom in that vastly more impor-
tant part of government which depends for success
on common sense and business habits. The mem-
bers of the South Carolina Convention have prob-
ably less knowledge of political economy than any
single average Northern merchant whose success
depends on an intimate knowledge of the laws of
trade and the world-wide contingencies of profit
and loss. Such a man would tell them, as the
result of invariable experience, that the prosperity
of no community was so precarious as that of one
whose very existence was dependent on a single
agricultural product. What divinity hedges cot-
ton, that competition may not touch it, — that
some disease, like that of the potato and the vine,
may not bring it to beggary in a single year, and
cure the overweening conceit of prosperity with
the sharp medicine of Ireland and Madeira ? But
these South Carolina economists are better at va-
poring than at calculation. They will find to their
cost that the figures of statistics have little mercy
for the figures of speech, which are so powerful
in raising enthusiasm and so helpless in raising
money. The eating of one 's own words, as they

E PLURIBUS UNUM 69

must do, sooner or later, is neither agreeable nor
nutritious; but it is better to do it before there
is nothing else left to eat. The secessionists are
strong in declamation, but they are weak in the
multiplication-table and the ledger. They have
no notion of any sort of logical connection between
treason and taxes. It is all very fine signing De-
clarations of Independence, and one may thus be-
come a kind of panic-price hero for a week or two,
even rising to the effigial martyrdom of the illus-
trated press; but these gentlemen seem to have
forgotten that, if their precious document should
lead to anything serious, they have been signing
promises to pay for the State of South Carolina to
an enormous amount. It is probably far short of
the truth to say that the taxes of an autonomous
palmetto republic would be three times what they
are now. To speak of nothing else, there must be
a military force kept constantly on foot ; and the
ministers of King Cotton will find that the charge
made by a standing army on the finances of the
new empire is likely to be far more serious and
damaging than can be compensated by the glory of
a great many such " spirited charges " as that by
which Colonel Pettigrew and his gallant rifles took
Fort Pinckney, with its garrison of one engineer
officer and its armament of no guns. Soldiers are
the most costly of all toys or tools. The outgo
for the army of the Pope, never amounting to ten
thousand effective men, in the cheapest country in
the world, has been half a million of dollars a
month. Under the present system, it needs no

60 E PLURIBUS UNUM

argument to show that the non-slaveholcling States,
with a free population considerably more than
double that of the slaveholding States, and with
much more generally distributed wealth and oppor-
tunities of spending, pay far more than the propor-
tion predicable on mere preponderance in numbers
of the expenses of a government supported mainly
by a tariff on importations. And it is not the
burden of this difference merely that the new
Cotton Republic must assume. They will need as
large, probably a larger, army and navy than that
of the present Union ; as numerous a diplomatic
establishment ; a postal system whose large yearly
deficit they must bear themselves ; and they must
assume the main charges of the Indian Bureau. If
they adopt free trade, they will alienate the Border
Slave States, and even Louisiana ; if a system of
customs, they have cut themselves off from the
chief consumers of foreign goods. One of the
calculations of the Southern conspirators is to
render the Free States tributary to their new re-
public by adopting free trade and smuggling their
imported goods across the border. But this is all
moonshine ; for, even if smuggling could not be
prevented as easily as it now is from the British
Provinces, how long would it be before the North
would adapt its tariff to the new order of things ?
And thus thrown back upon direct taxation, how
many years would it take to open the eyes of the
poorer classes of Secessia to the hardship of their
position and its causes ? Their ignorance has been
trifled with by men who cover treasonable designs

E PLURIBUS UNUM 61

with a pretence of local patriotism. Neither they
nor their misleaders have any true conception of
the people of the Free States, of those "white
slaves " who in Massachusetts alone have a deposit
in the Savings Banks whose yearly interest would
pay seven times over the four hundred thousand
dollars which South Carolina cannot raise-
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 ex-
ception in favor of sugar ? Some of the leaders of
the secession movement have already become aware
of this difficulty, and accordingly propose the abo-
lition 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 neu-
tralization 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 trans-
formed 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-pep-
pery temperaments would find themselves at home.

62 E PL U RIB US UNUM

Tlie 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 in-
tention that the President-elect shall be inaugu-
rated, 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 life-
time ; to-day, it is General Harney or Commodore
Kearney who has concluded to be true to the coun-
try 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 coun-
try would it be considered creditable to an officer
that he merely did not turn traitor at the first op-
portunity? There can be no doubt of the honor
both of the army and navj'', 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.

E PLURIBUS UNUM 63

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 diffi-
cult 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 con-
scious nationality and a timely concentration of the

64 E PLURIBUS UNUM

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 pro-
tecting: 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 ito
Let us not be misled by any sophisms about con-
ciliation 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 de-
mand 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 al-
ready signed its own death-warrant, when it con-
sents 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 com-
promise, 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 argu-
ments has lost its force, not a cipher of the sta-
tistics 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

E PLURIBUS UNUM 65

assumed to decide upon any question of the right-
eousness or policy of certain social arrangements
existing in any part of the Confederacy ; they have
not undertaken to constitute themselves the con-
science of their neighbors ; they have simply en-
deavored to do their duty to their own posterity,
and to protect them from a system which, as am-
ple 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 ex-
istence ; it is a question whether Americans shall
govern America, or whether a disappointed clique
shall nullify all government now, and render a sta-
ble government difficult hereafter ; it is a ques-
tion, 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 au-
gust in the world. Having once known what it was
to be members of a grand and peaceful constella-
tion, we shall not believe, without further proof,
that the laws of our gravitation are to be aboL

66 E PLURIBUS UNUM

ished, 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 seK-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 stabil-
ity ; and this once firmly settled, the greater the
extent of conterminous territory that can be sub-
jected to one system and one language and in-
spired 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 organi-
zations and nationalities, has been not only the
dream of conquerors, but the ideal of specula-
tive 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 sla-
very, it may. One language, one law, one citizen-
ship over thousands of miles, and a government
on the whole so good that we seem to have for-
gotten what government means, — these are things
not to be spoken of with levity, privileges not to
be surrendered without a struggle. And yet while

E PLURIBUS UNUM 67

Germany and Italy, taught by tlie 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 mak-
ing 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 an-
tipathy 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 ex-
istence by asserting that it exists. The misunder-
standing and dislike between them is not so great
as they were within living memory between Eng-
land and Scotland, as they are now between Eng-
land 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 Scot-
land, no British subjects who would be more

68 E PLURIBUS UNUM

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
our country, would be a fatal blindness to the
lessons which immemorial history has been tra-
cing on the earth's surface, either with the ben-
eficent 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 as-
sertion 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 ma-
jority, and certainly a powerful minority, in the
seceding States, who are loyal to the Union ; and

E PLURIBUS UNUM 69

these should have that support which the pres-
tige of the General Government can alone give
them. It is not to the North nor to the Kepub-
lican party that the malcontents are called on
to submit, but to the laws and to the benign in-
tentions of the Constitution, as they were under=
stood 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 hesi-
tate 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 en-
force an obligation abhorrent, and, as there is
reason to believe, made purposely abhorrent, to
her dearest convictions and most venerable tradi-
tions ; and yet the same Government ta.mpers with
armed treason, and lets / dare not wait upon /
would, when it is a question of protecting the ac-
knowledged property of the Union, and of sus-
taining, 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 suggest-
ing that a soldier deserves court-martial who has
done all he could to maintain himself in a for-
lorn hope, with rebellion in his front and trea-

70 E PLURIBUS UNUM

chery in Ms 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 na-
tional existence as milk-and-water is now to de-
stroy 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 Northamj)-
ton, 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 '11 accommo-
date the scoundrels ! " General Jackson, we sus-
pect, would have accommodated rebel commis-
sioners 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 igno-
rant into the belief that the principles and practice
of the Free States were truly represented by John
Brown. All this might have been jarevented, had
Mr. Buchanan in his Message thought of the inter-
ests of his country instead of those of his party.
It is not too late to check and neutralize it now.

E PLURIBUS UNUM 71

A decisively national and patriotic policy is all
that can prevent excited men from involving them-
selves so deej)ly that they will find " returning as
tedious as go o'er," and be more afraid of coward-
ice 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 reestablish-
ment 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 com-
plicity with an odious system. They can be pa-
tient, as Providence is often patient, till natural
causes work that conviction which conscience has
been unable to effect. They believe that the vio-
lent abolition of slavery, which would be sure to
follow sooner or later the disruption of our Con-
federacy, 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 everlast-
ing foundations of just Authority, — that that au-
thority, once delegated by the people, becomes a
common stock of Power to be wielded for the com-
mon protection, and from which no minority or

72 E PLURIBUS UNUM

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 sup-
pressing 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 in-
itiative, 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

E PLURIBUS UNUM 73

taste of real war to the boys who are playing sol-
dier 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 peo=
pie 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 co-
ercion, 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.

74 E PLURIBUS UNUM

We wisli 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, with-
out a struggle, to unlawful and irresponsible vio-
lence.

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
EEBELLION

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

76 PI CKENS-AND-STEA LIN'S REBELLION

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 sta-
bility 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 Con-
vention 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

PICKENS-AND-STEALIJSrS REBELLION 77

must be in a new place, whieli was a great con-
solation. If tliese gentlemen gave nothing very
valuable to the people of the Free States, they
were giving the Secessionists what was of inesti-
mable 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 autho-
rity 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 re-
bellion, to contract a kind of morganatic marriage
with Treason, by which they could enjoy the plea-
sant sin without the tedious responsibility, and to
be traitors in everything but the vulgar contingency
of hemp. Doubtless the aim of the political man-
agers 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

78 PICKENS-AND-STEALIN' S REBELLION

as to be able to demand with some show o£ reason
a recognition from foreign powers, and to render
it politic for the United States to consent to peace-
able separation. They counted on the self-interest
of England and the supineness of the North. As
to the former, they were not wholly without justi-
fication, — 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 institu-
tions ; but in regard to the latter they made the
fatal mistake of believing our Buchanans, Cush-
ings, 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 con-
victions, 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 cohe-
rence, 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 uncer-
tainty, so doubtful seemed the loyalty of the
Democratic party as represented by its spokesmen
at the North, so irresolute was the tone of many

PICKENS-AND-STEALIN' S REBELLION 79

Kepublican 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 be-
fore 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 Consti-
tution 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 3Iister 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.

80 PICKENS-AND-STEALIN'S REBELLION

Thus far the Secessionists had the game all their
own way, for their dice were loaded with Northern
lead. They framed their sham constitution, ap-
pointed themselves to their sham offices, issued
their sham commissions, endeavored to bribe Eng-
land with a sham offer of low duties and Virginia
with a sham prohibition of the slave-trade, adver-
tised 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 for-
tresses with cannon stolen from national arsenals.
They sent out secret agents to Europe, they had
their secret allies in the Free States, their con-
ventions transacted all important business in secret
session ; — there was but one exception to the
shrinldng 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
Homanic races, by which, as the wonderful ethnol-
ogist of De Borons Revieio tells us, the Southern
States where settled, and from which they derive a
close entail of chivalric characteristics, to the ex-
clusion of the vulgar Saxons of the North, such is
by no means the case. For the first time in his-
tory the deliberate treachery of a general is deemed
worthy of a civic ovation, and Virginia has the
honor of being: the first State claimins: to be civil-

PICKENS-AND-STEALIN'S REBELLION 81

ized 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. Re-
bellion, 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 per-
jury. 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 com-
monly 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

82 PICKENS- AND-STEALIN'S REBELLION

would Lave 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 dishearten-
ing 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 distinguisb
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

PICKENS-AND-STEALIN'S REBELLION 83

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 con-
spirators were ripe. In both States men were
actively recruited and enrolled to assist in attack-
ing the capital. With them, as with the more
openly rebellious States, the new theory of " Coer-
cion " was ingeniously arranged like a valve, yield-
ing 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

84 PICKENS-AND-STEALIN'S REBELLION

national dignity that people were glad to see the
Government active at length, even if only in set-
ting 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 al-
ready 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 be-
come 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 gov-
ernment 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 estab-
lishing a government and electing an anti-presi-
dent. The way to insure the loyalty of the Border
States, as the event has shown, was to convince
them that disloyalty was dangerous. That revolu-
tions never go backward is one of those compact
generalizations wliich the world is so ready to

PICKENS-AND-STEALIN'S REBELLION 85

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 o£ the gravest
moment, as respected its moral influence, that
Secession shoidd not have time allowed it to as-
sume the proportions and the dignity of revolu-
tion ; 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 revo-
lution, 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 rebelKon continues to be rebellion until it has
accomplished its object and secured the acknow-
ledgment 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 Seces-
sionists 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 un-

86 PICKENS-AND-STEALIN'S REBELLION

doubted and lawful authority, as rebels, and re-
sorted to their usvial 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 recon-
struction 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 slave-
holder,— 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 attemjjt 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 organiza-
tion, while the seeming gain of a few days or weeks
was a loss to the Government, whose great advan-
tage 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

PICKENS-AND-STEALIN'S REBELLION 87

Washington, and Canadian journals to recommend
a strict neutrality, as if the independence and legi-
timacy of the mushroom despotism of New Ashan-
tee 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 neu-
trality, prepared to seize the arsenal at Harper's
Ferry and the navy-yard at Norfolk ; slie 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 common-
wealth. She " resumed her sovereignty," whatever
that meant ; her Convention passed an ordinance
of secession, concluded a league offensive and de-
fensive with the rebel Confederacy, appointed Jef-
ferson 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 no-
tion of law and precedent.

88 PICKENS-AND-STEALIN'S REBELLION

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 E,uffin 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 Aj)rils ago. As these
began a conflict which gave us independence, so
that began another which is to give us nationality.
It was cei'tainly 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 Adminis-
tration ; we apjjreciate their reluctance to begin a
war the responsibility of which was as great as its
consequences seemed doubtful ; but we cannot un-
derstand 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 na-
tional character to that of a craven submission to
manifest wrong, the postponement of moral to ma-
terial 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

PICKENS-AND-STEALIN'S REBELLION 89

" Let them alone, and they '11 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, es-
pecially when it was all on one side, and who would
never have given the Government the great advan-
tage 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 o?^ 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 be-
lieve 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

90 PICKENS-AND-STEALIN'S REBELLION

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 for-
eign 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 deter-
mination. 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 proba-
bilities 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 with-
out the confidence of the brokers. There is no ques-
tion on which side the strength lies. The whole
tone of the Southern journals, so far as we are able

PICKENS-AND-STEALIN'S REBELLION 91

to judge, shows the inherent folly and weakness o£
the secession movement. Men who feel strong in
the justice of their cause, or confident in their pow-
ers, 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 illu-
sions, 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 Constitu-
tion, 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 sys-
tem 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.

GENEEAL McCLELLAN'S KEPORT

1864

We can conceive of no object capable of rous-
ing deeper sympatby than a defeated commander.
Tbougb the first movement of popular feeling may
be one of wratMul 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 gen-
erous minds to seek every possible ground of extenu-
ation, 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 compara-
tively 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 en-
thusiasm which is a necessity of the heart. The
imagination needs a single figure which it can
invest with all those attributes of admiration that

GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT 93

become vague and pointless when divided among
a host. Accordingly, we impersonate in the gen-
eral, 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 in-
dividual 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 Csesar, 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 incon-
solably 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 some-

94 GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT

thing 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 char-
acter is one of the conditions of mastery in every
sphere of human activity, for it is the stuff th^t
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 Rich-
mond ! Never did nation give such an example of
faith and patience as while the Army of the Po-
tomac 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.

GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT 95

Disguise and soften it as we may, the campaign
of the Peninsula was a disastrous failure, — a fail-
ure months long, like a bad novel in weekly instal-
ments, 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. McClel-
lan, and makes affidavit in one volume^ 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 endeavor-
ing 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.

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

1 Letter of the Secretary of War, transmitting Beport 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, 1S62,
Washington : Govemment Printing-Office. 1864. 8vo, pp. 242.

96 GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT

been unwise, for we think that no unprejudiced per-
son can read the vokime without a melancholy feel-
ing that General McClellan has foiled himself even
more completely than the Rebels were able to do.
He should have been more careful of his communi-
cations, 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, color-
less, unimpassioned statement of facts which is
usually so refreshing in the official papers of mili-
tary 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 him-
self 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 wis-
dom for the man but to acknowledge defeat and be

GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT 97

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, ob-
stinacy into firmness ; but the one thing that can-
not 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 supe-
riors. 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 re-
peated 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 deserv-
ing 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.

98 GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT

We believe that General McClellan has been
ruined, like another general whose name began
with Mac, bj 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 hand-
ling a small force, and he might with experience
have shown similar qualities in directing the op-
erations of a great army, had not the promise
of the Presidency made him responsible to other
masters than military duty and unselfish patriot-
ism. 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 suppres-
sion 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 re-
alities, so essential to a commander, in contempla-
ting the mirage that floated the White House
before his eyes. At an age considerably beyond
that of General Bonaparte when he had trium-
phantly 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

GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT 99

be admitted that these last luanaged matters
cleverly, if a little coarsely. They went to work
deliberately to Barnumize their prospective candi-
date. No prima donna was ever more thoroughly
exploited by her Hebrew impresario. The papers
swarmed with anecdotes, incidents, sayings. Noth-
ing was too unimportant, and the new comman-
der-in-chief pulled on his boots by telegram from
Maine to California, and picked his teeth by spe-
cial 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 Amer-
ica. But we think that it insensibly affected his
judgment, led him to regard himself as the rep-
resentative 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 administra-
tion 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 af&rmed 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

100 GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT

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 con-
tempt 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 impor-
tant camj)aign with a reputation to save instead of
to earn, so that he was hampered by the crown-
ing 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 poli-
tician.

He seems very early to have misapprehended
the true relation in which he stood to the govern-
ment. By the operation of natural causes, as poli-
ticians would call them, he had become heir pre-
sumptive 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 sfovernment 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

GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT 101

army, nor was it long before there were unmistak-
able 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 con-
tingencies 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 con-
siderations 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 every-
thing from a personal point of view, to judge men
and measures by their presumed relation to his own
interests, and at length faiidy persuaded himself
that the inevitable results of his own want of initia-
tive were due to the hostile combination against
him of Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Stanton, and General

102 GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT

Halleck. Regarding himself too much in consid-
ering the advantages of success, he regards others
too little in awarding the responsibility of failure.

The intense self-consciousness of General Mc-
Clellan and a certain aim at effect for ulterior and
unmilitary purposes show themselves early. In
October, 1861, addressing a memorial to Mr. Cam-
eron, 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 will-
ingly sacrificed my private happiness with the sin-
gle 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

GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT 103

step from a captaincy of engineers to the command
in chief of a great nation on fire with angry enthu-
siasm, spendthrift of men, money, devotion, to be
the chosen champion of order, freedom, and civili-
zation, — 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 think-
ing 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 obscu-
rity can a successfid 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 tak-
ing the command till his removal, he was con-
stantly asking for more men, constantly receiving

104 GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT

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 over-
taxed impatience of the country to pry him up
from his encampment on the Potomac with a spe-
cial 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 him-
self before he can move others. The larger his
army, the more helpless was General McClellan.
Like the magician's famulus^ who rashly under-
took 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 rein-
forcement 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 anx-
iety swells their muster-roll at last to two hundred
thousand. We say his anxiety, for no man of ordi-
nary 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.

GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT 105

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 Rich-
mond, but to occupy Charleston, Savannah, Mont-
gomery, 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 so-
lution when they lie before him as practical diffi-
culties. For when we consider the necessary de-
tachments from this force to guard his communi-
cations through an enemy's country, as he wishes
the President to do, in order to justify the large-
ness 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 Or-
leans, 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 thou-
sand troops ? At the same time General McClellan
assigns twenty thousand as a force adequate for
opening the Mississipj)i. This plan, to be sure,
was soon abandoned, but it is an illustration of the

106 GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT

want of precision and forethought which charac-
terizes the mind of its author. A man so vao:ue in
his conceptions is apt to be timid in action, for the
same haziness of mind may, according to circum-
stances, either soften and obscure the objects of
thought, or make them loom with purely fantastic
exag^geration. 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 sup-
ported by statistics too exquisitely conclusive.

It was on precisely such a specious basis of defi-
nite 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 end-
ing 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 Washing-
ton, 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, ren-
dered thorough reconnoissances slow, dangerous,
and difficult" (p. 79). General McClellan's men-
tal constitution would seem to be one of those, easily

GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT 107

elated and easily depressed, that exaggerate dis-
tant advantages and dangers near at band, —
minds stronger in conception than j)erception, and
accordingly, as such always are, wanting that fac-
ulty 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 mo-
ment, 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 ad-
mission 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 cam-
paign was lost by his sitting down in front of York-
town, 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 She-
nandoah valley, General McDowell's army would
have been enabled to come to his assistance. Gen-
eral McClellan, it is true, complains that it was
not sent round by water, as he wished ; but even if

108 GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT

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 ac-
tion 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 re-
bellion, 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. Lin-
coln's part to order General McDowell off on a
wild-goose chase after Jackson. The co(3peration
of this force might have enabled General McClel-
lan 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 re-
cover 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 re-
treat we think he would deserve all credit, had he
not been under the necessity of making it. It was

GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT 109

conducted witli 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 Mc-
Clellan put them at once on the aggressive, we
believe his campaign would have been a trium-
phant one. With truly great generals resolve is
instinctive, a deduction from premises supplied by
the eye, not the memory, and men find out the sci-
ence of their achievements afterwards, like the
mathematical law in the Greek column. The
stiffness rather than firmness of mind, the surren-
der 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 com-
binations 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

110 GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT

what he himseK thought of the importance of tak-
ing Richmond. That, no doubt, would be a great
advantage, but the loss of a recognized seat of gov-
ernment, 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 prob-
ably Kentucky, into the scale against us. So long
as we held Washington, we had on our side the
two powerful sentiments of permanence and tradi-
tion, some insensible portions of which the Rebels
were winning from us with every day of repose al-
lowed 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 in-
surrection 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 vol-
ume 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

GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT 111

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 ad-
verse 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 Re-
port of the Committee on the Conduct of the War,
that we feel the full weight of the cumulative evi-
dence going to show the hearty support in men
and confidence that he received from the Adminis-
tration, and, when there were no more men to be
sent, and confidence began to yield before irresisti-
ble facts, the pi-olonged 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 par-
tisans 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 him-
self believe, or expect any one else to believe, that
the President and the Secretaiy of War would

112 GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT

" 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 Presi-
dency ? 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 wan-
ton insult does him honor : "I have not said you
were ungenerous for saying you needed reinforce-
ments ; I thought you were ungenerous in assum-
ing 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 satisfacto-
rily. 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

GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT 113

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 himseK nothing
more than an officer endeavoring to palliate a fail-
ure, 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 re-
sources, and whose only fault it was not sooner to
discover his incapacity to conduct aggressive move-
ments. 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 abil-
ity he has shown as a general, or the specific prin-
ciples of policy he is supposed to represent. What-
ever 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 abil-
ity. Questions cannot fail to arise taxing pru-
dence of the longest forecast and decision of the

114 GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT

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 politi-
cal 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 rep-
resent 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 neces-
sities 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

GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT 115

been more than once shown by the same man, and,
naturally enough, because they both result from
the same qualities of mind, an instant apprehen-
sion of the demand of the moment, and a self-con-
fidence 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 get-
ting 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 de-
manded of a statesman. His capacity for organ-
ization may be conspicuous ; but, be it what it may,
it is one thing- to brings 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 pre-
cisely 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

116 GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT

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 be-
hind the times. Sometimes it is used as the rally-
ing-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 com/me il
faut than Mr. Lincoln, a country where a flatboat-
man may rise to the top, by virtue of mere man-
hood, being hardly the place for people of truly
refined sensibilities. Or does it really mean no-
thing 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 pur-
pose, 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 advan-
tage 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

GENERAL McCLELLAN'S REPORT 117

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 v^ho would not deem it
more trustworthy than any human testimony,
however honest, which was made up from per-
sonal recollection. The actors in great affairs
are seldom to be depended on as witnesses, either
to the order of events or their bearing upon re-
sults ; 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. Tliis 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 Colo-

THE REBELLION 119

nies to make the British troops not only wan-
ton, 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 Red-
coats 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 disput-
able 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 ex-
act 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
stiU to be bought at street-stalls within a few
years, affirms three times in a single stanza that

120 THE REBELLION

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 wliich he might
have for nothing in this, whUe 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, ac-
cording 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 histo-
rian may give a thoroughly false view of an event
by simply assuming that after means in conse-
quence of^ or even by the felicitous turn of a
sentence. Style will find readers and shape con-
victions, while mere truth only gathers dust on
the sheK. 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 im-
agination of Carlyle. Indeed, after reading his-
tory, one can only turn round, with Montaigne,
and say, WTiat hnow If 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,

THE REBELLION 121

and an English poet made him the hero of a tra-
gedy, 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, what-
ever 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, immiti=
gable, — with his philosophy of history, and his
stereotyped phrase, his one Amurath succeeding
another, so very dead, so unlike anything but his-
torical characters, that we can scarce believe they

122 THE REBELLION

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 negoti-
ations, still the traditional door is opened to the
inroad of democratic innovation, still it is im-
possible to interpret the motives which inspired
the conduct of so-and-so in this particular emer-
gency. 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 soul-
less 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, stop-
ping both ears, he slips safely by those Sirens,
keeping safe that sobriety of style which his fel-
low-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 dis-
interested and disinteresting, writes with as me-
chanic an industry and as little emotion as he
would have brought to the weaving of calico or
the digging of potatoes, under other circum-

THE REBELLION 123

stances! 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 instinc-
tive 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 Asdryas-
dust, 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 interest-
ing, 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 his-
torical 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 treat-
ment. 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

124 THE REBELLION

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 neces-
sity ! Again, there is the new light, or perhaps,
more properly, the forlorn-hope method, where the
author accepts a brief against the advocatus dia-
boli, 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 serv-
ing to jDrove what x may really be. The weakness
of this heroic treatment, it seems to us, is in allow-
ing 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. Buclde stands at
the head of this school, and has just found a worthy
disciple in M. Taine, who, in his Histoire de la
Litter ature Anglaise, having first assumed certain
ethnological postulates, seems rather to shape the
character of the literature to the race than to illus-
trate that of the race by the literature.

In short, whether we consider the incompetence
of men in general as observers, their carelessness
about things at the moment indifferent, but which
may become of consequence hereafter (as, for
example, in the dating of letters), their want of
impartiality, both in seeing and stating occurrences

THE REBELLION 125

and In tracing or attributing motives, it is plain
that history is not to be depended on in any ab-
sokite sense. That smooth and indifferent quality
of mind, without a flaw of prejudice or a blur of
theory, which can reflect passing events as they
truly are, is as rare, if not so precious, as that
artistic sense which can hold the mirror up to
nature. The fact that there is so little historical
or political prescience, that no man of experience
ventures to prophesy, is enough to prove, either
that it is impossible to know all the terms of our
problem, or that history does not repeat itself with
anything like the exactness of coincidence which is
so pleasing to the imagination. Six mouths after
the coup cVetat of December, 1851, Mr. Savage
Landor, who knew him well, said to us that Louis
Napoleon had ten times the political sagacity of
his uncle ; but who foresaw or foretold an Augustus
in the dull-eyed frequenter of Lady Blessington's,
the melodramatic hero of Strasburg and Bologne,
with his cocked hat and his eagle from Astley's?
What insurance company would have taken the
risk of his hare-brained adventure ? Coleridge
used to take credit to himself for certain lucky
vaticinations, but his memory was always inexact,
his confounding of what he did and what he
thought he meant to do always to be suspected,
and his prophecies, when examined, are hardly
more precise than an ancient oracle or a couplet
of Nostradamus. The almanac-makers took the
wisest course, stretching through a whole month
their '' about this time expect a change of weather."

126 THE REBELLION

That history repeats itself has become a kind of
truism, but of as little practical value in helping
us to form our opinions as other similar labor-sav-
ing expedients to escape thought. Sceptical minds
see in human affairs a regular oscillation, hopeful
ones a continual progress, and both can support
their creeds with abundance of pertinent example.
Both seem to admit a law of recurrence, but the
former make it act in a circle, the latter in a spiral.
There is, no doubt, one constant element in the
reckoning, namely, human nature, and perhaps an-
other in human nature itself, — the tendency to
reaction from all extremes ; but the way in which
these shall operate, and the force they shall exert,
are dependent on a multitude of new and impredi-
cable circumstances. Coincidences there certainl}''
are, but our records are hardly yet long enough to
furnish the basis for secure induction. Such par-
allelisms are merely curious, and entertain the
fancy rather than supply precedent for the judg-
ment. When Tacitus tells us that gladiators have
not so much stomach for fighting as soldiers, we
remember our own roughs and shoulder-hitters at
the beginning of the war, and are inclined to think
that Macer and Billy Wilson illustrated a general
truth. But, unfortunately, Octavius found prize-
fighters of another metal, not to speak of Sparta-
cus. Perhaps the objections to our making use of
colored soldiers (Jiic niger est, hunc tu^ Momane,
caveto^ will seem as absurd one of these days as
the outcry that Caesar was degrading the service
by enlisting Gauls ; but we will not hazard a

THE REBELLION 127

prophecy. In the alarm of the Pannonian revolt,
his nephew recruited the army of Italy by a con-
scription of slaves, who thereby became free, and
this measure seems to have been acquiesced in by
the unwarlike citizens, who preferred that the ex-
periment of death should be made in dorpore vili
rather than in their own persons.

If the analogies between past and present were
as precise as they are sometimes represented to be,
if Time really dotes and repeats his old stories,
then ought students of history to be the best states-
men. Yet, with Guizot for an adviser, Louis
Philippe, himself the eyewitness of two revolutions,
became the easy victim of a third. Reasoning
from what has been to what will be is apt to be
paralogistic at the best. Much influence must
still be left to chance, much accounted for by what
pagans called Fate, and we Providence. We can
only say, Victrix causa diis jjlacuit, and Cato
must make the best of it. What is called poetical
justice, that is, an exact subservience of human
fortunes to moral laws, so that the actual becomes
the liege vassal of the ideal, is so seldom seen in
the events of real life that even the gentile world
felt the need of a future state of rewards and pun-
ishments to make the scale of Divine justice even,
and satisfy the cravings of the soul. Our sense of
right, or of what we believe to be right, is so
pleased with an example of retribution that a
single instance is allowed to outweigh the many in
which wrong escapes unwhipped. It was remarked
that sudden death overtook the purchasers of cer-

128 THE REBELLION

tain property bequeathed for pious uses in Eng-
land, and sequestered at the Reformation. Fuller
tells of a Sir Miles Pateridge, who threw dice with
the king for Jesus' bells, and how " the ropes after
catched about his neck," he being hanged in the
reign of Edward VI. But at least a fifth of the
land in England was held by suppressed monas-
teries, and the metal for the victorious cannon of
revolutionary France once called to the service of
the Prince of Peace from consecrated sj)ires. We
err in looking for a visible and material penalty,
as if God imposed a fine of mishap for the breach
of his statutes. Seldom, says Horace, has penalty
lost the scent of crime, yet, on second thought, he
makes the sleuth-hound lame. Slow seems the
sword of Divine justice, adds Dante, to him who
longs to see it smite. The cry of all generations
has been, " How long, O Lord ? " Where crime
has its root in weakness of character, that same
weakness is likely to play the avenger ; but where
it springs from that indifference as to means and
that contempt of consequences which are likely to
be felt by a strong nature, intent upon its end, it
would be hardy to reckon on the same dramatic
result. And if we find this difficulty in the cases
of individual men, it is even more rash to personify
nations, and deal out to them our little vials of
Divine retribution, as if we were the general dis-=
pensaries of doom. Shall we lay to a nation the
sins of a line of despots whom it cannot shake off ?
If we accept too blindly the theory of national
responsibility, we ought, by parity of reason, to

THE REBELLION 129

admit success as a valid proof of right. The mor-
alists of fifty years ago, who saw the democratic
orgies of France punished with Napoleon, whose
own crimes brought him in turn to the rock of Pro-
metheus, how would they explain the phenomenon
of Napoleon III. ? The readiness to trace a too
close and consequent relation between public delin=
quencies and temporal judgments seems to us a
superstition holding over from the time when each
race, each family even, had its private and tute-
lary divinity, — a mere refinement of fetichism.
The world has too often seen " captive good attend-
ing captain ill " to believe in a providence that
sets man-traps and spring-gnus for the trespassers
on its domain, and Christianity, perhaps, elevated
man in no way so much as in making every one
personally, not gregariously, angwerable for his
doings or not-doings, and thus inventing con-
science, as we understand its meaning. But just
in proportion as the private citizen is enlightened
does he become capable of an influence on that
manifold result of thought, sentiment, reason, im-
pulse, magnanimity, and meanness which, as Pub-
lic Opinion, has now so great a share in shaping
the destiny of nations. And in this sense does he
become responsible, and out of the aggregate of
such individual responsibilities we can assume a
common complicity in the guilt of common wrong
doing.

But surely the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth ;
and though we do not believe in his so immediate
interference in events as would satisfy our impa-

130 THE REBELLION

tience of iu justice, yet he achieves his ends and
brings about his compensations by having made
Good infinitely and eternally lovely to the soul of
man, while the beauty of Evil is but a brief cheat,
which their own lusts put upon the senses of her
victims. And it is surely fixed as the foundations
of the earth that faithfulness to right and duty,
seK-sacrifice, loyalty to that service whose visible
reward is often but suffering and baffled hope,
draw strength and succor from exhaustless springs
far up in those Delectable Mountains of trial which
the All-knowing has set between us and the achieve-
ment of every noble purpose. History teaches, at
least, that wrong can reckon on no alliance with
the diviner part of man, while every high example
of virtue, though it led to the stake or the scaf-
fold, becomes a part of the reserved force of hu-
manity, and from generation to generation summons
kindred natures to the standard of righteousness
as with the sound of a trumpet. There is no such
reinforcement as faith in God, and that faith is
impossible till we have squared our policy and con-
duct with our highest instincts. In the loom of
time, though the woof be divinely foreordained,
yet man supplies the weft, and the figures of the
endless web are shaped and colored by our own
wisdom or folly. Let no nation think itseK safe
in being merely right, unless its captains are in-
spired and sustained by a sense thereof.

We do not believe that history supplies any
trustworthy data for easting the horoscope of our
war. America is something without precedent

THE REBELLION 131

Moreover, such changes have been g'oing on in the
social and moral condition of nations as to make
the lessons of even comparatively recent times of
little import in forming conclusions on contem-
porary affairs. Formerly a fact, not yet forgetful
of its etymology, was a thing done, a deed, and in
a certain sense implied, truly enough, the predomi-
nance of individual actors and prevailing charac-
ters. But powerful personalities are becoming of
less and less account, when facility of communica-
tion has given both force and the means of exert-
ing it to the sentiment of civilized mankind, and
when commerce has made the banker's strong-box
a true temple of Janus, the shutting or opening of
which means peace or war. Battles are decisive
now not so ranch by the destruction of armies as
by the defeat of public spirit, and a something
that has actually happened may be a less important
fact, either in conjecturing probabilities or deter-
mining policy, than the indefinable progress of
change, not marked on any dial, but instinctively
divined, that is taking place in the general
thought.

The history of no civil war can be written with-
out bias, scarcely without passionate prejudice. It
is always hard for men to conceive the honesty or
intelligence of those who hold other opinions, or
indeed to allow them the right to think for them-
selves ; but in troubled times the blood mounts to
the head, and colors the judgment, giving to sus-
picions and fancies the force of realities, and in-
tensifying personal predilections, till they seem the

132 THE REBELLION

pith and substance of national duties. Ev^en where
the office of historian is assumed in the fairest
temper, it is impossible that the narrative of events
whose bearing is so momentous should not insen-
sibly take somewhat the form of an argument, —
that the political sympathies of the author should
not affect his judgment of men and measures. And
in such conflicts, far more than in ordinary times,
as the stake at issue is more absorbing and appeals
more directly to every private interest and patriotic
sentiment, so men, as they become prominent, and
more or less identified with this or that policy, at
last take the place of principles with the majority
of minds. To agree with us is to be a great com-
mander, a prudent administrator, a j)olitician with-
out private ends.

The contrast between the works of Mr. Pollard ^
and Mr. Greeley ^ is very striking. Though coin-
cident in design, they are the antipodes of each
other in treatment. Mr. Greeley, finding a coun-
try beyond measure prosperous suddenly assailed
by rebellion, is naturally led to seek an adequate
cause for so abnormal an effect. Mr. Pollard,
formerly an office-holder under the United States,
and now the editor of a Richmond newspaper, is
struck by the same reflection, and, unwilling to
state the true cause, or unable to find a plausible
reason, is driven to hunt up an excuse for what
strikes ordinary people as one of the greatest crimes
in history. The difference is instructive.

^ The Southern History of the War. The First Year of the War
By Edward A. Pollard.

2 The American Conflict. By Horace Greeley. Vol. I.

THE REBELLION 133

Mr. Pollard's book, however, is well worth read-
ing by those who wish to learn something of the
motives which originally led the Southern States
into rebellion, and still actuate them in their ob-
stinate resistance. To any one familiar with the
history of the last thirty years, it woidd almost
seem that Mr. Pollard's object had been to expose
the futiKty of the pretences set up by the origina-
tors of Secession, so utterly does he fail in showing
any adequate grounds for that desperate measure.
As a history, the book is of little value, except as
giving us here and there a hint by which we can
guess something of the state of mind prevailing at
the South. In point of style it is a curious jumble
of American sense and Southern highfaluting .
One might fancy it written by a schoolmaster,
whose boys had got hold of the manuscript, and
inserted here and there passages taken at random
from the Gems of Irish Oratory. Mr. Pollard's
notions of the " Yankees," and the condition of
things among them, would be creditable to a Chi-
naman from pretty well up in the back country.
No society could hold together for a moment in the
condition of moral decay which he attributes to the
Northern States. Before writing his next volume
he should read Charles Lamb's advice " to those who
have the framing of advertisements for the appre-
hension of offenders." We must do him the justice
to say, however, that he writes no nonsense about
difference of races, and that, of aU " Yankees,"
he most thoroughly despises the Northern snob who
professes a sympathy for " Southern institutions "

134 THE REBELLION

because lie believes that a slaveholder is a better
man than himself.

In narrating the causes which brought about
the present state of things, Mr. Pollard arranges
matters to suit his own convenience, constantly
reversing the relations of cause and effect, and
forgetting that the order of events is of every im-
portance in estimating their moral bearing. The
only theoretic reason he gives for Secession is the
desire to escape from the tyranny of a " numerical
majority." Yet it was by precisely such a ma-
jority, and that attained by force or fraud, that the
seceding States were taken out of the Union. We
entirely agree with Mr. Pollard that a show of
hands is no test of truth ; but he seems to forget
that, except under a despotism, a numerical ma-
jority of some soi't or other is sure to govern. No
man capable of thought, as Mr. Pollard certainly
is, would admit that a majority was any more
likely to be right under a system of limited than
under one of universal suffrage, always provided
the said majority did not express his own opinions.
The majority always governs in the long run, be-
cause it comes gradually round to the side of what is
just and for the common interest, and the only dan-
gerous majorit}^ is that of a mob unchecked by the
delay for reflection which all constitutional govern-
ment interposes. The constitutions of most of the
Slave States, so far as white men are concerned,
are of the most intensely democratic type. Would
Mr. Pollard consolidate them all under one strong
government, or does he believe that to be good for

THE REBELLION 135

a single State which is bad for many united ? It
is curious to see, in his own intense antipathy to a
slaveholding aristocracy, how purely American he
is in spite of his theories ; and, bitterly hostile as
he is to the Davis administration, he may chance
on the reflection that a majority is pretty much
the same thing in one parallel of latitude as an-
other. Of one thing he may be assured, — that
we of the North do not understand by republic a
government of the better and more intelligent class
by the worse and more ignorant, and accordingly
are doing our best by education to abolish the dis-
tinction between the two.

The fact that no adequate reasons for Secession
have ever been brought forward, either by tbe
seceding States at the time, or by their apologists
since, can only be explained on the theory that
nothing more than a coup d'etat was intended,
which should put the South in possession of the
government. Owing to the wretched policy (if
supineness deserve the name) largely prevalent in
the North, of sending to the lower house of Con-
gress the men who needed rather than those who
ought to go there, — men without the responsibility
or the independence which only established repu-
tation, social position, long converse with great
questions, or native strength of character can give,
— and to the habit of looking on a seat in the
national legislature more as the reward for partisan
activity than as imposing a service of the highest
nature, so that representatives were changed as
often as there were new political debts to pay or

136 THE REBELLION

cliques to be conciliated, — owing to these things,
the South maintained an easy superiority at Wash-
ington, and learned to measure the Free States by
men who represented their weakest, and sometimes
their least honorable, characteristics. We doubt if
the Slave States have sent many men to the Capi-
tol who could be bought, while it is notorious that
from the north of Mason and Dixon's line many
an M. C. has cleared, like a ship, for Washington
and a market. Southern politicians judge the
North by men without courage and without princi-
ple, who would consent to any measure if it could
be becomingly draped in generalities, or. if they
could evade the pillory of the yeas and nays. The
increasing drain of forensic ability toward the large
cities, with the m'istaken theory that residence in
the district was a necessaiy qualification in candi-
dates, tended still more to bring down the average
of Northern representation. The " claims " of a
section of the State, or even part of a district,
have been allowed to have weight, as if square
miles or acres were to be weighed against capacity
and experience. We attached too little imjjortance
to the social prestige which the South acquired and
maintained at the seat of government, forgetting
the necessary influence it would exert upon the in-
dependence of many of our own members. These
in turn brought home the new impressions they had
acquired, till the fallacy gradually became con-
viction of . a general superiority in the South,
though it had only so much truth in it as this,
that the people of that section sent their men of

THE REBELLION 137

character and position to Washington, and kept
them there till every year of experience added an
efficiency which more than made up for their
numerical inferiority. Meanwhile, our thinking
men allowed, whether from timidity or contempt,
certain demagogic fallacies to become axioms by
dint of repetition, chief among which was the
notion that a man was the better representative of
the democratic principle who had contrived to push
himself forward to popularity by whatever means,
and who represented the average instead of the
highest culture of the community, thus establishing
an aristocracy of mediocrity, nay, even of vulgarity,
in some less intelligent constituencies. The one
great strength of democracy is, that it opens all
the highways of power and station to the better
man, that it gives every man the chance of rising
to his natural level ; and its great weakness is in its
tendency to urge this principle to a vicious excess,
by pushing men forward into positions for which
they are unfit, not so much because they deserve
to rise, or because they have risen by great quali-
ties, as because they began low. Our quadrennial
change of offices, which turns public service into
a matter of bargain and sale instead of the reward
of merit and capacity, which sends men to Con-
gress to represent private interests in the sharing
of plunder, without regard to any claims of states-
manship or questions of national policy, as if the
ship of state were periodically captured by priva-
teers, has hastened our downward progress in the
evil way. By making the administration promi-

138 THE REBELLION

nent at the cost of the government, and by its
constant lesson of scramble and vicissitude, almost
obliterating the idea of orderly permanence, it has
tended in no small measure to make disruption
possible, for Mr. Lincoln's election threw the
weight of every office-holder in the South into the
scale of Secession. The war, however, has proved
that the core of Democracy was sound ; that the
people, if they had been neglectful of their duties,
or had misapprehended them, had not become
corrupt.

Mr. Greeley's volume is a valuable contribution
to our political history. Though for many years
well known as an ardent politician, and associated
by popular prejudice with that class of untried
social theories which are known by the name of
isms, his tone is singularly calm and dispassionate.
Disfigured here and there by a vulgarism which
adds nothing to its point, while it detracts from
its purity, his style is clear, straightforward,
and masculine, — a good business style, at once
bare of ornament and undiluted with eloquence.
Mr. Greeley's intimate knowledge of our politics
and instinctive sympathy with the far-reaching
scope of our institutions (for, as Beranger said of
himself, he is tout peuple) admirably fitted him
for his task. He is clear, concise, and accurate,
honestly striving after the truth, while his judi-
cious Preface shows that he appreciates fully the
difficulties that beset whoever seeks to find it. If
none of his readers will be surprised to find his
Work that of an able man, there are many who

THE REBELLION 139

would not expect it to be, as it is, that of a fair-
minded one. He writes without passion, making
due allowance for human nature in the South as
well as the North, and does not waste his strength,
as is the manner of fanatics, in fighting imaginary
giants while a real enemy is in the field. Tracing
Secession to its twin sources in slavery and the
doctrine of State Rights, and amply sustaining his
statements of fact by citations from contemporary
documents and speeches, he has made the plainest,
and for that very reason, we think, the strongest,
argument that has been put forth on the national
side of the question at issue in our civil war.
Above all, he is ready to allow those virtues in the
character of the Southern people whose existence
alone makes reunion desirable or possible. We
should not forget that the Negro is at least no more
our brother than they, for if he have fallen among
thieves who have robbed him of his manhood, they
have been equally enslaved by prejudice, ignorance,
and social inferiority.

It is not a little singular that, while slavery has
been for nearly eighty years the one root of bitter-
ness in our politics, the general knowledge of its
history should be so superficial. Abolitionism has
been so persistently represented as the disturbing
element which threatened the permanence of our
Union, that mere repetition has at last become
conviction with that large class of minds with
which a conclusion is valuable exactly in propor-
tion as it saves mental labor. Mr. Greeley's
chronological narrative is an excellent corrective of

140 THE REBELLION

this delusion, and his tough little facts, driven
firmly home, will serve to sjjike this parrot battery,
and render it harmless for the future, A consecu-
tive statement of such of the events in our history
as bear directly on the question of slavery, sepa-
rated from all secondary circumstances, shows two
things clearly : first, that the doctrine that there
was any national obligation to consider slaves as
merely property, or to hold our tongues about
slavery, is of comparatively recent origin ; and,
second, that there was a pretty uniform ebb of
anti-slavery sentiment for nearly sixty years after
the adoption of the Constitution, the young flood
beginning to set strongly in again after the full
meaning of the annexation of Texas began to be
understood at the North, but not fairly filling up
again even its own deserted channels till the South-
ern party succeeded in cutting the embankment of
the Missouri Compromise. Then at last it became
evident that the real danger to be guarded against
was the abolition of Freedom, and the reaction was
as violent as it was sudden.

In the early days of the Republic, slavery was
admitted to be a social and moral evil, only to be
justified by necessity ; and we think it more than
doubtful if South Carolina and Georgia could have
procured an extension of the slave-trade, had there
not been a general persuasion that the whole sys-
tem could not long maintain itself against the
growth of intelligence and humanity. As early as
1786 a resident of South Carolina wrote : " In
countries where slavery is encouraged, the ideas of

THE REBELLION 141

the people are of a peculiar cast ; the soul becomes
dark and narrow, and assumes a tone of savage
brutality. . . . The most elevated and liberal Car-
olinians abhor slavery ; they will not debase them-
selves by attempting to vindicate it." In 1789
William Pinckney said, in the Maryland Assem-
bly : " Sir, by the eternal principles of natural jus-
tice, no master in the State has a right to hold his
slave in bondage for a single hour." And he went
on to speak of slavery in a way which, fifty years
later, would have earned him a coat of tar and
feathers, if not a halter, in any of the Slave States,
and in some of the Free. In 1787 Delaware
passed an act forbidding the importation of " negro
or mulatto slaves into the State for sale or other-
wise ; " and three years later her courts declared a
slave, hired in Maryland and brought over the bor-
der, free under this statute. In 1790 there were
Abolition societies in Maryland and Virginia. In
1787 the Synod of the Presbyterian Church (since
called the General Assembly), in their pastoral
letter, " strongly recommended the abolition of
slavery, with the instruction of the negroes in liter-
ature and religion." We cite these instances to
show that the sacredness of slavery from discussion
was a discovery of much later date. So also was
the theory of its divine origin, — a theological
slough in which, we are sorry to say. Northern men
have shown themselves readiest to bemire them-
selves. It was when slave labor and slave breed=
ing began to bring large and rapid profits, by the
extension of cotton-culture consequent on the in-

142 THE REBELLION

vention of Whitney's gin, and the purchase of
Louisiana, that slavery was found to be identical
with religion, and, like Duty, a " daughter of the
voice of God." Till it became rich, it had been
content with claiming the municipal law for its
parent, but now it was easy to find heralds who
could blazon for it a nobler pedigree. Men who
looked upon dancing as sinful could see the very
beauty of holiness in a system like this ! It is
consoling to think that, even in England, it is little
more than a century since the divine right of kings
ceased to be defended in the same way, by mak-
ing the narrative portions of Scripture doctrinal.
Such strange things have been found in the Bible
that we are not without hope of the discovery of
Christianity there, one of these days.

The influence of the Southern States in the na-
tional politics was due mainly to the fact of their
having a single interest on which they were all
united, and, though fond of contrasting their more
chivalric character with the commercial spirit of
the North, it will be found that profit has been the
motive to all the encroachments of slavery. These
encroachments first assumed the offensive with the
annexation of Texas. In the admission of Mis-
souri, though the Free States might justly claim a
right to fix the political destiny of half the terri-
tory, bought with the common money of the nation,
and though events have since proved that the com-
promise of 1820 was a fatal mistake, yet, as sla-
very was already established there, the South might,
with some show of reason, claim to be on the

THE REBELLION 143

defensive. In one sense, it is true, every enlarge-
ment of the boundaries of slavery lias been an
aggression. For it cannot with any fairness be
assumed that the framers of the Constitution in-
tended to foreordain a perpetual balance of power
between the Free and the Slave States. If they
had, it is morally certain that they would not so
have arranged the basis of representation as to se-
cure to the South an unfair preponderance, to be
increased with every addition of territory. It is
much more probable that they expected the South-
ern States to fall more and more into a minority
of population and wealth, and were willing to
strengthen this minority by yielding it somewhat
more than its just share of power in Congress. In-
deed, it was mainly on the ground of the undue
advantage which the South would gain, politically,
that the admission of Missouri was distasteful to
the North.

It was not till after the Southern politicians had
firmly established their system of governing the
country by an alliance with the Democratic party
of the Free States, on the basis of a division of
offices, that they dreamed of making their " insti-
tution " the chief concern of the nation. As we
follow Mr. Greeley's narrative, we see them first
pleading for the existence of slavery, then for its
equality, and at last claiming for it an absolute do-
minion. Such had been the result of uniform con-
cession on the part of the North for the sake of
Union, such the decline of public spirit, that within
sixty years of the time when slaveholders like

144 THE REBELLION

George Mason of Virginia could denounce slavery
for its inconsistency with the principles on which
our Revolution had triumphed, the leaders of a
party at the North claiming a kind of patent in
the rights of man as an expedient for catching
Azotes were decrying the doctrines of the Declara-
tion of Independence as visionary and impractica-
ble. Was it the Slave or the Free States that had
just cause to be alarmed for their peculiar institu-
tions ? And, meanwhile, it had been discovered
that slavery was conservative ! It would protect a
country in which, almost every voter was a land-
holder from any sudden frenzy of agrarianism !
In the South it certainly conserved a privileged
class, and prevented a general debauch of educa-
tion ; but in the North it preserved nothing but
political corruption, subserviency, cant, and all
those baser qualities which unenviably distinguish
man from the brutes.

The nation had paid ten millions for Texas, an
extension of the area of freedom, as it was shame-
lessly called, which was to raise the value of slaves
in Virginia, according to Mr. Upshur, and did
raise it, fifty per cent. It was next proposed to
purchase Cuba for one hundred millions, or to take
it by force if Spain refused to sell. And all this
for fear of abolition. This was paying rather dearly
for our conservative element, it should seem, esjDe-
cially when it stood in need of such continual and
costly conservation. But it continued to be plain
to a majority of voters that democratic institutions
absolutely demanded a safeguard against demo-

THE REBELLION 145

d'acy, and that the only insurance was something
that must be itself constantly insured at more and
more ruinous rates. It continued to be plain also
that slavery was purely a matter of local concern,
though it could help itself to the national money,
force the nation into an unjust war, and stain its
reputation in Europe with the buccaneering prin-
ciples proclaimed in the Ostend Manifesto. All
these were plainly the results of the ever-increasing
and unprovoked aggressions of Northern fanati-
cism. To be the victims of such injustice seemed
not unpleasing to the South. Let us sum up the
items of their little bill against us. They de-
manded Missouri, — we yielded ; they could not
get along without Texas, — we re-annexed it ; they
must have a more stringent fugitive-slave law, —
we gulped it ; they must no longer be insulted with
the Missouri Compromise, — we repealed it. Thus
far the North had surely been faithful to the terms
of the bond. We had paid our pound of flesh
whenever it was asked for, and with fewer wry
faces, inasmuch as Brother Ham underwent the in-
cision. Not at all. We had only surrendered the
principles of the Revolution ; we must give up the
theory also, if we would be loyal to the Constitu-
tion.

We entirely agree with Mr. Greeley that the
quibble which would make the Constitution an
anti-slavery document, because the word slave is
not mentioned in it, cannot stand a moment if we
consider the speeches made in Convention, or the
ideas by which the action of its members was

146 THE REBELLION

guided. But the question of slavery in the Ter-
ritories stands on wholly different ground. We
know what the opinions of the men were who
drafted the Constitution, by their own procedure
in passing the Ordinance of 1787. That the
North should yield all claim to the common lands
was certainly a new interpretation of constitutional
law. And yet this was practically insisted on by
the South, and its denial was the more immediate
occasion of rupture between the two sections. But,
in our opinion, the real cause which brought the
question to the decision of war was the habit of
concession on the part of the North, and the inabil-
ity of its representatives to say No, when policy as
well as conscience made it imperative. Without
that confidence in Northern pusillanimity into
which the South had been educated by their long
experience of this weakness, whatever might have
been the secret wish of the leading plotters, they
would never have dared to rush their fellow-citizens
into a position where further compromise became
impossible.

Inextricably confused with the question of Sla-
very, and essential to an understanding of the mo-
tives and character of the Southern people as dis-
tinguished from their politicians, is the doctrine of
State Rights. On this topic also Mr. Greeley fur-
nishes all the data requisite to a full understanding
of the matter. The dispute resolves itself substan-
tially into this : whether the adoption of the Con-
stitution established a union or a confederacy, a
government or a league, a nation or a committee.

THE REBELLION 147

This also is a question which can only be deter-
mined by a knowledge of what the Convention of
1787 intended and accomplished, and the States
severally acceded to, — it being of course under-
stood that no State had a right, or at the time pre-
tended any right, to accept the Constitution with
mental reservations. On this subject we have am=
pie and unimpeachable testimony in the discussions
which led to the calling of the Convention, and the
debates which followed in the different conventions
of the States called together to decide whether the
new frame of government should be accepted or
rejected. The conviction that it was absolutely
necessary to remodel the Articles of Confederation
was wrought wholly by an experience of the inade-
quacy of the existing plan (under which a single
State could oppose its veto to a law of Congress),
from the looseness of its cohesion and its want of
power to compel obedience. The principle of coer-
cive authority, which was represented as so oppres-
sively unconstitutional by the friends of Secession
in the North as well as the South four years ago,
was precisely that which, as its absence had
brought the old plan to a dead-lock, was deemed
essential to the new. The formal proposal for a
convention, originated by Hamilton, was seconded
by one State after another. Here is a sample of
Virginian public sentiment at that time, from the
"instructions to their representatives," by several
constituencies : " Government without coercion is a
proposition at once so absurd and self -contradic-
tory that the idea creates a confusion of the under-

148 THE REBELLION

standing ; it is form without substance, at best a
body without a soul." Oliver Ellsworth, advoca-
ting the adoption of the Constitution in the Con-
vention of Connecticut, says : " A more energetic
system is necessary. The present is merely advi-
sory. It has no coercive power. Without this,
government is ineffectual, or rather is no govern-
ment at all." Earlier than this Madison had
claimed " an implied right of coercion" even for
the Confederate Congress, and Jefferson had gone
so far as to say that they possessed it " by the law
of nature." The leading objections to the new
Constitution were such as to show the general be-
lief that the State sovereignties were to be ab-
sorbed into the general government in all matters
of national concern. But the unhappy ingenuity
of Mr. Jefferson afterwards devised that theory of
strict construction which would enable any State
to profit by the powers of the Constitution so long-
as it was for her interest or convenience, and then,
by pleading its want of powers, to resolve the help-
less orgfanization once more into the incoherence of
confederacy. By this dexterous legerdemain, the
Union became a string of juggler's rings, which
seems a chain while it pleases the operator, but
which, by bringing the strain on the weak point
contrived for the purpose, is made to fall easily
asunder and become separate rings again. An
adroit use of this theory enabled the South to gain
one advantage after another by threatening dis-
union, and led naturally, on the first effective show
of resistance, to secession. But in order that the

THE REBELLION 149

threat might serve its purpose without the costly
necessity of putting it in execution, the doctrine of
State Rights was carefully inculcated at the South
by the same political party which made belief in
the value of the Union a fanaticism at the North.
On one side of Mason and Dixon's line it was law-
ful, and even praiseworthy, to steal the horse ; on
the other, it was a hanging matter to look over the
fence.

But in seeking for the cause of the rebellion,
with any fairness toward the Southern people,
and any wish to understand their motives and
character, it would be unwise to leave out of view
the fact that they have been carefully educated in
the faith that secession is not only their right, but
the only safeguard of their freedom. While it is
perfectly true that the great struggle now going on
is intrinsically between right and privilege, between
law and license, and while on the part of its leaders
the Southern revolt was a conspiracy against popu-
lar government, and an attempt to make a great
Republic into a mere convenient drudge for Slavery,
yet we should despair of our kind did we believe
that the rank and file of the Confederate armies
were consciously spending so much courage and
endurance on behalf of barbarism. It is more
consoling, as it is nearer the truth, to think that
they are fighting for what they have been taught to
believe their rights, and their inheritance as a free
people. The high qualities they have undoubtedly
shown in the course of the war, their tenacity,
patience, and discipline, show that, under better

150 THE REBELLION

influences, tliey may become woitliy to take their
part in advancing the true destinies of America.

It is yet too early to speculate with much con-
fidence on the remote consequences of the war.
One of its more immediate results has already
been to disabuse the Southern mind of some of
its most fatal misconceptions as to Northern char-
acter. They thought us a trading people, incajsable
of lofty sentiment, ready to sacrifice everything
for commercial advantage, — a heterogeneous rabble,
fit only to be ruled by a superior race. They are
not likely to make that mistake again, and must
have learned by this time that the best blood is
that which has in it most of the iron of purjjose
and constancy. War, the sternest and dearest
of teachers, has already made us a soberer and
older people on both sides. It has brought ques-
tions of government and policy home to us as never
before, and has made us feel that citizenship is a
duty to whose level we must rise, and not a privilege
to which we are born. The great principles of
humanity and politics, which had faded into the
distance of absti'action and history, have been for
four years the theme of earnest thought and dis-
cussion at every fireside and wherever two men
met together. They have again become living and
operative in the heart and mind of the nation.
What was before a mighty population is grown a
great country, united in one hope, inspired by one
thought, and welded into one power. But have
not the same influences produced the same result
in the South, and created there also a nation hope-

THE REBELLION 151

lessly alien and hostile? To a certain extent this
is true, but not in the unlimited way in which it
is stated by enemies in England, or politicians
at home, who would gladly put the people out of
heart, because they themselves are out of office.
With the destruction of slavery, the one object of
the war will have been lost by the Rebels, and its
one great advantage gained by the government.
Slavery is by no means dead as yet, whether
socially in its relation of man to man, or morally
in its hold on public opinion and its strength as
a political superstition. But there is no party at
the North, considerable in numbers or influence,
which could come into power on the platform of
making peace with the Rebels on their own terms.
No party can get possession of the government
which is not in sympathy with the temper of the
people, and the people, forced into war against
their will by the unprovoked attack of pro-slavery
bigotry, are resolved on pushing it to its legiti-
mate conclusion. War means now, consciously
with many, unconsciously with most, but inevita-
bly, abolition. Nothing can save slavery but peace.
Let its doom be once accomplished, or its recon-
struction (for reconstruction means nothing more)
clearly seen to be an impossibility, and the bond
between the men at the South who were willing to
destroy the Union, and those at the North who
only wish to save it, for the sake of slavery, will
be broken. The ambitious in both sections will
prefer their chances as members of a mighty
empire to what would always be secondary places

152 THE REBELLION

in two rival and hostile nations, powerless to com-
mand respect abroad or secure prosperity at home.
The masses of the Southern people will not feel
too keenly the loss of a kind of property in which
they had no share, while it made them underlings,
nor will they find it hard to reconcile themselves
with a government from which they had no real
cause of estrangement. If the war be waged man-
fully, as becomes a thoughtful people, without
insult or childish triumph in success, if we meet
opinion with wiser opinion, waste no time in
badgering prejvidice till it become hostility, and
attack slavery as a crime against the nation, and
not as individual sin, it will end, we believe, in
making us the most powerfvil and prosperous com-
munity the world ever saw. Our example and our
ideas will react more powerfully than ever on the
Old World, and the consequence of a rebellion,
aimed at the natural equality of all men, will be
to hasten incalculably the progress of equalization
over the whole earth. Above all. Freedom will
become the one absorbing interest of the whole
people, making us a nation alive from sea to sea
with the consciousness of a great purpose and
a noble destiny, and uniting us as slavery has
hitherto combined and made powerful the most
hateful aristocracy known to man.

McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN?

1864

The spectacle of an opposition waiting patiently
during several months for its principles to turn up
would be amusing in times less critical than these.
Nor was this the worst. If there might be persons
malicious enough to think that the Democratic
party could get along very well without principles,
all would admit that a candidate was among the
necessaries of life. Now, where not only immedi-
ate policy, but the very creed which that policy
is to embody, is dependent on circumstances, and
on circiunstances so shifting and doubtful as those
of a campaign, it is hard to find a representative
man whose name may, in some possible contingen-
cy, mean enough, without, in some other equally
possible contingency, meaning too much. The
problem was to hunt up somebody who, without
being anything in particular, might be anything
in general, as occasion demanded. Of course, the
professed object of the party was to save their
country, but which loas their countiy, and which
it would be most profitable to save, whether Amer-
ica or Secessia, was a question that Grant or
Sherman might answer one way or the other in
a single battle. If only somebody or something

15^ McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN?

would tell them whether they were for war or
peace ! The oracles were dumb, and all summer
long they looked anxiously out, like Sister Anne
from her tower, for the hero who should rescue
unhappy Columbia from the Republican Blue-
beard. Did they see a cloud of dust in the
direction of Richmond or Atlanta? Perhaps
Grant might be the man, after all, or even Sher-
man would answer at a pinch. When at last no
great man would come along, it was debated
whether it might not be better to nominate some
one without a record, as it is called, since a no-
body was clearly the best exponent of a party
that was under the unhappy necessity of being
still uncertain whether it had any recognizable
soul or not. Meanwhile, the time was getting
short and the public impatience peremptory.

" Under which king, bezonian ? Speak, or die ! "

The party found it alike inconvenient to do the
one or the other, and ended by a compromise
which might serve to keep them alive till after
election, but which was as far from any distinct
utterance as if their mouths were already full of
that official pudding which they hope for as the
reward of their amphibological patriotism. Since
it was not safe to be either for peace or war, they
resolved to satisfy every reasonable expectation
by being at the same time both and neither. If
you are warlike, there is General McClellan ; if
pacific, surely you must be suited with Mr. Pendle-
ton ; if neither, the combination of the two makes

McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN? 155

a tertium quid that is neither one thing nor
another. As the politic Frenchman, kissing the
foot of St. Peter's statue (recast out of a Jupiter),
while he thus did homage to existing prejudices,
hoped that the Thunderer would remember him
if he ever came into power again, so the Chicago
Convention compliments the prevailing warlike
sentiment of the country with a soldier, but holds
the civilian quietly in reserve for the future con-
tingencies of submission. The nomination is a
kind of political What-is-itf and voters are ex-
pected, without asking impertinent questions, to
pay their money and make their own choice as
to the natural history of the animal. Looked at
from the Northern side, it is a raven, the bird of
carnage, to be sure, but whitewashed and looking
as decorously dove-like as it can ; from the South-
ern, it is a dove, blackened over for the nonce,
but letting the olive-branch peep from under its
wing.

A more delicate matter for a convention, how-
ever, even than the selection of candidates, is the
framing of a platform for them to stand upon.
It was especially delicate for a gathering which
represented so many heterogeneous and almost
hostile elements. So incongruous an assemblage
has not been seen since the host of Peter the
Hermit, unanimous in nothing but the hope of
plunder and of reconquering the Holy Land of
office. Thei'e were War Democrats ready to unite
in peace resolutions, and Peace Democrats eager
to move the unanimous nomination of a war can-

156 McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN?

didate. To make the confusion complete, Mr.
Franklin Pierce, the dragooner of Kansas, writes
a letter in favor of free elections, and the ma-
ligners of New England propose a Connecticut
Yankee as their favorite nominee. The Conven-
tion was a rag-bag of dissent, made up of bits so
various in hue and texture that the managers must
have been as much puzzled to arrange them in any-
kind of harmonious pattern as the thrifty house-
v^^ife in planning her coverlet out of the parings
of twenty years' dressmaking. All the odds and
ends of personal discontent, every shred of private
grudge, every resentful rag snipped off by official
shears, scraps of Rebel gray and leavings of Union
blue, — all had been gathered, as if for the tailor-
ing of Joseph's coat ; and as a Chatham Street
broker first carefully removes all marks of previous
ownership from the handkerchiefs which find their
way to his counter, so the temporary chairman
advised his hearers, by way of a preliminary cau-
tion, to surrender their convictions. This, perhaps,
was superfluous, for it may be doubted whether
anybody present, except Mr. Fernando Wood, ever
legally had one, though Captain Rynders must
have brought many in his following who richly
deserved it. Mr. Belmont, being chosen to repre-
sent the Democracy of Mammon, did little more
than paraphrase in prose the speech of that fallen
financier in another rebellious conclave, as reported
by Milton : —

' ' How in safety best we may
Compose our present evils, with regard

McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN? 157

Of what we are and were, dismissing' quite
All thoughts of war."

But we turn from the momentary elevation of
the banker, to follow the arduous labors of the
Committee on Resolutions.^ The single end to be
served by the platform they were to construct was
that of a bridge over which their candidate might
make his way into the White House. But it must
be so built as to satisfy the somewhat exacting the-
ory of construction held by the Rebel emissaries at
Niagara, while at the same time no apprehensions
as to its soundness must be awakened in the loyal
voters of the party. The war plank would offend
the one, the State Rights plank excite the suspicion
of the other. The poor fellow in ^sop, with his
two wives, one pulling out the black hairs and the
other the white, was not in a more desperate sit-
uation than the Committee, — MacHeath, between
his two doxies, not more embarrassed. The result
of their labors was, accordingly, as narrow as the
pathway of the faithful into the Mahometan par-
adise, — so slender, indeed, that Blondin should
have been selected as the only candidate who could
hope to keep his balance on it, with the torrent of
events rushing ever swifter and louder below. It
might sustain the somewhat light Unionism of Mr.
Pendleton, but would General McClellan dare to
trust its fragile footing, with his Report and his
West Point oration, with his record, in short, under
his arm ? Without these documents General Mc-

^ The Platform of the Chicago Convention was published in the
public journals 80th August.

158 McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN?

Clellan is a nobody ; with them, before he can step
on a peace platform, he must eat an amount of leek
that would have turned the stomach of Ancient
Pistol himself. It remained to be seen whether he
was more in favor of being President than of his
own honor and that of the country.

The Resolutions of the Chicago Convention,
though they denounce various wrongs and evils,
some of them merely imaginary, and all the neces-
sary results of civil war, propose only one thing,
— surrender. Disguise it as you will, flavor it as
you will, call it what you will, umble-pie is umble-
pie, and nothing else. The people instinctively so
understood it. They rejected with disgust a plan
whose mere proposal took their pusillanimity for
granted, and whose acceptance assured their self-
contempt. At a moment when the Rebels would
be checkmated in another move, we are advised to
give them a knight and begin the game over again.
If they are not desperate, what chance of their ac-
cepting offers which they rejected with scorn before
the war began ? If they are not desperate, why is
their interest more intense in the result of our next
Presidential election than even in the campaign
at their very door ? If they were not desjDerate,
would two respectable men like Messrs. Clay and
Holcomb endure the society of George Saunders ?
General McClellan himself admitted the righteous-
ness of the war by volunteering in it, and, the war
once begun, the only real question has been whether
the principle of legitimate authority or that of
wanton insurrection against it should prevail, — -

McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN? 159

whether we should have for the future a gov-
ernment of opinion or of brute force. When the
rebellion began, its leaders had no intention to
dissolve the Union, but to reconstruct it, to make
the Montgomery Constitution and Jefferson Davis
supreme over the whole country, and not over a
feeble fragment of it. They knew, as we knew, the
weakness of a divided country, and our experience
of foreign governments during the last four years
has not been such as to lessen the apprehension on
that score, or to make the consciousness of it less
pungent in either of the contending sections. Even
now, Jefferson Davis is said to be in favor of a con-
federation between the Free and the Slave States.
But what confederation could give us back the
power and prestige of the old Union ? The expe-
rience of Germany surely does not tempt to imi-
tation. And in making overtures for peace, with
whom are we to treat ? Talking vaguely about
" the South," " the Confederate States," or " the
Southern people," does not help the matter ; for
the cat under all this meal is always the govern-
merit at Richmond, men with everything to expect
from independence, with much to hope from re-
construction, and sure of nothing but ruin from
reunion. And these men, who were arrogant as
eqiials and partners, are to be moderate in dictat-
ing terms as conquerors ! If the people understood
less clearly the vital principle which is at hazard in
this contest, if they were not fully persuaded that
Slavery and State Rights are merely the coun-
ters, and that free institutions are the real stake,

100 McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN ?

they might be dehided with the hojie of compro-
mise. But there are things that are not subjects
of compromise. The honor, the conscience, the
very soul of a nation, cannot be compromised with-
out ceasing to exist. When you propose to yield
a part, of them, there is already nothing left to
yield.

And yet this is all that the party calling itself
Democratic, after months of deliberation, after
four years in which to study the popular mind,
have to offer in the way of policy. It is neither
more nor less than to confess that they have no
real faith in popular self-government, for it is to
assume that the people have neither common nor
moral sense. General McClellan is to be put in
command of the national citadel, on condition that
he immediately offers to capitulate. To accept the
nomination on these terms was to lose, not only
his election, but his self-respect. Accordingly, no
sooner was the damaging effect of the platform
evident than it was rumored that he would consent
to the candidacy, but reject the conditions on
which alone it was offered. The singular uniform,
half Union -blue and half Confederate - gray, in
which it was proposed by the managers at Chicago
to drray the Democratic party, while it might be no
novelty to some camp-followers of the New York
delegation familiar with the rules of certain of our
public institutions, could hardly be agreeable to
one who had worn the livery of his country with
distinction. It was the scene of Petruchio and the
tailor over ao-ain : —

McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN? 161

Gen. McC. *' Why, what, i' th' Devil's name, tailor, call'st thou

this ? "
Committee. " You bid me make it orderly and well.

According to the fashion and the time."
Gen. McC. " Marry, I did; hut, if you be remembered,

I did not bid you mar it to the time.''''

Between the nomination and acceptance came
the taking of Atlanta, marring the coat to the time
with a vengeance, and suggesting the necessity of
turning it, — a sudden cure which should rank
among the first in future testimonials to the efficacy
of Sherman's lozenges. Had General McClellan
thrust the resolutions away from him with an hon-
est scorn, we should have nothing to say save in
commendation. But to accept them with his own
interpretation, to put upon them a meaning utterly
averse from their plain intention, and from that
understanding of them which the journals of his
own faction clearly indicated by their exultation or
their silence, according as they favored Confeder-
acy or Union, is to prepare a deception for one of
the parties to the bargain. In such cases, which
is commonly cheated, the candidate, or the people
who vote for him ? If the solemn and deliberate
language of resolutions is to be interpreted by con-
traries, what rule of hermeneutics shall we apply
to the letter of a candidate ? If the Convention
meant precisely what they did not say, have we
any assurance that the aspirant has not said pre-
cisely what he did not mean ? Two negatives may
constitute an affirmative, but surely the affirmation
of two contradictory propositions by parties to the
same bargain assures nothiag but misunderstanding.

162 McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN ?

The resolutions were adopted with but four dis-
senting votes ; their meaning was obvious, and the
whole country understood it to be peace on any
conditions that would be condescended to at Rich-
mond. If a nation were only a contrivance to pro-
tect men in gathering gear, if territory meant only
so many acres for the raising of crops, if power
were of worth only as a police to prevent or punish
crimes against person and property, then peace for
the mere sake of peace were the one desirable thing
for a people whose only history would be written
in its cash-book. But if a nation be a living unity,
leaning on the past by tradition, and reaching
toward the future by continued aspiration and
achievement, — if territory be of value for the rais-
ing of men formed to high aims and inspired to
uoble deeds by that common impulse which, spring-
ing from a national ideal, gradually takes authen-
tic shape in a national character, — if power be
but a gross and earthy bulk till it be ensouled with
thought and purpose, and of worth only as the
guardian and promoter of truth and justice among
men, — then there are misfortunes worse than war
and blessings greater than peace. At this moment,
not the Democratic party only, but the whole coun-
try, longs for peace, and the difference is merely as
to the price that shall be paid for it. Shall we pay
in degradation, and sue for a cessation of hostili-
ties which would make chaos the rule and order the
exception, which would not be j^eace, but toleration,
not the repose of manly security, but the helpless
quiet of political death ? Or shall we pay, in a

McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN? 163

little more present suffering, self-sacrifice, and ear-
nestness of purpose, for a peace that shall be as
lasting as honorable, won as it will be by the vic-
tory of right over wrong, and resting on the prom-
ise of God and the hope of man ? We believe the
country has already made up its mind as to the an-
swer, and will prove that a democracy may have as
clear a conception of its interests and duties, as
fixed a purpose in defending the one and fulfilling
the other, a will as united and prompt, as have
hitherto been supposed to characterize forms of
government where the interests were more personal
and the power less diffused.

Fortunately, though some of General McClellan's
indiscreet friends would make the coming election
to turn upon his personal quarrel with the admin-
istration, the question at issue between the two par-
ties which seek to shape the policy of the country
is one which manifestly transcends all lesser con-
siderations, and must be discussed in the higher
atmosphere of principle, by appeals to the reason,
and not the passions, of the people. However
incongruous with each other in opinion the candi-
dates of the Democratic party may be, in point of
respectability they are unexceptionable. It is true,
as one of the candidates represents war and the
other peace, and " when two men ride on one horse,
one must ride behind," that it is of some conse-
quence to know which is to be in the saddle and
which on the croup ; but we will take it for granted
that General McClellan will have no more delicacy
about the opinions of Mr. Pendleton than he has

164 McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN?

shown for those of the Convention. Still, we
shonlcl remember that the General may be impru-
dent enough to die, as General Harrison and Gen-
eral Taylor did before him, and that Providence
may again make " of our pleasant vices whips to
scourge us." We shall say nothing of the sectional
aspect of the nomination, for we do not believe
that what we deemed a pitiful electioneering cla-
mor, when raised against our own candidates four
years ago, becomes reasonable ai-gument in oppos-
ing those of our adversaries now. The point of
interest, then, is simply this : What can General
McClellan accomplish for the country which Mr.
Lincoln has failed to accomplish? In what re-
spect would their policies differ ? And, supposing
them to differ, which would be most consistent
with the honor and permanent well-being of the
nation ?

General McClellan, in his letter of acceptance,^
assumes that, in nominating liim, " the record of
his 25ublic life was kept in view " by the Conven-
tion. This will enable us to define with some cer-
tainty the points on which his policy would be
likely to differ from that of Mr. Lincoln. He
agrees with him that the war was a matter of ne-
cessity, not of choice. He agrees with him in as-
suming a right to emancipate slaves as a matter of
military expediency, differing only as to the method
and extent of its application, — a mere question of
judgment. He agrees with him as to the propriety
of drafting men for the public service, having, iu-

^ This letter was published in the public journals 9 September.

McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN? 165

deed, been the first to recommend a draft of men
whom he was to command himself. He agrees
with him that it is not only lawful, but politic, to
make arrests without the ordinary forms of law
where the public safety requires it, and himself
both advised and accomplished the seizure of an
entire Legislature. So far there is no essential
difference, and beyond this we find very little, ex-
cept that Mr. Lincoln was in a position where he
was called on to act with a view to the public wel-
fare, and General McClellan in one where he could
express abstract opinions, without the responsibility
of trial, to be used hereafter for partisan purposes
as a part of his " record." For example, just after
his failure to coerce the State of Virginia, he took
occasion to instruct his superiors in their duty, and,
among other things, stated his opinion that the war
" should not be a war looking to the subjugation of
the people of any State," but " should be against
armed forces and political organizations." The
whole question of the right to " coerce a sovereign
State " appears to have arisen from a confusion of
the relations of a State to its own internal policy
and to the general government. But a State is
certainly a " political oi-ganization," and, if we un-
derstand General McClellan rightly, he would co-
erce a State, but not the people of it, — a distinc-
tion which we hope he appreciates better than its
victims would be likely to do. We find here also
no diversity in principle between the two men,
only that Mr. Lincoln has been compelled to do,
while General McClellan has had the easier task

166 McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN?

of telling us wliat he would do. After the Penin-
sular campaign, we cannot but think that even the
latter would have been inclined to say, with the
wisest man that ever spoke in our tongue, "If to
do were as easy as to know what ' t were good to
do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cot-
tages princes' palaces."

The single question of policy on which General
McClellan differs from Mr. Lincoln, strij)ped of
the conventional phrases in which he drajDes it, is
Slavery. He can mean nothing else when he talks
of " conciliation and compromise," of receiving
back any State that may choose to return " with a
full guaranty of all its constitutional rights." If
it be true that a rose by any other name will smell
as sweet, it is equally true that there is a certain
species of toadstool that would be none the less dis-
gusting under whatever alias. Comj)romise and
conciliation are both excellent things in their own
way, and in the fitting time and place, but right
cannot be compromised without surrendering it,
and to attempt conciliation by showing the white
feather ends, not in reconcilement, but subjection.
The combined ignorance of the Seven Sleepers of
Ephesus as to what had been going on while they
were in their cavern would hardly equal that of
General McClellan alone as to the political history
of the country. In the few months between Mr.
Lincoln's election and the attack on Fort Sumter
we tried conciliation in every form, carrying it
almost to the vei"ge of ignominy. The Southern
leaders would have none of it. They saw in it

McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN? 167

only a confession of weakness, and were but the
more arrogant in their demand of all or nothing.
Compromise we tried for three quarters of a cen-
tury, and it brought us to where we are, for it was
only a fine name for cowardice, and invited aggres-
sion. And now that the patient is dying of this
drench of lukewarm water, Doctor Sangrado Mc-
Clellan gravely prescribes another gallon. If that
fail to finish him, why, give him a gallon more.

We wish it were as easy to restore General Mc-
Clellan's army to what it was before the Peninsular
campaign as he seems to think it is to put the
country back where it was at the beginning of the
war. The war, it is true, was undertaken to assert
the sovereignty of the Constitution, but the true
cause of quarrel was, not that the South denied
the supremacy of that instrument, but that they
claimed the sole right to interpret it, and to inter-
pret it in a sense hostile to the true ideal of the
country, and the clear interests of the people. But
circumstances have changed, and what was at first
a struggle to maintain the outward form of our
government has become a contest to preserve the
life and assert the supreme will of the nation.
Even in April, 1861, underneath that desire for
legal sanction common to our race, which expressed
itself in loyalty to the Constitution, there was an
instinctive feeling that the very germinating prin-
ciple of our nationality was at stake, and that unity
of territory was but another name for unity of
idea ; nay, was impossible without it, and undesir-
able if it were possible. It was not against the

168 McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN?

Constitution that the Rebels declared war, but
against free institutions ; and if they are beaten,
they must submit to the triumph of those institu-
tions. Their only chance of constitutional victory
was at the polls. They rejected it, though it was
in their grasp, and now it is for us, and not them,
to dictate terms. After all the priceless blood they
have shed, General McClellan would say to them,
" Come back and rule us." Mr. Lincoln says,
" Come back as equals, with every avenue of power
open to you that is open to us ; but the advantage
which the slaveholding interest wrung from the
weakness of the fathers your own madness has for-
feited to the sons."

General McClellan tells us that if the war had
been conducted " in accordance with those prin-
ciples which he took occasion to declare when in
active service, reconciliation would have been
easy." We suppose he refers to his despatch of
July 7th, 1862, when, having just demonstrated
his incapacity in the profession for which he had
been educated, he kindly offered to take the civil
policy of the country under his direction, expect-
ing, perhaps, to be more successful in a task for
which he was fitted neither by training nor ex-
perience. It is true he had already been spoken
of as a possible candidate for the Presidency, and
that despatch was probably written to be referred
to afterwards as part of the "record" to which
he alludes in his recent letter. Indeed, he could
have had no other conceivable object in so imper-
tinent a proceeding, for, up to that time, the war

McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN? 169

had been conducted on the very principles he re-
commended; nay, was so conducted for six months
longer, till it was demonstrated that reconciliation
was not to be had on those terms, and that victory
was incompatible with them. Mr. Lincoln was
forced into what General McClellan calls a radical
policy by the necessity of the case. The Rebels
themselves insisted on convincing him that his
choice was between that and failure. They boasted
that slavery was their bulwark and arsenal ; that,
while every Northern soldier withdrew so much
from the productive industry of the Union, every
fighting-man at the South could be brought into
the field, so long as the negroes were left to do
the work that was to feed and clothe him. Were
these negroes property? The laws of war jus-
tified us in appropriating them to our own use.
Were they population ? The laws of war equally
justified us in appealing to them for aid in a cause
which was their own more than it was ours. It
was so much the worse for the South that its pro-
perty was of a kind that could be converted from
chattels into men, and from men into soldiers, by
the scratch of a pen. The dragon's teeth were
not of our sowing, but, so far from our being under
any obligation not to take into our service the
army that sprang from them, it would have been
the extreme of weakness and folly not to do it.
If there be no provision in the Constitution for
emancipating the negroes, neither is there any for
taking Richmond ; and we give General McClellan
too much credit for intelligence and patriotism to

170 McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN?

suppose that if, when he asked for a hundred
thousand more men at Harrison's Bar, he had been
told that he could have black ones, he would have
refused them.

But supposing the very improbable chance of
General McClellan's election to the Presidency,
how would he set about his policy of conciliation ?
Would he disarm the colored troops? In favor
of prosecuting the war, as he declares himself to
be, this would only necessitate the draft of just
so many white ones in their stead. Would he
recall the proclamation of freedom? This would
only be to incite a servile insurrection. The
people have already suffered too much by General
McClellan's genius for retreat, to follow him in
another even more disastrous. But it is idle to
suppose that the Rebels are to be appeased by any
exhibition of weakness. Like other men, they
would take fresh courage from it. Force is the
only argument to which they are in a condition
to listen, and, like other men, they will yield to
it at last, if it prove irresistible. We cannot
think that General McClellan would wish to go
down to posterity as the President who tried to
restore the Union by the reenslaving of men who
had fought in its defence, and had failed in the
attempt. We doubt if he had any very clear con-
ception of what he meant by conciliation and com-
promise, except as a gloss to make the uncondi-
tional surrender doctrine of the Chicago Convention
a little less odious. If he meant more, if he hoped
to gain political strength by an appeal to the old

McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN? 171

pro-slavery prejudices of the country, he merely
shows the same unfortunate unconsciousness of the
passage of time, and the changes it brings with it,
that kept him in the trenches at Yorktown till his
own defeat became inevitable. Perhaps he believes
that the Rebels would accept from him what they
rejected with contempt when offered by Mr. Lin-
coln, — that they would do in compliment to him
what they refused to do from the interest of self-
preservation. If they did, it would simply prove
that they were in a condition to submit to terms,
and not to dictate them. If they listened to his
advances, their cause must be so hopeless that it
would be a betrayal of his trust to make them.
If they were obstinate, he would be left with the
same war on his hands which has forced Mr. Lin-
coln iuto all his measures, and which would not be
less exacting on himself. As a peace candidate he
might solicit votes with some show of reason, but
on a war platform we see no good reason for dis-
placing Mr. Lincoln in his favor except on personal
grounds; and we fear that our campaigns would
hardly be conducted with vigor under a President
whom the people should have invested with the
office by way of poultice for his bruised sensibilities
as a defeated connnander. Once in the Presidential
chair, with a country behind him insisting on a
re-establishment of the Union, and a rebellion be-
fore him deaf to all offers from a government that
faltered in its purposes, we do not see what form
of conciliation he would hit upon by which to per-
suade a refractory " political organization," except

172 McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN?

that practised by Hood's butclier when he was ad-
vised to try it on a drove of sheep.

" He seized upon the foremost wetlier,
And hugged and lugged and tugged him neck and crop,
Just nolens volens through the open shop
(If tails came off he did not care a feather) ;
Then, walking to the door and smiling grim.
He rubbed his forehead and his sleeve together, —
' There ! I 've coweiliatc^d him ! ' "

It is idle, however, to think of allaying angry
feeling or appeasing resentment while the war lasts,
and idler to hope for any permanent settlement,
except in the complete subjugation of the rebellion.
There are persons who profess to be so much shocked
at the word subjugation as to be willing that we
should have immediate experience of the thing, by
receiving back the Rebels on their own conditions.
Mr. Lincoln has already proclaimed an amnesty
wide enough to satisfy the demands of the most
exacting humanity, and they must reckon on a
singular stupidity in their hearers who impute fero-
cious designs to a man who cannot nerve his mind
to the shootino; of a deserter or the hang^ingf of a
spy. Mr. Lincoln, in our judgment, has shown
from the first the considerate wisdom of a practical
statesman. If he has been sometimes slow in mak-
ing up his mind, it has saved him the necessity of
being hasty to change it when once made up, and
he has waited till the gradual movement of the
popular sentiment shoiild help him to his conclu-
sions and sustain him iu them. To be moderate
and unimpassioned in revolutionary times that
kindle natures of more flimsy texture to a blaze

McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN? 173

may not be a romantic quality, but it is a rai^e
one, and goes with those massive understandings
on which a solid structure of achievement may be
reared, Mr. Lincoln is a long-headed and long=
purposed man, who knows when he is ready, — a
secret General McClellan never learned. That he
should be accused o£ playing Cromwell by the Op-
position, and reproached with not being Cromwel-
lian enough by the more ardent of his own sup-
porters, is proof enough that his action has been
of that firm but deliberate temper best suited to
troublous times and to constitutional precedents.
One of these accusations is the unworthy fetch of
a party at a loss for argument, and the other springs
from that exaggerated notion of the power of some
exceptional characters ujjon events which Carlyle
has made fashionable, but which was never even
approximately true except in times when there was
no such thing as public opinion, and of which there
is no record personal enough to assure us what we
are to believe. A more sincere man than Cromwell
never lived, yet they know little of his history who
do not know that his policy was forced to trim be-
tween Independents and Presbyterians, and that
he so far healed the wounds of civil war as to make
England dreaded without satisfying either. We
have seen no reason to change our opinion of Mr.
Lincoln since his wary scrupulousness won him the
applause of one party, or his decided action, when
he was at last convinced of its necessity, made him
the momentary idol of the other. We will not
call him a great man, for over-hasty praise is too

174 McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN f

apt to sour at last into satire, and greatness may
be trusted safely to history and the future ; but an
honest one we believe him to be, and with no aim
save to repair the glory and greatness of his country.
But fortunately it is no trial of the personal
merits of opposing candidates on which the next
election is to pronounce a verdict. The men set
up by the two parties represent principles utterly
antagonistic, and so far-reaching in their conse-
quences that all personal considerations and con-
temporary squabbles become as contemptible in
appearance as they always are in reality. How-
ever General McClellan may equivocate and strive
to hide himself in a cloud of ink, the man who
represents the party that deliberately and unani-
mously adopted the Chicago Platform is the prac-
tical embodiment of the j)i'iuciples contained in it.
By ignoring the platform, he seems, it is true, to
nominate himself ; but this, though it may be good
evidence of his own presumption, affords no tittle
of proof that he could have been successful at
Chicago without some distinct previous pledges of
what his policy would be. If no such pledges
were given, then the Convention nominated him
with a clear persuasion that he was the sort of
timber out of which tools are made. If they were
not given, does not the acceptance of the nomina-
tion under false pretences imply a certain sacrifice
of personal honor ? And will the honor of the
country be safe in the hands of a man who is
careless of his own ? General McClellan's election
will be understood by the South and by the whole

McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN? 175

country as an acknowledgment of the right of se-
cession, — an acknowledgment which will resolve
the United States into an association for insurance
against any risk of national strength and greatness
by land or sea. Mr. Lincoln, on the other hand,
is the exponent of principles vital to our peace,
dignity, and renown, — of all that can save Amer-
ica from becoming Mexico, and insure popular
freedom for centuries to come.

It is the merest electioneering trick to pay that
the war has been turned from its original intention,
as if this implied that a cheat had thereby been
put upon the country. The truth is, that the
popular understanding has been gradually enlight-
ened as to the real causes of the war, and, in con-
sequence of that enlightenment, a purpose has
grown up, defining itself slowly into clearer con-
sciousness, to finish the war in the only way that
will keep it finished, by rooting out the evil prin-
ciple from which it sprang. The country has been
convinced that a settlement which should stop
short of this would be nothing; more than a truce
favorable only to the weaker party in the struggle,
to the very criminals who forced it upon us. The
single question is, Shall we have peace by sub-
mission or by victory ? General McClellan's elec-
tion insures the one, Mr. Lincoln's gives us our
only chance of the other. It is Slavery, and not
the Southern people, that is our enemy; we must
conquer this to be at peace with them. With the
relations of the several States of the Rebel Con-
federacy to the Richmond government we have

176 McCLELLAN OR LINCOLN?

nothing to do ; but to say that, after being beaten
as foreign enemies, they are to resume their previ-
ous relations to our own government as if nothing
had happened, seems to us a manifest absurdity.
From whom would General McClellan, if elected
under his plan of conciliation, exact the penalties
of rebellion? The States cannot be punished, and
the only merciful way in which we can reach the
real criminals is by that very policy of emancipa-
tion whose efficacy is proved by the bitter opposi-
tion of all the allies of the Rebellion in the North.
This is a punishment which will not affect the in-
dependence of individual States, which will imjarove
the condition of the mass of the Southern popu-
lation, and which alone will remove the rock of
offence from the pathway of democratic institutions.
So long as slavery is left, there is antipathy be-
tween the two halves of the country, and the re-
currence of actual war will be only a question of
time. It is the nature of evil to be aggressive.
Without moral force in itself, it is driven, by the
necessity of things, to seek material props. It
cannot make peace with truth, if it would. Good,
on the other hand, is by its very nature peaceful.
Strong in itself, strong in the will of God and the
sympathy of man, its conquests are silent and be-
neficent as those of summer, warming into life,
and bringing to blossom and fruitage, whatever is
wholesome in men and the institutions of men.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

1864-1865.

There have been many painful crises since tlie
impatient vanity of South Carolina hurried ten
prosperous Commonwealths into a crime whose
assured retribution was to leave them either at the
mercy of the nation they had wronged, or of tlie
anarchy they had summoned but could not control,
when no thoughtful American opened his morning
paper without dreading to find that he had no
longer a country to love and honor. Whatever the
result of the convulsion whose first shocks were
beginning to be felt, there would still be enough
square miles of earth for elbow-room ; but that in-
effable sentiment made up of memory and hope, of
instinct and tradition, which swells every man's
heart and shapes his thought, though perhaps never
present to his consciousness, would be gone from
it, leaving it common earth and nothing more.
Men might gather rich crops from it, but that ideal
harvest of priceless associations would be reaped
no longer ; that fine virtue which sent up messages
of courage and security from every sod of it would
have evaporated beyond recall. We should be
irrevocably cut off from our past, and be forced to
splice the ragged ends of our lives upon whatever
new conditions chance might leave dangling for us.

178 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

We confess that we had our doubts at first
whether the patriotism of our people were not too
narrowly provincial to embrace the proportions of
national peril. We felt an only too natural dis-
trust of immense public meetings and enthusiastic
cheers.

That a reaction should follow the holiday en-
thusiasm with which the war was entered on, that
it should follow soon, and that the slackening of
public spirit should be proportionate to the previ-
ous over-tension, might well be foreseen by all who
had studied human nature or history. Men acting
gregariously are always In extremes. As they are
one moment capable of higher courage, so they are
liable, the next, to baser depression, and it is often
a matter of chance whether numbers shall multiply
confidence or discouragement. Nor does deception
lead more surely to distrust of men than self-de-
ception to suspicion of principles. The only faith
that wears well and holds its color in all weathers
is that which is woven of conviction and set with
the sharp mordant of experience. Enthusiasm is
good material for the orator, but the statesman
needs something more durable to work in, — must
be able to rely on the deliberate reason and conse-
quent firmness of the people, without which that
presence of mind, no less essential in times of
moral than of material peril, will be wanting at the
critical moment. Would this fervor of the Free
States hold out ? Was it kindled by a just feeling
of the value of constitutional liberty ? Had it
body enough to withstand the inevitable dampen-

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 179

ing of checks, reverses, delays ? Had our popula-
tion intelligence enough to comprehend that the
choice was between order and anarchy, between
the equilibrium of a government by law and the
tussle of misrule by pronunciamiento ? Could a
war be maintained without the ordinary stimulus
of hatred and plunder, and with the impersonal
loyalty of principle ? These were serious questions,
and with no precedent to aid in answering them.

At the beginning of the war there was, indeed,
occasion for the most anxious apprehension. A
President known to be infected with the political
heresies, and suspected of sympathy with the trea-
son, of the Southern conspirators, had just sur-
rendered the reins, we will not say of power, but of
chaos, to a successor known only as the representa-
tive of a party whose leaders, with long training in
opposition, had none in the conduct of affairs ; an
empty treasury was called on to supply resources
beyond precedent in the history of finance ; the
trees were yet growing and the iron unmined with
which a navy was to be built and armored ; offi-
cers without discipline were to make a mob into an
army ; and, above all, the public opinion of Eu-
rope, echoed and reinforced with every vague hint
and every specious argument of despondency by
a powerful faction at home, was either contemptu-
ously sceptical or actively hostile. It would be
hard to over-estimate the force of this latter ele-
ment of disintegration and discouragement among
a people where every citizen at home, and every
soldier in the field, is a reader of newspapers.

180 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

The pedlers of rumor in the Nortli were the most
effectiv^e allies of the rel)ellion. A nation can be
liable to no more insidious treachery tlian thuit of
the telegraph, sending hourly its electric thrill of
panic along the remotest nerves of the community,
till the excited imagination makes every real dan-
ger loom heightened with its unreal double.

And even if we look only at more i)ali)able diffi-
culties, the problem to be solved by our civil war
was so vast, both in its immediate relations and
its future consequences ; the conditions of its solu-
tion were so intricate and so greatly dependent on
incalculable and uncontrollable contingencies ; so
many of the data, whether for hope or fear, were,
from their noveltj^ incapable of arrangement un-
der any of the categories of historical precedent,
that there were moments of crisis when the firmest
believer in the strength and sufficiency of the dem-
ocratic theory of government might well hold his
breath in vague apprehension of disaster. Our
teachers of political philosoph}^, solemnly arguing
from the precedent of some pett}- Grecian, Italian,
or Flemish city, whose long periods of aristocracy
were broken now and then by awkward paren-
theses of mob, had always taught us that democra-
cies were incapable of the sentiment of loyalty, of
concentrated and prolonged effort, of far-reaching
conceptions ; were absorbed in material interests ;
impatient of regular, and much more of exceptional
restraint ; had no natural nucleus of gravitation,
nor any forces but centrifugal ; were always on the
verge of civil war, and slunk at last into the nat-

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 181

ural almshouse of bankrupt popular government, a
military despotism. Here was indeed a dreary out-
look for persons who knew democracy, not by rub-
bing shoulders with it lifelong, but merely from
books, and America only by the report of some
fellow-Briton, who, having eaten a bad dinner or
lost a carpet-bag here, had written to the " Times "
demanding redress, and drawing a mournful in-
ference of democratic instability. Nor were men
wanting among ourselves who had so steeped their
brains in London literatui'e as to mistake Cockney-
ism for European culture, and contempt of their
country for cosmopolitan breadth of view, and who,
owing all they had and all they were to democracy,
thought it had an air of high-breeding to join in
the shallow epicedium that our bubble had burst.

But beside any disheartening influences which
might affect the timid or the despondent, there were
reasons enough of settled gravity against any over-
confidence of hope. A war — which, whether we
consider the expanse of the territory at stake, the
hosts brought into the field, or the reach of the
principles involved, may fairly be reckoned the most
momentous of modern times — was to be waged by
a people divided at home, unnerved by fifty years of
peace, under a chief magistrate without experience
and without reputation, whose every measure was
sure to be cunningly hampered by a jealous and
unscrupulous minority, and who, while dealing with
unheard-of complications at home, must soothe a
hostile neutrality abroad, waiting only a pretext to
become war. All this was to be done without

182 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

warning and without preparation, while at the same
time a social revolution was to be accomplished in
the political condition of four millions of people,
by softening the prejudices, allaying the fears, and
gradually obtaining the cooperation, of their un-
willing liberators. Surely, if ever there were an
occasion when the heightened imagination of the
historian might see Destiny visibly intervening in
human affairs, here was a knot worthy of her
shears. Never, perhajDs, was any system of gov-
ernment tried by so continuous and searching a
strain as ours during the last three years ; never
has any shown itself stronger ; and never could that
strength be so directly traced to the virtue and in-
telligence of the people, — to that general enlight-
enment and prompt efficiency of public opinion
possible only under the influence of a political
framework like our own. We find it hard to
understand how even a foreigner should be blind
to the grandeur of the combat of ideas that has
been going on here, — to the heroic energy, per-
sistency, and self-reliance of a nation proving that
it knows how much dearer greatness is than mere
power ; and we own that it is impossible for us to
conceive the mental and moral condition of the
American who does not feel his spirit braced and
heightened by being even a spectator of such qual-
ities and achievements. That a steady purpose
and a definite aim have been given to the jarring
forces which, at the beginning of the war, spent
themselves in the discussion of schemes which could
only become operative, if at all, after the war was

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 183

over ; that a popular excitement has been slowly
intensified into an earnest national will ; that a
somewhat impracticable moral sentiment has been
made the unconscious instrument of a practical
moral end ; that the treason of covert enemies, the
jealousy of rivals, the unwise zeal of friends, have
been made not only useless for mischief, but even
useful for good ; that the conscientious sensitive-
ness of England to the horrors of civil conflict has
been prevented from complicating a domestic with
a foreign war ; — all these results, any one of which
might suffice to prove greatness jn a ruler, have
been mainly due to the good sense, the good-humor,
the sagacity, the large - mindedness, and the un-
selfish honesty of the unknown man whom a blind
fortune, as it seemed, had lifted from the crowd to
the most dangerous and difficult eminence of mod-
ern times. It is by presence of mind in untried
emergencies that the native metal of a man is
tested ; it is by the sagacity to see, and the fearless
honesty to admit, whatever of truth there may be
in an adverse opinion, in order more convincingly
to expose the fallacy that lurks behind it, that a
reasoner at length gains for his mere statement of
a fact the force of argument ; it is by a wise fore-
cast which allows hostile combinations to go so far
as by the inevitable reaction to become elements of
his own power, that a politician proves his genius
for state-craft ; and especially it is by so gently
guiding public sentiment that he seems to follow it,
by so yielding doubtful points that he can be firm
without seeming obstinate in essential ones, and

184 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

thus gain the advantages of compromise without the

weakness of concession ; by so instinctively com-
prehending the temper and prejudices of a people
as to make them gradually conscious of the supe-
rior wisdom of his freedom from temper and preju-
dice, — it is by qualities such as these that a mag-
istrate shows himself worthy to be chief in a
commonwealth of freemen. And it is for qualities
such as these that we firmly believe History will
rank Mr. Lincoln among the most prudent of
statesmen and the most successfid of riders. If
we wish to appreciate him, we have only to con-
ceive the inevitable chaos in which we shoidd now
be weltering, had a weak man or an unwise one
been chosen in his stead.

" Bare is back," says the Norse proverb, " with-
out brother behind it" ; and this is, by analogy, true
of an elective magistracy. The hereditary ruler
in any critical emergency may reckon on the in-
exhaustible resources of prestige, of sentiment, of
superstition, of dependent interest, while the new
man must slowly and painfully create all these out
of the unwilling material around him, by superior-
ity of character, by patient singleness of purjjose,
by sagacious presentiment of popular tendencies
and instinctive S3anpathy with the national charac-
ter. Mr. Lincoln's task was one of peculiar and
exceptional difficulty. Long habit had accustomed
the American people to the notion of a party in
power, and of a President as its creature and or-
gan, while the more vital fact, that the executive
for the time being represents the abstract idea of

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 185

government as a jjermanent principle superior to
all party and all private interest, had gradually be-
come unfamiliar. They had so long seen the pub-
lic policy more or less directed by views of party,
and often even of personal advantage, as to be
ready to suspect the motives of a chief magisti'ate
compelled, for the first time in our history, to feel
himself the head and hand of a great nation, and
to act upon the fundamental maxim, laid down by
all publicists, that the first duty of a government is
to defend and maintain its own existence. Accord-
ingly, a powerful weapon seemed to be put into the
hands of the opposition by the necessity imder
which the administration found itself of applying
this old truth to new relations. Nor were the op-
position his only nor his most dangerous oppo-
nents.

The Republicans had carried the country upon
an issue in which ethics were more directly and
visibly mingled with politics than usual. Their
leaders were trained to a method of oratory which
relied for its effect rather on the moral sense than
the understanding. Their arguments were drawn,
not so much from experience as from general prin-
ciples of right and wrong. When the war came,
their system continued to be applicable and effec-
tive, for here again the reason of the people was to
be reached and kindled through their sentiments.
It was one of those periods of excitement, gather-
ing, contagious, universal, which, while they last,
exalt and clarify the minds of men, giving to the
mere words country, human rights, democracy, a

186 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

meaning and a force beyond that of sober and logi-
cal argument. They were convictions, maintained
and defended by the supreme logic of passion.
That penetrating fire ran in and roused those pri-
mary instincts that make their lair in the dens and
caverns of the mind. What is called the great
popular heart was awakened, that indefinable some-
thing which may be, according to circumstances,
the highest reason or the most brutish unreason.
But enthusiasm, once cold, can never be warmed
over into anything better than cant, — and phrases,
when once the inspiration that filled them with
beneficent power has ebbed away, retain only that
semblance of meaning which enables them to sup-
plant reason in hasty minds. Among the lessons
taught by the French Revolution there is none sad-
der or more striking than this, that you may make
everything else out of the passions of men except a
political system that will work, and that there is
nothing so pitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sin-
cerity formulated into dogma. It is always demor-
alizing to extend the domain of sentiment over
questions where it has no legitimate jurisdiction ;
and perhaps the severest strain upon Mr. Lincoln
was in resisting a tendency of his own supporters
which chimed with his own private desires, while
wholly opposed to his convictions of what would be
wise policy.

The change which three years have brought
about is too remarkable to be passed over without
comment, too weighty in its lesson not to be laid
to heart. Never did a President enter upon office

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 187

with less means at his cominand, outside his own
strength of heart and steadiness of understanding,
for inspiring confidence in the people, and so win-
ning it for himself, than Mr. Lincoln. All that
was known of him was that he was a good stump-
speaker, nominated for his availability, — that is,
because he had no history, — and chosen by a party
with whose more extreme opinions he was not in
sympathy. It might well be feared that a man past
fifty, against whom the ingenuity of hostile parti-
sans could rake up no accusation, must be lacking
in manliness of character, in decision of principle,
in strength of will ; that a man who was at best
only the representative of a party, and who yet did
not fairly represent even that, would fail of politi-
cal, much more of popular, support. And cer-
tainly no one ever entered upon office with so few
resources of power in the past, and so many mate-
rials of weakness in the present, as Mr. Lincoln.
Even in that half of the Union which acknow-
ledged him as President, there was a large and at
that time dangerous minority, that hardly admitted
his claim to the office, and even in the party that
elected him there was also a large minority that
suspected him of being secretly a communicant
with the church of Laodicea. All that he did was
sure to be virulently attacked as ultra by one side ;
all that he left undone, to be stigmatized as proof
of lukewarmness and backsliding by the other.
Meanwhile, he was to carry on a truly colossal
war by means of both ; he was to disengage the
country from diplomatic entanglements of unpre-

188 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

cedented peril undisturbed by the Help or the hin-
drance of either, and to win from the crowning
dangers of his administration, in the confidence of
the people, the means of his safety and their own.
He has contrived to do it, and perhaps none of our
Presidents since Washington has stood so firm in
the confidence of the people as he does after three
years of stormy administration.

Mr. Lincoln's policy was a tentative one, and
rightly so. He laid down no programme which
must compel him to be either inconsistent or un-
wise, no cast-iron theorem to which circumstances
must be fitted as they rose, or else be useless to his
ends. He seemed to have chosen Mazarin's motto,
Z/e temps et moi. The moi, to be sure, was not
very prominent at first ; but it has grown more and
more so, till the world is beginning to be persuaded
that it stands for a character of marked individual-
ity and capacity for affairs. Time was his prime-
minister, and, we began to think, at one period, his
general-in-chief also. At first he was so slow that
he tired out all those who see no evidence of pro-
gress but in blowing up the engine ; then he was
so fast, that he took the breath away from those
who think there is no getting on safely while there
is a spark of fire under the boilers. God is the
only being who has time enough; but a prudent
man, who knows how to seize occasion, can com-
monly make a shift to find as much as he needs.
Mr. Lincoln, as it seems to us in reviewing his ca-
reer, though we have sometimes in our impatience
thought otherwise, has always waited, as a wise

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 189

man should, till the right moment brought up all
his reserves. Semper nocuit differre paratis is
a sound axiom, but the really efficacious man will
also be sure to know when he is not ready, and be
firm against all persuasion and reproach till he is.

One would be apt to think, from some of the crit-
icisms made on Mr. Lincoln's course by those who
mainly agree with him in principle, that the chief
object of a statesman should be rather to proclaim
his adhesion to certain doctrines, than to achieve
their triumph by quietly accomplishing his ends.
In our opinion, there is no more unsafe politician
than a conscientiously rigid doctrinaire, nothing
more sure to end in disaster than a theoretic scheme
of policy that admits of no pliability for contingen-
cies. True, there is a popular image of an impos-
sible He, in whose plastic hands the submissive
destinies of mankind become as wax, and to whose
commanding necessity the toughest facts yield with
the graceful pliancy of fiction ; but in real life we
commonly find that the men who control circum-
stances, as it is called, are those who have learned
to allow for the influence of their eddies, and have
the nerve to turn them to account at the happy
instant. Mr. Lincoln's perilous task has been to
carry a rather shaky raft through the rapids, mak-
ing fast the unrulier logs as he could snatch oppor-
tunity, and the country is to be congratulated that
he did not think it his duty to run straight at all
hazards, but cautiously to assure himself with his
setting-pole where the main current was, and keep
steadily to that. He is still in wild water, but we

190 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

have faitli that his skill and sureness of eye will
bring him out right at last.

A curious, and, as we think, not inapt parallel
might be drawn between Mr. Lincoln and one of the
most striking figures in modern history, — Henry
lY. of France. The career of the latter may be
more picturesque, as that of a daring captain al-
ways is ; but in all its vicissitudes there is nothing
more romantic than that sudden change, as by a
i-ub of Aladdin's lamp, from the attorney's office
in a country town of Illinois to the helm of a great
nation in times like these. The analogy between
the characters and circumstances of the two men is
in many respects singularly close. Succeeding to
a rebellion rather than a crown, Henry's chief mar
terial dependence was the Huguenot party, whose
doctrines sat upon him with a looseness distasteful
certainly, if not suspicious, to the more fanatical
among them. King only in name over the greater
part of France, and with his capital barred against
him, it yet gradually became clear to the more
far-seeing even of the Catholic party that he was
the only centre of order and legitimate authority
round which France could reorganize itself. While
preachers who held the divine right of kings made
the churches of Paris ring with declamations in
favor of democracy rather than submit to the her-
etic dog of a Bearnois, — much as our soi-disant
Democrats have lately been preaching the divine
right of slavery, and denouncing the heresies of the
Declaration of Independence, — Henry bore both
parties in hand till he was convinced that only one

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 191

course of action could possibly combine his own in-
terests and those of France. Meanwhile the Prot-
estants believed somewhat doubtfully that he was
theirs, the Catholics hoped somewhat doubtfully
that he would be theirs, and Henry himseK turned
aside remonstrance, advice, and curiosity alike with
a jest or a proverb (if a little high, he liked them
none the worse), joking continually as his manner
was. We have seen Mr. Lincoln contemptuously
compared to Sancho Panza by persons incapable
of appreciating one of the deepest pieces of wisdom
in the profoundest romance ever written ; namely,
that, while Don Quixote was incomparable in the-
oretic and ideal statesmanship, Sancho, with his
stock of proverbs, the ready money of human expe-
rience, made the best possible practical governor.
Henry IV. was as full of wise saws and modern in-
stances as Mr. Lincoln, but beneath all this was
the thoughtful, practical, humane, and thoroughly
earnest man, around whom the fragments of France
were to gather themselves till she took her place
again as a planet of the first magnitude in the Eu-
ropean system. In one respect Mr. Lincoln was
more fortunate than Henry. However some may
think him wanting in zeal, the most fanatical can
find no taint of apostasy in any measure of his, nor
can the most bitter charge him with being influ-
enced by motives of personal interest. The lead-
ing distinction between the policies of the two is
one of circumstances. Henry went over to the
nation ; Mr. Lincoln has steadily drawn the nation
over to him. One left a united France ; the other,

192 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

we liope and believe, will leave a reunited America.
We leave our readers to trace the further points of
difference and resemblance for themselves, merely
suggesting a general similarity which has often oc-
curred to us. One only point of melancholy inter-
est we will allow ourselves to touch upon. That
Mr. Lincoln is not handsome nor elegant, we learn
from certain English tourists who would consider
similar revelations in regard to Queen Victoria as
thoroughly American in their want of bienseance.
It is no concern of ours, nor does it affect his fit-
ness for the high place he so worthily occupies;
but he is certainly as fortunate as Henry in the
matter of good looks, if we may trust contempo-
rary evidence. Mr. Lincoln has also been re-
proached with Americanism by some not unfriendly
British critics ; but, with all deference, we cannot
say that we like him any the worse for it, or see in
it any reason why he should govern Americans the
less wisely.

People of more sensitive organizations may be
shocked, but we are glad that in this our true war
of independence, which is to free us forever from
the Old World, we have had at the head of our
affairs a man whom America made, as God made
Adam, out of the very earth, unancestried, unpriv-
ileged, unknown, to show us how much truth, how
much magnanimity, and how much state-craft await
the caU of opportunity in simple manhood when
it believes in the justice of God and the worth of
man. Conventionalities are all very well in their
proper place, but they shrivel at the touch of nature

ABRAHAAf LINCOLN 193

like stubble in the fire. The genius that sways a
nation by its arbitrary will seems less august to
us than that which multiplies and reinforces itself
in the instincts and convictions of an entire people.
Autocracy may have something in it more melodra-
matic than this, but falls far short of it in himian
value and interest.

Experience would have bred in us a rooted dis-
trust of improvised statesmanship, even if we did
not believe poHtics to be a science, which, if it can-
not always command men of special aptitude and
great powers, at least demands the long and steady
application of the best powers of such men as it
can command to master even its first principles. It
is curious, that, in a country which boasts of its
intelligence, the theory should be so generally held
that the most complicated of human contrivances,
and one which every day becomes more complica-
ted, can be worked at sight by any man able to
talk for an hour or two without stopping to think.

Mr. Lincoln is sometimes claimed as an example
of a ready-made ruler. But no case covdd well be
less in point ; for, besides that he was a man of
such fair-mindedness as is always the raw material
of wisdom, he had in his profession a training pre-
cisely the opposite of that to which a partisan is
subjected. His experience as a lawyer compelled
him not only to see that there is a principle under-
lying every phenomenon in human affairs, but that
there are always two sides to every question, both
of which must be fully understood in order to un-
derstand either, and that it is of greater advantage

194 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

to an advocate to appreciate tlie strengtli than the
weakness of his antagonist's position. Nothing is
more remarkable than the unerring tact with which,
in his debate with Mr. Douglas, he went straight
to the reason of the question ; nor have we ever
had a more striking lesson in political tactics than
the fact, that, opposed to a man exceptionally
adroit in using popular prejudice and bigotry to his
purpose, exceptionally unscrupulous in appealing
to those baser motives that turn a meeting of citi-
zens into a mob of barbarians, he should yet have
won his case before a jury of the people. Mr. Lin-
coln was as far as possible from an impromptu pol-
itician. His wisdom was made up of a knowledge
of things as well as of men ; his sagacity resulted
from a clear perception and honest acknowledg-
ment of difficulties, which enabled him to see that
the only durable triumph of political opinion is
based, not on any abstract right, but upon so much
of justice, the highest attainable at any given mo-
ment in human affairs, as may be had in the bal-
ance of mutual concession. Doubtless he had an
ideal, but it was the ideal of a practical statesman,
— to aim at the best, and to take the next best, if
he is lucky enough to get even that. His slow, but
singularly masculine, intelligence taught him that
precedent is only another name for embodied ex-
perience, and that it counts for even more in the
guidance of communities of men than in that of the
individual life. He was not a man who held it
good public economy to pull down on the mere
chance of rebuilding better. Mr. Lincoln's faith in

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 195

God was qualified by a very well-founded distrust
of the wisdom of man. Perhaps it was his want of
self-confidence that more than anything' else won
him the unlimited confidence of the people, for
they felt that there would be no need of retreat
from any position he had deliberately taken. The
cautious,. but steady, advance of his policy during
the war was like that of a Roman army. He left
behind him a firm road on which public confidence
could follow ; he took America with him where he
went ; what he gained he occupied, and his ad-
vanced posts became colonies. The very homeliness
of his genius was its distinction. His kingship was
conspicuous by its workday homespun. Never was
ruler so absolute as he, nor so little conscious of it ;
for he was the incarnate common-sense of the peo-
ple. With all that tenderness of nature whose
sweet sadness touched whoever saw him with some-
thing of its own pathos, there was no trace of sen-
timentalism in his speech or action. He seems to
have had but one rule of conduct, always that of
practical and successful politics, to let himself be
guided by events, when they were sure to bring
him out where he wished to go, though by what
seemed to unpractical minds, which let go the pos-
sible to grasp at the desirable, a longer road.

Undoubtedly the highest function of statesman-
ship is by degrees to accommodate the conduct of
communities to ethical laws, and to subordinate the
conflicting self-interests of the day to higher and
more permanent concerns. But it is on the under-
standing, and not on the sentiment, of a nation that

196 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

all safe legislation must be based. Voltaire's say-
ing, that " a consideration of petty circumstances
is the tomb of great things," may be true of indi-
vidual men, but it certainly is not true of govern-
ments. It is by a multitude of such considerations,
each in itself trifling, but all together weighty, that
the framers of policy can alone divine what is
practicable and therefore wise. The imputation of
inconsistency is one to which every sound politician
and every honest thinker must sooner or later sub-
ject himself. The foolish and the dead alone never
change their opinion. The course of a great states-
man resembles that of navigable rivers, avoiding
immovable obstacles with noble bends of conces-
sion, seeking the broad levels of opinion on which
men soonest settle and longest dwell, following and
marking the almost imperceptible slopes of na-
tional tendency, yet always aiming at direct ad-
vances, always recruited from sources nearer heaven,
and sometimes bursting open paths of progress and
fruitful human commerce through what seem the
eternal barriers of both. It is loyalty to great
ends, even though forced to combine the small and
opposing motives of selfish men to accomplish
them ; it is the anchored cling to solid principles of
duty and action, which knows how to swing with
the tide, but is never carried away by it, — that we
demand in public men, and not obstinacy in preju-
dice, sameness of policy, or a conscientious persis-
tency in what is impracticable. For the imprac-
ticable, however theoretically enticing, is always
politically unwise, sound statesmanship being the

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 197

application of that prudence to the public business
which is the safest guide in that of private men.

No doubt slavery was the most delicate and em-
barrassing question with which Mr. Lincoln was
called on to deal, and it was one which no man in
his position, whatever his opinions, could evade ;
for, though he might withstand the clamor of par-
tisans, he must sooner or later yield to the persistent
importunacy of circumstances, which thrust the
problem upon him at every turn and in every
shape.

It has been brought against us as an accusation
abroad, and repeated here by people who measure
their country rather by what is thought of it than
by what it is, that our war has not been distinctly
and avowedly for the extinction of slavery, but a
war rather for the preservation of our national
power and greatness, in which the emancipation of
the negro has been forced upon us by circumstances
and accepted as a necessity. We are very far from
denying this ; nay, we admit that it is so far true
that we were slow to renounce our constitutional
obligations even toward those who had absolved us
by their own act from the letter of our duty. We
are speaking of the government which, legally in-
stalled for the whole country, was bound, so long
as it was possible, not to overstep the limits of or-
derly prescription, and could not, without abnega-
ting its own very nature, take the lead in making
rebellion an excuse for revolution. There were,
no doubt, many ardent and sincere persons who
seemed to think this as simple a thing to do as to

198 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

lead off a Virginia reel. They forgot what should
be forgotten least of all in a system like ours, that
the administration for the time being represents
not only the majority which elects it, but the mi-
nority as well, — a minority in this case powerful,
and so little ready for emancipation that it was op-
posed even to war. Mr. Lincoln had not been
chosen as general agent of an antislavery society,
but President of the United States, to perform cer-
tain functions exactly defined by law. Whatever
were his wishes, it was no less duty than policy to
mark out for himself a line of action that would
not further distract the country, by raising before
their time questions which plainly would soon
enough compel attention, and for which ever}^ day
was making the answer more easy.

Meanwhile he must solve the riddle of this new
Sphinx, or be devoured. Though Mr. Lincoln's
policy in this critical affair has not been such as to
satisfy those who demand an heroic treatment for
even the most trifling occasion, and who will not
cut their coat according to their cloth, unless they
can borrow the scissors of Atropos, it has been at
least not unworthy of the long-headed king of
Ithaca. Mr. Lincoln had the choice of Bassanio
offered him. Which of the three caskets held the
prize that was to redeem the fortunes of the coun-
try ? There was the golden one whose show}' spe-
ciousness might have tempted a vain man ; tlie sil-
ver of compromise, which might have decided the
choice of a merely acute one ; and the leaden, —
dull and homely looking, as prudence always is, —

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 199

yet with something about it sure to attract the eye
of practical wisdom. Mr. Lincoln daUied with his
decision perhaps longer than seemed needful to
those on whom its awful responsibility was not to
rest, but when he made it, it was worthy of his
cautious but sure-footed understanding. The moral
of the Sphinx-riddle, and it is a deep one, lies in
the childish simplicity of the solution. Those who
fail in guessing it, fail because they are over-
ingenious, and cast about for an answer that shall
suit their own notion of the gravity of the occasion
and of their own dignity, rather than the occasion
itself.

In a matter which must be finally settled by pub-
lic opinion, and in regard to which the ferment of
prejudice and passion on both sides has not yet
subsided to that equilibrium of compromise from
which alone a sound public opinion can result, it
is proper enough for the private citizen to press
his own convictions with all possible force of argu-
ment and persuasion ; but the popular magistrate,
whose judgment must become action, and whose
action involves the whole country, is bound to wait
till the sentiment of the people is so far advanced
toward his own point of view, that what he does
shall find support in it, instead of merely confusing
it with new elements of division. It was not un-
natural that men earnestly devoted to the saving
of their country, and profoundly convinced that
slavery was its only real enemy, should demand
a decided policy round which all patriots might
rally, — and this might have been the wisest course

200 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

for an absolute ruler. But in the then unsettled
state of the public mind, with a large party decry-
ing even resistance to the slaveholders' rebellion as
not only unwise, but even unlawftd ; with a major-
ity, perhaps, even of the would-be loyal so long ac-
customed to regard the Constitution as a deed of
gift conveying to the South their own judgment as
to policy and instinct as to right, that they were in
doubt at first whether their loyalty were due to the
country or to slavery ; and with a resjoectable body
of honest and influential men who still believed in
the possibility of conciliation, — Mr. Lincoln judged
wisely, that, in laying down a policy in deference
to one party, he should be giving to the other the
very fulcrum for which their disloyalty had been
waiting.

It behooved a clear-headed man in his position
not to yield so far to an honest indignation against
the brokers of treason in the North as to lose sight
of the materials for misleading which were their
stock in trade, and to forget that it is not the false-
hood of sophistry which is to be feared, but the
grain of truth mingled with it to make it specious,
— that it is not the knavery of the leaders so much
as the honesty of the followers they may seduce,
that gives them power for evil. It was especially
his duty to do nothing which might help the peojjle
to forget the true cause of the war in fruitless dis-
putes about its inevitable consequences.

The doctrine of state rights can be so handled
by an adroit demagogue as easily to confound the
distinction between liberty and lawlessness in the

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 201

minds of ignorant persons, accustomed always to
be influenced by the sound of certain words, rather
than to reflect upon the principles which give them
meaning. For, though Secession involves the man-
ifest absurdity of denying to a State the right of
making war against any foreign power while per-
mitting it against the United States ; though it sup-
poses a compact of mutual concessions and guaran-
ties among States without any arbiter in case of
dissension ; though it contradicts common-sense in
assuming that the men who framed our government
did not know what they meant when they substi-
tuted Union for Confederation ; though it falsifies
history, which shows that the main opposition to
the adoption of the Constitution was based on the
argument that it did not allow that independence
in the several States which alone would justify
them in seceding ; — yet, as slavery was universally
admitted to be a reserved right, an inference could
be drawn from any direct attack upon it (though
only in self-defence) to a natural right of resist-
ance, logical enough to satisfy minds untrained to
detect fallacy, as the majority of men always are,
and now too much disturbed by the disorder of
the times to consider that the order of events had
any legitimate bearing on the argument. Though
Mr. Lincoln was too sagacious to give the North-
ern allies of the Rebels the occasion they desired
and even strove to provoke, yet from the beginning
of the war the most persistent efforts have been
made to confuse the public mind as to its origin
and motives, and to drag the people of the loyal

202 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

States down from the national position they had
instinctively taken to the old level of party squab-
bles and antipathies. The wholly unprovoked re-
bellion of an oligarchy proclaiming negro slavery
the corner-stone of free institutions, and in the first
flush of over-hasty confidence venturing to parade
the logical sequence of their leading dogma, " that
slavery is right in principle, and has nothing to do
with difference of comjjlexion," has been repre-
sented as a legitimate and gallant attempt to main-
tain the true principles of democracy. The right-
ful endeavor of an established government, the
least onerous that ever existed, to defend itself
against a treacherous attack on its very existence,
has been cunningly made to seem the wicked effort
of a fanatical clique to force its doctrines on an
oppressed population.

Even so long ago as when Mr. Lincoln, not yet
convinced of the danger and magnitude of the cri-
sis, was endeavoring to persuade himseK of Union
majorities at the South, and to carry on a war that
was haK peace in the hope of a peace that would
have been all war, — while he was still enforcing
the Fugitive Slave Law, under some theory that
Secession, however it might absolve States from
their obligations, could not escheat them of their
claims under the Constitution, and that slavehold-
ers in rebellion had alone among mortals the priv-
ilege of having their cake and eating it at the same
time, — the enemies of free government were striv-
ing to persuade the people that the war was an
Abolition crusade. To rebel without reason was

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 203

proclaimed as one of the rights of man, while it was
carefully kept out of sight that to suppress rebel-
lion is the first duty of government. All the evils
that have come upon the country have been attri-
buted to the Abolitionists, though it is hard to see
how any party can become permanently powerful
except in one of two ways, — either by the greater
truth of its principles, or the extravagance of the
party opposed to it. To fancy the ship of state,
riding safe at her constitutional moorings, sud-
denly engulfed by a huge kraken of Abolitionism,
rising from unknown depths and grasping it with
slimy tentacles, is to look at the natural history of
the matter with the eyes of Pontoppidan. To be-
lieve that the leaders in the Southern treason
feared any danger from Abolitionism would be to
deny them ordinary intelligence, though there can
be little doubt that they made use of it to stir the
passions and excite the fears of their deluded ac-
complices. They rebelled, not because they thought
slavery weak, but because they believed it strong
enough, not to overthrow the government, but to
get possession of it ; for it becomes daily clearer
that they used rebellion only as a means of revolu-
. tion, and if they got revolution, though not in the
shape they looked for, is the American people to
save them from its consequences at the cost of its
own existence ? The election of Mr. Lincoln, which
it was clearly in their power to prevent had they
wished, was the occasion merely, and not the cause,
of their revolt. Abolitionism, till within a year or
two, was the despised heresy of a few earnest per-

204 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

sons, without political weight enough to carry the
election of a parish constable ; and their cardinal
principle was disunion, because they were con-
vinced that within the Union the position of sla-
very was impregnable. In spite of the proverb,
great effects do not follow from small causes, —
that is, disproportionately small, — but from ade-
quate causes acting luider certain required condi-
tions. To contrast the size of the oak with that of
the parent acorn, as if the poor seed had paid all
costs from its slender strong-box, may serve for a
child's wonder ; but the real miracle lies in that
divine league which bound all the forces of nature
to the service of the tiny germ in fulfilling its des-
tiny. Everything has been at work for the past
ten years in the cause of anti-slavery, but Garrison
and Phillips have been far less successful propa-
gandists than the slaveholders themselves, with the
constantly growing arrogance of their pretensions
and encroachments. They have forced the question
upon the attention of every voter in the Free States,
by defiantly putting freedom and democracy on the
defensive. But, even after the Kansas outrages,
there was no wide-spread desire on the part of the
North to commit aggressions, though there was a
growing determination to resist them. The popu-
lar unanimity in favor of the war three years aga
was but in small measure the result of anti-slavery
sentiment, far less of any zeal for abolition. But
every month of the war, every movement of the
allies of slavery in the Free States, has been mak-
ing Abolitionists by the thousand. The masses

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 205

of any people, liowever intelligent, are very little
moved by abstract principles of humanity and jus-
tice, until those principles are interpreted for them
by the stinging commentary of some infringement
upon their own rights, and then their instincts and
passions, once aroused, do indeed derive an incalcu-
lable reinforcement of impulse and intensity from
those higher ideas, those sublime traditions, which
have no motive political force till they are allied
with a sense of immediate personal wrong or immi-
nent peril. Then at last the stars in their courses
begin to fight against Sisera. Had any one doubted
before that the rights of human nature are unitary,
that oppression is of one hue the world over, no
matter what the color of the oppressed, — had any
one failed to see what the real essence of the con-
test was, — the efforts of the advocates of slavery
among ourselves to throw discredit upon the funda-
mental axioms of the Declaration of Independence
and the radical doctrines of Christianity could not
fail to sharpen his eyes.

While every day was bringing the people nearer
to the conclusion which all thinking men saw to be
inevitable from the beginning, it was wise in Mr.
Lincoln to leave the shaping of his policy to events.
In this country, where the rough and ready under-
standing of the people is sure at last to be the con-
trolling power, a profound common-sense is the best
genius for statesmanship. Hitherto the wisdom of
the President's measures has been justified by the
fact that they have always resulted in more firmly
uniting public opinion. One of the things particu-

206 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

larly admirable in the public utterances of President
Lincoln is a certain tone of familiar dignity, whicb,
while it is perhaps the most difficult attainment of
mere style, is also no doubtful indication of per-
sonal character. There must be something essen-
tially noble in an elective ruler who can descend to
the level of confidential ease without forfeiting re-
spect, something very manly in one who can break
through the etiquette of his conventional rank and
trust himself to the reason and intelligence of those
who have elected him. No higher compliment was
ever paid to a nation than the simple confidence,
the fireside plainness, with which Mr. Lincoln al-
ways addresses himself to the reason of the Amer-
ican people. This was, indeed, a true democrat,
who grounded himself on the assumption that a
democracy can think. " Come, let us reason to-
gether about this matter," has been the tone of all
his addresses to the people ; and accordingly we
have never had a chief magistrate who so won to
himself the love and at the same time tljie judgment
of his countrymen. To us, that simple confidence
of his in the right-mindedness of his feUow-men is
very touching, and its success is as strong an argu-
ment as we have ever seen in favor of the theory
that men can govern themselves. He never ap-
peals to any vulgar sentiment, he never alludes to
the humbleness of his origin ; it probably never
occurred to him, indeed, that there was anything
higher to start from than manhood; and he put
himself on a level with those he addressed, not by
going down to them, but only by taking it for

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 207

granted that tliey had brains and would come up to
a common ground of reason. In an article lately
printed in " The Nation," Mr. Bayard Taylor men-
tions the striking fact, that in the foulest dens of
the Five Points he found the portrait of Lincoln.
The wretched population that makes its hive there
threw all its votes and more against him, and yet
paid this instinctive tribute to the sweet humanity
of his nature. Their ignorance sold its vote and
took its money, but all that was left of manhood
in them recognized its saint and martyr.

Mr. Lincoln is not in the habit of saying, " This
is my opinion, or my theory," but, " This is the
conclusion to which, in my judgment, the time has
come, and to which, accordingly, the sooner we
come the better for us." His policy has been the
policy of public opinion based on adequate discus-
sion and on a timely recognition of the influence of
passing events in shaping the features of events to
come.

One secret of Mr. Lincoln's remarkable success
in captivating the popular mind is undoubtedly an
unconsciousness of self which enables him, though
under the necessity of constantly using the capital
I, to do it without any suggestion of egotism.
There is no single vowel which men's mouths can
pronounce with such difference of effect. That
which one shall hide away, as it were, behind the
substance of his discourse, or, if he bring it to the
front, shall use merely to give an agreeable accent
of individuality to what he says, another shall make
an offensive challenge to the self-satisfaction of all

208 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

his hearers, and an unwarranted intrusion upon
each man's sense of personal importance, irritating
every pore of his vanity, like a dry northeast wind,
to a goose-flesh of opposition and hostility. Mr.
Lincoln has never studied Quinctilian ; but he has,
in the earnest simplicity and unaffected American-
ism of his own character, one art of oratory worth
all the rest. He forgets himself so entirely in his
object as to give his / the sympathetic and persua-
sive effect of We with the great body of his coun-
trymen. Homely, dispassionate, showing all the
rough-edged process of his thought as it goes along,
yet arriving at his conclusions with an honest kind
of every-day logic, he is so eminently our represen-
tative man, that, when he speaks, it seems as if the
people were listening to their own thinking aloud.
The dignity of his thought owes nothing to any
ceremonial garb of words, but to the manly move-
ment that comes of settled purpose and an energy
of reason that knows not what rhetoric means.
There has been nothing of Cleon, still less of Strep-
siades striving to underbid him in demagogism, to
be found in the public utterances of Mr. Lincoln.
He has always addressed the intelligence of men,
never their prejudice, their passion, or their igno-
rance.

On the day of his death, this simple Western at-
torney, who according to one party was a vulgar
joker, and whom the doctrinaires among his own
supporters accused of wanting every element of
statesmanship, was the most absolute ruler in Chris-

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 209

tendom, and this solely by the hold his good-hu-
mored sagacity had laid on the hearts and under-
standings of his countrymen. Nor was this all,
for it appeared that he had drawn the great ma-
jority, not only of his fellow-citizens, but of man-
kind also, to his side. So strong and so persuasive
is honest manhness without a single quality of ro-
mance or unreal sentiment to help it ! A civilian
during times of the most captivating military
achievement, awkward, with no skill in the lower
technicalities of manners, he left behind him a
fame beyond that of any conqueror, the memory of
a grace higher than that of outward person, and
of a gentlemanliness deeper than mere breeding,
Never before that startled April morning did such
multitudes of men shed tears for the death of one
they had never seen, as if with him a friendly
presence had been taken away from their lives,
leaving them colder and darker. Never was fu-
neral panegyric so eloquent as the silent look of
sympathy which strangers exchanged when they
met on that day. Their common manhood had lost
a kinsman.

EECONSTKUCTION

1865

In the glare of our civil war, certain truths,
hitherto unobserved or guessed at merely, have
been brought out with extraordinary sharpness of
relief ; and two of them have been specially im-
pressive, the one for European observers, the other
for ourselves. The fu-st, and perhaps the most
startling to the Old World watcher of the political
skies, upon whose field of vision the flaming sword
of our western heavens grew from a misty speck
to its full comet-like proportions, perplexing them
with fear of change, has been the amazing strength
and no less amazing steadiness of democratic insti-
tutions. An army twice larger than England,
with the help of bounties, drafts, and the purchase
of foreign vagabonds, ever set in the field during
the direst stress of her struggle with Napoleon has
been raised in a single year by voluntary enlist-
ment. A people untrained to bear the burden of
heavy taxes not only devotes to the public service
sums gathered by private subscription that in any
other country would be deemed fabulous, but by
sheer force of public opinion compels its legislators
to the utmost ingenuity and searchingness of taxa-
tion. What was uttered as a sarcasm on the want

RECONSTRUCTION 211

of public spirit in Florence is here only literally
true : —

* ' Many refuse to bear the cominon burden ;
But thy solicitous people answereth
Unasked, and cries, ' I bend my back to it.' "

And that the contrast may be felt in its fullest
completeness, we must consider that no private
soldier is tempted into the ranks by hopes of
plunder, or driven into them by want of fair wages
for fair work, — that no officer can look forward
to the splendid prizes of hereditary wealth and
title. Love of their country was the only incen-
tive, its gratitude their only reward. And in the
matter of taxation also, a willingness to help bear
the common burden has more of generosity in it
where the wealth of the people is in great part the
daily result of their daily toil, and not a hoard
inherited without merit, as without industry.

Nor have the qualities which lead to such strik-
ing results been exhibited only by the North. The
same public spirit, though misled by -svicked men
for selfish ends, has shown itself in almost equal
strength at the South. And in both cases it has
been unmistakably owing to that living and active
devotion of the people to institutions in whose ex-
cellence they share, and their habit of obedience to
laws of their own making. If we have not hitherto
had that conscious feeling of nationality, the ideal
abstract of history and tradition, which belongs to
older countries, compacted by frequent war and
united by memories of common danger and com-
mon triumph, it has been simply because our na-

212 RECONSTRUCTION

tional existence has never been in such peril as to
force upon us the conviction that it was both the
title-deed of our greatness and its only safeguard.
But what splendid possibilities has not our trial
revealed even to ourselves ! What costly stuff
whereof to make a nation ! Here at last is a state
whose life is not narrowly concentred in a despot
or a class, but feels itself in every limb ; a govern-
ment which is not a mere application of force from
without, but dwells as a vital principle in the ^vill
of every citizen. Our enemies — and wherever a
man is to be found bribed by an abuse, or who
profits by a political superstition, we have a natural
enemy — have striven to laugh and sneer and lie
this apparition of royal manhood out of existence.
They conspired our murder ; but in this vision is
the prophecy of a dominion which is to push them
from their stools, and whose crown doth sear their
eyeballs. America lay asleej), like the princess of
the fairy tale, enchanted by prosperity ; but at the
first fiery kiss of war the spell is broken, the blood
tingles along her veins again, and she awakes con-
scious of her beauty and her sovereignty.

It is true that, by the side of the self-devotion and
public spirit, the vices and meannesses of troubled
times have shown themselves, as they will and must.
We have had shoddy, we have had contracts, we
have had substitute-brokerage, we have had spe-
culators in patriotism, and, still worse, in military
notoriety. Men have striven to make the blood
of our martyrs the seed of wealth or office. But
in times of public and universal extremity, when

RECONSTRUCTION. 213

Iialiitual standai'ds of action no longer serve., and
ordinary currents of thought are swamped in the
flood of enthusiasm or excitement, it always hap-
pens that the evil passions of some men are stimu-
lated by what serves only to exalt the nobler quali-
ties of others. In such epochs, evil as well as
good is exaggerated. A great social convulsion
shakes up the lees which underlie society, forgotten
because quiescent, and the stimulus of calamity
brings out the extremes of human nature, whether
for good or evil.

What is especially instructive in the events we
have been witnessing for the past four years is the
fact that the people have been the chief actors in
the drama. They have not been the led, but the
leaders. They have not been involved in war by
the passions or interests of their rulers, but delib-
erately accepted the ordeal of battle in defence
of institutions which were the work of their own
hands, and of whose beneficence experience had
satisfied them. Loyalty has hitherto been a senti-
ment rather than a virtue ; it has been more often
a superstition or a prejudice than a conviction of
the conscience or of the understanding. Now for
the first time it is identical with patriotism, and
has its seat in the brain, and not the blood. It has
before been picturesque, devoted, beautifid, as for-
getfulness of self always is, but now it is something-
more than all these, — it is logical. Here we have
testimony that cannot be gainsaid to the universal
vitality and intelligence which our system diffuses
with healthy pulse through all its members. Every

214 RECONSTRUCTION

man feels himself a part, and not a subject, of the
government, and can say in a truer and higher
sense than Louis XIV., " I am the state." But
we have produced no Cromwell, no Napoleon. Let
us be thankful that we have passed beyond that
period of political development when such produc-
tions are necessary, or even possible. It is but
another evidence of the excellence of the democratic
principle. Where power is the privilege of a class
or of a single person, it may be usurped ; but where
it is the expression of the common will, it can no
more be monopolized than air or light. The igno-
rant and unreasoning force of a populace, sure of
losing nothing and with a chance of gaining some-
thing by any change, that restless material out of
which violent revolutions are made, if it exist here
at all, is to be found only in our great cities, among
a class who have learned in other countries to look
upon all law as their natural enemy. Nor is it by
any fault of American training, but by the want of
it, that these people are what they are. When
Lord Derby says that the government of this coun-
try is at the mercy of an excited mob, he proves
either that the demagogue is no exclusive product
of a democracy, or that England would be in less
danger of war if her governing class knew some-
thing less of ancient Greece and a little more of
modern America.

Whether or no there be any truth in the asser-
tion that democracy tends to bring men down to a
common level (as it surely brings them up to one),
we shall not stop to inquire, for the world has not

RECONSTRUCTION 215

yet had a long enough experience of it to warrant
any safe conclusion. During our revolutionary
struggle, it seems to us that both our civil and
military leaders compare very well in point of
ability with the British product of the same period,
and the same thing may very well be true at the
present time. But while it may be the glory, it
can hardly be called the duty of a country to pi-o-
duce great men ; and if forms of polity have any-
thing to do in the matter, we should incline to
prefer that which could make a great nation felt
to be such and loved as such by every human fibre
in it, to one which stunted the many that a few
favored specimens might grow the taller and fairer.
While the attitude of the government was by
the necessity of the case expectant so far as slavery
w^as concerned, it is also true that the people ran
before it, and were moved by a deeper impulse
than the mere instinct of self-preservation. The
public conscience gave energy and intention to the
public will, and the bounty which drew our best
soldiers to the ranks was an idea. The game was
the ordinary game of war, and they but the un-
reasoning pieces on the board ; but they felt that
a higher reason was moving them in a game where
the stake was the life not merely of their coun-
try, but of a principle whose rescue was to make
America in very deed a New World, the cradle
of a fairer manhood. Weakness was to be no
longer the tyrant's opportunity, but the victim's
claim ; labor should never henceforth be degraded
as a curse, but honored as that salt of the earth

216 RECONSTRUCTION

which keeps life sweet, and gives its savor to duty.
To be of good family should mean being a child of
the one Father of us all ; and good birth, the being
born into God's world, and not into a fool's para-
dise of man's invention. But even had this moral
leaven been wanting, had the popular impulse been
merely one of patriotism, we should have been well
content to claim as the result of democracy that
for the first time in the history of the world it had
mustered an army that knew for what it was fight-
ing. Nationality is no dead abstraction, no unreal
sentiment, but a living and operative virtue in the
heart and moral nature of men. It enlivens the
dullest soul with an ideal out of and beyond itself,
lifting every faculty to a higher level of vision and
action. It enlarges the narrowest intellect with
a fealty to something better than self. It eman-
cipates men from petty and personal interests, to
make them conscious of sympathies whose society
ennobles. Life has a deeper meaning when its
throb beats time to a common impulse and catches
its motion from the general heart.

But while the experience of the last four years
has been such, with all its sorrows, as to make us
proud of our strength and grateful for the sources
of it, we cannot but feel that peace will put to the
test those higher qualities which war leaves in re-
serve. What are we to do with the country our
arms have regained ? It is by our conduct in this
stewardship, and not by our rights under the origi-
nal compact of the States, that our policy is to be
justified. The glory of conquest is trifling and

RECONSTRUCTION 217

barren, unless victory clear the way to a higher
civilization, a more solid prosperity, and a Union
based upon reciprocal benefits. In what precise
manner the seceding- States shall return, whether
by inherent right, or with some preliminary pen-
ance and ceremony of readoption, is of less conse=
quence than what they shall be after their return.
Dependent provinces, sullenly submitting to a
destiny which they loathe, would be a burden to us,
rather than an increase of strength or an element
of prosperity. War would have won us a jieace
stripped of all the advantages that make peace a
blessing. We should have so much more territory,
and so much less substantial greatness. We did
not enter upon war to open a new market, or fresh
fields for speculators, or an outlet for redundant
population, but to save the experiment of demo-
cracy from destruction, and put it in a fairer way
of success by removing the single disturbing ele-
ment. Our business now is not to allow ourselves
to be turned aside from a purpose which our ex-
perience thus far has demonstrated to have been
as wise as it was necessary, and to see to it that,
whatever be the other conditions of reconstruction,
democracy, which is our real strength, receive no
detriment.

We would not be understood to mean that Con-
gress should lay down in advance a fixed rule not
to be departed from to suit the circumstances of
special cases as they arise. What may do very
well for Tennessee may not be as good for South
Carolina. Wise statesmanship does not so much

218 . RECONSTRUCTION

consist in the agreement of its forms with any
abstract ideal, however perfect, as in its adaptation
to the wants of the governed and its capacity of
shaping itself to the demands of the time. It is
not to be judged by its intention, but by its results,
and those will be proportioned to its practical, and
not its theoretic, excellence. The Anglo-Saxon
soundness of understanding has shown itself in
nothing more clearly than in allowing institutions
to be formulated gradually by custom, convenience,
or necessity, and in preferring the practical comfort
of a system that works, to the French method of a
scientific machinery of perpetual motion, demon-
strably perfect in all its parts, and yet refusing to
go. We do not wish to see scientific treatment,
however admirable, applied to the details of recon-
struction, if that is to be, as now seems probable,
the next problem that is to try our intelligence and
firmness. But there are certain points, it seems
to us, on which it is important that public opinion
should come to some sort of understanding in
advance.

The peace negotiations have been of service in
demonstrating that it is not any ill blood engen-
dered by war, any diversity of interests properly
national, any supposed antagonism of race, but
simply the slaveholding class, that now stands
between us and peace, as four years ago it forced
us into war. Precisely as the principle of Divine
right could make no lasting truce with the French
Revolution, the Satanic right of the stronger to
enslave the weaker can come to no understanding

RECONSTRUCTION 219

with democracy. The conflict is in the things, not
in the men, and one or the other must abdicate.
Of course the leaders, to whom submission would
be ruin, and a few sincere believers in the doc-
trine of State rights, are willing to sacrifice even
slavery for independence, a word which has a
double meaning for some of them ; but there can
be no doubt that an offer to receive the seceding
States back to their old position under the Consti=
tution would have put the war party in a hopeless
minority at the South. We think there are mani-
fest symptoms that the chinks made by the four
years' struggle have let in new light to the South-
ern people, however it may be with their ruling
faction, and that they begin to suspect a diversity
of interest between themselves, who chiefly suffer
by the war, and the small class who bullied them
into it for selfish purposes of their own. However
that may be, the late proposal of Davis and Lee
for the arming of slaves, though they certainly did
not so intend it, has removed a very serious ob-
stacle from our path. It is true that the emanci-
pating clause was struck out of the act as finally
passed by the shadowy Congress at Richmond.
But this was only for the sake of appearances.
Once arm and drill the negroes, and they can
never be slaves again. This is admitted on all
hands, and accordingly, whatever the words of the
act may be, it practically at once promotes the
negro to manhood by brevet, as it were, but at any
rate to manhood. For the offer of emancipation
as a bounty implies reason in him to whom it is

220 RECONSTRUCTION

offered ; nay, more, implies a capacity for progress
and a wish for it, which are in themselves valid
titles to freedom. This at a step puts the South
back to the position held by her greatest men In
regard to slavery. All the Scriptural arguments,
all the fitness of things, all the physiological dem-
onstrations, all Mr. Stephens's corner-stones. Ham,
Onesimus, heels, hair, and facial ^ngle, — all are
swept out, by one flirt of the besom of Fate, into
the inexorable limbo of things that were and never
should have been. How is Truth wounded to
death in the house of her friends ! The highest
authority of the South has deliberately renounced
its vested interest in the curse of Noah, and its
right to make beasts of black men because St. Paul
sent back a white one to his master. Never was
there a more exact verification of the Spanish
proverb, that he who went out for wool may come
back shorn. Alas for Nott and Gliddon ! Thrice
alas for Bishop Hopkins ! With slavery they lose
their hold on the last clue by which human reason
could find its way to a direct proof of the bene-
volence of God and the plenary inspiration of
Scripture.

All that we have learned of the blacks during
the war makes the plan of arming a part of them
to help maintain the master's tyranny over the rest
seem so futile, and the arguments urged against it
by Mr. Gholson and Mr. Hunter are so convincing,
that we can hardly persuade ourselves that the
authors of it did not intend it to make the way
easier, not to independence, but to reunion. It is

RECONSTRUCTION 221

said to argue desperation on the part of the chief
conspirators at Richmond, and it undoubtedly does ;
but we see in what we believe to be the causes
of their despair something more hopeful than the
mere exhaustion it indicates. It is simply incredi-
ble that the losses of a four years' war should have
drained the fighting men of a population of five
millions, or anything like it ; and the impossibil-
ity of any longer filling the Rebel armies even by
the most elaborate system of press-gangs proves
to our mind that the poorer class of whites have
for some reason or other deserted the cause of the
wealthy planters. The men are certainly there,
but they have lost all stomach for fighting. Here
again we see something which is likely to make a
final settlement more easy than it would have been
even a year ago. Though the fact that so large a
proportion of the Southern people cannot read
makes it harder to reach them, yet our soldiers
have circulated among them like so many North-
ern newspapers, and it is impossible that this in-
tercourse, which has been constant, should not have
suggested to them many ideas of a kind which their
treacherous guides would gladly keep from them.
The frantic rage of Southern members of Congress
against such books as Helper's can be explained
only by their fear lest their poorer constituents
should be set a-thinking, for the notion of corrupt-
ing a field-hand by an Abolition document is too
absurd even for a Wigfall or a Charleston editor.

Here, then, are two elements of a favorable horo-
scope for our future ; an acknowledgment of the

222 RECONSTRUCTION

human nature of the negro by the very Sanhedrim
of the South, thus removing his case from the court
of ethics to that of political economy ; and a sus-
picion on the part of the Southern majority that
something has been wrong, which makes them
readier to see and accept what is right. We do not
mean to say that there is any very large amount of
even latent Unionism at the South, but we believe
there is plenty of material in solution there which
waits only to be precipitated into whatever form of
crystal we desire. We must not forget that the
main elements of Southern regeneration are to be
sought in the South itself, and that such elements
are abundant. A people that has shown so much
courage and constancy in a bad cause, because they
believed it a good one, is worth winning even by
the sacrifice of our natural feeling of resentment.
If we forgive the negro for his degradation and
his ignorance, in consideration of the system of
which he has been the sacrifice, we ought also to
make every allowance for the evil influence of
that system upon the poor whites. It is the fatal
necessity of all wrong to revenge itself upon those
who are guilty of it, or even accessory to it. The
oppressor is dragged down by the victim of his
tyranny. The eternal justice makes the balance
even ; and as the sufferer by unjust laws is lifted
above his physical abasement by spiritual compen-
sations and that nearness to God which only suffer-
ing is capable of, in like measure are the material
advantages of the wrong-doer countei'poised by a
moral impoverishment. Our duty is not to punish,

RECONSTRUCTION 223

but to repair ; and the cure must work botli ways,
emancipating- the master from the slave, as well as
the slave from the master. Once rid of slavery,
which was the real criminal, let us have no more
reproaches, justifiable only while the Southern sin
made us its forced accomplices ; and while we bind
up the wounds of our black brother who had fallen
among thieves that robbed him of his rights as a
man, let us not harden our hearts against our white
brethren, from whom interest and custom, those
slyer knaves, whose fingers we have felt about our
own pockets, had stolen away their conscience and
their sense of human brotherhood.

The first question that arises in the mind of
everybody in thinking of reconstruction is. What is
to be done about the negro ? After the war is over,
there will be our Old Man of the Sea, as ready
to ride us as ever. If we only emancipate him,
he will not let us go free. We must do something
more than merely this. While the suffering from
them is still sharp, we should fix it in our minds as
a principle, that the evils which have come upon
us are the direct and logical consequence of our
forefathers having dealt with a question of man as
they would with one of trade or territory, — as if
the rights of others were something susceptible of
compromise, — as if the laws that govern the moral,
and, through it, the material world, would stay
their operation for our convenience. It is well to
keep this present iu the mind, because in the gen-
eral joy and hurry of peace we shall be likely to
forget it again, and to make concessions, or to

224 RECONSTRUCTION

leave things at loose ends for time to settle, — as
time lias settled tlie blunders of our ancestors.
Let us concede everything except what does not
belong to us, but is only a trust-property, namely,
the principle of democracy and the prosjDerity of
the future involved in the normal development of
that principle.

We take it for granted at the outset, that the
mind of the country is made up as to making no
terms with slavery in any way, large or limited,
open or covert. Not a single good quality trace-
able to this system has been brought to light in the
white race at the South by the searching test of
war. In the black it may have engendered that
touching piety of which we have had so many
proofs, and it has certainly given them the unity
of interest and the sympathy of intelligence which
make them everywhere our friends, and which have
saved them from compromising their advantage,
and still further complicating the difficulties of
civil war by insurrection. But what have been
its effects upon the ruling class, which is, after all,
the supreme test of institutions? It has made
them boastful, selfish, cruel, and false, to a degree
unparalleled in history. So far from having given
them any special fitness for rule, it has made them
incapable of any but violent methods of govern-
ment, and unable to deal with the simplest prob-
lems of political economy. An utter ignorance
of their own countrymen at the North led them
to begin the war, and an equal misconception of
Europe encouraged them to continue it. That

RECONSTRUCTION 225

they have shown courage is true, but that is no
exclusive property of theirs, and the military ad-
vantage they seemed to possess is due less to any
superiority of their own than to the extent of their
territory and the roadless wildernesses which are
at once the reproach and the fortification of their
wasteful system of agriculture. Their advantages
in war have been in proportion to their disadvan-
tages in peace, and it is peace which most convin-
cingly tries both the vigor of a nation and the wis-
dom of its polity. It is with this class that we
shall have to deal in arranging the conditions of
settlement ; and we must do it with a broad view
of the interests of the whole country and of the
great mass of the Southern people, whose ignorance
and the prejudices consequent from it made it so
easy to use them as the instruments of their own
ruin. No immediate advantage must blind us to
the real objects of the war, — the securing our ex-
ternal power and our internal tranquillity, and the
making them inherent and indestructible by found-
ing them upon the common welfare.

The first condition of permanent peace is to
render those who were the great slaveholders when
the war began, and who will be the great land-
holders after it is over, powerless for mischief.
What punishment should be inflicted on the chief
criminals is a matter of little moment. The South
has received a lesson of suffering which satisfies all
the legitimate ends of punishment, and as for ven-
geance, it is contrary to our national temper and
the spirit of our government. Our great object

226 RECONSTRUCTION

should be, not to weaken, but to strengthen the
South, — to make it richer, and not poorer. We
must not rej^eat the stupid and fatal blunder of
slaveholding publicists, that the wealth and power
of one portion of the country are a drain upon the
resources of the rest, instead of being- their natural
feeders and invigorators. Any general confiscation
of Rebel property, therefore, seems to us unthrifty
housekeeping, for it is really a levying on our own
estate, and a lessening of our own resources. The
people of the Southern States will be called upon
to bear their part of the grievous burden of taxa-
tion which the war will leave upon our shoulders,
and that is the fairest as well as the most prudent
way of making them contribute to our national
solvency. All irregular modes of levying contri-
butions, however just, — and exactly just they can
seldom be, — leave discontent behind them, while a
uniform system, where every man knows what he
is to pay and why he is to pay it, tends to restore
stability by the very evenness of its operation, by
its making national interests familiar to all, and by
removing any sense of injustice. Any sweeping
confiscation, such as has sometimes been proposed
in Congress with more heat than judgment, would
render the South less available for revenue, would
retard the return of industry to its legitimate chan-
nels, by lessening its means, and would not destroy
the influence of the misgoverning aristocracy. On
the contrary, it would give them that prestige of
misfortune whose power over the sentiments of
mankind is the moral of the story of Stuarts and

RECONSTRUCTION 227

Bourbons and Bonapartes. Retribution they should
have, but let them have it in the only way worthy
of a great people to inflict. Let it come in a sense
of their own folly and sin, brought about by the
magnanimity of their conquerors, by the return of
a more substantial prosperity born of the new
order of things, so as to convince, instead of alien-
ating. We should remember that it is our country
which we have regained, and not merely a rebel-
lious faction which we have subdued.

Whether it would not be good policy for the
general government to assume all the wild lands in
the rebellious States, and to devote the proceeds of
their sale to actual settlers to the payment of the
national debt, is worth consideration. Texas alone,
on whose public lands our assumption of her in-
debtedness gives us an equitable claim, woukl
suffice to secure our liabilities and to lighten our
taxation, and in all cases of land granted to freed-
men no title should vest till a fair price had been
paid, — a principle no less essential to their true
interests than our own. That these people, who
are to be the peasantry of the future Southern
States, should be made landholders, is the main
condition of a healthy regeneration of that part of
the country, and the one warranty of our rightful
repossession of it. The wealth that makes a nation
really strong, and not merely rich, is the oppor-
tunity for industry, intelligence, and well-being of
its laboring population. This is the real country
of poor men, as the great majority must always be.
No glories of war or art, no luxurious refinement of

228 RECONSTRUCTION

the few, can give them a*sense of nationality where
this is wanting. If we free the slave without giv-
ing him a right in the soil, and the inducement to
industry which this offers, we reproduce only a more
specious form of all the old abuses. We leave all
political power in the hands of the wealthy land-
holders, where it was before. We leave the poorer
whites unemancipated, for we leave labor still at
the mercy of capital, and with its old stigma of
degradation. Blind to the lessons of all experi-
ence, we deliberately make the South what Ire-
land was when Arthur Young travelled there, the
country richest in the world by nature, reduced to
irredeemable poverty and hopeless weakness by an
upper class who would not, and a lower class who
could not, improve. We have no right to purchase
dominion, no right to purchase even abolition, at
such a price as that. No uti possidetis conveys
any legitimate title, except on the condition of wise
administration and mutual benefit.

But will it be enough to make the freedmen
landholders merely ? Must we not make them
voters also, that they may have that power of self-
protection which no interference of government can
so safely, cheaply, and surely exercise in their be=
half ? We answer this question in the affirmative,
for reasons both of expediency and justice. At
best, the difficulty, if not settled now, will come
up again for settlement hereafter, when it may not
be so easy of solution. As a matter of expediency,
it is always wisest to shape a system of policy with
a view to permanence, much more than to imme-

RECONSTRUCTION 229

diate convenience. When things are put upon a
right footing at first, — and the only right footing
is one which will meet the inevitable demands of
the future as well as the more noisy ones of the
present, — all subsidiary relations will of necessity
arrange themselves by mutual adaptation, without
constantly calling for the clumsy interference of
authority. We must leave behind us no expecta-
tion and no fear of change, to unsettle men's minds
and dishearten their industry. Both the late mas-
ter and the late slave should begin on the new
order of things with a sense of its permanence on
the one hand and its rightfulness on the other.
They will soon learn that neither intelligence can
do without labor, nor labor without intelligence,
and that wealth will result only from a clearly un-
derstood and reciprocally beneficial dependence of
each upon the other. Unless we make the black a
citizen, we take away from the white the strongest
inducement to educate and enlighten him. As
a mere proletary, his ignorance is a temptation to
the stronger race ; as a voter, it is a danger to
them which it becomes their interest to remove.
It is easy to manage the mob of New York for
the time with grape-shot, but it is the power for
evil which their suffrage gives them that will at
last interest all classes, by reform and education,
to make it a power for good.

Under the head of expediency comes also this
other consideration, — that, unless made citizens,
the emancipated blacks, reckoned as they must be
in the basis of representation, and yet without

230 RECONSTRUCTION

power to modify the character of the representa-
tives chosen, will throw so mucli more power into
the hands of men certain to turn it to their disad-
vantage, and only too probably to our own. This
mass, if we leave it inert, may, in any near balance;
of parties, be enough to crush us ; while, if we en-
dow it with life and volition, if we put it in the
way of rising in intelligence and profiting by self-
exertion, it will be the best garrison for maintain-
ing the supremacy of our ideas, till they have had
time to justify themselves by experience. Have
we endured and prosecuted this war for the sake
of brinoino' back our old enemies to leaislate for
us, stronger than ever, with all the resentment and
none of the instruction of defeat ?

But as a measure of justice also, which is always
the highest exjsediency, we are in favor of giving
the ballot to the freedmen. Our answer to the
question, What are we to do with the negro ? is
short and simple. Give him a fair chance. We
must get rid of the delusion that right is in any
way dependent on the skin, and not on an inward
virtue. Our war has been carried on for the prin-
ciples of democracy, and a cardinal point of those
principles is, that the only way in which to fit men
for freedom is to make them free, the only way to
teach them how to use political power is to give it
them. Both South and North have at last con-
ceded the manhood of the negro, and the question
now is how we shall make that manhood available
and profitable to him and to us. Democrac}^ does
not mean, to any intelligent person, an attempt at

RECONSTRUCTION 231

the impossibility of making one man as good as
another. But it certainly does mean the making
of one man's manhood as good as another's and the
giving to every human being the right of unlim-
ited free trade in all his faculties and acquire-
ments. We believe the white race, by their intel-
lectual and traditional superiority, will retain sufti-
cient ascendency to prevent any serious mischief
from the new order of things. We admit that the
whole subject bristles with difficulties, and we
would by no means discuss or decide it on senti-
mental grounds. But our choice would seem to be
between unqualified citizenship, to depend on the
ability to read and write, if you will, and setting
the blacks apart in some territory by themselves.
There are, we think, insuperable objections to this
last plan. It would put them beyond the reach of
all good influence from the higher civilization of
the whites, without which they might relapse into
barbarism like the Maroons of Surinam, and it
would deprive the whole Southern country of the
very labor it needs. As to any prejudices which
should prevent the two races from living together,
it would soon yield to interest and necessity. The
mere antipathy of color is not so strong there as
here, and the blacks would form so very large a
majority of the laboring class as not to excite the
jealousy of rivalry. We can remember when the
prejudice against the Celt was as strong in many of
the Free States as that against the African could
ever be at the South. It is not very long since
this prejudice nearly gave a new direction to the

232 RECONSTRUCTION

politics of the country. Yet, like all prejudices,
it had not coherence enough to keep any consider-
able party long together.

The objections to the plan are, of course, the
same which lie against any theory of universal
suffrage. These are many and strong, if consid-
ered abstractly ; but we assume that theory to be
admitted now as the rule of our political practice,
and its evils as a working system have not been
found so great, taking the country at large, as
nearly to outweigh its advantages. Moreover, as
we have said before, it compels the redress of its
own abuses, and the remedy is one which is a bene-
fit to the whole community, for it is simply to raise
the general standard of intelligence. Tt is supe-
rior, certainly, to the English system, in which the
body of the nation is alienated from its highest
intellect and culture. We think the objections are
quite as strong to any elective plan of government,
for a select majority is as liable to be governed by
its interests and passions as any popular one. Wit-
ness the elections at Oxford. Is the average wis-
dom or unselfishness of mankind so high that there
should be no narrow minds and no selfish hearts
in any body of electors, however carefully selected ?
The only infallible sovereign on earth is chosen by
the majority of a body in which passion and intrigue
and the influence (sometimes none of the purest)
of conflicting coui'ts are certainly not inoj)erative.
Man is perhaps not the wisest of animals, but he
has at least as keen a sense of his own advantage
in a hovel as in a palace, and what is for the inter-

RECONSTRUCTION 233

est of the masses of the people is not very far from
being for that of the country. It is said, to be
sure, that we are inadequately represented in Con-
gress ; but a representative is apt to be a tolerably
exact exponent of the merits of his constituency,
and we must look for relief to the general im-
provement of our people in morals, manners, and
culture. We doubt if the freedmen would send
worse members to Congress than some in whose
election merchants and bankers and even doctors
of divinity have been accomplices.

With the end of the war the real trial of our
statesmanship, our patriotism, and our patience
will begin. The passions excited by it will, no
doubt, subside in due time, but meanwhile it be-
hooves the party in possession of the government to
conciliate patriotic men of all shades of opinion by
a liberal, manly and unpartisan policy. Repub-
licans must learn to acknowledge that all crit-
icisms of their measures have not been dictated
by passion or disloyalty, that many moderate and
honest men, many enlightened ones, have really
found reason for apprehension in certain arbitrary
stretches of authority, nay, may even have been
opposed to the war itself, without being in love
with slavery, and without deserving to be called
Copperheads. Many have doubted the wisdom of
our financial policy, without being unpati'iotic. It
is precisely this class, dispassionate and moderate
in their opinions, whose help we shall need in heal-
ing the wounds of war and giving equanimity to
our counsels. We hope to see a course of action

234 RECONSTRUCTION

entered upon which shall draw them to its sup-
port. In peace, governments cannot, as in war,
find strength in the enthusiasm and even the pas-
sions of the people, but must seek it in the ap-
proval of their judgment and convictions. Dur-
ing war, all the measures of the dominant party
have a certain tincture of patriotism ; declamation
serves very well the purposes of eloquence, and
fervor of persuasion passes muster as reason ; but
in peaceful times everything must come back to a
specific standard, and stand or fall on its own
merits. Our faith is not unmixed with apprehen-
sion when we think of the immediate future, yet it
is an abiding faith nevertheless ; and with the ex-
perience of the last four years to sustain us, we
are willing to believe almost anything good of the
American people, and to say with the saint, Credi-
nius quia imjiossibile est. We see no good reason
why, if we use our victory with the moderation be-
coming men who profess themselves capable of self-
government, conceding all that can be conceded
without danger to the great principle which has
been at stake, the North and the South should not
live more harmoniously together in the future than
in the past, now that the one rock of offence has
been blasted out of the way. We do not believe
that the war has tended to lessen their respect for
each other, or that it has left scars which will take
to aching again with every change of the political
weather. We must bind the recovered communi-
ties to us with hooks of interest, by convincing
them that we desire their prosperity as an integral

RECONS TR UCTION 235

part of our own. For a long while yet there will
be a latent disaffection, even when the outward
show may be fair, as in spring the ground often
stiffens when the thermometer is above the freezing
point. But we believe, in spite of this, that all
this untowardness will yield to the gradual wooing
of circumstances, and that it is to May, and not
December, that we are to look forward. Even
in our finances, which are confessedly our weakest
point, we doubt if the experience of any other na-
tion will enable us to form a true conception of our
future. We shall have, beyond question, the ordi-
nary collapse of speculation that follows a sudden
expansion of paper currency. We shall have that
shivering and expectant period when the sails flap
and the ship trembles ere it takes the wind on the
new tack. But it is no idle boast to say that there
never was a country with such resources as ours.
In Europe the question about a man always is.
What is he ? Here it is as invariably, What does
he do ? And in that little difference lies the se-
curity of our national debt for whoever has eyes.
In America there is no idle class supported at the
expense of the nation, there is no splendid poor-
house of rank or office, but every man is at
work adding his share to the wealth, and to that
extent insuring the solvency, of the country. Our
farm, indeed, is mortgaged, but it is a mortgage
which the yearly profits will pay off.

Those who look upon the war as a wicked cru-
sade of the North against the divinely sanctioned
mstitutions of the South, and those who hope even

236 RECONSTRUCTION

yet to reknit the monstrous league between slavery
and a party calling itself Democratic, will of course
be willing to take back the seceding States without
conditions. Neither of these classes is any longer
formidable, either by its numbers or the character
of its leaders. But there is yet a third class, who
seem to have confused their minds with some
fancied distinction between civil and foreign war.
Holding the States to be indestructible, they seem
to think that, by the mere cessation of hostilities,
they are to resume their places as if nothing had
happened, or rather as if this had been a mere
political contest which we had carried. But it is
with the people of the States, and not with any
abstract sovereignty, that we have been at war,
and it is of them that we are to exact conditions,
and not of some convenient cjuasi-entity, which is
not there when the battle is raging, and is there
when the terms of capitulation are to be settled.
No, it is slavery which made this war, and slavery
which must pay the damages. While we should
not by any unseemly exultation remind the South-
ern people that they have been conquered, we should
also not be weak enough to forget that we have won
the right of the victor. And what is that right, if
it be not to exact indemnity for the past and secu-
rity for the future? And what more nobly and
satisfactorily fulfils both those conditions, than
utterly to extinguish the cause of quarrel ? What
we fear is the foolish and weak good-nature inher-
ent in popular government, but against which mon-
archies and aristocracies are insured by self-interest,

RECONSTRUCTION 237

which the prospect o£ peace is sure to arouse, and
which may make our settlement a stage-reconcilia-
tion, where everybody rushes into the arms of every-
body else with a fervor which has nothing to do
with the living relations of the actors. We believe
that the public mind should be made up as to what
are the essential conditions of real and lasting
peace, before it is subjected to the sentimental
delusions of the inevitable era of good feeling,
in which the stronger brother is so apt to play
the part of Esau. If we are to try the experi-
ment of democracy fairly, it must be tried in its
fullest extent, and not half-way. The theory which
grants political power to the ignorant white for-
eigner need not be squeamish about granting it to
the ignorant black native, for the gist of the matter
is in the dark mind, and not the more or less dusky
skin. Of course we shall be met by the usual
fallacy, — Would you confer equality on the blacks?
But the answer is a very simple one. Equality
cannot be conferred on any man, be he white or
black. If he be capable of it, his title is from
God, and not from us. The opinion of the North
is made up on the subject of emancipation, and
Mr. Lincoln has announced it as the one essential
preliminary to the readmission of the insurgent
States. To our mind, citizenship is the necessary
consequence, as it is the only effectual warranty,
of freedom; and accordingly we are in favor of
distinctly settling beforehand some conditional
right of admission to it. We have purposely
avoided any discussion on gradualism as an ele-

238 RECONSTRUCTION

ment in emancipation, because we consider its evil
results to have been demonstrated in the British
"West Indies. True conservative policy is not an
anodyne hiding away our evil from us in a brief
forgetfulness. It looks to the long future of a
nation, and dares the heroic remedy where it is
scientifically sure of the nature of the disease.
The only desperate case for a people is where its
moral sense is paralyzed, and the first symptom
is a readiness to accept an easy expedient at the
sacrifice of a difficult justice. The relation which
is to be final and permanent cannot be too soon
decided on and put in working order, whether for
the true interest of master or slave ; and the only
safe relation is one that shall be fearlessly true to
the principles in virtue of which we asserted our
own claim to autonomy, and our right to compel
obedience to the government so established. Any-
thing short of that has the weakness of an expe-
dient which will erelong compel us to reconstruct
our reconstruction, and the worse weakness of hy-
pocrisy, which will sooner or later again lay us
open to the retribution of that eternal sincerity
which brings all things at last to the test of its
own unswerving: standard.

SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT?

1865

It has been said that the American people are
less apt than others to profit by experience, because
the bustle of their lives keeps breaking the thread
of that attention which is the material of memory,
till no one has patience or leisure to spin from it a
continuous thread of thought. We suspect that
this is not more true of us than of other nations, —
than it is of all people who read newspapers.
Great events are perhaps not more common than
they used to be, but a vastly greater number of
trivial incidents are now recorded, and this dust
of time gets in our eyes. The telegraph strips his-
tory of everything down to the bare fact, but it
does not observe the true proportions of things,
and we must make an effort to recover them. In
brevity and cynicism it is a mechanical Tacitus,
giving no less space to the movements of Sala than
of Sherman, as impartial a leveller as death. It
announces with equal sangfroid the surrender of
Kirby Smith and the capture of a fresh rebel
governor, reducing us to the stature at which pos-
terity shall reckon us. Eminent contemporaneous-
ness may see here how much space will be allotted
to it in the historical compends and biographical

240 SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT?

dictionaries of tlie next generation. Tn artless
irony the telegraph is unequalled among the sat-
irists of this generation. But this short-hand dia-
rist confounds all distinctions of great and little,
and roils the memory with minute particles of what
is oddly enough called intelligence. We read in
successive paragraphs the appointment of a Pro-
visional Governor of North Carolina, whose fitness
or want of it may be the turning-point of our fu-
ture history, and the nomination of a minister, who
will at most only bewilder some foreign court with
a more desperately helpless French than his pre-
decessor. The conspiracy trial at Washington,
whose result will have absolutely no effect on the
real affairs of the nation, occupies for the moment
more of the public mind and thought than the
question of reconstruction, which involves the life
or death of the very principle we have been fight-
ing for these four years.

Undoubtedly the event of the day, whatever it
may be, is apt to become unduly prominent, and to
thrust itself obscuringly between us and the per-
haps more important event of yesterday, where the
public appetite demands fresh gossip rather than
real news, and the press accordingly keeps its spies
everywhere on the lookout for trifles that become
important by being later than the last. And yet
this minuteness of triviality has its value also.
Our sensitive sheet gives us every morning the
photograph of yesterday, and enables us to detect
and to study at leisure that fleeting expression of
the time which betrays its character, and which

SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL ITf 241

miglit altogether escape us in the idealized histori-
cal portrait. We cannot estimate the value of the
items in our daily newspaper, because the world to
which they relate is too familiar and prosaic ; but
a hundred years hence some Thackeray will find
them full of picturesque life and spirit. The
" Chronicle " of the Annual Register makes the
England of the last century more vividly real to
us than any history. The jests which Pompeian
idlers scribbled on the walls, while Vesuvius was
brooding its fiery conspiracy under their feet, bring
the scene nearer home to us than the letter of
Pliny, and deepen the tragedy by their trifling
contrast, like the grave-diggers' unseemly gabble in
Hamlet. Perhaps our judgment of history is made
sounder, and our view of it more lifelike, when we
are so constantly reminded how the little things of
life assert their place alongside the great ones, and
how healthy the constitution of the race is, how
sound its digestion, how gay its humor, that can
take the world so easily while our continent is
racked with fever and struggling for life against
the doctors.

" Let Hercules himself do what he may,
The cat will mew, the dog must have his day."

It is always pleasant to meet Dame Clio over the
tea-table, as it were, where she is often more enter-
taining, if not more instructive, than when she puts
on the loftier port and more ceremonious habit
of a Muse. These inadvertences of history are
pleasing. We are no longer foreigners, in any
age of the world, but feel that in a few days we

242 SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL ITf

could have accommodated ourselves there, and that,
wherever men are, we are not far from home. The
more we can individualize and personify, the more
lively our sympathy. Man interests us scientifi-
cally, but men claim us through all that we have
made a part of our nature by education and cus-
tom. We would give more to know what Xeno-
phon's soldiers gossiped about round their camp-
fires, than for all the particulars of their retreat.
Sparta becomes human to us when we think of
Agesilaus on his hobby-horse. Finding that those
heroic fignires romped with their children, we begin
for the first time to suspect that they ever really
existed as much as Robinson Crusoe. Without
these personal traits, antiquity seems as unreal to
us as Sir Thomas More's Utopia. It is, indeed,
surprising how little of real life what is reckoned
solid literature has preserved to us, voluminous as
it is. Where does chivalry at last become some-
thing more than a mere procession of plumes and
armor, to be lamented by Burke, except in some of
the less ambitious verses of the Trouveres, where
we hear the canakin clink too emphatically, per-
haps, but which at least paint living men and pos-
sible manners ? Tennyson's knights are cloudy,
gigantic, of no age or country, like the heroes of
Ossian. They are creatures without stomachs.
Homer is more condescending, and though we
might not be able to draw the bow of Ulysses, we
feel quite at home with him and Eumoeus over
their roast pork.

We cannot deny that the poetical view of any

SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL ITf 243

period is higher, and in the deepest sense truer,
than all others ; but we are thankful also for the
penny-a-liner, whether ancient or modern, who re-
flects the whims and humors, the enthusiasms and
weaknesses, of the public in unguarded moments.
Is it so certain, after all, that we should not be in-
teresting ourselves in other quite as nugatory mat-
ters if these were denied us ? In one respect, and
no unimportant one, the instantaneous dispersion
of news and the universal interest in it have af-
fected the national thought and character. The
whole people have acquired a certain metropolitan
temper ; they feel everything at once and in com-
mon ; a single pulse sends anger, grief, or triumph
through the whole country ; one man sitting at the
keyboard of the telegraph in Washington sets the
chords vibrating to the same tune from sea to sea ;
and this simultaneousness^ this unanimity, deepens
national consciousness and intensifies popular emo-
tion. Every man feels himself a part, sensitive
and sympathetic, of this vast organism, a partner
in its life or death. The sentiment of patriotism
is etherealized and ennobled by it, is kindled by
the more or less conscious presence of an ideal ele-
ment ; and the instinctive love of a few familiar
hills and fields widens, till Country is no longer an
abstraction, but a living presence, felt in the heart
and operative in the conscience, like that of an ab-
sent mother. It is no trifling matter that thirty
millions of men should be thinking the same
thought and feeling the same pang at a single mo-
ment of time, and that these vast parallels of lati-

244 SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT?

tude should become a neighborhood more intimate
than many a country village. The dream of Hu-
man Brotherhood seems to be coming true at last.
The peasant who dipped his net in the Danube, or
trapped the beaver on its banks, perhaps never
heard of Caesar or of Caesar's murder ; but the shot
that shattered the forecasting brain, and curdled
the warm, sweet heart of the most American of
Americans, echoed along the wires through the
length and breadth of a continent, swelling all eyes
at once with tears of indignant sorrow. Here was
a tragedy fulfilling the demands of Aristotle, and
purifying with an instantaneous throb of pity and
terror a theatre of such proportions as the world
never saw. We doubt if history ever recorded an
event so touching and awful as this sympathy, so
wholly emancipated from the toils of space and
time that it might seem as if earth were really sen-
tient, as some have dreamed, or the great god
Pan alive again to make the hearts of nations stand
still with his shout. What is Beethoven's " Fu-
neral March for the Death of a Hero " to the sym-
phony of love, pity, and wrathful resolve which the
telegraph of that April morning played on the
pulses of a nation ?

It has been said that our system of town meet-
ings made our Revolution possible, by educating
the people in self-government. But this was at
most of partial efficacy, while the newspaper and
telegraph gather the whole nation into a vast town-
meeting, where every one hears the affairs of the
country discussed, and where the better judgment

SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT? 245

is pretty sure to make itself valid at last. No
memorable thing is said or done, no invention or
discovery is made, that some mention of it does not
sooner or later reach the ears of a majority of
Americans. It is this constant mental and moral
stimulus which gives them the alertness and viva-
city, the wide-awakeness of temperament, charac-
teristic of dwellers iu great cities, and which has
been remarked on by English tourists as if it were
a kind of physiological ti-ansformation. They seem
to think we have lost something of that solidity of
character which (with all other good qualities) they
consider the peculiar inheritance of the British
race, though inherited in an elder brother's pro-
portion by the favored dwellers in the British Isles.
We doubt if any substantial excellence is lost by
this suppling of the intellectual faculties, and
bringing the nervous system nearer the surface
hj the absorjrtion of superfluous fat. What is
lost in bulk may be gained in spring. It is
true that the clown, with his parochial horizon,
his diet inconveniently thin, and his head conveni-
ently thick, whose notion of greatness is a prize
pig, and whose patriotism rises or falls with the
strength of his beer, is a creature as little likely
to be met with here as the dodo, his only rival
in the qualities that make up a good citizen ; but
this is no result of climatic influences. Such crea-
tures are the contemporaries of an earlier period
of civilization than ours. Nor is it so clear that
solidity is always a virtue, and lightness a vice in
character, any more than in bread, or that the

246 SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT?

leaven of our institutions works anything else than
a wholesome ferment and aeration. The experi-
ence of the last four years is enough to j)rove that
sensibility may consist with tenacity of purpose,
and that enthusiasm may become a permanent
motive where the conviction of the worth of its
object is profound and logical. There are things
in this universe deeper and highei-, more solid even,
than the English Constitution. If that is the per-
fection of human wisdom and a sufficing object of
faith and worship for our cousins over the water,
on the other hand God's dealing with this chosen
people is preparing them to conceive of a perfec-
tion of divine wisdom, of a constitution in the
framing of which man's wit had no share, and which
shall yet be supreme, as it is continually more or
less plainly influential in the government of the
world. We may need even sterner teaching than
any we have yet had, but we have faith that the
lesson will be learned at last.

If the assertion which we alluded to at the out-
set were true, if we, more than others, are apt to
forget the past in the present, the work of Mr.
Moore ^ would do much in helping us to recover
what we have lost. Had its execution been as com-
plete as its plan was excellent, it would have left
nothing to be desired. Its want of order may be
charged upon the necessity of monthly publication ;
but there are other defects which this will hardly
excuse. The editor seems to have become grad-
ually helpless before the mass of material that

^ The Bebellion Record. Edited by Frank Moore. Six vols.

SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT? 247

heaped itself about him, and to have shovelled
from sheer despair of selection. In the documen-
tary part he is sufficiently, sometimes even depres-
singly full, and he has preserved a great deal of
fugitive poetry from both sides, much of it spirited,
and some of it vigorously original ; ^ but he has
frequently neglected to give his authorities. His
extracts from the newspapers of the day, especially
from Southern and foreign ones, are provokingly
few, and his department of " incidents and rumors,"
the true mirror of the time, inadequate both in
quantity and quality. In spite of these defects,
however, there is enough to recall vividly the fea-
tures of the time at any marked period during the
war, to renew the phases of feeling, to trace the
slowly gathering current of opinion, and to see
a definite purpose gradually orbing itself out of
the chaos of plans and motives, hopes, fears, en-
thusiasms, and despondencies. We do not propose
to review the book, — we might, indeed, almost as
well undertake to review the works of Father Time
himself, — but, relying chiefly on its help in piecing
out our materials, shall try to freshen the memory
of certain facts and experiences worth bearing in
mind either for example or warning.

It is of importance, especially considering the
part which what are called the " leading minds " of
the South are expected to play in reconstruction, to
keep clearly before our eyes the motives and the
manner of the Rebellion. Perhaps we should say

1 See especially The Old Sergeant, a remarkable poem by For-
ceythe WiUson, in the sixth volume.

248 SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL ITf

inducements rather than motives, for of these there
was but a singie one put forward by the seceding
States, namely, the obtaining security, permanence,
and extension for the system of slavery. We do
not use the qualifying epithet " African," because
the franker propagandists of Southern principles
affirmed the divine institution of slavery pure and
simple, without regard to color or the curse of
Canaan. This being the singie motive of the Re-
bellion, what was its real object? Primarily, to
possess itself of the government by a sudden coup
d'etat; or that failing, then, secondarily, by a peace-
ful secession, which should paralyze the commerce
and manufactures of the Free States, to bring them
to terms of submission. Whatever may have been
the opinion of some of the more far-sighted, it is
clear that a vast majority of the Southern people,
including their public men, believed that their re-
volution would be peaceful. Their inducements to
moving precisely when they did were several. At
home the treasury was empty ; faithless ministers
had supplied the Southern arsenals with arms, and
so disposed the army and navy as to render them
useless for any sudden need ; but above all, they
could reckon on several months of an administra-
tion which, if not friendly, was so feeble as to be
more dangerous to the country than to its betrayers,
and there was a great party at the North hitherto
their subservient allies, and now sharing with them
in the bitterness of a common political defeat.^

^ Mr. A. H. Stephens, Vice-President of the late Confederacy,
attributed the Secession movement to disappointed ambition.

SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT? 249

Abroad there was peace, with the prospect of its
continuance ; the two great maritime powers were
also the great consumers of cotton, were both deadly
enemies, like themselves, to the democratic princi-
ple, and, if not actively interfering, would at least
throw all the moral weight of their sympathy and
encouragement on the Southern side. They were
not altogether mistaken in their reckoning. The
imbecility of Mr. Buchanan bedded the ship of
state in an ooze of helpless inaction, where none of
her guns could be brought to bear, and whence no-
thing but the tide of indignation which followed
the attack on Sumter could have set her afloat again,
while prominent men and journals of the Demo-
cratic party hastened to assure the Rebels, not only
of approval, but of active physical assistance. Eng-
land, with indecent eagerness, proclaimed a neu-
trality which secured belligerent rights to a conspi-
racy that was never to become a nation, and thus
enabled members of Parliament to fit out privateers
to prey with impunity on the commerce of a friendly
power. The wily Napoleon followed, after an in-
terval long enough to throw all responsibility for
the measure, and to direct all the natural irritation
it excited in this country, upon his neighbor over
the way. England is now endeavoring to evade the
consequences of her hasty proclamation and her
jaunty indifference to the enforcement of it upon
her own subjects. The principle of international law
involved is a most important one ; but it was not
so much the act itself, or the pecuniary damage
resulting from it, as the animus that so plainly

250 SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT?

prompted it, which Americans find it hard to for-
give.

It would be unwise in us to forget that inde-
pendence was a merely secondary and incidental
consideration with the Southern conspirators at the
beginning of the Rebellion, however they may have
thought it wise to put it in the front, both for the
sake of their foreign abettors who were squeam-
ish about seeming, though quite indifferent about
being, false to their own professions and the higher
interests of their country, and also for the sake of
its traditionary influence among the Southern peo-
ple. Some, it is true, were bold enough or logical
enough to advocate barbarism as a good in itself ;
and in estimating the influences which have ren-
dered some minds, if not friendly to the Rebellion,
at least indifferent to the success of the Union, we
should not forget that reaction against the softening
and humanizing effect of modern civilization, led
by such men as Carlyle, and joined in by a multi-
tude whose intellectual and moral fibre is too much
unstrung to be excited by anything less pungent
than paradox. Protestants against the religion
which sacrifices to the polished idol of Decorum
and translates Jehovah by Comme-il-faut^ they find
even the divine manhood of Christ too tame for
them, and transfer their allegiance to the shaggy
Thor with his mallet of brute force. This is hardly
to be wondered at when we hear England called
prosperous for the strange reason that she no longer
dares to act from a noble impulse, and when, at
whatever page of her recent history one opens, he

SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT? 251

finds her statesmanship to consist of one Noble
Lord or Honorable Member asking a question, and
another Noble Lord or Honorable Member endea-
voring to dodge it, amid cries of Hear ! Hear I
enthusiastic in proportion to the fruitlessness of
listening. After all, we are inclined to think there
is more real prosperity, more that posterity will
find to have a deep meaning and reality, in a de-
mocracy spending itself for a principle, and, in spite
of the remonstrances, protests, and sneers of a
world busy in the eternal seesaw of the balance of
Eul-ope, persisting in a belief that life and property
are mere counters, of no value except as represen-
tatives of a higher idea. May it be long ere gov-
ernment become in the New World, as in the Old,
an armed police and fire-department, to protect
property as it grows more worthless by being sel-
fislily clutched in fewer hands, and keep God's fire
of manhood from reaching that gunpowder of the
dangerous classes which underlies all institutions
based only on the wisdom of our ancestors.

As we look back to the beginnings of the Rebel-
lion, we are struck with the thoughtlessness with
which both parties entered upon a war of whose
vast proportions and results neither was even dimly
conscious. But a manifest difference is to be re-
marked. In the South this thoughtlessness was the
result of an ignorant self-confidence, in the North
of inexperience and good humor. It was long be-
fore either side could believe that the other was in
earnest : the one in attacking a government which
they knew only by their lion's share in its offices

252 SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT?

and influence, the other in resisting the unprovoked
assault of a race born in the saddle, incapable of
subjugation, and unable to die comfortably except
in the last ditch of jubilant oratory. When at last
each was convinced of the other's sincerity, the
moods of both might have been predicted by any
observer of human nature. The side which felt
that it was not only in the wrong, but that it had
made a blunder, lost all control of its temper, all
regard for truth and honor. It betook itself forth-
with to lies, bluster, and cowardly abuse of its an-
tagonist. But beneath every other expression of
Southern sentiment, and seeming to be the base
of it, was a ferocity not to be accounted for by
thwarted calculations or by any resentment at in-
juries received, but only by the influence of slavery
on the character and manners. " Scratch a Rus-
sian," said Napoleon, " and you come to the Tartar
beneath." Scratch a slaveholder, and beneath the
varnish of conventionalism you come upon some-
thing akin to the man-hunter of Dahomey. Nay,
the selfishness engendered by any system which
rests on the right of the strongest is more irritable
and resentful in the civilized than the savage man,
as it is enhanced by a consciousness of guilt. In
the first flush of over-confidence, when the Rebels
reckoned on taking Washington, the air was to be
darkened with the gibbeted carcasses of dogs and
caitiffs. Pollard, in the first volume of his South-
ern History of the War, prints without comment
the letter of a ruffian who helped butcher our
wounded in Sudley Church after the first battle of

SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT? 253

Manassas, in whicti lie says that he had resolved to
give no quarter. In Missouri the Rebels took scalps
as trophies, and that they made personal ornaments
of the bones of our unburied dead, and that women
wore them, though seeming incredible, has been
proved beyond question. Later in the war, they
literally starved our prisoners in a country where
Sherman's army of a hundred thousand men found
supplies so abundant that they could dispense with
their provision train. Yet these were the " gen-
try " of the country, in whose struggle to escape
from the contamination of mob-government the
better classes of England so keenly sympathized.
Our experience is thrown away unless it teach us
that every form of conventionalized injustice is in-
stinctively in league with every other, the world
over, and that all institutions safe only in law, but
forever in danger from reason and conscience, be-
get first selfishness, next fear, and then cruelty,
by an incurable degeneration. Having been thus
taught that a rebellion against justice and mercy
has certain natural confederates, we must be blind
indeed not to see whose alliance at the South is
to give meaning and permanence to our victory
over it.

In the North, on the other hand, nothing is more
striking than the persistence in good nature, the
tenacity with which the theories of the erring
brother and the prodigal son were clung to, despite
all evidence of facts to the contrary. There was a
kind of boyishness in the rumors which the news-
papers circulated (not seldom with intent to dis-

254 SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT?

pirit), and the people believed on the authority of
reliable gentlemen from Hiehmond, or Union refu-
gees whose information could be trusted. At one
time the Rebels had mined eleven acres in the
neighborhood of Bull Hun ; at another, there were
regiments of giants on their way from Texas, who,
first paralyzing our batteries by a yell, would rush
unscathed upon the guns, and rip Tip the unresist-
ing artillerymen with bowie-knives three feet long,
made for that precise service, and the only weapon
to which these Berserkers would condescend ; again,
for the fiftieth time, France and England had de-
finitely agreed upon a forcible intervention ; finally,
in order to sap the growing confidence of the peo-
ple in President Lincoln, one of his family was
accused of communicating our plans to the Rebels,
and this at a time when the favorite charge against
his administration was the having no plan at all.
The public mind, as the public folly is generally
called, was kept in a fidget by these marvels and
others like them. But the point to which we would
especially call attention is this : that while the
war slowly educated the North, it has had compara-
tively little effect in shaking the old nonsense out
of the South. Nothing is more striking, as we
trace Northern opinion through those four years
that seemed so long and seem so short, than to see
how the minds of men were sobered, braced, and
matured as the greatness of the principles at stake
became more and more manifest ; how their pur-
pose, instead of relaxing, was strained tighter by
disappointment, and by the growing sense of a

SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT? 255

guidance wiser than their own. Nor should we
forget how slow the great body of the people were
in being persuaded of the expediency of directly
attacking slavery, and after that of enlisting colored
troops ; of the fact, in short, that it must always be
legal to preserve the source of the law's authority,
and constitutional to save the country. The jiru-
dence of those measures is now acknowledged by
all, and justified by the result : but we must not
be blind to the deeper moral, that justice is always
and only politic, that it needs no precedent, and
that we were prosperous in proportion as we were
willing to be true to our nobler judgment. In one
respect only the popular understanding seems al-
ways to have been, and still to remain, confused.
Our notion of treason is a purely traditional one,
derived from countries where the question at issue
has not been the life of the nation, but the con-
flicting titles of this or that family to govern it.
Many people appear to consider civil war as merely
a more earnest kind of political contest, which
leaves the relative position of the parties as they
would be after a Presidential election. But no
treason was ever so wicked as that of Davis and his
fellow-conspirators, for it had no apology of injury
or even of disputed right, and it was aimed against
the fairest hope and promise of the woiid. They
did not attempt to put one king in place of another,
but to dethrone human nature and discrown the
very manhood of the race. And in what respect
does a civil war differ from any other in the dis-
cretion which it leaves to the victor of exacting

256 SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT?

indemnity for tlie past and security for the future?
A contest begun for such ends and maintained by
such expedients as tins has been, is not to be con-
cluded by merely crying quits and shaking hands^
The slaveholding States chose to make themselves
a foreign people to us, and they must take the con-
sequences. We surely cannot be expected to take
them back as if nothing had happened, as if victory
rendered us helpless to promote good or prevent
evil, and took from us all title to insist on the ad-
mission of the very principle for which we have
sacrificed so much. The war has established the
unity of the government, but no peace will be any-
thing more than a pretence unless it rest upon the
unity of the nation, and that can only be secured
by making everywhere supreme the national idea
that freedom is a right inherent in man himself,
and not a creature of the law, to be granted to
one class of men or withheld from it at the option
of another.

What have we conquered ? The Southern
States? The Southern people? A cessation of
present war ? Surely not these or any one of
these merely. The fruit of our victory, as it was
always the object of our warfare, is the everlasting
validity of the theory of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence in these United States, and the obligation
before God and man to make it the rule of our
practice. It was in that only that we were stronger
than our enemies, stronger than the public opinion
of the world ; and it is from that alone that we
derive our right of the strongest, for it is wisdom,

SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT? 257

justice, and the manifest will of Him who made of
one blood all the nations of the earth. It were a
childish view of the matter to think this is a mere
trial of strength or struggle for supremacy between
the North and South. The war sprang from the
inherent antipathy between two forms of political
organization radically hostile to each other. Is the
war over, will it ever be over, if we allow the in-
compatibility to remain, childishly satisfied with a
mere change of shape ? This has been the grapple
of two brothers that already struggled with each
other even in the womb. One of them has fallen
under the other ; but let simple, good-natured Esau
beware how he slacken his grip till he has got back
his inheritance, for Jacob is cunninger with the
tongue than he.

We have said that the war has given the North
a higher conception of its manhood and its duties,
and of the vital force of ideas. But do we find
any parallel change in the South ? We confess we
look for it in vain. There is the same arrogance,
the same materialistic mode of thought, which
reckons the strength and value of a country by the
amount of its crops rather than by the depth of
political principle which inspires its people, the
same boyish conceit on which even defeat wastes
its lesson. Here is a clear case for the interference
of authority. The people have done their part by
settling the fact that we have a government ; and
it is for the government now to do its duty toward
the people by seeing to it that their blood and
treasure shall not have been squandered in a mean-

258 SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT?

ingless conflict. We must not let ourselves be
misled by the terms North and South, as if those
names implied any essential diversity of interest,
or the claim to any separate share in the future
destiny of the country. Let us concede every right
to the several States except that of mischief, and
never again be deceived by the fallacy that a moral
wrong can be local in its evil influence, or that a
principle alien to the instincts of the nation can be
consistent either with its prosperity or its peace.
We must not be confused into a belief that it is
with States that we are dealing in this matter.
The very problem is how to reconstitute safely a
certain territory or population as States. It is not
we that take anything from them. The war has
left them nothing that they can fairly call their
own politically but helplessness and confusion.
We propose only to admit them for the first time
into a real union with us, and to give them an
equal share in privileges, our belief in whose value
we have proved by our sacrifices in asserting them.
There is always a time for doing what is fit to be
done ; and if it be done wisely, temperately, and
firmh^, it need appeal for its legality to no higher
test than success. It is the nation, and not a sec-
tion, which is victorious, and it is only on princi-
ples of purely national advantage that any perma-
nent settlement can be based.

The South will come back to the Union intent
on saving whatever fragments it can from the
wreck of the evil element in its social structure,
which it clings to with that servile constancy which

SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT? 259

men often show for the vice that is making them
its victims. If they must lose slavery, they will
make a shift to be comfortable on the best substi-
tute they can find in a system of caste. The ques-
tion for a wise government in such a case seems to
us not to be, Have we the right to interfere ? but
much rather, Have we the right to let them alone ?
If we are entitled, as conquerors, — and it is only
as such that we are so entitled, — to stipulate for
the abolition of slavery, what is there to prevent
our exacting further conditions no less essential to
our safety and the prosperity of the South ? The
national unity we have paid so dearly for will turn
out a pinchbeck counterfeit, without that sympathy
of interests and ideas, that unity of the people,
which can spring only from homogeneousness of
institutions. The successive advances toward jus-
tice which we made during the war, and which
looked so difficult and doubtful before they were
made, the proclamation of freedom and the arming
of the blacks, seem now to have been measures of
the simplest expediency, as the highest always
turns out to be the simplest when we have the wit
to try it. The heavens were to have come crash-
ing down after both those measures ; yet the pil-
lars of the universe not only stood firm on their
divinely laid foundations, but held us up also, and,
to the amazement of many, God did not frown on
an experiment of righteousness. People are not
yet agreed whether these things were constitutional ;
we believe, indeed, that the weight of legal opinion
is against them, but nevertheless events are toler-

260 SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT?

ably unanimous that without them we should have
had a fine Constitution left on our hands with no
body politic for it to animate.

Laws of the wisest human device are, after all,
but the sheath of the sword of Power, which must
not be allowed to rust in them, till it cannot be
drawn swiftly in time of need. President Lincoln
had many scruples to overcome ere he could over-
step the limits of precedent into the divine air of
moral greatness. Like most men, he was reluctant
to be the bearer of that message of God with which
his name will be linked in the grateful memory of
mankind. If he won an immortality of fame by
consenting to ally himself with the eternal justice,
and to reinforce his armies by the inspiration of
their own nobler instincts, an equal choice of re-
nown is offered to his successor in applying the
same loyalty to conscience in the establishment of
peace. We could not live together half slave and
half free ; shall we succeed better in trying a
second left-handed marriage between democracy
and another form of aristocracy, less gross, but not
less uncongenial? They who before misled the
country into a policy false and deadly to the very
truth which was its life and strength, by the fear
of abolitionism, are making ready to misrule it
again by the meaner prejudice of color. We can
have no permanent peace with the South but by
Americanizing it, by compelling it, if need be, to
accept the idea, and with it the safety of demo-
cracy. At present we seem on the brink of con-
tracting to protect from insurrection States in

SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT? 261

which a majority of the i^opulation, many of them
now trained to arms, and all of them conscious of
a claiiii upon us to make their freedom strong
enough to protect them, are to be left at the mercy
of laws which they have had no share in enacting.
The gravity of this consideration alone should
make us pause. The more thought we bestow
upon the matter, the more thoroughly are we per-
suaded that the only way to get rid of the negro is
to do him justice. Democracy is safe because it is
just, and safe only when it is just to all. Here is
no question of white or black, but simply of man.
We have hitherto been strong in proportion as we
dared be true to the sublime thought of our own
Declaration of Independence, which for the first
time proposed to embody Christianity in human
laws, and announced the discovery that the secu-
rity of the state is based on the moral instincts and
the manhood of its members. In the very mid-
night of the war, when we were compassed round
with despondency and the fear of man, that peer-
less utterance of human policy rang like a trumpet
announcing heavenlj' succor, and lifted us out of the
darkness of our doubts into that courage which comes
of the fear of God. Now, if ever, may a statesman
depend upon the people sustaining him in doing
what is simply right, for they have found out the
infinite worth of freedom, and how much they love
it, by being called on to defend it. We have seen
how our contest has been watched by a breathless
world ; how every humane and generous heart,
every intellect bold enough to believe that men

262 SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT?

may be safely trusted with government as well as
with any other of their concerns, has wished ns
God-speed. And we have felt as never before the
meaning of those awful words, " Hell beneath is
stirred for thee," as we saw all that was mean and
timid and selfish and wicked, by a horrible impul-
sion of nature, gathering to the help of our ene-
mies. Why should we shrink from embodying
our own idea as if it would turn out a Franken-
stein? Why should we let the vanquished dictate
terms of peace ? A choice is offered that may
never come again, unless after another war. We
should sin against our own light, if we allowed
mongrel republics to grow up again at the South,
and deliberately organized anarchy, as if it were
better than war. Let the law be made equal for
all men. If the power does not exist in the Con-
stitution, find it somewhere else, or confess that
democracy, strongest of all governments for war,
is the weakest of all in the statesmanship that shall
save us from it. There is no doubt what the
wishes of the administration are. Let them act
up to their own convictions and the emergency of
the hour, sure of the support of the people ; for it
is one of the chief merits of our form of polity
that the public reason, which gives our Constitu-
tion all its force, is always a reserve of power to
the magistrate, open to the appeal of justice, and
ready to ratify the decisions of conscience. There
is no need of hurry in readmitting the States that
locked themselves out of the old homestead. It is
not enough to conquer unless we convert them, and

SCOTCH THE SNAKE, OR KILL IT? 263

time, the best means of quiet persuasion, is in our
own Lands. Shall we hasten to cover with the
thin ashes of another compromise that smoulder-
ing war which we called peace for seventy years,
only to have it flame up again when the wind of
Southern doctrine has set long enough in the old
quarter ? It is not the absence of war, but of its
causes, that is in our grasp. That is what we
fought for, and there must be a right somewhere
to enforce what aU see to be essential. To quibble
away such an opportunity would be as cowardly as
unwise.

THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP

1866

Mr. Johnson is the first of our Presidents who
has descended to the stump, and spoken to the
people as if they were a mob. We do not care to
waste words in criticising the taste of this proceed-
ing, but deem it our duty to comment on some of
its graver aspects. We shall leave entirely aside
whatever was personal in the extraordinary dia-
tribe of the 22d of February, merely remarking
that we believe the majority of Americans have
too much good sense to be flattered by an allusion
to the humbleness of their chief magistrate's ori-
gin ; the matter of interest for them being rather
to ascertain what he has arrived at than where he
started from, — we do not mean in station, but in
character, intelligence, and fitness for the place he
occupies. We have reason to suspect, indeed, that
pride of origin, whether high or low, springs from
the same principle in human nature, and that one
is but the positive, the other the negative, pole of
a single weakness. The people do not take it as a
compliment to be told that they have chosen a ple-
beian to the highest office, for they are not fond of
a plebeian tone of mind or manners. What they
do like, we believe, is to be represented by their

THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP 265

foremost man, tlieir highest type of courage, seuse,
and patriotism, no matter what his origin. For,
after all, no one in this country incurs any natal
disadvantage unless he be born to an ease which
robs him of the necessity of exerting, and so of in-
creasing and maturing, his natural powers. It is
of very little consequence to know what our Presi-
dent was ; of the very highest, to ascertain what he
is, and to make the best of him. We may say, in
passing, that the bearing of Congress, under the
temptations of the last few weeks, has been most
encouraging, though we must except from our com-
mendation the recent speech of Mr. Stevens of
Pennsylvania. There is a pride of patriotism that
should make all personal pique seem trifling ; and
Mr. Stevens ought to have remembered that it
was not so much the nakedness of an antagonist
that he was uncovering as that of his country.

The dangers of popular oratory are always great,
and unhappily ours is nearly all of this kind.
Even a speaker in Congress addresses his real
hearers through the reporters and the post-office.
The merits of the question at issue concern him
less than what he shall say about it so as not to
ruin his own chance of reelection, or that of some
fourth cousin to a tidewaitership. Few men have
any great amount of gathered wisdom, still fewer
of extemporary, while there are unhappily many
who have a large stock of accumulated phrases,
and hold their parts of speech subject to immediate
draft. In a country where the party newspapers
and speakers have done their best to make us be-

266 THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP

iieve that consistency is of so much more impor-
tance than statesmanship, and where every public
man is more or less in the habit of considering
what he calls his " record " as the one thing to be
saved in the general deluge, a hasty speech, if the
speaker be in a position to make his words things,
may, by this binding force which is superstitiously
attributed to the word once uttered, prove to be of
public detriment. It would be well for us if we
could shake off this baleful system of requiring
that a man who has once made a fool of himself
shall always thereafter persevere in being one.
Unhappily it is something more easy of accomplish-
ment than the final perseverance of the saints.
Let us learn to be more careful in distinguishing
between betrayal of principle, and breaking loose
from a stupid consistency that compels its victims
to break their heads against the wall instead of
going a few steps round to the door. To eat our
own words would seem to bear some analogy to
that diet of east-wind which is sometimes attrib-
uted to the wild ass, and might therefore be whole-
some for the tame variety of that noble and neces-
sary animal, which, like the poor, we are sure to
have always with us. If the words have been
foolish, we can conceive of no food likely to be
more nutritious, and could almost wish that we
might have public establishments at the common
charge, like those at which the Spartans ate black
broth, where we might all sit down together to a
meal of this cheaply beneficial kind. Among other
amendments of the Constitution, since every Sena-

THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP 267

tor seems to carry half a dozen in his pocket now-
adays, a sort of legislative six-shooter, might we
not have one to the effect that a public character
might change his mind as circumstances changed
theirs, say once in five years, without forfeiting the
confidence of his fellow-citizens ?

We trust that Mr. Johnson may not be so often
reminded of his late harangue as to be provoked
into maintaining it as part of his settled policy,
and that every opportunity will be given him for
forgetting it, as we are sure his better sense will
make him wish to do. For the more we reflect
upon it, the more it seems to us to contain, either
directly or by implication, principles of very dan-
gerous consequence to the well-being of the Repub-
lic. We are by no means disposed to forget Mr.
Johnson's loyalty when it was hard to be loyal, nor
the many evidences he has given of a sincere de-
sire to accomplish what seemed to him best for the
future of the whole country ; but, at the same time,
we cannot help thinking that some of his over-
frank confidences of late have shown alarming mis-
conceptions, both of the position he holds either in
the public sentiment or by virtue of his office, and
of the duty thereby devolved upon him. We do
not mean to indulge ourselves in any nonsensical
rhetoric about usurpations like those which cost
an English king his head, for we consider the mat-
ter in too serious a light, and no crowded galleries
invite us to thrill them with Bulwerian common-
place ; but we have a conviction that the exceptional
circumstances of the last five years, which gave a

268 THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP

necessary predominance to tlie executive part of
our government, have left behind them a false im-
pression of the prerogative of a President in ordi-
nary times. The balance-wheel of our system has
insensibly come to think itself the motive power,
whereas that, to be properly effective, should al-
ways be generated by the deliberate public opinion
of the country. Already the Democratic party,
anxious to profit by any chance at resuscitation, —
for it is extremely inconvenient to be dead so long,
— is more than hinting that the right of veto was
given to the President that he might bother and
baffle a refractory Congress into concession, not to
his reasons, but to his whim. There seemed to be
a plan at one time of forming a President's party,
with no principle but that of general opposition to
the policy of that great majority which carried him
into power. Such a scheme might have had some
chance of success in the good old times when it
seemed to the people as if there was nothing more
important at stake than who should be in and who
out ; but it would be sure of failure now that the
public mind is intelligently made up as to the vital
meaning of whatever policy we adopt, and the
necessity of establishing our institutions, once for
all, on a basis as permanent as human prudence
can make it.

Congress is sometimes complained of for wasting
time in discussion, and for not having, after a four
months' session, arrived at any definite plan of
settlement. There has been, perhaps, a little eager-
ness on the part of honorable members to associate

THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP 269

their names with the particular nostrum that is to
build up our national system again. In a country
where, unhappily, any man may be President, it is
natural that a means of advertising so efficacious
as this should not be neglected. But really, we do
not see how Congress can be blamed for not being
ready with a plan definite and precise upon every
point of possible application, when it is not yet in
possession of the facts according to whose varying
complexion the plan must be good or bad. The
question with us is much more whether another
branch of the government, — to which, from its
position and its opportunity for a wider view, the
country naturally looks for initiative suggestion,
and in which a few months ago even decisive action
would have been pardoned, — whether this did not
let the lucky moment go by without using it. That
moment was immediately after Mr. Lincoln's mur-
der, when the victorious nation was ready to apply,
and the conquered faction would have submitted
without a murmur to that bold and comprehen-
sive policy which is the only wise as it is the only
safe one for great occasions. To let that moment
slip was to descend irrecoverably from the van-
tage ground where statesmanship is an exact sci-
ence to the experimental level of tentative politics.
We cannot often venture to set our own house on
fire with civil war, in order to heat our iron up
to that point of easy forging at which it glowed,
longing for the hammer of the master-smith, less
than a year ago. That Occasion is swift we
learned long ago from the adage ; but this vola-

270 THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP

tillty is meant only of moments where force of
personal character is decisive, where the fame or
fortune of a single man is at stake. The life of
nations can afford to take less strict account of
time, and in their affairs there may always be a
hope that the slow old tortoise, Prudence, may over-
take again the opportunity that seemed flown by
so irrecoverably. Our people have shown so much
of this hard - shelled virtue during the last five
years, that we look with more confidence than ap-
prehension to the result of our present difficulties.
Never was the common-sense of a nation more often
and directly appealed to, never was it readier in
coming to its conclusion and making it operative
in public affairs, than during the war whose wounds
we are now endeavoring to stanch. It is the duty
of patriotic men to keep this great popular faculty
always in view, to satisfy its natural demand for
clearness and practicality in the measures proj)osed,
and not to distract it and render it nugatory by
the insubstantial metaphysics of abstract policy.
From the splitting of heads to the splitting of
hairs would seem to be a long journey, and yet
some are already well on their way to the end of
it, who should be the leaders of public opinion and
not the skirmishing harassers of its march. It
would be well if some of our public men would
consider that Providence has saved their modesty
the trial of an experiment in cosmogony, and that
their task is the difficult, no doubt, but much sim-
pler and less ambitious one, of bringing back the
confused material which lies ready to their hand,

THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP 271

always with a divinely implanted instinct of order
in it, to as near an agreement with the providential
intention as their best wisdom can discern. The
aggregate opinion of a nation moves slowly. Like
those old migrations of entire tribes, it is encum-
bered with much household stuff ; a thousand un-
foreseen things may divert or impede it ; a hostile
check or the temptation of present convenience
may lead it to settle far short of its original aim ;
the want of some guiding intellect and central will
may disperse it ; but experience shows one constant
element of its progress, which those who aspire to
be its leaders should keep in mind, namely, that
the place of a wise general should be of tener in the
rear or the centre than the extreme front. The
secret of permanent leadership is to know how to
be modei"ate. The rashness of conception that
makes opportunity, the gallantry that heads the
advance, may win admiration, may possibly achieve
a desultory and indecisive exploit ; but it is the
slow steadiness of temper, bent always on the main
design and the general movement, that gains by
degrees a confidence as unshakable as its own, the
only basis for permanent power over the minds of
men. It was the surest proof of Mr. Lincoln's
sagacity and the deliberate reach of his under-
standing, that he never thought time wasted while
he waited for the wagon that brought his supplies.
The very immovability of his purpose, fixed always
on what was attainable, laid him open to the shal-
low criticism of having none, — for a shooting star
draws more eyes, and seems for the moment to have

272 THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP

a more definite aim, than a planet, — but it gained

him at last such a following as made him iri'esisti-
ble. It lays a much lighter tax on the intellect,
and proves its resources less, to suggest a number
of plans, than to devise and carry through a single
one.

Mr. Johnson has an undoubted constitutional
right to choose any, or to reject all, of the schemes
of settlement proposed by Congress, though the
wisdom of his action in any case is a perfectly
proper subject of discussion among those who put
him where he is, who are therefore responsible for
his power of good or evil, and to whom the conse-
quences of his decision must come home at last.
He has an undoubted j^ersonal right to propose any
scheme of settlement himself, and to advocate it
with whatever energy of reason or argument he
possesses, but is liable, in our judgment, to very
grave reprehension if he appeal to the body of the
people against those who are more immediately its
representatives than himself in any case of doubt-
ful exjDcdiency, before discussion is exhausted, and
where the difference may well seem one of personal
pique rather than of considerate judgment. This
is to degrade us from a republic, in whose fore-
ordered periodicity of submission to popular judg-
ment democracy has guarded itself against its own
passions, to a mass meeting, where momentary in-
terest, panic, or persuasive sophistry — all of them
gregarious influences, and all of them contagious — ••
may decide by a shout what years of afterthought
may find it hard, or even impossible, to undo. There

THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP 273

have been some things in the deportment of the
President of late that have suggested to thoughtful
men rather the pettish foible of wilfulness than the
strength of well-trained and conscientious will. It is
by the objects for whose sake the force of volition
is called into play that we decide whether it is
childish or manly, whether we are to call it obsti-
nacy or firmness. Our own judgment can draw no
favorable augxiry from meetings gathered " to sus-
tain the President," as it is called, especially if we
consider the previous character of those who are
prominent in them, nor from the ill-considered
gossip about a " President's party ; " and they
would excite our apprehension of evil to come,
did we not believe that the experience of the last
five years had settled into convictions in the mind
of the people. The practical result to which all
benevolent men finally come is that it is idle to try
to sustain any man who has not force of character
enough to sustain himself without their help, and
the only party which has any chance now before
the people is that of resolute good sense. What
is now demanded of Congress is unanimity in the
best course that is feasible. They should recollect
that Wisdom is more likely to be wounded in the
division of those who should be her friends, than
either of the parties to the quarrel. Our difficul-
ties are by no means so great as timid or interested
people would represent them to be. We are to
decide, it is true, for posterity ; but the question
presented to us is precisely that which every man
has to decide in making his will, — neither greater

274 THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP

nor less than that, nor demanding a wisdom above
what that demands. The power is in our own
hands, so long as it is prudent for us to keep it
there; and we are justified, not in doing simply
what we will with our own, but what is best to be
done. The great danger in the present posture of
affairs seems to be lest the influence which in Mr.
Lincoln's case was inherent in the occasion and the
man should have held over in the popular mind as
if it were entailed upon the office. To our minds
more is to be apprehended in such a conjuncture
from the weakness than from the strength of the
President's character.

There is another topic which we feel obliged to
comment on, regretting deeply, as we do, that the
President has given us occasion for it, and believ-
ing, as we would fain do, that his own better judg-
ment wUl lead him to abstain from it in the future.
He has most unfortunately permitted himself to
assume a sectional ground. Geography is learned
to little purpose in Tennessee, if it does not teach
that the Northeast as well as the Southwest is an
integral and necessary part of the United States.
By the very necessity of his high office, a Presi-
dent becomes an American, whose concern is with
the outward boundaries of his country, and not its
internal subdivisions. One great object of the
war, we had supposed, was to abolish all fallacies
of sectional distinction in a patriotism that could
embrace something wider than a township, a
county, or even a State. But Mr. Johnson has
chosen to revive the paltry party-cries from before

THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP 275

that deluge wliich we hoped had washed everything
clean, and to talk of treason at both ends of the
Union, as if there were no difference between
men who attempted the life of their country, and
those who differ from him in their judgment of
what is best for her future safety and greatness.
We have heard enough of New England radical-
ism, as if that part of the country where there
is the most education and the greatest accumula-
tion of property in the hands of the most holders
were the most likely to be carried away by what are
called agrarian theories. All that New England
and the West demand is that America should be
American ; that every relic of a barbarism more
archaic than any institution of the Old World
should be absolutely and irrecoverably destroyed ;
that there should be no longer two peoples here,
but one, homogeneous and powerful by a sympa-
thy in idea. Does Mr. Johnson desire anything
more ? Does he, alas ! desire anything less ? If so,
it may be the worse for his future fame, but it will
not and cannot hinder the irresistible march of
that national instinct which forced us into war,
brought us out of it victorious, and will not now
be cheated of its fruits. If we may trust those
who have studied the matter, it is moderate to say
that more than half the entire population of the
Free States is of New England descent, much more
than half the native population. It is by the votes
of these men that Mr. Johnson holds his office ; it
was as the exponent of their convictions of duty
and policy that he was chosen to it. Not a vote

276 THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP

did he or could he get in a single one of the States
in rebellion. If they were the American people
when they elected him to execute their will, are they
less the American people now ? It seems to us the
idlest of all possible abstractions now to discuss the
question whether the rebellious States were ever
out of the Union or not, as if that settled the right
of secession. The victory of superior strength
settled it, and nothing else. For four years they
were practically as much out of the Union as
Japan ; had they been strong enough, they would
have continued out of it ; and what matters it
where they were theoretically ? Why, until Queen
Victoria, every English sovereign assumed the
style of King of France. The King of Sardinia
was, and the King of Italy, we suppose, is still tit-
ular King of Jerusalem. Did either monarch ever
exercise sovereignty or levy taxes in those imagi-
nary dominions? What the war accomplished for
us was the reduction of an insurgent population ;
and what it settled was, not the right of secession,
for that must always depend on will and strength,
but that every inhabitant of every State was a sub-
ject as well as a citizen of the United States, — in
short, that the theory of freedom was limited by
the equally necessary theory of authority. We
hoped to hear less in future of the possible inter-
pretations by which the Constitution may be made
to mean this or that, and more of what will help
the present need and conduce to the future strength
and greatness of the whole country. It was by
precisely such constitutional quibbles, educating

THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP 277

meu to believe they had a right to claim whatever
they could sophistically demonstrate to their own
satisfaction, — and self-interest is the most cunning
of sophists, — that we were interjDreted, in spite of
ourselves, into civil war. It was by just such a
misunderstanding of one part of the country by
another as that to which Mr. Johnson has lent the
weight of ^ his name and the authority of his place,
that rendered a hearty national sympathy, and may
render a lasting reorganization, impossible.

If history were still written as it was till within
two centuries, and the author put into the mouth
of his speakers such words as his conception of the
character and the situation made probable and fit-
ting, we could conceive an historian writing a hun-
dred years hence to imagine some such speech as
this for Mr. Johnson in an interview with a South-
ern delegation.

" Gentlemen, I am glad to meet you once more
as friends, I wish I might say as fellow-citizens.
How soon we may again stand in that relation to
each other depends wholly upon yourselves. You
have been pleased to say that my birth and life-
long associations gave you confidence that I would
be friendly to the South. In so saying, you do no
more than justice to my heart and my intentions ;
but you must allow me to tell you frankly, that, if
you use the word South in any other than a purely
geographical sense, the sooner you convince your-
selves of its impropriety as addressed to an Amer-
ican President, the better. The South as a politi-
cal entity was Slavery, and went out of existence

278 THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP

with it. And let me also, as naturally connected
with this topic, entreat you to di-sabuse your minds
of the fatally mistaken theory that you have been
conquered by the North. It is the American peo-
ple who are victors in this conflict, and who intend
to inflict no worse penalty on you than that of ad-
mitting you to an entire equality with themselves.
They are resolved, by God's grace, to Americanize
you, and America means education, equality before
the law, and every upward avenue of life made as
free to one man as another. You urge upon me,
with great force and variety of argument, the mani-
fold evils of the present unsettled state of things, the
propriety and advantage of your being represented
in both houses of Congress, the injustice of taxation
without representation. I admit the importance
of every one of these considerations, but I think
you are laboring under some misapprehension of the
actual state of affairs. I know not if any of you
have been in America since the spring of 1861, or
whether (as I rather suspect) you have all been
busy in Europe endeavoring to — but I beg par-
don, I did not intend to say anything that should
recall old animosities. But intelligence is slow to
arrive in any part of the world, and intelligence
from America painfully so in reaching Europe.
You do not seem to be aware that something has
happened here during the last Jour years^ some-
thing that has made a very painful and lasting im-
pression on the memory of the American people,
whose voice on this occasion I have the honor to
be. They feel constrained to demand that you

THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP 279

sLall enter into bonds to keep the peace. They do
not, I regret to say, agree with you in looking upon
what has happened here of late as only a more em-
phatic way of settling a Presidential election, the
result of which leaves both parties entirely free
to try again. They seem to take the matter much
more seriously. Nor do they, so far as I can see,
agree with you in your estimate of the importance
of conserving your several state sovereignties, as
you continue to call them, insisting much rather
on the conservation of America and of American
ideas. They say that the only thing which can
individualize or perpetuate a commonwealth is to
have a history ; and they ask which of the States
lately in rebellion, except Virginia and South
Carolina, had anything of the kind ? In spite of
my natural sympathies, gentlemen, my reason com-
pels me to agree with them. Your strength, such
as it was, was due less to the fertility of your
brains than to that of your soil and to the inven-
tion of the Yankee Whitney which you used and
never paid for. You tell me it is hard to put you
on a level with your negroes. As a believer in
the superiority of the white race, I cannot admit
the necessity of enforcing that superiority by law.
A Roman emperor once said that gold never re-
tained the unpleasant odor of its source, and I must
say to you that loyalty is sweet to me, whether it
throb under a black skin or a white. The Amer-
ican people has learned of late to set a greater
value on the color of ideas than on shades of com-
plexion. As to the injustice of taxation without

280 THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP

represeDtation, that is an idea derived from our
English ancestors, and is liable, like all rules, to
the exceptions of necessity. I see no reason why
a State may not as well be disfranchised as a bor-
ough for an illegal abuse of its privileges ; nor do
I quite feel the parity of the reason which should
enable you to do that with a loyal black which we
may not do with a disloyal white. Remember that
this government is bound by every obligation, ethi-
cal and political, to protect these people because
they are weak, and to reward them (if the common
privilege of manhood may be called a reward) be-
cause they are faithful. We are not fanatics, but
a nation that has neither faith in itself nor faith
toward others must soon crumble to pieces by moral
dry-rot. If we may conquer you, gentlemen, (and
you forced the necessity upon us,) we may surely
impose terms upon you ; for it is an old principle
of law that cui liceat majus, ei licet etiam minus.
" In your part of the country, gentlemen, that
which we should naturally appeal to as the friend of
order and stability — property — is blindly against
us ; prejudice is also against us ; and we have noth-
ing left to which we can appeal but human nature
and the common privilege of manhood. You seem
to have entertained some hope that I would gather
about myself a ' President's party," which should be
more friendly to. you and those animosities which
you mistake for interests. But you grossly deceive
yourselves ; I have no sympathy but with my
wdiole country, and there is nothing out of which
such a party as you dream of could be constructed,

THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP 281

except the broken remnant of those who deserted
you when for the first time you needed their help
and not their subserviency, and those feathery
characters who are drawn hither and thither by
the chances of office. I need not say to you that I
am and can be nothing in this matter but the voice
of the nation's deliberate resolve. The recent past
is too painful, the immediate future too momentous,
to tolerate any personal considerations. You throw
yourselves upon our magnanimity, and I must be
frank with you. My predecessor, Mr. Buchanan,
taught us the impolicy of weakness and concession.
The people are magnanimous, but they understand
by magnanimity a courageous steadiness in prin-
ciple. They do not think it possible that a large
heart should consist with a narrow brain ; and
they would consider it pusillanimous in them to
consent to the weakness of their country by admit-
ting you to a share in its government before you
have given evidence of sincere loyalty to its prin-
ciples, or, at least, of wholesome fear of its power.
They believe, and I heartily agree with them, that
a strong nation begets strong citizens, and a weak
one weak, — that the powers of the private man
are invigorated and enlarged by his confidence in
the power of the body politic ; and they see no
possible means of attaining or securing this needed
strength but in that homogeneousness of laws and
institutions which breeds unanimity of ideas and
sentiments, no way of arriving at that homogene-
ousness but the straightforward path of perfect
confidence in freedom. All nations have a right to

282 THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP

security, ours to greatness ; and must have the one
as an essential preliminary to the other. If your
prejudices stand in the way, and you are too weak
to rid yourselves of them, it will be for the Ameri-
can people to consider whether the plain duty of
conquering them for you will be, after all, so diffi-
cult a conquest as some they have already achieved.
By yourselves or us they must be conquered.
Gentlemen, in bidding you farewell, I ask you to
consider whether you have not forgotten that, in
order to men's living peacefully together in com-
munities, the idea of government must precede
that of liberty, and that the one is as much the
child of necessity as the other is a slow concession
to civilization, which itself mainly consists in the
habit of obedience to something more refined than
force."

THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION

1866

The late Philadelphia experiment at making a
party out of nullities reminds us of nothing so
much as of the Irishman's undertaking to produce
a very palatable soup out of no more costly mate-
rial than a pebble. Of course he was to be fur-
nished with a kettle as his field of operations, and
after that he asked only for just the least bit of
beef in the world to give his culinary miracle a
flavor, and a pinch of salt by way of relish. As
nothing could be more hollow and empty than the
pretence on which the new movement was founded,
nothing more coppery than the material out of which
it was mainly composed, we need look no further
for the likeness of a kettle wherewith to justify our
comparison ; as for the stone, nothing could be
more like that than the Northern disunion faction,
which was to be the chief ingredient in the new-
fangled pottage, and whose leading characteristic
for the last five years has been a uniform alacrity
in going under ; the offices in the gift of the Presi-
dent might very well be reckoned on to supply the
beef which should lead by their noses the weary
expectants whose hunger might be too strong for
their nicety of stomach ; and the pinch of salt, — "

284 THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION

why could not that be found, in the handful of Re-
publicans who might be drawn over by love of
notoriety, private disgusts, or that mixture of mo-
tives which has none of the substance of opinion,
much less of the tenacity of principle, but which
is largely operative in the action of illogical minds ?
But the people ? Would the}^ be likely to have
their appetite aroused, by the fumes of this thin
decoction ? Where a Chinaman is cook, one is apt
to be a little suspicious ; and if the Address in
which the Convention advertised their ingenious
mess had not a little in its verbiage to remind one
of the flowery kingdom, there was something in
that part of the assemblage which could claim any
bygone merit of Republicanism calculated to stim-
ulate rather than to allay any dreadful surmise of
the sagacious rodent which our antipodes are said
to find savory. And as for the people, it is a curi-
ous fact, that the party which has always been
loudest to profess its faith in their capacity of self-
government has been the last to conceive it pos-
sible that they should apprehend a principle, arrive
at a logical conclusion, or be influenced by any
other than a mean motive. The cordons hlevs of
the political cooks at Philadelphia were men admi-
rably adapted for the petty intrigues of a local
caucus, but by defect of nature profoundly uncon-
scious of that simple process of generalization from
a few plain premises by which the popular mind
is guided in times like these, and upon questions
which appeal to the moral instincts of men.

The Convention was well managed, we freely

THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 285

admit, — and why not, when all those who were
allowed to have any leading part in it belonged
exclusively to that class of men who are known as
party managers, and who, like the director of a
theatre or a circus, look upon the mass of mankind
as creatures to be influenced by a taking title, by
amplitude of posters, and by a thrilling sensation
or two, no matter how coarse ? As for the title,
nothing could be better than that of the " Devoted
Unionists," — and were not the actors, no less than
the scenery and decorations, for the most part
entirely new, — at least in that particular play ?
Advertisement they did not lack, with the whole
Democratic press and the Department of State at
their service, not to speak of the real clown be-
ing allowed to exhibit himself at short intervals
upon the highest platform in this or any other coun-
try. And if we ask for sensation, never were so
many performers exhibited together in their grand
act of riding two horses at once, or leaping through
a hoop with nothing more substantial to resist them
than the tissue-paper of former professions, nay, of
recent pledges. And yet the skill of the managers
had something greater still behind, in Massachu-
setts linked arm in arm with South Carolina. To
be sure, a thoughtful mind might find something
like a false syllogism in pairing off a Commonwealth
whose greatest sin it has been to lead the van in
freedom of opinion, and in those public methods of
enlightenment which make it a safeguard of popular
government, with an Oligarchy whose leadership
has been in precisely the opposite direction, as if

286 THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION

both had equally sinned against American ideas.
But such incongruities are trifles no greater than
those of costume so common on every stage ; and
perhaps the only person to be pitied in the exhibi-
tion was Governor Orr, who had once uttered a
hope that his own State might one day walk abreast
with the daughter of Puritan forethought in the
nobler procession of prosperous industry, and who
must have felt a slight shock of surprise, if nothing
more, at the form in which Massachusetts had
chosen to incarnate herself on that particular occa-
sion. We cannot congratulate the Convention on
the name of its chairman, for there is something
ominously suggestive in it. But, on the other hand
it is to be remembered that Mr. Doolittle has a
remarkably powerful voice, which is certainly one
element in the manufacture of sound opinions. A
little too much latitude was allowed to Mr. Ray-
mond in the Address, though on the whole perhaps
it was prudent to make that document so long as to
insure it against being read. In their treatment
of Mr. Vallandigham the managers were prudent.
He was allowed to appear just enough not quite to
alienate his party, on whom the new movement
counts largely for support, and just not enough to
compromise the Convention with the new recruits
it had made among those who would follow the
name Conservative into anything short of down-
right anarchy. The Convention, it must be con-
fessed, had a rather hard problem to solve, — no-
thing less than to make their patent reconciliation
cement out of firfe and gunpowder, both useful

THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 287

things in themselves, but liable in concert to bring
about some odd results in the way of harmonious
action. It is generally thought wiser to keep them
aj^art, and accordingly Mr. Vallandigham was ex-
cluded from the Convention altogether, and the
Southern delegates were not allowed any share in
the Address or Resolutions. Indeed, as the North-
ern members were there to see what they could
make, and the Southern to find out how much they
could save, and whatever could be made or saved
was to come out of the North, it was more prudent
to leave all matters of policy in the hands of those
who were supposed to understand best the weak
side of the intended victim. The South was really
playing the game, and is to have the lion's share of
the winnings ; but it is only as a disinterested
bystander, who looks over the cards of one of the
parties, and guides his confederate by hints so
adroitly managed as not to alarm the pigeon. The
Convention avoided the reef where the wreck of
the Chicago lies bleaching ; but we are not so sure
that they did not ground themselves fast upon the
equally dangerous mud-bank that lies on the op-
posite side of the honest channel. At Chicago they
were so precisely frank as to arouse indignation ;
at Philadelphia they are so careful of generalities
that they make us doubtful, if not suspicious. Does
the expectation or even the mere hope of pudding
make the utterance as thick as if the mouth were
already full of it ? As to the greater part of the
Resolutions, they were political truisms in which
everybody would agree as so harmless that the Con-

288 THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION

vention might almost as well have resolved the
multiplication table article by article. The Address
was far less explicit ; and where there is so very
much meal, it is perhaps not altogether unchai'i-
table to suspect that there may be something under
it. There is surely a suspicious bulge here and
there, that has the look of the old Democratic cat.
But, after all, of what consequence are the prin-
ciples of the party, when President Johnson covers
them all when he puts on his hat, and may change
them between dinner and tea, as he has done several
times already? The real principle of the party,
its seminal and vital principle alike, is the power
of the President, and its policy is every moment at
the mercy of his discretion. That power has too
often been the plaything of whim, and that discre-
tion the victim of ill-temper or vanity, for us to
have any other feeling left than regret for the one
and distrust of the other.

The new party does not seem to have drawn
to itself any great accession of strength from the
Republican side, or indeed to have made many
converts that were not already theirs in fact, though
not in name. It was joined, of course, at once by
the little platoon of gentlemen calling themselves,
for some mystical reason. Conservatives, who have
for some time been acting with the Democratic
faction, carefully keeping their handkerchiefs to
their noses all the while. But these involuntary
Catos are sure, as if by instinct, to choose that
side which is doomed not to please the gods, and
their adhesion is as good as a warranty of defeat.

THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 289

During the President's progress they must often
have been driven to their handkerchiefs ag'ain.
It was a great blunder of Mr. Seward to allow
him to assume the apostolate of the new creed in
person, for every word he has uttered must have
convinced many, even of those unwilling to make
the admission, that a doctrine could hardly be
sound which had its origin and derives its power
from a source so impure. For so much of Mr.
Johnson's harangues as is not positively shocking,
we know of no parallel so close as in his Imperial
Majesty Kobes I. : —

" Er riiluiite dass er nie studirt
Auf Universitaten
Und Reden sprach aus sieh selbst heraiis,
Ganz ohne Facultaten."

And when we consider his power of tears ; when
we remember Mr. Reverdy Johnson and Mr. An-
drew Johnson confronting each other like two
augurs, the one trying not to laugh while he saw
the other trying to cry; when we recall the
touching scene at Canandaigua, where the Presi-
dent was overpowered by hearing the pathetic
announcement that Stephen A. Douglas had for
two years attended the academy in what will doubt-
less henceforward be dubbed that " classic locality,"
we cannot help thinking of

" In seinem sehonen Auge glanzt
Die Thrane, die Stereotype."

Indeed, if the exhibition of himself were not so
profoundly sad, when we think of the high place
he occupies and the great man he succeeded in it.

290 THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION

notMng could well be so comic as some of the in-
cidents of Mr. Johnson's tour. No satirist could
have conceived anything so bewitchingly absurd as
the cheers which greeted the name of Simeon at
the dinner in New York, whether we suppose the
audience to have thought him some eminent mem-
ber of their party of whom they had never heard,
or whom they had forgotten as thoroughly as they
had Mr. Douglas, or if we consider that they were
involuntarily giving vent to their delight at the
pleasing prospect opened by their "illustrious
guest's " allusion to his speedy departure. Nor
could anything have been imagined beforehand
so ludicrously ominous as Mr. Seward's fears lest
the platform should break down under them at
Niagara. They were groundless fears, it is true,
for the Johnson platform gave way irreparably
on the 22d of February ; but they at least luckily
prevented Nicholas Bottom Cromwell from utter-
ing his after-dinner threat against the peojDle's
immediate representatives, against the very body
whose vote supplies the funds of his party, and
whose money, it seems, is constitutional, even if
its own existence as a Congress be not. We pity
Mr. Seward in his new office of bear-leader.
How he must hate his Bruin when it turns out
that his tricks do not even please the crowd !

But the ostensible object of this indecent orgy
seems to us almost as discreditable as the purpose
it veiled so thinly. Who was Stephen A. Douglas,
that the President, with his Cabinet and the two
highest officers of the army and navy, should add

THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 291

their official dignity to the raising of his monument,
and make the whole country an accomplice in con-
secrating his memory? His name is not associated
with a single measure of national importance, un-
less upon the wrong side. So far was he from
being a statesman that, even on the lower groimd
of politics, both his principles and his expression
of them were tainted with the reek of vulgar asso-
ciations, A man of naturally great abilities he
certainly was, but wholly without that instinct for
the higher atmosphere of thought or ethics which
alone makes them of value to any but their pos-
sessor, and without which they are more often dan-
gerous than serviceable to the commonwealth. He
habitually courted those weaknesses in the people
which tend to degrade them into a populace, in-
stead of appealing to the virtues that grow by use,
and whose mere acknowledgment in a man in some
sort ennobles him. And by doing this he proved
that he despised the very masses whose sweet
breaths he wooed, and had no faith in the system
under which alone such a one as he could have
been able to climb so high. He never deserted the
South to take side with the country till the South
had both betrayed and deserted him. If such a
man were the fairest outcome of Democracy, then
is it indeed a wretched failure. But for the facti-
tious importance given to his name by the necessity
of furnishing the President with a pretext for
stumping the West in the interest of Congress,
Mr. Douglas would be wellnigh as utterly forgotten
as Cass or Tyler, or Buchanan or Fillmore ; nor

292 THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION

should we liave alluded to him now but that the
recent pilgrimage has made his name once more
public property, and because we think it a common
misfortune when such men are made into saints,
though for any one's advantage but their own.
We certainly have no wish to play the part of
advocatus didboli on such an occasion, even were
it necessary at a canonization where the office of
Pontif ex Maximus is so appropriately filled by Mr.
Johnson.

In speaking of the late unhappy exposure of
the unseemly side of democratic institutions, we
have been far from desirous of insisting on Mr,
Seward's share in it. We endeavored to account
for it at first by supposing that the Secretary of
State, seeing into the hands of how vain and weak
a man the reins of administration had fallen, was
willing, by flattering his vanity, to control his
weakness for the public good. But we are forced
against our will to give up any such theory, and to
confess that Mr. Seward's nature has been " sub-
dued to what it works in." We see it with sincere
sorrow, and are far from adding our voice to the
popular outcry against a man the long and honor-
able services of whose prime we are not willing to
forget in the decline of his abilities and that dry-
rot of the mind's nobler temper which so often re-
sults from the possession of power. Long contact
with the meaner qualities of men, to whose infec-
tion place and patronage are so unhappily exposed,
could not fail of forcing to a disproportionate
growth any germs of that cynicism always latent

THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 293

in temperaments so exclusively intellectual and
unmitigated by any kindly lenitive of humor.
Timid by nature, the war which he had jDrophesied,
but had not foreseen, and which invigorated bolder
men, unbraced him ; and while the spendthrift
verbosity of his despatches was the nightmare of
foreign ministries, his uncertain and temporizing
counsels were the perpetual discouragement of his
party at home. More than any minister with
whose official correspondence we are acquainted,
he carried the principle of paper money into diplo-
macy, and bewildered Earl Russell and M. Drouyn
de Lhuys with a horrible doubt as to the real value
of the verbal currency they were obliged to receive.
But, unfortunately, his own countiymen were also
unprovided with a price-current of the latest quota-
tion in phrases, and the same gift of groping and
inconclusive generalities which perhaps was useful
as a bewilderment to would-be hostile governments
abroad was often equally effective in disheartening
the defenders of nationality at home. We cannot
join with those who accuse Mr. Seward of betray-
ing his party, for we think ourselves justified by
recent events in believing that he has always looked
upon parties as the mere ladders of ambitious men ;
and when his own broke under him at Chicago in
1860, he forthwith began to cast about for another,
the rounds of which might be firmer under his
feet. He is not the first, and we fear will not be
the last, of our public men who have thought to
climb into the White House by a back window,
and have come ignominiously to the ground in at-

294 THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION

tempting it. Mr. Seward's view of the matter
probably is that the Republican party deserted him
six years ago, and that he was thus absolved of all
obligations to it. But might there not have been
such a thing as fidelity to its principles ? Or was
Mr. Seward drawn insensibly into the acceptance
of them by the drift of political necessity, and did
he take them up as if they were but the hand that
had been dealt him in the game, not from any con-
viction of their moral permanence and power, per-
haps with no perception of it, but from a mere
intellectual persuasion of the use that might be
made of them politically and for the nonce by a
skilful gamester? We should be very unwilling
to admit such a theory of his character ; but surely
what we have just seen would seem to justify it,
for we can hardly conceive that any one should
suddenly descend from real statesmanship to tke
use of such catch-rabble devices as those with which
he has lately disgusted the country. A small poli-
tician cannot be made out of a great statesman,
for there is an oppugnancy of nature between the
two things, and we may fairly suspect the former
winnings of a man who has been once caught with
loaded dice in his pocket. However firm may be
Mr. Seward's faith in the new doctrine of John-
sonian infallibility, surely he need not have made
himself a partner in its vulgarity. And yet lie
has attempted to vie with the Jack-pudding tricks
of the unrivalled performer whose man-of-business
he is, in attempting a populacity (we must coin
a new word for a new thing) for which he was

THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 295

exquisitely unfitted. What more stiffly awkward
than his essays at easy familiarity ? What more
painfully remote from drollery than his efforts to
be droll ? In the case of a man who descends so
far as Mr. Seward, such feats can be character-
ized by no other word so aptly as by tumbling.
The thing would be sad enough in any prominent
man, but in him it becomes a public shame, for
in the eyes of the world it is the nation that
tumbles in its Prime Minister. The Secretary of
State's place may be dependent on the President,
but the dignity of it belongs to the country, and
neither of them has any right to trifle with it. Mr.
Seward might stand on his head in front of what
Jenkins calls his " park gate," at Auburn, and we
should be the last to question his perfect right as
a private citizen to amuse himself in his own way,
but in a great officer of the government such
pranks are no longer harmless. They are a na-
tional scandal, and not merely so, but a national
detriment, inasmuch as they serve to foster in
foreign statesmen a profound misapprehension of
the American people and of the motives which in-
fluence them in questions of public policy. Never
was so great a wrong done to democracy, nor so
great an insult offered to it, as in this professional
circuit of the presidential Punch and his ministerial
showman.

Fortunately, the exhibitions of this unlucky pair,
and their passing round the hat without catching
even the greasy pence they courted, have very
little to do with the great question to be decided

296 THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION

at the next elections, except in so far as we may
be justified in suspecting their purity of motive
who could consent to such impurity of means, and
the soundness of their judgment in great things
who in small ones show such want of sagacity.
The crowds they have drawn are no index of popu=
lar approval. We remember seeing the prodigious
nose of Mr. Tyler (for the person behind it had
been added by nature merely as the handle to so
fine a hatchet) drawn by six white horses through
the streets, and followed by an eager multitude,
nine tenths of whom thought the man belonging
to it a traitor to the party which had chosen him.
But then the effigy at least of a grandiose, if not
a great man, sat beside him, and the display was
saved from contempt by the massive shape of
Webster, beneath which he showed like a swallow
against a thunder-cloud. Even Mr. Fillmore, to
whom the Fugitive Slave Law denies the complete
boon of an otherwise justly earned oblivion, had
some dignity given to his administration by the
presence of Everett. But in this late advertising-
tour of a policy in want of a party, Cleon and
Agoracritus seem to have joined partnership, and
the manners of the man match those of the master.
Mr. Johnson cannot so much as hope for the suc-
cess in escaping memory achieved by the last of
those small Virginians whom the traditionary fame
of a State once fertile in statesmen lifted to four
years of imperial pillory, where his own littleness
seemed to heighten rather than lower the grandeur
of his station ; his name will not be associated

THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 297

with the accomplishment of a great wrong against
humanity, let us hope not with the futile attempt
at one ; but he will be indignantly remembered as
the first, and we trust the last, of our chief magis-
trates who believed in the brutality of the peo-
ple, and gave to the White House the ill-savor
of a corner-grocery. He a tribune of the people ?
A lord of misrule, an abbot of unreason, much
rather !

No one can object more strongly than we to the
mixing of politics with personal character ; but
they are here inextricably entangled together, and
we hold it to be the duty of every journal in the
country to join in condemning a spectacle which
silence might seem to justify as a common event in
our politics. We turn gladly from the vulgarity
of the President and his minister to consider the
force of their arguments. Mr. Johnson seems to
claim that he has not betrayed the trust to which
he was elected, mainly because the Union party
have always af&rmed that the rebellious States
could not secede, and therefore ex vi termini are
still in the Union. The corollary drawn from this
is, that they have therefore a manifest right to
immediate representation in Congress. What we
have always understood the Union party as meaning
to affirm was, that a State had no right to secede ;
and it was upon that question, which is a very dif-
ferent thing from the other, that the whole con-
troversy hinged. To assert that a State or States
coidd not secede, if they were strong enough,
would be an absurdity. In point of fact, all but

298 THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION

three of the Slave States did secede, and for four
years it would have been treason throughout their
whole territory, and death on the nearest tree, to
assert the contrary. The law forbids a man to
steal, but he may steal, nevertheless ; and then, if
he had Mr. Johnson's power as a logician, he might
claim to escape all penalty by pleading that when
the law said should not it meant could not, and
therefore he had not. If a four years' war, if a
half million lives, and if a debt which is counted
by the thousand million are not satisfactory proofs
that somebody did contrive to secede practically,
whatever the theoretic right may have been, then
nothing that ought not to be done ever has been
done. We do not, however, consider the question
as to whether the Rebel States were constitution-
ally, or in the opinion of any political organization,
out of the Union or not as of the least practical
importance ; for we have never known an instance
in which any party has retreated into the thickets
and swamps of constitutional interpretation, where
it had the least chance of maintaining its ground
in the open field of common sense or against
the pressure of popular will. The practical fact
is, that the will of the majority, or the national
necessity for the time being, has always been con-
stitutional ; which is only as much as to say that
the Convention of 1787 was not wholly made up of
inspired prophets, who could provide beforehand
for every possible contingency. The doctrine of a
strict and even pettifogging interpretation of the
Constitution had its rise among: men who looked

THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 299

upon that instrument as a treaty, and at a time
when the conception of a national power which
should receive that of the States into its stream as
tributary was something which had entered the
head of only here and there a dreamer. The theo-
rists of the Virginia school would have dammed up
and diverted the force of each State into a narrow
channel of its own, with its little saw-mill and its
little grist-mill for local needs, instead of letting it
follow the slopes of the continental water-shed to
swell the volume of one great current ample for
the larger uses and needful for the higher civiliza-
tion of all. That there should always be a school
who interpret the Constitution by its letter is a
good thing, as interposing a check to hasty or par-
tial action, and gaining time for ample discussion ;
but that in the end we should be governed by its
spirit, living and operative in the energies of an
advancing people, is a still better thing ; since the
levels and shore-lines of politics are no more sta-
tionary than those of continents, and the ship of
state would in time be left aground far inland, to
long in vain for that open sea which is the only
pathway to fortune and to glory.

Equally idle with the claim that the Union party
is foreclosed from now dealing with the Rebel
States as seceded, because four years ago it de-
clared that they had no right to secede, is the as-
sertion that the object of the war was proclaimed
to be for the restoration of the Union and the Con-
stitution as they were. Even were we to admit
that 1861 is the same thing as 1866, the question

300 THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION

comes back again to precisely the point tliat is at
issue between the President and Congress, namely,
What is the wisest way of restoring the Union ? for
which both profess themselves equally anxious.
As for the Constitution, we cannot have that as it
was, but only as its framers hoped it would be,
with its one weak and wicked element excluded.
But as to Union, are we in favor of a Union in
form or in fact ? of a Union on the map and in our
national style merely, or one of ideas, interests, and
aspirations ? If we cannot have the latter, the for-
mer is a delusion and a snare ; and the strength of
the nation would be continually called away from
prosperous toil to be wasted in holding a wolf by
the ears, which would still be a wolf, and known
by all our enemies for such, though we called
heaven and earth to witness, in no matter how
many messages or resolves, that the innocent crea-
ture was a lamb. That somebody has a right to
dictate some kind of terms is admitted by Mr.
Johnson's own repeated action in the matter ; but
who that somebody should be, whether a single
man, of whose discretion even his own partisans
are daily becoming more doubtful, or the imme-
diate representatives of that large majority of the
States and of the people who for the last five years
have been forced against their will to represent and
to be the United States, is certainly too grave an
affair to be settled by that single man himself.

We have seen to what extremes the party calling
itself Conservative has hinted its willingness to go,
under the plea of restored Union, but with the ob-

THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 301

ject of regained power. At Philadelphia, they went
as far as they publicly dared in insinuating that
the South would be justified in another rebellion,
and their journals have more than once prompted
the President to violent measures, which would as
certainly be his ruin as they would lead to incalcu^
lable public disaster. The President himself has
openly announced something like a design of for-
cibly suppressing a Congress elected by the same
votes and secured by the same guaranties that
elected him to his place and secure Mm in it, — a
Congress whose validity he has acknowledged by
sending in his messages to it, by signing its bills,
and by drawing his pay under its vote ; and yet
thinking men are not to be allowed to doubt the
propriety of leaving the gravest measure that ever
yet came up for settlement by the country to a
party and a man so reckless as these have shown
themselves to be. Mr. Johnson talks of the dan-
ger of centralization, and repeats the old despotic
fallacy of many tyrants being worse than one, — a
fallacy originally invented, and ever since repeated,
as a slur upon democracy, but which is a palpable
absurdity when the people who are to be tyran-
nized over have the right of displacing their ty-
rants every two years. The true many-headed ty-
rant is the Mob, that part of the deliberative body
of a nation which Mr. Johnson, with his Southern
notions of popular government, has been vainly
seeking, that he might pay court to it, from the
seaboard to St. Louis, but which hardly exists, we
are thankful to say, as a constituent body, in any

302 THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION

part of the Northern States outside the city of New
York.

Mr. Seward, with that playfulness which sits
upon him so gracefully, and which draws its re-
sources from a reading so extensive that not even
John Gilpin has escaped its research, puts his
argument to the people in a form where the So-
cratic and arithmetic methods are neatly combined,
and asks, " How many States are there in the Un-
ion ? " He himself answers his own question for
an audience among whom it might have been diffi>
cult to find any political adherent capable of so ar-
duous a solution, by asking another, " Thirty-six ? "
Then he goes on to say that there is a certain
party which insists that the number shall be less
by ten, and ends by the clincher, " Now how many
stars do you wish to see in your flag ? " The re-
sult of some of Mr. Johnson's harangues was so
often a personal collision, in which the more ardent
on both sides had an opportunity to see any num-
ber of new constellations, that this astronomical
view of the case must have struck the audience
rather by its pertinence than its novelty. But in
the argument of the Secretary, as in that of the
President, there is a manifest confusion of logic,
and something very like a petitio principii. We
might answer Mr. Seward's question with, " As
many fixed stars as you please, but no more shoot-
ing stars with any consent of ours." But really
this matter is of more interest to heralds of arms
than to practical men. The difference between
Congress and the President is not, as Mr. SeWard

THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 303

would insinuate, that Congress or anybody else
wishes to keep the ten States out, but that the
Radical party (we cheerfully accept our share in
the opprobrium of the name) insists that they shall
come in on a footing of perfect equality with the
rest ; while the President would reward them for
rebellion by giving them an additional weight of
nearly one half in the national councils. The cry
of " Taxation without representation " is foolish
enough as raised by the Philadelphia Convention,
for do we not tax every foreigner that comes to us
while he is in process of becoming a citizen and a
voter ? But under the Johnsonian theory of recon-
struction, we shall leave a population which is now
four millions not only taxed without representation,
but doomed to be so forever without any reason-
able hope of relief. The true point is not as to the
abstract merits of universal suffrage (though we
believe it the only way toward an enlightened
democracy and the only safeguard of popular gov-
ernment), but as to whether we shall leave the
freedmen without the only adequate means of self-
defence. And however it may be now, the twenty-
six States certainly were the Union when they ac-
cepted the aid of these people and pledged the
faith of the government to their protection. Ja-
maica, at the end of nearly thirty years since eman-
cipation, shows us how competent former masters
are to accomplish the elevation of their liberated
slaves, even though their own interests would
prompt them to it. Surely it is a strange plea to
be effective in a democratic country, that we owe

B04 THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION

these people nothing because they cannot help
themselves ; as if governments were instituted for
the care of the strong only. The argument against
their voting which is based upon their ignorance
strikes us oddly in the mouths of those whose own
hope of votes lies in the ignorance, or, what is
often worse, the prejudice, of the voters. Besides,
we do not demand that the seceding States should
at once confer the right of suffrage on the blacks,
but only that they should give them the same
chance to attain it, and the same inducement to
make themselves worthy of it, as to every one else.
The answer that they have not the right in some of
the Northern States may be a reproach to the in-
telligence of those States, but has no relevancy if
made to the general government. It is not with
these States that we are making terms or claim any
right to make them, nor is the number of their
non-voting population so large as to make them
dangerous, or the prejudice against them so great
that it may not safely be left to time and common
sense. It was not till all men were made equal be-
fore the law, and the fact recognized that govern-
ment is something that does not merely preside
over, but reside in, the rights of all, that even
white peasants were enabled to rise out of their
degradation, and to become the strength instead of
the danger of France. Nothing short of such a re-
form could have conquered the contempt and aver-
sion with which the higher classes looked upon the
emancipated serf. Norman-French literature reeks
with the outbreak of this feelins: toward the ances-

THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 305

tors, whether Jews or villeins, of the very men who
are now the aristocracy of South Carolina, — a feel-
ing as intense, as nauseous in its expression, and as
utterly groundless, as that against the negro now.
We are apt, it would seem, a little to confound the
meaning of the two terms government and self-gov-
ernment, and the principles on which they respec-
tively rest. If the latter has its rights, the former
has quite as plainly its duties; and one of them
certainly is to see that no freedom should be al-
lowed to the parts which would endanger the safety
of the whole. An occasion calling for the exercise
of this duty is forced upon us now, and we must be
equal to it. Self-government, in any rightful defi-
nition of it, can hardly be stretched so far that it
will cover, as the late Rebels and their Northern
advocates contend, the right to dispose absolutely
of the destinies of four millions of people, the allies
and hearty friends of the United States, without
allowing them any voice in the matter.

It is alleged by reckless party orators that those
who ask for guaranties before readmitting the se-
ceded States wish to treat them with harshness, if
not with cruelty. Mr. Thaddeus Stevens is tri-
umphantly quoted, as if his foolish violence fairly
represented the political opinions of the Union
party. They might as well be made responsible
for his notions of finance. We are quite willing to
let Mr. Stevens be paired off with Mr. VaUan-
digham, and to believe that neither is a fair expo-
nent of the average sentiment of his party. Call-
ing names should be left to children, with whom,

30G THE SE WARD-JOHN SON REACTION

as with too large a class of our political speakers,
it seems to pass for argument. We believe it
never does so with the people ; certainly not with
the intelligent, who make a majority among themy
unless (as in the case of " Copperhead ") there
be one of those hardly-to-be-defined realities be-
hind the name which they are so quick to detect.
We cannot say that we have any great sympathy
for the particular form of mildness which discov-
ers either a "martyr," or a "pure -hearted pa-
triot," or even a " lofty statesman," in Mr. Jef-
ferson Davis, the latter qualification of him having
been among the discoveries of the London Times
when it thought his side was going to win ; but we
can say that nothing has surprised us more, or
seemed to us a more striking evidence of the hu-
manizing influence of democracy, than the entire
absence of any temper that could be called revenge-
ful in the people of the North toward their late
enemies. If it be a part of that inconsistent mix-
ture of purely personal motives and more than
legitimate executive action which Mr. Johnson is
pleased to call his " policy," — if it be a part of
that to treat the South with all the leniency that is
short of folly and all the conciliation that is short
of meanness, — then we were advocates of it before
Mr. Johnson. While he was yet only ruminating
in his vindictive mind, sore with such rancor as
none but a " plebeian," as he used to call himself,
can feel against his social superiors, the only really
agrarian proclamation ever put forth by any legiti-
mate ruler, and which was countersigned by the

THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 307

now suddenly " conservative " Secretary of State,
we were in favor of measures that should look
to governing the South by such means as the
South itself afforded, or could be made to afford.
It is true that, as a part of the South, we reck-
oned the colored people bound to us by every
tie of honor, justice, and principle, but we never
wished to wink out of sight the natural feelings of
men suddenly deprived of what they conceived to
be their property, — of men, too, whom we re-
spected for their courage and endurance even in a
bad cause. But we believed then, as we believe
now, and as events have justified us in believing,
that there could be no graver error than to flatter
our own feebleness and uncertainty by calling it
magnanimity, — a virtue which does not scorn the
society of patience and prudence, but which cannot
subsist apart from courage and fidelity to principle.
A people so boyish and conceited as the Southern-
ers have always shown themselves to be, unwilling
ever to deal with facts, but only with their own
imagination of them, would be sure to interpret
indecision as cowardice, if not as an unwilling
tribute to that superiority of which men who
really possess it are the last to boast. They have
learned nothing from the war but to hate the
men who subdued them, and to misinterpret and
misrepresent the causes of their subduing ; and
even now, when a feeling has been steadily growing
in the rest of the country for the last nine months
deeper and more intense than any during the war,
because mixed with an angry sense of unexpected

308 THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION

and treacherous disappointment, instead of setting
their strength to the rebuilding of their shat-
tered social fabric, they are waiting, as they waited
four years ago, for a division in the North which
will never come, and hailing in Andrew Johnson
a scourge of God who is to avenge them in the
desolation of our cities ! Is it not time that these
men were transplanted at least into the nineteenth
century, and, if they cannot be suddenly Ameri-
canized, made to understand something of the coun-
try which was too good for them, even though at
the cost of a rude shock to their childish self-con-
ceit ? Is that a properly reconstructed Union in
the Southern half of which no Northern man's life
is safe except at the sacrifice of his conscience, his
freedom of speech, of everything but his love of
money? To our minds the providential purpose
of this intervention of Mr. Johnson in our affairs
is to warn us of the solemn duty that lies upon us
in this single crisis of our history, when the chance
is offered us of stamping our future with greatness
or contempt, and which requires something like
statesmanship in the people themselves, as well as
in those who act for them. The South insisted
upon war, and has had enough of it ; it is now our
turn to insist that the peace we have conquered
shall be so settled as to make war impossible for
the future.

But how is this to be done ? The road to it is a
very plain one. We shall gain all we want if we
make the South really prosperous ; for with pro&.
perity will come roads, schools, churches, printing*

THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 309

presses, industry, thrift, intelligence, and security
of life and property. Hitherto the prosperity of
the South has been factitious ; it has been a pros-
perity of the Middle Ages, keeping the many poor
that a few might show their wealth in the barba-
rism of showy equipages and numerous servants, and
spend in foreign cities the wealth that should have
built up civilization and made way for refinement
at home. There were no public libraries, no col-
leges worthy of the name ; there was no art, no
science, — still worse, no literature but Simms's :
there was no desire for them. We do not say it in
reproach ; we are simply stating a fact, and are
quite aware that the North is far behind Europe in
these things. But we are not behind her in the
value we set upon them ; are even before her in the
price we are willing to pay for them, and are in the
way to get them. The South was not in that way ;
could not get into it, indeed, so long as the labor
that made wealth was cut off from any interest in
its expenditure, nor had any goal for such hopes as
soared away from the dreary level of its lifelong
drudgery but in the grave and the world beyond
it. We are not blind to what may be said on
the other side, nor to that fatal picturesqueness,
so attractive to sentimental minds and so melan-
choly to thoughtful ones, which threw a charm over
certain exceptional modes of Southern life among
the older families in Virginia and South Carolina.
But there are higher and manlier kinds of beauty,
— barer and sterner, some would call them, — with
less softly rounded edges, certainly, than the Wolf's

310 THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION

Crag pieturesqueness, which carries the mind with
pensive indolence toward the past, instead of stir-
ring it with a sense of present life, or bracing it
with the hope of future opportunity, and which at
once veils and betrays the decay of ancient civiliza=
tions. Unless life is arranged for the mere benefit
of the novelist, what right had these bits of last-
century Europe here? Even the virtues of the
South were some of them anachronisms ; and even
those that were not existed side by side with an
obtuseness of moral sense that could make a hero
of Semmes, and a barbarism that could starve pri-
soners by the thousand.

Some philosophers, to be sure, plead with us that
the Southerners are remarkable for their smaller
hands and feet, though so good an observer as
Thackeray pronounced this to be true of the whole
American people ; but really we cannot think such
arguments as this will give any pause to the inev-
itable advance of that democracy, somewhat rude
and raw as yet, a clumsy boy-giant, and not too
well mannered, whose office it nevertheless is to
make the world ready for the true second coming
of Christ in the practical supremacy of his doc-
trine, and its incarnation, after so many centuries
of burial, in the daily lives of men. We have been
but dimly, if at all, conscious of the greatness of
our errand, while we have already accomplished a
part of it in bringing together the people of all
nations to see each other no longer as aliens or ene-
mies, but as equal partakers of the highest earthly
dignity, — a common manhood. We have been

THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 311

forced, whether we would or no, first to endure,
then to tolerate, and at last to like men from all
the four corners of the world, and to see that each
added a certain virtue of his own to that precious
amalgam of which we are in due time to fashion a
great nation. We are now brought face to face
with our duty toward one of those dusky races that
have long sat in the shadow of the world ; we are
to be taught to see the Christ disguised also in
these, and to find at last that a part of our salva-
tion is inextricably knit up with the necessity of
doing them justice and leading them to the light.
This is no sentimental fancy ; it is written in plain
characters upon the very surface of things. We
have done everything to get rid of the negro ; and
the more we did, the more he was thrust upon us in
every possible relation of life and asj)ect of thought.
One thing we have not tried, — a spell before which
he would vanish away from us at once, by taking
quietly the place, whatever it be, to which Nature
has assigned him. We have not acknowledged him
as our brother. Till we have done so he will be
always at our elbow, a perpetual discomfort to him-
self and us. Now this one thing that will give us
rest is precisely what the South, if we leave the
work of reconstruction in their hands, will make it
impossible for us to do ; and yet it must be done
ere America can penetrate the Southern States.
It is for this reason, and not with any desire of es-
tablishing a standing garrison of four himdred
thousand loyal voters in the South, that we insist
on the absolute necessity of justice to the black

312 THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION

man. Not that we have not a perfect right to de-
mand the reception of such a garrison, but we wish
the South to govern itself ; and this it will never
be able to do, it will be governed as heretofore by
its circumstances, if we allow it to replace slavery
by the diseuf ranchisement of color, and to make an
Ireland out of what should be the most productive,
populous, and happy part of the Union, We may
evade this manifest duty of ours from indolence, or
indifference, or selfish haste ; but if there is one
truth truer than another, it is that no man or
nation ever neglected a duty that was not sooner or
later laid upon them in a heavier form, to be done
at a dearer rate. Neither man nor nation can find
rest short of their highest convictions.

This is something that altogether transcends any
partisan politics. It is of comparatively little con-
sequence to us whether Congress or the President
carry the day, provided only that America tri-
umph. That is, after all, the real question. On
which side is the future of the country, — the fu-
ture that we cannot escape if we would, but which
our action may embarrass and retard? If we had
looked upon the war as a mere trial of physical
strength between two rival sections of the country,
we should have been the first to oppose it, as a
wicked waste of treasure and blood. But it was
something much deeper than this, and so the peo-
ple of the North instinctively recognized it to be
from the first, — instinctively, we say, and not
deliberately at first ; but before it was over, their
understandings had grasped its true meaning, as an

THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 313

effort of tlie ideal America, which was to them half
a dream and half a reality, to cast off an alien
element. It was this ideal something, not the less
strongly felt because vaguely defined, that made
them eager, as only what is above sordid motives
can, to sacrifice all that they had and all that they
were rather than fail in its attainment. And it is to
men not yet cooled from the white-heat of this pas-
sionate mood that Mr. Johnson comes with his pal-
try offer of " my policy," in exchange for the logical
consequences of all this devotion and this sacrifice.
What is any one man's policy, and especially any
one weak man's policy, against the settled drift of a
nation's conviction, conscience, and instinct? The
American people had made up not only their minds,
but their hearts, and no man who knows anything
of human nature could doubt what their decision
would be. They wanted only a sufficient obstacle
to awaken them to a full consciousness of what was
at stake, and that obstacle the obstinate vanity of
the President and the blindness or resentment of
his prime minister have supplied. They are fully
resolved to have the great stake they played for and
won, and that stake was the Americanization of
all America, nothing more and nothing less. Mr.
Johnson told us in New York, with so profound a
misconception of the feeling of the Northern States
as was only possible to a vulgar mind, and that
mind a Southern one, that the South had set up
slavery as its stake, and lost, and that now the
North was in danger of losing the stake it had
risked on reconstruction in the national debt. Mr.

314 THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION

Johnson is still, it would seem, under that delusion
which led the South into the war ; namely, that it
was that section of the country which was the chief
element in its wealth and greatness. But no North-
ern man, who, so long as he lives, will be obliged
to pay his fine of taxes for the abolition of slavery
which was forced upon us by the South, is likely to
think it very hard that the South should be com-
pelled to furnish its share toward the common bur-
den, or will be afraid that the loyal States, whose
urgent demands compelled a timid Congress at last
to impose direct taxes, will be unable to meet their
obligations in the future, as in the past.

We say again that the questions before the
country are not to be decided on any grounds of
personal prejudice or partiality. We are far from
thinking that Congress has in all respects acted as
became the dignity of its position, or seized all the
advantage of the opportunity. They have seemed
to us sometimes afraid of coming before the people
with a direct, frank, and simple statement of what
was not only the best thing that could be done, but
the one thing that must be done. They were
afraid of the people, and did not count securely,
as they should have done, on that precious seeing
which four years of gradually wakening moral sense
had lent to the people's eyes. They should not
have shrunk from taking upon themselves and their
party all the odium of being in the right ; of being
on the side of justice, humanity, and of the Amer-
ica which is yet to be, whoever may fear to help
and whoever may try to hinder. The vulgar cry

THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 315

would be against them, at any rate, and they might
reckon on being accused of principles which they
thought it prudent to conceal, whether they com-
mitted their party to them or not. With those who
have the strong side, as they always do who have
conscience for an ally, a bold policy is the only
prosperous one. It is always wisest to accept in
advance all the logical consequences that can be
drawn from the principles we profess, and to make
a stand on the extremest limits of our position. It
will be time enough to fall back when we are
driven out. In taking a half-way position at first,
we expose ourselves to all the disadvantage and
discouragement of seeming to fight on a retreat,
and cut ourselves off from our supplies. For the
supplies of a party which is contending for a clear
principle, and not for its own immediate success,
are always drawn from the highest moral ground
included in its lines. We are not speaking here
of abstractions or wire - drawn corollaries, but of
those plain ethical axioms which every man may
apprehend, and which are so closely involved in
the question now before the country for decision.
We at least could lose nothing by letting the peo-
ple know exactly what we meant ; for we meant
nothing that could not claim the suffrage of sin-
cere democracy, of prudent statesmanship, or of
jealousy for the nation's honor and safety. That
the Republican party should be broken up is of
comparatively little consequence ; for it would be
merged in the stronger party of those who are re-
solved that no by-questions, no fallacies of gen-

316 THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION

erosity to the vanquished, shall turn it aside from
the one fixed purpose it has at heart ; that the war
shall not have been in vain ; and that the Kebel
States, when they return to the Union, shall return
to it as an addition of power, and under such terms
as that they must^ and not merely may^ be fixed
there. Let us call things by their right names,
and keep clearly in view both the nature of the
thing vanquished and of the war in which we were
victors. When men talk of generosity toward a
suppliant foe, they entirely forget what that foe
really was. To the people of the South no one
thinks of being unmerciful. But they were only
the blind force wielded by our real enemy, — an
enemy, prophesy what smooth things you will, with
whom we can never be reconciled and whom it
would be madness to spare. And this enemy was
not any body of kindred people, but that principle
of evil fatally repugnant to our institutions, which,
flinging away the hilt of its broken weapon, is now
cheating itself with the hope that it can forge a
new one of the soft and treacherous metal of
Northern disloyalty. The war can in no respect
be called a civil war, though that was what the
South, in its rash ignorance, threatened the North
with. It was as much a war between two different
nations, and the geographical line was as distinctly
drawn between them, as in the late war between
North and South Germany. They had been living,
it is true, under the same government, but the
South regarded this as implying no tie more in-
timate than that which brought the representatives

THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 317

of Prussia and Austria together in the Frankfort
Diet. We have the same right to impose terms
and to demand guaranties that Prussia has, that
the victor always has.

Many people are led to favor Mr. Johnson's pol-
icy because they dislike those whom they please to
call the " Republican leaders." If ever a party ex-
isted that had no recognized leaders, it is the Re-
publican party. Composed for the last five years,
at least, of men who, themselves professing all
shades of opinion, were agreed only in a determi-
nation to sustain the honor and preserve the ex-
istence of the nation, it has been rather a majority
than a party, employing the legislative machine to
carry out the purposes of public opinion. The
people were the true inspirers of all its mea-
sures, and accordingly it was left without a definite
policy the moment the mere poKticians in its ranks
became doubtful as to what direction the pop-
ular mind would take. It had no recognized leader
either in the House or Senate just at the time when
it first stood in need of such. The majority of
its representatives there tried in vain to cast any
political horoscope by which it would be safe for
them individually to be guided. They showed the
same distrust of the sound judgment of the people
and their power to grasp principles that they
showed at the beginning of the war, and at every
discouraging moment while it was going on. Now
that the signs of the times show unmistakably to
what the popular mind is making itself up, they
have once more a policy, if we may call that so

318 THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION

which is only a calculation of what it would be
'• safe to go before the people with," as they call it.
It is always safe to go before them with plain prin-
ciples of right, and with the conclusions that must
be drawn from them by common sense, though this
is what too many of our public men can never un-
derstand. Now joining a Know-Nothing " lodge,"
now hanging on the outskirts of a Fenian " circle,"
they mistake the momentary eddies of popular
whimsy for the great current that sets always
strongly in one direction through the life and his-
tory of the nation. Is it, as foreigners assert, the
fatal defect of our system to fill our highest offices
with men whose views in politics are bounded by
the next district election ? When we consider how
noble the science is, — nobler even than astronomy,
for it deals with the mutual repulsions and attrac-
tions, not of inert masses, but of bodies endowed
with thought and will, calculates moral forces, and
reckons the orbits of God's purposes toward man-
kind, — we feel sure that it is to find nobler teach-
ers and students, and to find them even here.

There is another class of men who are honestly
drawn toward the policy of what we are fain, for
want of a more definite name, to call the Presi-
dential Opposition party, by their approval of the
lenient measures which they suppose to be peculiar
to it. But our objection to the measures advocated
by the Philadelphia Convention, so far as we can
trace any definite shape amid the dust-cloud of
words, is, not they would treat the Rebel States
with moderation, but that they propose to take

THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 319

them back on trust. We freely admit that we
should have been inclined to see more reasonable-
ness in this course if we had not the examples of
Jamaica and New Orleans before our eyes ; if we
had not seen both there and in other instances with
which history supplies us, that it is not safe to leave
the settlement of such matters in the hands of men
who would be more than human if they had not the
prejudices and the resentments of caste. Here is
just one of those cases of public concern which call
for the arbitrament of a cool and impartial third
party, — the very office expected of a popular gov-
ernment, — which should as carefully abstain from
meddling in matters that may be safely left to be
decided by natural laws as it should be prompt to
interfere where those laws would to the general
detriment be inoperative. It should be remem-
bered that self-interest, though its requirefnents
may seem plain and imperative to an unprejudiced
bystander, is something which men, and even com-
munities, are often ready to sacrifice at the bidding
of their passions, and of none so readily as their
pride. As for the attachment between master and
slave, whose existence is sometimes asseverated in
the face of so many glaring facts to the contrary,
and on which we are asked to depend as something
stronger than written law, we have very little faith
in it. The system of clanship in the Scottish
Highlands is the strongest case to which we can
appeal in modern times of a truly patriarchal
social order. In that, the pride of the chief was
answered by the willing devotion of the sept, and

320 THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION

the two were bound together as closely as kindred
blood, immemorial tradition, and mutual depend-
ence could link them ; and yet, the moment it be-
came for the interest of the chieftain, in whom
alone was the landed title, to convert the mountain
slopes into sheep-walks, farewell to all consider-
ations of ancestral legend and ideal picturesque-
ness ! The clansmen were dispossessed of their lit-
tle holdings, and shipped off to the colonies like
cattle, by the very men for whom they would have
given their lives without question. The relation,
just like that of master and slave, or the proposed
one of superior and dependent, in the South, had
become an anachronism, to preserve which would
have been a vain struggle against that power of
Necessity which the Greeks revered as something
god-like. In our own case, so far from making it
for the interest of the ruling classes at the South to
elevate the condition of the black man, the policy
of Mr. Johnson offers them a bribe to keep him in
a state of hopeless dependency and subjection. It
gives them more members of Congress in propor-
tion as they have more unrepresented inhabitants.
Mr. Beecher asks us (and we see no possible rea-
son for doubting the honesty of his opinions, what-
ever may be their soundness) whether we are
afraid of the South, and tells us that, if we allow
them to govern us, we shall richly deserve it. It is
not that we are afraid of, nor are we in the habit
of forming our opinions on any such imaginary
grounds ; but we confess that we are afraid of
committing an act of national injustice, of national

THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 321

dishonor, of national breach of faith, and therefore
of national unwisdom and weakness. Moderation
is an excellent thing ; but taking things for granted
is not moderation, and there may be such a thing
as being immoderate in concession and confidence-
Aristotle taught us long ago that true moderation
was as far from the too-much of blind passion on
the one hand as from that of equally blind luke-
warmness on the other. We have an example of
wise reconstructive policy in that measure of the
Bourbon-restoration ministry, which compensated
the returned emigrants for their confiscated estates
by a grant from the public treasury. And the
measure was wise, for the reason that it enabled the
new proprietors and the ousted ones to live as citi-
zens of the same country together without mutual
hatred and distrust. We do not propose to com-
pensate the slaveholder for the loss of his chattels,
because the cases are not parallel, and because Mr.
Johnson no less than we acknowledges the justice
and validity of their emancipation. But the situa-
tion of the negro is strikingly parallel with that of
the new holders of land in France. As they were
entitled to security, so he has a right not only to be
secured in his freedom, but in the consequences
which legitimately flow from it. For it is only
so that he can be insured against that feeling of
distrust and uncertainty of the future which will
prevent him from being profitable to himself, his
former master, and the country. If we sought a
parallel for Mr. Johnson's " policy," we should find
it in James II., thinking his prerogative strong

322 THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION

enougli to overcome the instincts, convictions, and
fears of England.

However much fair-minded men may have been
wearied with the backing and filling of Congress,
and their uncertainty of action on some of the most
important questions that have come before them,
— however the dignity, and even propriety, of
their attitude toward Mr, Johnson may be in some
respects honestly called in question, — no one who
has looked fairly at the matter can pronounce the
terms they have imposed on the South as condi-
tions of restoration harsh ones. The character of
Congress is not before the country, but simply the
character of the jslan they propose. For ourselves,
we should frankly express our disgust at the dem-
agogism which courted the Fenians ; for, however
much we may sympathize with the real wrongs of
Ireland, it was not for an American Congress to
declare itself in favor of a movement which based
itself on the claim of every Irish voter in the coun-
try to a double citizenship, in which the adopted
country was made secondary, and which, directed
as it was against a j)rovince where Irishmen are
put on equal terms with every other inhabitant,
and where their own Church is the privileged one,
was nothing better than burglary and murder.
Whatever may be Mr. Seward's faults, he was cer-
tainly right in his dealing with that matter, unless
he is to be blamed for slowness. But as regards
the terms offered by Congress to the South, they
are very far from harsh or unreasonable ; they
are lamb-like compared to what we had reason to

THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 323

fear from Mr. Johnson, if we might judge by his
speeches and declarations of a year or two ago.
But for the unhappy haUucination which led Mr.
Johnson first to fancy himself the people of the
United States, and then to quarrel with the party
which elected him for not granting that he was so,
they would not have found a man in the North to
question their justice and propriety, unless among
those who from the outset would have been willing
to accept Mr. Jefferson Davis as the legitimate
President of the whole country. The terms im-
posed by Congress really demand nothing more
than that the South should put in practice at home
that Monroe Doctrine of which it has always been
so clamorous a supporter when it could be used for
party purposes. The system of privileged classes
which the South proposes to establish is a relic of
old Europe which we think it bad policy to in-
troduce again on this continent, after our so fresh
experience in the war of the evil consequences that
may spring from it. Aristocracy can form no
more intimate and hearty union with democracy
under one form than under another ; and unless
such a union be accomplished, or we can see some
reasonable hope of its future accomplishment, we
are as far from our object as ever.

The plan proposed disfranchises no one, does
not even interfere with the right of the States to
settle the conditions of the franchise. It merely
asks that the privilege shall "be alike within reach
of all, attainable on the same terms by those who
have shown themselves our friends as by those

324 THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION

whose hands were so lately red with the blood of
our nearest and dearest. We have nothing to do
with the number of actual loyalists at the South,
but with the number of possible ones. The ques-
tion is not how many now exist there, and what
are their rights, but how many may be made to
exist there, and by what means. The duty of the
country to itself transcends all private claims or
class interests. And when people speak of "the
South," do they very clearly define to themselves
what they mean by the words ? Do they not really
mean, without knowing it, the small body of dan-
gerous men who have misguided that part of the
country to its own ruin, and almost to that of the
Republic ? In the mind of our government the
South should have no such narrow meaning. It
should see behind the conspirators of yesterday
an innumerable throng of dusky faces, with their
dumb appeal, not to its mercy, its generosity, or
even its gratitude, but to its plighted faith, to the
solemn eng'ao'ement of its chief mag^istrate and
their martyr. Any theory of the South which
leaves out the negro is a scandal and reproach to
our honesty ; any attempt at another of those fatal
compromises which ignore his claims upon us, but
cannot ignore his claims upon nature and God and
that inevitable future which we may hope to put
far from us, but which is even now at our door,
would be an imputation on our judgment, and an
acknowledgment that we were unworthy to measure
our strength with a great occasion when it met us
face to face.

THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 325

We are very far from joining in the unfeeling
outcry which is sometimes raised by thoughtless
persons against the Southern people, because they
decorate with flowers the graves of their dead sol-
diers, and cherish the memory of those who fell in
the defence of a cause which they could not see to
be already fallen before they entered its service.
They have won our respect, the people of Virginia
especially, by their devotion and endurance in sus-
taining what they believed to be their righteous
quarrel. They would rather deserve our reproba-
tion, if they were wanting in these tributes to nat-
ural and human feeling. They are as harmless as
the monument to the memory of those who fell for
the Pretender, which McDonald of Glenaladale
raised after the last of the Stuarts was in his grave.
Let us sympathize with and respect all such exhibi-
tions of natural feeling. But at the same time let
us take care that it shall not be at the risk of his
life that the poor black shall fling his tribute on
the turf of those who died, with equal sacrifice of
self, in a better cause. Let us see to it that the
Union men of the South shall be safe in declaring
and advocating the reasons of their faith in a cause
which we believe to be sacred. Let us secure such
opportunities of education to the masses of the
Southern people, whether white or black, as shall
make any future rebellion impracticable, and ren-
der it possible for the dead of both sides to sleep
peaceably together under the safeguard of a com-
mon humanity, while the living dwell under the
protection of a nationality which both shall value

326 THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION

alike. Let us put it out of the power of a few
ambitious madmen to shake, though they could
not endanger, the foundations of a structure which
enshrines the better hope of mankind. When Con-
gress shall again come together, strong in the sym-
pathy of a united people, let them show a dignity
equal to the importance of the crisis. Let them
give the President a proof of their patriotism, not
only by allowing him the opportunity, but by mak-
ing it easy for him, to return to the national posi-
tion he once occupied. Let them not lower their
own dignity and that of the nation by any bandy-
ing of reproaches with the Executive. The cause
which we all have at heart is vulgarized by any lit-
tleness or show of personal resentment in its repre-
sentatives, and is of too serious import to admit of
any childishness or trilling. Let there be no more
foolish talk of impeachment for what is at best a
poor infirmity of nature, and could only be raised
into a harmful importance by being invested with
the dignity of a crime against the state. Nothing
could be more unwise than to entangle in legal
quibbles a cause so strong in its moral grounds, so
transparent in its equity, and so plain to the hum-
blest apprehension in its political justice and neces-
sity. We have already one criminal half turned
martyr at Fortress Monroe ; we should be in no
hurry to make another out of even more vulgar
material, — for unhappily martyrs are not Mercu-
ries. We have only to be unswervingly faithful to
what is the true America of our hope and belief,
and wliatever is American will rise from one end

THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION 327

of the country to the other instinctively to our side,
with more than ample means of present succor and
of final triumph. It is only by being loyal and
helpful to Truth that men learn at last how loyal
and helpful she can be to them.

^/. J.0D3. OSH 066(1}

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