The Brothers' War Part 3

Therefore he would none of it in his new home; and he settled in a non-slave community. Of course the southerner, knowing nothing of free labor and bred into a love of the slave system, settled among slaveholders. And so for a generation or two free and slave States were steadily added to the union in pairs.

But the unsettled lands were diminis.h.i.+ng in area. Its population multiplying so marvellously, the north felt urgent need for the whole of these lands. The great majority of settlers going thence into the Territories were farmers. Note some of the more influential cla.s.ses left behind them. The parents, relatives, and friends who wanted them suited in the west--this was the largest cla.s.s of all, and it was of prodigious intellectual, political, and moral potency. Then the manufacturers of agricultural implements, and of many articles, all of which the southerners either had their mechanic slaves to make by hand, and of oldtime fas.h.i.+on, or did without; the millers, and many sorts of wholesale merchants who had found slave owners poor and the employers of free labor good customers; and these manufacturers and merchants were greedy for the new markets which they could get only in free States.

These are but the merest hints, but they serve somewhat to suggest the all-powerful motives which at last united the great majority of northern people, east and west, in intelligent and inveterate opposition to the further spread of slavery.

Now look at the southern situation. At the outset, note that his slaves were the southerner's only laborers, and practically his only property.

And note especially that this property was not only self-supporting, but it was also the most rapidly self-reproducing that Tom, d.i.c.k, and Harry ever had in all history. A reliable witness tells this: "On my father's plantation an aged negro woman could call together more than one hundred of her lineal descendants. I saw this old negro dance at the wedding of her great-granddaughter."[24]

Let me repeat that slaves were not only money-making laborers, but also things of valuable property, which of themselves multiplied as dollars do at compound interest. Let the northern man unfamiliar with slavery try to understand this one of its phases by supposing that he has orchards abundantly yielding a fruit which is in good demand, and that the trees plant and tend themselves, gather and store the fruit, set out other orchards, and do all things else necessary to care for the property and keep it steadily growing. Such trees with their yearly produce and prodigious increase--each by an easy organic or natural, and not by a difficult artificial, process, relieving the owner from all but the slightest attention and labor of superintendence--would soon be the only ones in their entire zone of production; bringing it about that all other occupations and property therein would be dependent upon this main and really only industry. Such orchards would be somewhat like the slaves in their automatic production and acc.u.mulation, but they would be much inferior as marketable property in many particulars.

Although the profits of slave-planting were considerable, the greatest profit of all was what the master thought of and talked of all the day long,--the natural increase of his slaves, as he called it. His negroes were far more to him than his land. His planting was the furthest removed of all from a proper restorative agriculture. Quickly exhausting his new cleared fields, he looked elsewhere for other virgin soil to wear out. The number of the slaves in the south was growing fast, and the new lands in the older slave States were nearly gone. To keep the hens laying the golden eggs of natural increase, nests must be found for them on the cotton, sugar, and rice lands of the Territories. In other words, the area of slave culture must be extended; for whenever there is no land for a considerable number of our workers, it is evident that we have a surplus of slaves; and the effect of that will be at the first to lower the market value of our only property, and then gradually to destroy it. So the instincts of the southerners whispered in their ears.

We hope that we now have helped you to an understanding of the active principles each of free labor and of slave labor; how by reason of them the interests of north and south in dividing the public domain were in irreconcilable conflict; and how it was natural that the free States should band together against, and the slave States band together for, slavery. Thus the country split into two geographical though not political sections, the political division which ripened later being as yet only imminent and inchoate. That these sections had been made by deadly war between free labor and slave labor is all that we have to say here. The development went further, as we shall explain in the next chapter--all of it under the propulsion of the two active principles. They were always the ultimate and supreme motors. Often they are not to be seen at all. Still more often what they did was disguised. To read the facts of that time aright you must always and everywhere look for their work. Do that patiently, and you will detect every one of the many controversies over matters affecting an interest of either section as such--whether questions apparently of national politics, of morals, or religion, in newspapers, pamphlets, reviews, books, and all the vast contemporary literature, in the pulpit, on the platform, and in every place and corner of the entire land where policy and impolicy or right and wrong were mooted--to be but a part of one or the other of two great complexes of machinery, each geared to its particular motor and kept going by its mighty push.

CHAPTER IV

GENESIS, COURSE, AND GOAL OF SOUTHERN NATIONALIZATION

Nationalization is the process by which a nation makes itself. The process may be active for a long while without completion, as we see in the case of Ireland; it may form a nation, but to be overturned and wiped out, as the southern confederacy was; or it may find its consummation in such a powerful one as the United States. The most conspicuous effect of the process we now have in hand is to make one of many communities. But sometimes a part breaks off from a nation and sets up and maintains its independence as a country. Thus a portion of the territory of Mexico was settled over from our States, and after a while these settlers tore themselves loose from Mexico and became the nation of Texas. We shall tell you more fully in another chapter how the separate colonies became nationalized into the United States, and what we say here of southern nationalization will ill.u.s.trate to the reader that important transformation, to understand which is of especial moment to us in examining the brothers' war. But we must emphasize the characteristic feature of the nationalization of the south. I have searched the pages of history in vain for an example like it. The idiosyncrasy is that the south was h.o.m.ogeneous in origin, race, language, religion, inst.i.tutions, and customs with the north, and yet she developed away from the north into a separate nation. I have long been accustomed to parallel the case of Ireland's repulsion from Great Britain, but I always had to admit that there was dissimilarity in everything except the strong drift towards independence and the struggle to win it;[25] for the Irish are largely different from the English in origin, race, language, religion, inst.i.tutions, and customs. The more you consider it the more striking becomes this uniqueness of southern nationalization. Think of it for a moment. Thirteen adjacent colonies; each a dependency of the same nation; all settled promiscuously from every part and parcel of one mother country, and therefore the settlers rapidly becoming in time more like one another everywhere than the English were who at home were clinging to their several localities and dialects; governed alike; standing together against Indians, French, and Spanish, and after a while against the mother country;--where can you find another instance of so many common ties and tendencies, all prompting incessantly and mightily to union in a political whole, which is ever the goal of the nationalizing process. That the colonies did grow into a political whole is not at all wonderful to the historical student. The wonder is that after they had done this a number of them just like the others in the particulars above pointed out, which fuse adjacent communities into a nation, turn away from the old union and seek to form one of their own. The southern States all did the same thing with such practical unanimity that even the foreigner may know that the same cause was at work in every one of them. Manifestly there was a nationalizing element in them which was not in the others, and which made the former h.o.m.ogeneous with one another and heterogeneous to the rest.

And that element which differenced the south from the rest of the union so greatly that it was, from a time long before either she or the north had become conscious of it, impelling her irresistibly towards an independent nationality of her own, all of us natives know was the constructive and plastic principle of her slave industrial and property system.

It is not the purpose of the foregoing expatiation to prove to you such a familiar and well-known fact as that slavery parted north and south and caused the brothers' war. Its purpose is to arouse you to consider nationalization, and have you see how it acts according to a will of its own and not of man, and now and then works out most stupendous results contrary to all that mortals deem probabilities. You ought to recognize that the forces which produced the Confederate States were just as all-powerful and opposeless as those which produced the United States; that in fact they were exactly the same in kind, that is, the forces of nationalization.

To have you see that even at the time of making the federal const.i.tution the south had grown into a pro-slavery section and was far on the road towards independence, it is necessary to correct the prevalent opinion that there was then below Mason and Dixon's line a very widespread and influential hostility to slavery. The manumission of his slaves by Was.h.i.+ngton, the fearless and outspoken opposition to the inst.i.tution by Jefferson and some other prominent persons, and certain facts indicating unfavorable sentiment, have been too hastily accepted by even historians as demonstrations that the opinion is true. Here are the facts which prove it to be utterly untrue. In 1784, three years before our epochal convention a.s.sembled, Jefferson, as chairman of an appropriate committee consisting besides himself of Chase of Maryland and Howell of Rhode Island, reported to congress a plan for the temporary government of the West Territory. This region contained not only all the territory that was subsequently covered by the famous ordinance of 1787, but such a vast deal more that it was proposed to make seventeen States out of the whole.

Consider this provision of the report, the suggestion and work of Jefferson:

"That after the year 1800 of the christian era there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of said States, otherwise than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been convicted to have been personally guilty."

When the report was taken up by congress, Spaight of North Carolina made a motion to strike out the provision just quoted, and it was seconded by Reed of South Carolina. On the vote North Carolina was divided; but all the other southern States represented, to wit, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, voted for the motion, the colleagues of Jefferson of Virginia and those of Chase of Maryland out-voting these two southerners standing by the provision. All the northern States represented, which were the then four New England States, New York, and Pennsylvania, voted for the provision. But as it failed to get the necessary seven States it was not retained.

Thus it appears that at the close of the Revolutionary war the interest of the south in and her attachment to slavery were so great that by her representatives in congress she appears to be almost unanimous against the proposal to keep the inst.i.tution from extending.

This action of the south shows that both Virginia in ceding that part of the West Territory which was three years afterwards by the ordinance of 1787 put under Jefferson's provision which had been rejected when it had been proposed for all the territory, and the south in voting unanimously for the ordinance, were not actuated by hostility to slavery. The soil of the territory north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi to which the ordinance applied probably may have been thought by Virginians unsuited to tobacco, the then sole crop upon which slave labor could be lucratively used. Be that as it may, that the southern States in subsequent cessions made not long afterwards guarded against slavery prohibition must be kept in mind. When they are, it is proved that always from the time that Jefferson's provision failed to carry in 1784, as has been told above, the prevalent sentiment of the southern people overwhelmingly favored slavery.

Let us ill.u.s.trate from later times. Writers who claim that the south, meditating secession, purposed to reopen the African slave-trade, adduce some relevant evidence which at first flush appears to be very weighty, if not convincing. They show that A. H. Stephens of Georgia, who afterwards became vice-president of the confederacy, in 1859 used language indicating that he thought it vital to the south, in her struggle to extend the area of slavery, to get more Africans; and they further show similar utterances made at the time by certain papers and other prominent men of the south.

But the const.i.tution of the Confederate States, adopted in 1861, contains this provision:

"The importation of negroes of the African race from any foreign country other than the slaveholding States or Territories of the United States of America is hereby forbidden, and congress is required to pa.s.s such laws as shall effectually prevent the same."

Of course this solemn act unanimously voted for by the members of the congress, Stephens being one of them, counts incalculably more in weight to prove that predominant southern sentiment was against reopening the African slave-trade, than the counter evidence just stated. Likewise all that Was.h.i.+ngton, Jefferson, and other of their contemporaries may have done or said against slavery is outweighed by the contemporary pro-slavery legislation and measures dictated by the south. It is very probable that during the time we are now contemplating anti-slavery men were really as few in the south as union men were after the first blood spilled in the brothers' war.

Recall the three compromises between north and south, mentioned above, by which the union was formed, and you will understand that the fathers were preaching but to stones when they impugned slavery. And at this point meditate the language of Madison in the historic convention, which shows that he saw accurately even then the permanence of slavery, and the unequivocal geographical division it had made. He was discussing the apprehension of the small States, New Jersey, Delaware, and Rhode Island, that under the union proposed they would be absorbed by the larger adjacent States. He affirmed there was no such danger; and that the only danger arose from the antagonism between the slave and the non-slave sections. To avert this danger he proposed to arm north and south each with defensive power against the other by conceding to the former the superiority it would get in one branch of the federal legislature by reason of its greater population if the members thereof came in equal numbers from every State, large or small, and at the same time giving the south superiority in the other branch by allowing it increased representation therein for all its slaves counted as free inhabitants.

This prepares you for the language which we now give from the report, and which we would have you meditate:

"He [Madison] admitted that every peculiar interest, whether in any cla.s.s of citizens, or any description of States, ought to be secured as far as possible. Wherever there is danger of attack, there ought to be given a const.i.tutional power of defence. But he contended that the States were divided into different interests, not by their difference of size, but by other circ.u.mstances; the most material of which resulted partly from climate, but princ.i.p.ally from the effects of their having or not having slaves. These causes concurred in forming the great division of interests in the United States. It did not lie between the large and small States. It lay between the northern and southern; and if any defensive power were necessary, it ought to be mutually given to these two interests. He was so strongly impressed with this important truth, that he had been casting about in his mind for some expedient that would answer the purpose. The one which had occurred was that, instead of proportioning the votes of the States in both branches to their respective number of inhabitants, computing the slaves in the ratio of 5 to 3, they should be represented in one branch according to the number of free inhabitants only; and in the other according to their whole number, counting the slaves as free. By this arrangement the southern scale would have the advantage in one house and the northern in the other."

Madison meant to say that the great danger of disunion was that--we emphasize his statement by repeating and italicizing the essential part--"_the States were divided into different interests ... princ.i.p.ally from the effects of their having or not having slaves. These causes concurred in forming the great division of interests in the United States_."

How truly he expresses the economical antagonism of the southern and northern States, although he hints nothing of the nationalizing tendency of the former which was bound in time to show itself as one of "the effects of their having slaves."

It seems to me that Mr. Adams overeulogizes the political instinct and prophecy evinced by Madison at this tune. I cannot see that the latter does anything more than merely recognize the fact then plain to all. Note as proof this other pa.s.sage quoted by Mr. Adams from Madison in the convention, in which the material words are given by me in italics: "_It seems now well understood_ that the real difference of interests lies, not between the large and small, but between the northern and southern States."

If the historical expert but duly consider the important facts marshalled in the foregoing he must find them to be incontrovertible proofs that in 1787, when our fathers were making the federal const.i.tution, and for some years before, southern nationalization was not simply inchoate, but that it was growing so rapidly its course could be stopped in but one way; that is, by the extirpation of slavery, which was both its germ and active principle. This was before the invention of the gin. After that the lower south and west quickly added a vast territory to the empire of slavery, and southern nationalization received throughout its whole domain a new, a lasting, and a far more powerful impetus. And when the cotton States, as we call them, had really developed their industry, the southern confederacy was inevitable.

The fact of this nationalization is indisputable. When the confederates organized their government at Montgomery, everybody looking on felt and said that a new nation was born. Why ignore what is so plain and so important? Thus Mr. Adams most graphically contrasts the two widely different northern and southern civilizations which were flouris.h.i.+ng side by side,[26] and with a momentary inadvertence he ascribes national development only to the civilization north of the Potomac and Ohio, and treats State sovereignty as anti-national. The fact is that a nationalization, the end of which was southern independence, had been long active, as we have perhaps too copiously shown, and the doctrine of State sovereignty was really nothing but its instrument, nurse, and organ. Every southern State that invoked State sovereignty and seceded was shortly afterwards found in the new southern nation. Had that nation prospered, the doctrine would soon have died a natural death even in the confederacy.

Nationalization is the cardinal fact, the _vis major_, on each side. The free-labor nationalization of the north, purposing to appropriate and hold the continent, fas.h.i.+oned a self-preserving weapon of the a.s.sumption that the fathers made by the const.i.tution an indissoluble union; the slave nationalization of the south, purposing to appropriate and hold that part of the continent suiting its special staples, a.s.sumed that the fathers preserved State sovereignty intact in the federal union.

The closer you look the plainer you will see that the United States held within itself two nationalities so inveterately hostile to each other that gemination was long imminent before it actually occurred. The hostility between the statesmen of Virginia and her daughter States and those of the north, and especially New England,--Jefferson on one side and Hamilton and Adams on the other,--the party following the former calling itself republican and that following the latter calling itself federalist, was really rooted in the hostility of the two nationalities; and a survival of this hostility is now unpleasantly vigorous between many northern and southern writers and lecturers, each cla.s.s claiming too much of the good in our past history for its own section and ascribing too much of the bad to the other. As a lady friend, a native of Michigan who has lived in the south some years, remarked to me not long since, as soon as one going north crosses the Ohio he feels that he has entered another country; behind him is a land of corn-pone, biscuit, three cooked meals a day, and houses tended untidily by darkey servants; before him is a land of bakers'

bread of wheat, where there is hardly more than one warm meal a day, and the houses are kept as neat as a pin by the mothers and daughters of the family. Greater public activity of the county while there is hardly any at all of its subdivisions, the representative system almost everywhere in the munic.i.p.alities, no government by town-meeting and no direct legislation except occasionally, a most crude and feeble rural common school system, distinguish and characterize the south; buoyant energy of the towns.h.i.+p in public affairs, government by town-meeting instead of by representatives, a common-school system energetically improving, distinguish and characterize the north. The manners and customs of southerners are peculiar. To use an expressive cant word, they "gush" more than northeners. In cars and public meetings they give their seats to ladies, while northerners do not. Southerners are quick to return a blow for insulting words, and in the consequent rencounter they are p.r.o.ne to use deadly weapons; while northerners are generally as averse to personal violence as were the Greeks and Romans in their palmiest time. The battle-cry of the confederates was a wild cheering--a fox-hunt yell, as we called it; that of the union soldiers was huzza! huzza! huzza! From the beginning to the end, even at Franklin and Bentonville, and at Farmville, just two days before I was surrendered at Appomattox, the confederates always, if possible, took the offensive; the union soldiers were like the st.u.r.dy Englishmen, whose tactics from Hastings to Waterloo have generally been defensive.

This battle yell, this impetuous charge after charge until the field is won, marks the fighting of the Americans at King's Mountain--all of them southerners; and it is another weighty proof of the early coalescence of the south as a community on its way to independence.

Many other contrasts could be suggested. Think over the foregoing. They are the respective effects of two different causes,--a free-labor nationalization above, and a slave-labor nationalization below, Mason and Dixon's line. The latter--its origin and course--is the especial subject of this chapter. I believe that the proofs marshalled above demonstrate to the fair and unprejudiced reader that southern nationalization commenced before the making of the federal const.i.tution, and afterwards went directly on, gathering force and power all the while, until it culminated in

"A storm-cradled nation that fell."

CHAPTER V

AMERICAN NATIONALIZATION, AND HOW IT MADE THE BOND OF UNION STRONGER AND STRONGER

Greece was going down in her contest with Macedon when she gave the world to come the Achaean league, the first historical example of full-grown federation. As Freeman says of such a federal government: "Its perfect form is a late growth of a very high state of political culture."[27] This historian thus summarizes its essentials:

"Two requisites seem necessary to const.i.tute federal government in this its most perfect form. On the one hand, each of the members of the union must be wholly independent in those matters which concern each member only. On the other hand, all must be subject to a common power in those matters which concern the whole body of members collectively."[28]

No author has yet shown a better-considered and more accurate appreciation of the benefits to different communities of federal union. But the islander could not conceive--even at the centre of the British empire spread over the world--the advanced phase of Anglo-Saxon federation in America and Australia, which for want of a better name we may call, using a grand word of our fathers, continental federation.

And Americans of every generation have misunderstood the true nature of our union, and especially how it was made and how it could be unmade. The fathers were as much mistaken as to the real authors.h.i.+p of the declaration of independence, the articles of confederation, and the federal const.i.tution, as Burke and many people of his time were as to the true causes of the French revolution, or as the brothers were as to those of their war. In all that the fathers did they were sure that they acted as agents solely of their respective colonies or States, which they believed to be independent and sovereign. Therefore they maintained that the authors.h.i.+p of the three great doc.u.ments just mentioned was that of the separate States, when in truth it was that of the union. When the latter, which had been long forming its rudiments, came into something like consciousness, it at once spurred our fathers to make the declaration of independence. The declaration corresponds to the later ordinances of secession. And this union, gathering strength, led our fathers to make the old confederation; and its articles and the belonging government are closely paralleled by the const.i.tution of the Confederate States and its belonging government. As southern nationalization brought forth the southern confederacy, so it was American nationalization that caused secession from England, the declaration of independence, and the confederation which won the Revolutionary war. To summarize the foregoing: Southern nationalization evolved the southern union, and American nationalization evolved the American union. The fathers, with the usual undiscernment of contemporaries, by a most natural _hysteron proteron_ conceived the latter union to be the work, product, and result of the const.i.tution. In the intersectional contention, the south accepted the mistakes of the fathers and rested her cause upon them, and the north, instead of correcting them, subst.i.tuted a huge and glaring mistake of her own. Advocating the maintenance of the const.i.tution over all the States, she sought to refute the doctrine of State sovereignty urged by the south with the arguments of those who had opposed the adoption of the federal const.i.tution. Patrick Henry and Nathan Dane--we omit the others--argued that the const.i.tution, if ratified, would really wipe out State lines and make the central government supreme in authority over the States, and actually sovereign. Could the people of the thirteen States have been made to believe this, they would have unanimously rejected the instrument.

Was.h.i.+ngton, Hamilton, Madison, and many others competent to advise, stood in solid phalanx on the other side, and the people were convinced by them that adoption would have no such effect. They decided that the arguments were not good, and the const.i.tution was ratified. But the discredited arguments were afterwards, by a very queer psychological process, taken up by Story, Webster, and a great host, and paraded as unanswerable refutation of the doctrine of State sovereignty, and demonstration that by the const.i.tution the United States had acquired absolute supremacy over the different States.[29] At a later place we will try to show you how Webster's glory outs.h.i.+nes that of every other actor, except Lincoln, in the great struggle between north and south. But here we must emphasize how, when supporting the fallacies of Patrick Henry and Nathan Dane, he met the one real and signal defeat of his life, to which the drubbing he received from Binney in the Girard College case was a small affair--a defeat none the less signal because at the time, and long afterwards, it was and still is crowned as a glorious victory by thousands upon thousands.

The force-bill had just been introduced into the senate of the United States. It provided for the collection of the revenue in defiance of the nullification ordinance of South Carolina. The next day, January 22, 1833, Calhoun offered in that body his famous resolutions, embodying his doctrine of nullification, under which he justified the ordinance just mentioned. The 16th of the next month, Webster discussed the two cardinal ones of these resolutions at length. As he summarized them, they affirmed:

"1. That the political system under which we live, and under which congress is now a.s.sembled, is a compact, to which the people of the several States, as separate and sovereign communities, are the parties.

2. That these sovereign parties have a right to judge, each for itself, of any alleged violation of the const.i.tution by congress; and in case of such violation, to choose, each for itself, its own mode and measure of redress."

He had not long before contemplated making an address to the public in answer to Calhoun's pro-nullification letter to Governor Hamilton in the form of a letter from himself to Kent; and it cannot be doubted that he had got himself ready for this; nor can it be doubted that in the twenty-five days' interim he had not only worked over and adapted the unused materials of the address mentioned, but he had most diligently made special preparation for his speech--in short, it may be a.s.sumed that he had bestowed upon the subject of the resolutions the most searching examination and profound meditation of which, with his superhuman powers, he was capable. In spite of all his conscientious labors, as I am now especially concerned to impress upon you, he injured and set back the cause of the union by defending it with answerable arguments--nay, rather, with arguments helping the other side.

At the outset he severely and sternly rebukes two terms of Calhoun's, one being the use of _const.i.tutional compact_ for _const.i.tution_, and the other being _the accession of a State to the const.i.tution_. These terms are utterly impermissible, and are to be scouted. If we accept them, _we must acquiesce in the monstrous conclusions which the author of the resolutions draws from them_. That is really what Webster says. Note the confident positiveness of his pertinent language, some of which we subjoin:

"It is easy, quite easy, to see why the honorable gentleman has used it [const.i.tutional compact] in these resolutions. He cannot open the book, and look upon our written frame of government, without seeing that it is called a _const.i.tution_. This may well be appalling to him.