The Brothers' War Part 6

Let us give you the fewest possible selected brief pa.s.sages that will do something towards possessing you of the core of Calhoun's valedictory to the United States and the South.

This is first in order: "How can the union be saved? There is but one way by which it can with any certainty; and that is by a full and final settlement, on the principles of justice, of all the questions at issue between the two sections. The south asks for justice, simple justice, and less she ought not to take. She has no compromise to offer but the const.i.tution, and no concession or surrender to make."

The vital concern of his section against abolition, and what it must do to avoid it, he tells in these pa.s.sages:

"[The South] regards the relation [of master and slave] as one which cannot be destroyed without subjecting the two races to the greatest calamity, and the section to poverty, desolation, and wretchedness, and accordingly she feels bound, by every consideration of interest and safety, to defend it."

"Is it not certain that if something is not done to arrest it [the abolition movement], the south will be forced to choose between abolition and secession?"

If the south must choose secession, he justifies her by the example of Was.h.i.+ngton, with a calm and repose that prove his deepest conviction of its rightfulness, and with a power that cannot be confuted. He says:

["The Union cannot] be saved by invoking the name of the ill.u.s.trious southerner whose mortal remains repose on the western bank of the Potomac. He was one of us--a slaveholder and a planter. We have studied his history, and find nothing in it to justify submission to wrong. On the contrary, his great fame rests on the solid foundation that, while he was careful to avoid doing wrong to others, he was prompt and decided in repelling wrong. I trust that, in this respect, we have profited by his example.

Nor can we find anything in his history to deter us from seceding from the union should it fail to fulfil the objects for which it was inst.i.tuted, by being permanently and hopelessly converted into a means of oppressing instead of protecting us. On the contrary, we find much in his example to encourage us should we be forced to the extremity of deciding between submission and disunion.

There existed then as well as now a union,--that between the parent country and her then colonies. It was a union that had much to endear it to the people of the colonies. Under its protecting and superintending care the colonies were planted, and grew up and prospered, through a long course of years, until they became populous and wealthy. Its benefits were not limited to them. Their extensive agricultural and other productions gave birth to a flouris.h.i.+ng commerce which richly rewarded the parent country for the trouble and expense of establis.h.i.+ng and protecting them. Was.h.i.+ngton was born and grew up to manhood under that union. He acquired his early distinction in its service; and there is every reason to believe that he was devotedly attached to it. But his devotion was a rational one. He was attached to it, not as an end, but as a means to an end. When it failed to fulfil its end, and, instead of affording protection, was converted into the means of oppressing the colonies, he did not hesitate to draw his sword and head the great movement by which that union was forever severed, and the independence of these States established. This was the great and crowning glory of his life, which has spread his fame over the whole globe, and will transmit it to the latest posterity."

With what moving entreaty does he thus adjure the victorious north:

The north "has only to wish it to accomplish it--to do justice by conceding to the south an equal right in the acquired territory, and to do her duty by causing the stipulations relative to fugitive slaves to be faithfully fulfilled, to cease the agitation of the slavery question, and to provide for the insertion of a provision in the const.i.tution, by an amendment, which will restore to the south, in substance, the power she possessed of protecting herself before the equilibrium between the sections was destroyed by the action of the government. There will be no difficulty in devising such a provision--one that will protect the south and which at the same time will improve and strengthen the government instead of impairing and weakening it."

"The responsibility of saving the union rests on the north, and not on the south. The south cannot save it by any act of hers, and the north may save it without any sacrifice whatever, unless to do justice and to perform her duties under the const.i.tution should be regarded by her as a sacrifice."

This sleepless watchman since 1835 had again and again blown the trumpet as the sword of disunion was coming upon the land. Now, the grave yawning before him, he sees that sword nearer and sharper, and conscious that it is his last public duty he sends forth to all his country a blast of warning more earnest and more solemn than ever. Warning that the bloodiest of all wars is coming, and that between brothers. Warning--it is the whole of this dread deliverance. Here is the first paragraph:

"I have, senators, believed from the first that the agitation of the subject of slavery would, if not prevented by some timely and effective measure, end in disunion. Entertaining this opinion, I have on all proper occasions endeavored to call the attention of both the two great parties which divide the country to adopt some measure to prevent so great a disaster, but without success. The agitation has been permitted to proceed, with almost no attempt to resist it, until it has reached a point where it can no longer be disguised or denied that the union is in danger. You have thus had forced upon you the greatest and the gravest question that can ever come under your consideration,--How can the union be preserved?"

And this is the last paragraph:

"I have now, senators, done my duty in expressing my opinions fully and candidly on this solemn occasion. In doing so, I have been governed by the motives which have governed me in all stages of the agitation of the slavery question since its commencement. I have exerted myself during the whole period to arrest it with the intention of saving the union, if it could be done, and if it could not, to save the section where it has pleased providence to cast my lot, and which I sincerely believe has justice and the const.i.tution on its side.

Having faithfully done my duty to the best of my ability both to the union and my section, throughout this agitation, I shall have the consolation, let what will come, that I am free from all responsibility."

Had abolition been in charge of men, Calhoun, claiming, as appeared to them, the most palpable rights under current views of justice, under the const.i.tution, under the law, and under patriotic duty, would have prevailed. He never understood, no more than the abolitionists themselves did, that providence was making an instrument of abolition to remove the only danger to the American union, and that providence was not under human const.i.tutions, laws, and convictions of duty. As you meditate this superhuman achievement of the true citizen in his last stand for his doomed section, does it not help you to appreciate better the high saying of the Greeks, that the struggle of a good man against fate is the most elevating of all spectacles?

The speeches that will find place in the selection suggested above will not enrapture the reader with the proud diction, learning, ornateness, and exquisite finish of Webster, but he will find them everywhere to be proofs of the dictum of Faust:

"Es tragt Verstand and rechter Sinn Mit wenig Kunst sich selber vor; Und wenn's euch Ernst ist, was zu sagen, Ist's nothig, Worten nachzujagen?"[57]

He will also note that many of the wisest and most eloquent pa.s.sages are almost the extreme of choice, but chaste and severe, expression. Here read aloud the pa.s.sage as to Was.h.i.+ngton quoted above from the speech of March 4, 1850, and you will hardly dissent.

America owes it to Calhoun to publish a cheap edition of his best speeches, and also of his "Dissertation on Government."

A word as to the "Dissertation" and the "Discourse on the Const.i.tution of the United States." The project of these two books lay close to his heart for many years. He intended them as his last admonitions to the people of the great republic. Doubtless the special object of his retirement was to finish them, but he had to return to the senate. What we have of the books was written in the little leisure which he s.n.a.t.c.hed from the pressure of public duties, domestic affairs, and ill-health. The resoluteness with which, in the midst of these difficulties, he worked at the self-imposed task proves a lofty and unselfish love. He did not finish them to his satisfaction. Darwin did not do that with his epoch-making "Origin of Species," for he found there was no need to do so. I believe that, as the essentials of the belonging part of evolution are all to be found in the "Origin of Species," so all the essentials of Calhoun's great doctrine of government are fully set forth in his two books. To me the "Dissertation"

seems complete. I note with pleasure that, though slowly, it is steadily climbing to the lofty height which is its due place in the world's estimation. And the "Discourse"--of which he did not live to finish the final draft--surely leads all the productions of the State sovereignty school. The providence which opposed his wishes was kind to his country, to the world, and to himself in calling him from his desk; for it allowed him to get Texas and Oregon for us, to give mankind his Oregon speech, and his last, and thus to finish his good work and make his fame full.

The foregoing is intended to influence my readers to turn away from Von Holst, who wrote Calhoun's life, with the smoke and dust of the brothers'

war still in his eyes, and from Trent, who merely says ditto to Mr. Burke, to Stephens, to the great Webster, to the touching "Carolina Tribute," to the happy and appreciative sketch of Pinkney, to the man himself and his grand career, in order to find the facts and principles by which one of America's very greatest ought to be judged. And I do hope that they now begin to discern that Calhoun was nothing at all of a doctrinaire, nor chop-logic, nor fanatic, nor professional politician, nor ignorant and over-zealous partisan, but was the very height of practical talent and an extraordinarily successful man of affairs, of more than Roman integrity, conscientious and diligent beyond almost all others in the duties of his place, and a foremost statesman of wide and profound culture. Whether I have accomplished my design or not, let me beg you to read for yourself with careful attention what Webster said of him in the United States senate just after his death. Remember two things as you read: (1) The speaker and the dead had been opposed to one another in politics for more than twenty years, the former being the great exponent of free-labor nationalization and the other the great exponent of slave-labor nationalization; (2) n.o.body ever weighed his public utterances more carefully than did Webster, and that he would not say anything which he did not believe, even as a politeness.

Let us now try to follow with proper discernment this man whom we hope we have proved to be good and wise through his t.i.tanic defence of the cause which fate had decreed must fail. As our explanation of how evolution, and not the north on one side nor the south on the other, brought forward the crisis in which slavery, the sole menace of American dismemberment, was to perish, is so nearly complete, we can be much briefer in the rest of the chapter.

The true beginning here is with the proposition that everything which Calhoun did as the southern leader was prompted by a righteous conscience and the highest and most unselfish patriotism. He was the very first to discern the full menace of abolition to the welfare of the people he represented. And when years afterwards the situation became darker and more serious, and more and more importunately put to him the question, If abolition can be avoided only by leaving the union, what ought the south to do? he answered to himself, with the fullest approval of his conscience, she must go out; for manifestly it is her paramount duty to protect her citizens against any such invasion of their rights as abolition. But he had no illusion as to peaceable secession; and he likewise wors.h.i.+pped the union, believing with deepest conviction that it is far better for neighboring communities to be federated than independent. And the memories of the great American history were as sweet to him as they were to Webster. To sum up, only one thing in his opinion could justify secession. That was control of the federal government by the abolitionists. If that comes, the south must seek her independence, even if it is beyond a sea of blood.

Abolition was on its way then to overturn the supports of comfort and domestic peace in the south, as it afterwards did. Suppose Webster had seen the imminence of such a dreadful evil to New England, would he not have felt that his duty to his section was now the great thing? My brother who wore the blue, ought he not to have so felt? If the union had been turned into a course which would not only impoverish and beggar the people of New England, but would for long years actually deprive the ma.s.ses of those modes of business and labor by which they were subsisting themselves and their families, can it be thought that Webster, with his exalted admiration of the fathers, who endured all privations to win liberty from their oppressors, would not have been heart and soul for secession?

The only actual difference between the two great patriots was that to Calhoun the dread alternative of looking outside the union for defence and protection of home and fireside was commended by a cruel fate, while a kind fate withheld it from Webster.

I shall corroborate the foregoing by some pertinent excerpts from Calhoun's speeches in the United States senate. And as my purpose is to build everywhere in this book, as far as possible, upon only the most obvious facts and to vouch therefor the most accessible authorities, I take the excerpts from quotations made by Von Holst:

"It is to us a vital question. It involves not only our liberty, but, what is greater (if to freeman anything can be), existence itself. The relation which now exists between the two races in the slaveholding States has existed for two centuries. It has grown with our growth, and strengthened with our strength. It has entered into and modified all our inst.i.tutions, civil and political. None other can be subst.i.tuted. We will not, cannot, permit it to be destroyed.... Come what will, should it cost every drop of blood and every cent of property, we must defend ourselves; and if compelled, we should stand justified by all laws, human and divine; ... we would act under an imperious necessity. There would be to us but one alternative,--to triumph or perish as a people."[58]

"To destroy the existing relations would be to destroy this prosperity [of the southern States] and to place the two races in a state of conflict, which must end in the expulsion or extirpation of one or the other. No other can be subst.i.tuted compatible with their peace or security. The difficulty is in the diversity of the races.... Social and political equality between them is impossible. The causes lie too deep in the principles of our nature to be surmounted. But, without such equality, to change the present condition of the African race, were it possible, would be but to change the form of slavery."[59]

"He must be blind, indeed, who does not perceive that the subversion of a relation which must be followed with such disastrous consequences can be effected only by convulsions that would devastate the country, burst asunder the bonds of union, and engulf in a sea of blood the inst.i.tutions of the country. It is madness to suppose that the slaveholding States would quietly submit to be sacrificed. Every consideration--interest, duty, and humanity, the love of country, the sense of wrong, hatred of oppressors and treacherous and faithless confederates, and, finally, despair--would impel them to the most daring and desperate resistance in defence of property, family, country, liberty, and existence."[60]

The student unfamiliar with the confederate side of the brothers' war can find the whole of it clearly stated in these short pa.s.sages re-enforced by the cognate ones quoted above from the speech of March 4, 1850. The maintenance of the then existing relations between white and black was vital both to liberty and existence. Because of the world-wide diversity of the two races they cannot be socially or politically equal (a subject which we will deal with specially after a while). And it was the duty of the south to fight to the bitter end "in defence of property, family, country, liberty, and existence." This is the marrow of the quotations.

They convincingly show not only the grasp of the statesman, but the prescience of the prophet, as has been plainly proved by the brothers' war and what followed in its track.

Opposition to the tariff, which in his judgment favored the manufacturing at the expense of the staple States, seems to have been the first thing that led Calhoun to take a pro-Southern stand in politics.[61] It finally produced the famous nullification episode, which we have already somewhat discussed. In this his platform was simply anti-tariff. But the current, without his being aware of it, was carrying him resistlessly and rapidly on into the anti-abolition career in which his life ended. It was the pet.i.tion presented in 1835 to congress against slavery in the District of Columbia which, it seems, was the first thing that opened his eyes to the menace of abolition. Note his wonderful foresight. Compare him with Cicero just before the outbreak of the war between Pompey and Caesar; or with Demosthenes before Philip discloses his purpose towards Greece; or with Carl Marx, predicting the future of co-operative enterprise. Cicero almost foresees nothing--he mostly fears; Marx is utterly mistaken. The divination of Demosthenes is far superior, and it is clear; yet it is belated when it comes. But Calhoun sees with "appalling clearness," as Von Holst says, all the storm-cloud from which tempest and tornado will ravage the entire land, just as its first speck shows on the horizon; and n.o.body else will see that. If this abolition movement is not stopped in its incipiency, it will soon get beyond all control. This he says over and over in his public place. What a horrible spectre of the future haunted him for the rest of his life! The south in her self-defence forced out of the union, and then perhaps overcome in war. After her braves have perished, and their dear ones at home have been plunged in the depths of want, the triumphant abolitionists will have the former slaves to lord it over them.

His conscience commanded him to stand by slavery as the fundamental condition of his people's well-being; it also at the same time commanded him to strain all his energies to save the union by making it the protector instead of the a.s.sailant of slavery. This was the insuperable task which the powers in the unseen put him in the treadmill to do. From the time he commenced the discussion of the anti-slavery pet.i.tions until his exclamation over the "poor south," on his death-bed, life was to him but a deepening agony of solicitude and utmost effort,--solicitude for his country and section, effort to avert the danger that became greater and more awful to him every day. He strove after remedies under the const.i.tution. The more he recalled the success of the single stand of South Carolina against the tariff, the prouder he became of being the author of nullification. Its dearness to him was that it was peaceable as well as efficient. The better opinion of the State-rights school is that nullification is an absurdity, and that South Carolina's only true remedy against the tariff was to secede if it were not repealed. But he knew better than everybody else that secession meant internecine war between the sections, and this influenced him to exalt peaceable nullification above b.l.o.o.d.y secession.

It needs not to consider each barrier, whether party combinations, admission of new slave States, legislation, etc., that he tried to erect against the incoming oceanic wave. But we must briefly consider the amendment of the const.i.tution which he proposed. He wanted the north and the south each to have a president, as he said, "to be so elected, as that the two should be const.i.tuted the special organs and representatives of the respective sections in the executive department of the government; and requiring each to approve all the acts of congress before they shall become laws."[62] Do this, he urged, and neither section can use the powers of government to injure the other, for whatever proposed law menaces a section will be vetoed by its president. It profits the student of the science of government to consider the historical examples which Calhoun adduced here. They are indeed so apt that the hearing which has ever been denied him should be granted him at least academically. He says: "The two most distinguished const.i.tutional governments of antiquity both in respect to permanence and power had a dual executive. I refer to those of Sparta and Rome."[63]

It is interesting to be informed that those same wise Iroquois from whom our fathers probably got the precedent of the old confederation, put in practice something very like what Calhoun advises. We append both the account and instructive comment of Morgan:

"When the Iroquois confederacy was formed, or soon after that event, two permanent war-chiefs.h.i.+ps were created and named.... As general commanders they had charge of the military affairs of the confederacy, and the command of its joint forces when united in a general expedition.... The creation of two princ.i.p.al war-chiefs instead of one, and with equal power, argues a subtle and calculating policy to prevent the domination of a single man even in their military affairs.

They did without experience precisely as the Romans did in creating two consuls instead of one, after they had abolished the office of _rex_. Two consuls would balance the military power between them, and prevent either from becoming supreme. Among the Iroquois this office never became influential."[64]

But Calhoun lays much more stress upon another example,--that of the protection which the Roman plebeians got in tribunes elected from their own order alone, which tribunes could veto any act of the lawmaking organs, all of which were then actually in the hands of their oppressors, that is, the order of patricians; the result being that in course of time the plebeians achieved equality.[65]

Of course the inevitable could not be put off. And yet ought we not to admire the inventive genius of the statesman who of all proposed the remedy that promised the best? And ought we not also to cherish in affectionate memory this last and high effort of Calhoun to avert a dreadful brothers' war at hand, the end and consequences of which n.o.body could then forecast?

The situation of Rome granting tribunes to the plebs was widely different from ours. That was a case of giving a veto to one cla.s.s only, and to a cla.s.s which belonged to the entire body politic. Calhoun proposed not a single veto, but two; neither one to be given such a cla.s.s as we have just mentioned, but a veto to each one of two geographical divisions, in one of which there was a developed, and in the other a nascent and almost complete, nationality, these two nationalities already closed with each other in a life and death grapple. His hope must have been to confine the combatants to an arena which could be effectually policed by the civil power, and in which all fighting except with b.u.t.toned foils be prevented.

We may be almost sure that his heart broke when that presentiment which often comes to the dying as clear as sunlight revealed the b.l.o.o.d.y war that was quickening its approach.

O the unutterable pathos of his life from 1835 to 1850! During this time he was like the mother of a boy whom consumption has marked for its own.

In advance of all others she reads the first symptom, nay, she antic.i.p.ates it. All those who believe that they know him as well as she does, laugh at her fears with unsympathetic incredulity. But her eyes never fail to see grim death at the door, although bravely she hopes against hope, and fights, fights, fights. Inexorably, relentlessly the end, which others now begin to discern, comes on, but until the last breath of her darling she has ever some suggestion of change of place or climate, of a new remedy, of something else to be done. It is the supreme tragedy of her trial that while outwardly she is all self-gratifying love, inwardly she is all self-consuming misery. We say the love of a mother is greater than all other. But we know that she loves her country better than she does her child. Patriotism is as yet the strongest love of all. Realize that our exalted patriot was tending and nursing the cause of his country. Think of the n.o.ble Lee, his career of victory over, wearing away the winter at Petersburg, hourly expecting his line, so tensely stretched in order to face overwhelming odds, to break; think of him after it does break, on the retreat, when he has discovered that his supplies have gone wrong; and think of him when he must yield the sword as ever memorable as Hannibal's.

The world has given Lee, and will long give him, rains of gracious tears.

But he was never plagued with Calhoun's sharpened eyes to future disaster, and he was confident that he would reach the mountains almost until the very moment of surrender. Think rather of the great sufferers for high causes,--Bonnivard, wearing a pathway over the stone floor of his prison; Lear, of all of Shakspeare's heroes, in the deepest gulf of misfortune; and especially of Calvary and the crucifixion, for Jesus travailed for his brothers and sisters. It is here you must look for the like of Calhoun.

For fifteen years that "ma.s.s of moan" which was coming to his dear ones pierced his ears plainer and plainer and made his heart sicker and sicker, and during this long b.l.o.o.d.y sweat he gave the rarest devotion and self-sacrifice to his country which he feared more and more was to plunge over the precipice. As we recall the scene of his death it makes us rejoice to know that the cross he had borne so long has at last been cast off and he has entered into the rest of the martyr-patriot. Then it occurs to us that he carried with him his affections,--too lofty not to be immortal,--and we cannot believe that the sad spirit ever smiled until Wade Hampton, twenty-six years afterwards, re-erected white domination in South Carolina.

Dixie will never forget that one who of all her sons loved her best and suffered for her the most. And it is my conviction that each n.o.blest soul of the north will after a while revere in Calhoun the American parallel to the moral grandeur of Dante, of whom Michaelangelo said he would cheerfully endure his exile and all his misfortunes for his glory.

CHAPTER VIII