Mr. Adams, having made further inquiry of his own, December 22 of the same year, announced a still more advanced conclusion. He had said at Chicago that the confederate scale preponderated; but now his vision having become more certain he said the scales hung even.[6] Note that in the pa.s.sage just quoted from him I have italicized the two words "not morally." I do not understand that in the Charleston speech he meant to revoke the italicized words, and to say anything more than that each side was right in its own view of the nature of the government. Even with this reservation, the utterances of Mr. Adams evince a grateful improvement upon the dogmatism which characterizes nearly every other northerner or southerner who has treated the subject.
Professor Wendell sees clearly that both sides were morally right, and he is impartially just and equally loving to both. I feel that the quotations from a late work of his which I now make are the chief merits of this chapter. Considering the controversy between the sections, he says, with the truest insight, "The const.i.tution of the United States was presenting itself more and more in the light of an agreement between two incompatible sets of economic inst.i.tutions, a.s.suming to each the right freely to exist within its own limits."[7]
In this next pa.s.sage as to the same subject, rising above Mr. Adams to the high frankness which the facts demand, he says, "The truth is that an irrepressible social conflict was at hand, and that both sides were as honorable as were both sides during the American Revolution, or during the civil wars of England."[8]
How just to north and south each, and how fraternally compa.s.sionate towards the south is this: "Solemn enough to the uninvaded north, the war meant more than northern imagination has yet realized to those southern States into whose heart its horrors were slowly, surely carried. Such a time was too intense for much expression; it was a moment rather for heroic action; and in south and north alike it found armies of heroes. Of these there are few more stirring records than a simple ballad made by Dr.
Ticknor, of Georgia, concerning a confederate soldier."[9] And then he quotes "Little Giffen" in full.
Professor Wendell reaches a still greater height when he decorates the Tyrtaeus of the Confederate States and the supereminent anti-slavery lyricist of the north with equal homage and admiration. He says:
"The civil war brought forth no lines more fervent [than the concluding thirty-six of Timrod"s "The Cotton Boll," which are set out], and few whose fervor rises to such lyric height. In the days of conflict, north regarded south, and south north, as the incarnation of evil. Time, however, has begun its healing work; at last our country begins to understand itself better than ever before; and as our new patriotism strengthens, we cannot prize too highly such verses as Whittier"s, honestly phrasing n.o.ble northern sentiment, or as Timrod"s, who with equal honesty phrased the n.o.ble sentiment of the south. A literature which in the same years could produce work so utterly antagonistic in superficial sentiment, and yet so harmonious in their common sincerity and loftiness of feeling, is a literature from which riches may come."[10]
These words are more golden than I can tell. They parallel the elevation of Webster, showing the same love for South Carolina and Ma.s.sachusetts, in the pertinent parts of the reply to Hayne, which since my boyhood I have cherished as a nonpareil. It is cheering to a faithful southerner to receive such sure proof that the day must soon come when all obloquy will be lifted from the fame of Calhoun, Toombs, and Davis. What a grand triumph of contrast, almost surpa.s.sing the best achievement of Shakspeare, it will be when some honest Griffith, having shown Webster, Lincoln, and Grant in all the worth which merited their unspeakably happy lot, each radiant with the victor"s glory, places opposite the great civic heroes of the southern nation, their due renown at last fitly blazoned. That renown will be that they devoted the very greatest human powers and virtues all their lives, with never remitted effort and spotless fidelity, to save a doomed country,--the imperishable renown of grand failure in a cause which adverse fate cannot keep from being ever dear to all humanity.
My last word as to what I have just quoted from the three northern authors is that all of us--and especially the fast widening public of readers--ought to be forever in earnest to applaud such sentiments and chide every manifestation of excessive sectional bias or prejudice from either northerner or southerner. This has been my incessantly kept faith for years. As proof I refer to my article, "The Old and New South," nearly all of it written in the early part of 1875--thirty years ago--and which I published the next year. I give an exact copy of it in the Appendix. As you go through it remember these things of the author: The election of Lincoln made me believe, as it did thousands of other southerners, that secession was the only patriotic course. I therefore voted for secession delegates to the State convention. I served in the confederate army all the war, taking part in the First Mana.s.sas and many other battles; and when I had been surrendered and paroled at Appomattox I walked back to my home in Georgia. Ten years after this I had found full solace and comfort for the direful event to the south of the brothers" war; and I had learned that the brothers on each side had complete justification in conscience for their contrary parts as statesmen, public leaders, voters, and at the end as soldiers. I want my readers of each section to see that I have long practised what I am now preaching.
I beg attention to the article on another score. It shows that the opinions expressed in this book have not been formed in haste. Nearly all of the more important will be found therein, in embryo, at least; and the present book will show, I hope, that they have prosperously grown. There are pa.s.sages in the article, such as those touching the relations of the races, the future of the negro, the maintenance by the decentralizing forces of the union of their balance with the counter ones, and also others, which I might now justly claim to have proved prophetic; and I do not believe that a serious misprediction can be found in the entire article. This is, I hope, such corroboration by after occurrences as indicates that even my early studies of the transcendently important theme were not unfruitful.
Further, the article serves in some sort to mark a definite stage in evolution. To give but one ill.u.s.tration: Although my close attention to planting interests at the time and for the seven or eight preceding years had kept me closely watching the negro, I had not then discovered even the beginning of that division of the race into two cla.s.ses which is now so plain to me.
Possibly some readers may shy away from my book, deeming that its subject is hackneyed and worn out. They will exclaim, What can this author say that has not been said in the vast library of books already written upon the civil war? This will be asked, I am sure, only by the un.o.bservant and unreflecting. If one but turn away from the a.s.sumptions, dogmas, and philippics, with which north and south cannonaded each other"s morality with increasing fury from 1831 to 1861, to the _rerum causae_, the play of resistless social forces, and the other actualities and great things indicated above, their huge stores of varied novelty, interest, romance, and wisdom will greatly embara.s.s him--as has been my painful experience--both in making the best selection and in his felt inability to give what he does at last select its fit presentation.
As ill.u.s.tration I will say that every thoroughly impartial northern reader who meditates what I narrate as to Toombs will, I believe, be astonished to learn that one so prodigally gifted with supreme virtue and supreme genius, and who was of unexampled success in doing all the common and all the extraordinary duties of high place, has become worse than forgotten in almost his own day; and such a reader will suspect, as I do myself, that there is much more of value in his career that I have overlooked.
Perhaps this chapter is too long already. But I pray my reader to allow me to say a little more. We are upon the threshold of a new American era.
Evidently because of our western coast we are to dominate the Pacific ocean commerce and to develop it into proportions so enormous as to be now almost inconceivable. That coast will soon outstrip the Atlantic in population and great cities. Our people, safe against wars on the continent, maintaining armies only of workers, taught better methods every year by practice and science, will soon be far in advance of their present enviable prosperity and comfort. Cheering as is the promise of their material progress, that of their progress in virtue and good government is still more cheering. Everywhere in the north--which was not impoverished, deprived of familiar modes of production, and paralyzed with a race question by the event of the brothers" war--the State electorates are rebelling successfully against the party machine, cashiering the boss, and subverting the corporation oligarchy. That in the last election the voters most intelligently split their tickets a.s.sures the early expulsion of spoilsmen, grafters, and public-service franchise-grabbers from the control of our politics, legislation, and administration of government, and the real and permanent elevation of the people to being their own absolute governors. In several States--one of these a southern--the vote was for the most democratic and anti-plutocratic president since Lincoln, while at the same time the anti-plutocratic State candidates, either of the other party or independent, were elected. Our population will soon outstrip all the world in average riches, comfort, virtue, and education.
The special note to be made of this new American era now beginning is that we are to lead the nations into a war-abolishing United States of the world, which in the end will make and keep them our equals in solid welfare and happiness. With this prospect in view, the brighter and more enrapturing as I cannot keep from contrasting it with the black and hopeless future which settled around me at Appomattox, I would do all that I can to bring about that better understanding between north and south which befits the good time near at hand.
CHAPTER II
A BEGINNING MADE WITH SLAVERY
As a distinguished southerner, familiar with the subject, says, slavery in the United States was "a stupendous anachronism."[11] It is almost incredible to the average northerner of to-day that the enlightened people of the south sank backwards in social development a thousand years or more, and hugged to their bosoms for several generations such a monstrous evil and peril.
The co-operation of two facts fully explains the wonder just noted. Now let us try to understand this.
The first fact is the part played by tobacco and cotton before the anti-slavery sentiment became influential. At a time when there was practically no industry but agriculture these two staples became the most lucrative of all common American crops. Tobacco found its true soil in Virginia, and cotton farther south. It developed in time that both could be made far more profitably with African slaves than by free white labor, the only other labor to be had. Of course you are to remember that slave cultivation of tobacco did not become general in Virginia until near the end of the seventeenth century, and that it was the invention of the gin soon after the adoption of the federal const.i.tution in 1789 that started cotton production on a large scale. What you are especially to grasp here is the economic conditions which naturally spread slavery from its beginning at Jamestown, first over Virginia, and then throughout the entire south, either settled in large measure from Virginia, or looking thither for example. The Virginian who could not replace his exhausted fields with virgin soil at home went with his slaves either west or south, and hacked down enough of the primeval forest to give his working force its quantum of arable land. We need not stop here to tell of rice and cane, nor of other crops and industries which for a while engaged slave labor in northern regions of the south where the soil did not suit tobacco. The foregoing suggests adequately for this place how slavery became general in the south.
The second fact is that the prevalent opinion of that time was far different from that of to-day, for certain reasons, to which I would now have you attend.
Long before the discovery of America personal slavery had fallen under the ban of the christian church and become in Europe a thing of the past. The Divine Comedy catalogues in detail the religious, political, moral, and social events of its age. It is utterly silent throughout as to slavery.
Dante died in 1321, soon after he had finished the Divine Comedy. That was nearly three hundred years before the appearance of African slavery in Virginia.
Now for something of very great importance to us here, which occurred soon afterwards, and before the introduction of African slavery into America.
It is that by the Renascence the literature of slaveholding Greece and Rome suddenly acquired and long held commanding influence upon almost every educator of the public in the enlightened world. It was in the last quarter of the fourteenth century--some fifty years after Dante had died--that the cla.s.sics revived in Italy. Spreading thence over Europe, they are found dominating the great Elizabethan divines, philosophers, poets, and other opinion-forming writers at the end of the fifteenth century. And during all of the time from the landing of the twenty Africans at Jamestown by the Dutch man-of-war in 1619 until slavery had become the solitary prop of southern industry and property, the Greek and Latin ancient writers were in our mother country almost the sole subjects of school or university education, and the main reading of all those that read at all. And every page of this literature, studied with enthusiastic worship and resorted to day in and day out for instruction and inspiration, disclosed that in Greece and Rome the average family was dependent for its maintenance upon slaves; and that so far from slavery being a relic of barbarism, as the American root-and-branch abolitionists afterwards fulminated in a platform, it was the very foundation of the state in those two great nations whose philosophy, learning, science, jurisprudence, poetry, art, and eloquence are still the models in every enlightened land. Naturally the educated cla.s.ses, now that it had been several hundred years since slavery was a burning question, had forgotten or had never heard of the old disinclination of the church, and could not see any evil in that which their most admired and dearest ones had all practised. The cla.s.sics did not stop with giving slavery the negative support just mentioned. Although such authors as Quintilian and Seneca, and the later jurists--all of the discredited silver, and not of the glorified Ciceronian and Augustan ages--do express, theatrically and academically, anti-slavery opinions, yet what they say was merely dust in the balance when weighed against the commendations of the inst.i.tution to be found in the writings of Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero, who had now become the great idols of intellectual society.[12]
The church would not stay out in the cold and dark, whither it had been suddenly and rudely cast by the Renascence. It woke up to discover that as the African was a heathen barbarian it was G.o.d"s mercy to kidnap him for a christian master, and thus give him his only opportunity of saving his soul. And although it is not right to enslave other races, the descendants of Ham are an exception, who by reason of Noah"s curse are to be the servants of servants to the end of time--that is what Holy Church taught by precept and example.
"Sir John Hawkins has the unenviable distinction of being the first English captain of a slave-ship, about the year 1552."[13] His venture proved a great success. Good Queen Bess reproached him for his mistreatment of human beings. He answered that it was far better for the African thus to become a slave in a christian community, than to live the rest of his life in his native home of idolatry; and this was so convincing that "in the subsequent expeditions of this most heartless man-stealer, she was a partner and protector."[14] Until the end of the seventeenth century the ma.s.ses regarded the negro as being rather wild beast than man, showing no more scruples in catching and making a drudge of him than later generations did in la.s.soing wild horses and working them under curb-bit, spur, and whip. And the more understanding ones, who recognized that the negro belonged to humanity, re-enforced Aristotle[15]
and Pliny[16] with much that they found both in the Old and New Testaments.[17] The many who preached liberty or the true religion posed as humanitarians, pharisaically comparing themselves with the best characters of Greece and Rome. The citizens of those great republics, they said, in spite of their advanced democracy, tore men and women of their own race and blood away from home and country and forced them with the scourge to toil in chains, while we do that only with savages and heathens, who cannot be civilized or christianized in any other way. We eschew slavery in the abstract. We tolerate it only in the concrete, which is the slavery of those destined for it by G.o.d and nature. Slave-catcher, slaveholder, and the public seriously and conscientiously held this creed.
You must now add to the list of influences planting and stimulating slavery in America the protection it got in the const.i.tution under which the federal government started in 1789. As Mr. Blaine says:
"The compromises on the slavery question, inserted in the const.i.tution, were among the essential conditions upon which the federal government was organized. If the African slave-trade had not been permitted to continue for twenty years, if it had not been conceded that three-fifths of the slaves should be counted in the apportionment of representatives in congress, if it had not been agreed that fugitives from service should be returned to their owners, the thirteen States would not have been able in 1787 "to form a more perfect union.""[18]
Think over it until you can fully take in the prodigious favor to slavery which this countenance of it by the American bible of bibles naturally created in the north and south.
The forces rapidly sketched in the foregoing were so powerful in their co-operation to bring in slavery that its establishment and a long era of vigorous growth were inevitable. Note the years during which they met no sensible or only a fitful opposition. The first anti-slavery agitation that shook the entire country was that over the Missouri question, which having lasted a little more than two years ended in 1821, thirty-two years after the adoption of the const.i.tution. This agitation was only against the extension of slavery. It was not until 1835 that the presentation to Congress of pet.i.tions for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia disclosed to the far-seeing Calhoun alone that serious and mighty aggression upon slavery in the States was commencing. Here we may date the beginning of the abolition movement. But that movement did not become respectable with the great ma.s.s of northern people until the application of California in 1850 for admission into the union as a free State widened the chasm between the sections so that it commenced to show to the dullest eye, and "Uncle Tom"s Cabin," which came out in 1852, stirred the north to its depths. The growth of slavery was then and had been for a quarter of a century complete. The soil, climate, and best agricultural interests of the south, at a time when she was to be wholly agricultural or economically nothing at all, the practice and precepts of the sages of Greece and Rome, of the patriarchs of Israel, of Jesus and his disciples and apostles, of the great and good of modern times,--all these had, with oracular consensus, led her understanding and conscience into adopting, nurturing, and on into extending slavery over her territory. Thus when abolition first emerged into open day, slavery had become the very economical life of the south. It had so permeated and informed the combined property, social, and political structure, that abolition would subvert the community fabric and beggar the population of the southern States now living in content and comfort.
I trust that the foregoing shows you that it is not so strange after all that slavery ran the career just described.
But some one says, how could the southerners as Americans, the especial champions of liberty, stultify themselves by slaveholding? how could they forget the world-arousing words of the declaration of independence that all men are created equal, and endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness?
This has already been answered. The slaveholding republics of Greece and Rome had advanced in democracy so far beyond anything to be found in Europe at the revival of learning, that from that time on for many years the political doctrine in the recovered cla.s.sics was the very greatest of all the intellectual influences that made for mere democracy. The celebrated pa.s.sage in which Burke eulogizes the stubborn maintenance of their freedom by free slaveholders has been the text of speakers from Pinkney, addressing the United States senate on the Missouri question, to Toombs, lecturing in Tremont Temple, Boston, and it has never been confuted. History shows no instance where such men ever reproached themselves for slaveholding, and while it was profitable put it aside because it is undemocratic.
As to the words which you quote from the declaration of independence, Jefferson, the draftsman, doubtless, meant them to include the African; but the majority of the congress making it, and the American people actually ratifying it, almost unanimously held that the African was not enough of man to come within the words.
A Roman law parallel aptly ill.u.s.trates. In the Inst.i.tutes it is said that slavery is contrary to the law of nature, for under this every one is born free;[19] and again, that slavery was established by the _jus gentium_ under which a man is made subject to the dominion of another _contra naturam_, that is, against nature, against _jus naturale_, or the law of nature.[20] And in the Pandects this is weakly echoed.[21] But the actual enactment of the _corpus juris civilis_ fortifies slavery as it had been established all over the world by the _jus gentium_ with these plain words: "The master has power of life and death over his slave; and whatever property the slave acquires, he acquires for the master."[22]
Our forefathers making the declaration of independence, and the Romans of Justinian"s time, sentimentalized in the same words over the natural right to equality and liberty of all human beings, and also resolutely held on to their slaves. The solemn a.s.sertion that all men are created equal and of inalienable liberty made by American slaveholders was but a repet.i.tion of what Roman slaveholders had already said; and it is curious that the fact has not attracted due attention.
I fancy that my objector now shoots his last bolt. He exclaims that southerners were incredibly dull and obtuse not to discern that resistlessly puissant economical, political, moral, and intellectual forces, not of America only but of the entire world, were leaguing together against slavery, and therefore they ought to have fled in time from the coming wrath and evil day.
A satisfactory reply need not postulate any other than ordinary intelligence and alertness for the south. Note how people dwell near overflowing rivers, or a sea of tidal waves, or live volcanoes, or in earthquake districts, or near a tribe of scalping redskins, where they, their wives and children, keep merry as the day is long until calamity comes. The warning of the abolitionists was too late. Suppose we had given the inhabitants of Herculaneum or Pompeii or St. Pierre timely counsel to abandon their homes and settle beyond the reach of eruption. How many would have done it? I knew hundreds of people, and among all of them there was but one who showed by his actions that he foresaw the early fall of slavery. That was Mr. Frank L. Upson of Lexington, Georgia, a highly accomplished and well-informed man. In 1856, I think it was, he sold all of his slaves, declaring as his reason that he believed if he kept them he would see them freed without compensation. He was so serious that he declared this even to his purchasers. They merely laughed, and everybody else laughed too, to think how green he was to give them the good bargain that he did. But after the war he enjoyed comfort from the money those slaves had brought him, when all his neighbors had been plunged into hard times by emanc.i.p.ation. There may have been others that did like him. There could not have been many such, for I have never been able to hear of a single one.
We did like the rest of mankind do or would have done. We stuck to our homes and business until the tidal wave washed them away. Yet there are wise ones who are positive that had we not been far more dull and unforeseeing than the average we would have understood many years before the final convulsion that the forces arrayed against slavery were irresistible, and surrendered it in time to get compensated emanc.i.p.ation.
Look at the monopolists now preying upon the public in every corner of the land. They are confident that their holdings are impregnable against democracy coming invincibly against them. Look at the great ma.s.s of our population, shutting the fresh air out of their houses in order to be comfortably warm, and thereby rearing parents--especially mothers--who unawares are incessantly developing tuberculosis to destroy themselves and their children. Some years hence when resumption by government of its functions now granted to private persons has dispossessed all the monopolists, and when every dwelling-house is kept perfectly ventilated and free from infected air, there will be other wise ones to believe that hindsight is just the same as foresight, and to inveigh against the monopolists and parents just mentioned for their unwonted stupidity and improvidence.
CHAPTER III
UNAPPEASABLE ANTAGONISM OF FREE LABOR AND SLAVE LABOR, AND THEIR MORTAL COMBAT OVER THE PUBLIC LANDS
Now a brief explanation of the antagonism between free and slave labor.
The expense of his slaves to the farmer is the same whether they are resting or at work. Sundays, days and even seasons of unfavorable weather, in long do-nothing intervals succeeding the making and also the gathering of the crop, they cost him just as much as when he can work them from sun to sun. But this is not all of his load. The year round he must subsist the numerous non-workers in the families of his laborers, whether young, superannuated, or afflicted. Suppose another farmer to be on adjoining land who can employ laborers just as he wants them, and discharge them as soon as he has no further use for them. Do you not perceive that this free-labor farmer can produce far more cheaply than the slave farmer? And do you not also perceive that if there is a supply of free labor to be had in a slave country, and it can be got by every farmer _ad libitum_, slaves must lose their value as property and be driven to the wall? Free labor was kept out of the south by the repugnance of the white laborer to the negro. Note also that when the number of slaves had become considerable their owners would naturally combine to protect the market value of their property by preventing the coming in of cheaper labor. This was the real reason why Virginia and Delaware opposed the extension of the African slave-trade from 1800 to 1808, and the Confederate States" const.i.tution refused to reopen it. Slavery made some headway in the north. But not finding there the stimulus of such products as tobacco and cotton, it could not become so widespread and deep-seated as to sweep out free labor.
The latter under favorable conditions commenced the compet.i.tion in which it could not fail to win; and in due time slavery died out in the north.
We especially desire to emphasize the att.i.tude towards extension of slavery that free labor was bound to take. That it had already ejected slavery from every other enlightened community will occur to the reader at once as weighty proof that the two cannot live together.[23] Think of the free worker"s suffrage, and you cannot believe that he could long be induced to vote for the protection and further spread of a system taking the bread out of his own mouth, and degrading him by engendering profound disrespect for his cla.s.s; and then think of the vast and rapidly growing numbers of the free laborers of the north, receiving every day great accessions of foreign immigrants avoiding the south as they would the plague; think of all these, and you begin to discern what a mighty power was rising against slavery.
This has brought us to the place where we can properly treat the contention for the Territories. Consider their vast area. Remember that our people have settled thereon in such numbers that thirty-two new States have been added to the old thirteen, and others still are to be added.
Here for some generations was land for the landless; the full meaning of which Henry George has made us plainly see. The adventurous and enterprising of the old States of each section set their faces thitherward in a constantly swelling stream. Attend to the only material difference for us between the northerner and the southerner going west.
Each settler wanted a community like his native one. The northerner had not been trained to manage slave labor and property; he did not like it; he thought it out of date and vastly inferior to free labor; and he could not endure to have himself and family live among negroes, repulsive to him because of unfamiliarity. He had learned from its history in the south that wherever slavery established itself it superseded all other labor.