"In a newspaper interview?"
"Yes, sir."
"Nonsense."
"It"s your character that will count."
"Such an answer would be a straw pitched against a hurricane. I am told that this book has already reached a circulation of half a million copies and it has only begun. That means already three million readers.
To answer this book my pen should be better trained than my sword--"
"It is, sir, if you"ll only use it."
"The South has only trained swords. And not so many of them as we think.
We have no writers. We have no literature. We have no champions in the forum of the world"s thought. We are being arraigned at the judgment bar of mankind and we are dumb. It"s appalling."
"That"s why you must speak for us. Speak in our defense. Speak with a tongue of flame--"
"I am not trained for speech, Ruffin. And the pen is mightier than the sword. I"ve never realized it before. The South will soon have the civilized world arraigned against her. The North with a thousand pens is stirring the faiths, the prejudices and the sentiments of the millions.
This appeal is made in the face of History, Reason and Law. But its force will be as the gravitation of the earth, beyond the power of resistance, unless we can check it in time."
"When it comes to resistance," Ruffin snapped, "that"s another question.
The Yankees are a race of d.a.m.ned cowards and poltroons, sir. They won"t fight."
Lee shook his head gravely.
"I"ve been in the service more than a quarter of a century, my friend.
I"ve seen a lot of Yankees under fire. I"ve seen a lot of them die. And I know better. Your idea of a Yankee is about as correct as the Northern notion of Southern fighters. A notion they"re beginning to exploit in cartoons which show an effeminate lady killer with an umbrella stuck in the end of his musket and a negro mixing mint juleps for him."
"We"ve got to denounce those slanders. I"m a man of cool judgment and I never lose my temper--"
He leaped to his feet purple with rage.
"But, by G.o.d, sir, we can"t sit quietly under the a.s.sault of these narrow-minded bigots. You must give the lie to this infamous book!"
"How can I, my friend?"
"Doesn"t she make heroes of law breakers?"
"Surely."
"Is there no reverence for law left in this country?"
"In Courts of Justice, yes. But not in the courts of pa.s.sion, prejudice, beliefs, sentiment. The writers of sentiment sing the praises of law breakers--"
"But there can be no question of the right or wrong of this book. It is an infamous slander. I deny and impeach it!"
"I"m afraid that"s all we can do, Ruffin--deny and impeach it. When we come down to bra.s.s tacks we can"t answer it. From their standpoint the North is right. From our standpoint we are right, because our rights are clear under the Const.i.tution. Slavery is not a Southern inst.i.tution; it is a national inheritance. It is a national calamity. It was written into the Const.i.tution by all the States, North and South. And if the North is ignorant of our rights under the laws of our fathers, we have failed to enlighten them--"
"We won"t be dictated to, sir, by a lot of fanatics and hypocrites."
"Exactly, we stand on our dignity. We deny and we are ready to fight.
But we will not argue. As an abstract proposition in ethics or economics, Slavery does not admit of argument. It is a curse. It"s on us and we can"t throw it off at once. My quarrel with the North is that they do not give us their sympathy and their help in our dilemma.
Instead they rave and denounce and insult us. They are even more responsible than we for the existence of Slavery, since their ships, not ours, brought the negro to our sh.o.r.es. Slavery is an outgrown economic folly, a bar to progress, a political and social curse to the white race. It must die of its own weakness, South, as it died of its own weakness, North. It is now in the process of dying. The South has freed over three hundred thousand slaves by the voluntary act of the master.
If these appeals of the mob leader to the spirit of the mob can be stopped, a solution will be found."
"It will never be found in the ravings of Abolitionists."
"Nor in the hot tempers of our Southern partisans, Ruffin. Look in the mirror, my good friend. Chattel Slavery is doomed because of the superior efficiency of the wage system. Morals have nothing to do with it. The Captain of Industry abolished Chattel Slavery in the North, not the preacher or the agitator. He established the wage system in its place because it is a mightier weapon in his hand. It is subject to but one law. The iron law of supply and demand. Labor is a commodity to be bought and sold to the highest bidder. And the highest bidder is at liberty to bid lower than the price of bread, clothes, fuel and shelter, if he chooses. This system is now moving Southward like a glacier from the frozen heart of the Northern mountains, eating all in its path. It is creeping over Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri. It will slowly engulf Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee and the end is sure. Its propelling force is not moral. It is soulless. It is purely economic.
The wage earner, driven by hunger and cold, by the fear of the loss of life itself--is more efficient in his toil than the care-free negro slave of the South, who is a.s.sured of bread, of clothes, of fuel and shelter, with or without work. Slavery does not admit of argument, my friend. To argue about it is to destroy it."
"I disagree with you, sir!" Ruffin thundered.
"I know you do. But you can"t answer this book."
"It can be answered, sir."
Lee paced the floor, his arms folded behind his back, paused and watched Ruffin"s flushed face. He shook his head again.
"The book is unanswerable, because it is an appeal to emotion based on a study of Slavery in the abstract. If no allowance be made for the tender and humane character of the Southern people or the modification of statutory law by the growth of public sentiment, its imaginary scenes are within the bounds of the probable. The story is crude, but it is told with singular power without a trace of bitterness. The blind ferocity of Garrison, who sees in every slaveholder a fiend, nowhere appears in its pages. On the other hand, Mrs. Stowe has painted one slaveholder as gentle and generous. Simon Legree, her villain, is a Yankee who has moved South and taken advantage of the power of a master to work evil. Such men have come South. Such things might be done. It is precisely this possibility that makes Slavery indefensible. You know this. And I know it."
"You astound me, Colonel."
"Yes, I"m afraid I do. I"d like to speak a message to the South about this book. I"ve a great deal more to say to my own people than to our critics."
Ruffin rose, thrust his hands in his pockets, walked to the window, turned suddenly and faced his host.
"But look here, Colonel Lee, I"m d.a.m.ned if I can agree with you, sir!
Suppose Slavery _is_ wrong--an economic fallacy and a social evil--I don"t say it is, mind you. Just suppose for the sake of argument that it is. We don"t propose to be lectured on this subject by our inferiors in the North. The children of the men who stole these slaves from Africa and sold them to us at a profit!"
Lee laughed softly.
"The sins of an inferior cannot excuse the mistakes of a superior. The man of superior culture and breeding should lead the world in progress.
What has come over us in the South, Ruffin? Your father and mine never defended Slavery. They knew it was to them, their children and this land, a curse. It was a blessing only to the savage who was being taught the rudiments of civilization at a tremendous cost to his teacher. The first Abolition Societies were organized in the South. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Randolph, all the great leaders of the old South, the men whose genius created this republic--all denounced Slavery. They told us that it is a poison, breeding pride and tyranny of character, that it corrupts the mind of the child, that it degrades labor, wears out our land, destroys invention, and saps our ideal of liberty. And yet we have begun to defend it."
"Because we are being hounded, traduced and insulted by the North, yes--"
"Yes, but also because we must have more land."
"We"ve as much right in the West as the North."
"That"s not the real reason we demand the right of entry. We are exhausting the soil of the South by our slipshod farming on great plantations where we use old-fashioned tools and slave labor. We refuse to study history. Ancient empires tried this system and died. The Carthagenians developed it to perfection and fell before the Romans. The Romans borrowed it from Carthage. It destroyed the small farms and drove out the individual land owners. It destroyed respect for trades and crafts. It strangled the development of industrial art. And when the test came Roman civilization pa.s.sed. You hot-heads under the goading of Abolition crusaders now blindly propose to build the whole structure of Southern Society on this system."
"We"ve no choice, sir."
"Then we must find one. Slowly but surely the clouds gather for the storm. We catch only the first rumblings now but it"s coming."
Ruffin flared.
"Now listen to me, Colonel. I"m a man of cool judgment and I never lose my temper, sir--"