CHAPTER X. THE CAUSE OF BULLETS, ’61; BALLOTS, ’92.—ABRAHAM LINCOLN, THE PEOPLE’S CHOICE IN ’60.
Of political parties in America, De Tocqueville declared that “Aristocratic or democratic passions may easily be detected at the bottom of all parties, and although they escape a superficial observation, they are the main point and soul of every faction in the United States.”
That greatest conflict of American history, the military and political struggle between the forces of slavery and the forces of human freedom, was no less a conflict between aristocracy and democracy. In the South, which President-elect Cleveland only the other day termed—with undoubted historical accuracy—the cradle of American liberty, there had been developed a social and political aristocracy as distinct and powerful as almost any the world has seen.
To this development, which did not become marked until after the early part of the present century, many causes contributed. The industry of the South had become centralized in the hands of large land owners who cultivated extensive plantations with slave labor. The tremendous growth of slavery exerted a depressing effect upon the manufacturing spirit; the artisan, the mechanic, and the trader came to be regarded as socially inferior. The planting of rice, sugar cane, and especially cotton, which was found to be the most profitable business, was also the most esteemed; and the South became an almost purely agricultural section.
Lorin Blodget lays it down as an accepted rule that “the country wholly devoted to agriculture necessarily tends to aristocratic despotism, or some form of enslavement of the masses;” and he quotes similar expressions from Adam Smith, Buckle, and other recognized authorities on political economy.
Nor are reasons hard to find. De Tocqueville points out that the great guarantees of popular liberty in America are universal education and the general division of landed property. Now, in a purely agricultural country the education of the people is certain to be defective. The population is necessarily dispersed, for where there are no manufactories there can be few towns; and where there are few towns there are fewer and less efficient schools, and libraries and lyceums are practically unknown. Harrison’s “History of Virginia” states that that State had, in 1848, 166,000 youths between seven and sixteen years old, of whom only 40,000 attended any school.
Landed property had naturally tended to fall more and more into a few hands. As John Stuart Mill said of ancient Rome: “When inequality of wealth once commences in a community not constantly engaged in repairing, by industry, the injuries of fortune, its advances are gigantic; the great masses swallow up the smaller. The Roman Empire ultimately became covered with the vast landed possessions of a comparatively few families, for whose luxury, and still more for whose ostentation, the most costly products were raised, while the cultivators of the soil were slaves or small tenants in a nearly servile condition.” The description is closely applicable to the landed aristocracy of the South in the years immediately before the war.
It is a mistake—a not uncommon mistake—to suppose that the ante-bellum South was poor. It was rich—considerably richer than the North, in proportion to its population. In 1860 the South had much more than its share of the assessed wealth of the nation. The total value of property in the Union was $12,000,000,000, and of this the Southern States, with only one-third of the country’s population (and less than one-fourth of the country’s white population), had $5,000,000,000, or more than forty per cent.
But in the agricultural South wealth was far more unevenly distributed than in the manufacturing and commercial North. In the latter great fortunes were made, but were almost sure to be distributed among several heirs, or lost in the fluctuations of trade, while the prevalence of the industrial and inventive spirit opened the path of advancement to those born at the bottom of the ladder. In the former, large landed properties were handed down from father to son, and tended to grow larger by accretion, as is the rule with great estates. The small land owner could not compete with them. The peasant, whose only calling was the tilling of the soil, had little prospect of bettering his condition.
“The Southern planter,” says a member[2] of one of the old landed families, who is now well known as the self-appointed manager of New York society, “was a born aristocrat. He had literally as much power in his little sphere as any old feudal lord. His slaves were the creatures of his caprice and pleasure. The work of their hands supported him, gave him his position and influence. I have lived on a plantation with twelve hundred slaves, all devotedly attached to their master, evidencing as much loyalty and fealty as an Englishman to his sovereign, and taking great pride in their master and mistress.”
The planter’s life was one of patriarchal magnificence. His entertainments, according to the same authority, “would be appreciated in the old Faubourg at Paris;” his wines were old and abundant; his songs were the ballads of his historical prototype, the mediæval baron of England:
“Lord Thomas, he was a bold forester,
The keeper of the King’s deer;
Lady Eleanor was a fine woman,
Lord Thomas he loved her dear.”
Political power within its own commonwealths was of course practically monopolized by this land-owning caste. Of power in national politics it wielded a tremendous share. It had taken advantage of that feature of the Federal Constitution which, when it was first framed, Patrick Henry attacked when he prophesied that “an aristocracy of the rich and well born would spring up and trample upon the masses.” Outnumbered in the House of Representatives, it had firmly intrenched itself in the United States Senate.
In that body, up to the time just before the war, when it was no longer possible to create a new Southern State to offset each Northern State, it held half the seats and votes—a position that gave it complete control of all Presidential nominations to office. Through its possession of this unassailable veto power on appointments, it had come to pass that, as Mr. Blaine observes in his “Twenty Years of Congress,” “the Courts of the United States, both Supreme and District, throughout the Union, were filled with men acceptable to the South. Cabinets were constituted in the same way. Representatives of the government in foreign countries were necessarily taken from the class approved by the same power. Mr. Webster, speaking in his most conservative tone in the famous speech of March 7, 1850, declared that from the formation of the Union to that hour the South had monopolized three-fourths of the places of honor and emolument under the Federal Government. It was an accepted fact that the class interest of slavery, by holding a tie in the Senate, could defeat any measure or any nomination to which its leaders might be opposed; and, thus banded together by an absolutely cohesive political force, they could and did dictate terms.”
Such was the land-holding, slave-holding, office-holding aristocracy, against which the first directly and avowedly antagonistic movement was that of the Republican party. Young and weak in its first Presidential contest of 1856, the new organization gathered strength steadily; and when, on April 29, 1860, the Democratic Convention at Baltimore was rent asunder by the Secessionists, it became clear that the Republicans would have to face the threatened disruption of the Union.
The Republican Convention met at Chicago and chose, in preference to the able and experienced Seward, Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, a man who, then comparatively unknown, was to take rank as perhaps the noblest and greatest of all America’s sons.
Lincoln, when asked for an account of his boyhood, said that it might be summed up in Crabbe’s famous line: “The short and simple annals of the poor.” J. G. Holland thus reviews the career of the man who led the struggle that began in 1860: “Born in the humblest and remotest obscurity, subjected to the rudest toil in the meanest offices, achieving the development of his powers by means of his own institution, he had, with none of the tricks of the demagogue, with none of the aids of wealth and social influence, with none of the opportunities for exhibiting his powers which high official position bestows, against all the combinations of genius and eminence and interest, raised himself by force of manly excellence of heart and brain into national recognition, and had become the local center of the affectionate interest and curious inquisition of thirty millions of people.”
To the end of his life, Lincoln was the very incarnation of democratic simplicity. He was never at home in a drawing-room; he never could dispose gracefully his hands and feet—appendages whose size was proportionate to his huge stature. After his nomination for the Presidency, he used to answer his own bell at his little house in Springfield, Illinois.
The people’s man of 1860, Abraham Lincoln! The pulse of patriotism quickens at the pronunciation of the name. The people’s plain Abe Lincoln; one of them, a commoner, of them, with them, like them. To foreign nations, he may have appeared as “President Abraham Lincoln, Chief Magistrate of the United States.” He may have been “Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy,” in the minds of his subordinates in those two important branches of his administration from ’61 to ’65. History may record him as the “wise, able, and philanthropical.” But his memory will last enshrined in a temple more lasting than bronze or stone—the hearts of the people.
To them he was Abe Lincoln—one of them, feeling their sensations, a common bond between him and them. He was a democrat by birth, by experience, by sentiment, reason, and patriotism. He was a President of the masses, and how well and loyally did they love him! His homely ways and phrases, his unadorned and vigorous speeches, were the ways of the people, speeches of the people; loved by the people for the very enemies he had made, for his enemies were the enemies of the people. Every caricature of Lincoln was a caricature of the people; every attack upon his personality was an attack upon the personality of the “mudsills” of the people, and his call to arms was their call to arms, and they sprang forward, responsive to his appeal, recognizing in it their appeal, as no sham aristocrat or autocrat can ever hope to have a nation do.
His memory will not remain green in the minds of the masses by his martyrdom; but dear will the picture be, from generation to generation, of the boy studying by the light of a flickering fire, and splitting rails for daily bread; fighting his way onward and upward without wealth, or powerful friends, until at last, in the supreme hour of the people’s need, he comes to bear their standard in the battle which they waged against “caste.” He did not come to the contest as a hired soldier, but as a volunteer, feeling all that was felt by the common soldier. It was his battle, for he had felt the sting of class distinction, as did every private soldier of his army.
Loving, loyal, faithful Abe Lincoln! May your name never be belittled by any of your descendants adopting a crest or coat-of-arms. Your coat-of-arms is engraved in figures as lasting as the eternal hills of America upon the minds of the people. Should a degenerate descendant seek a coat-of-arms, let him make it an axe and rail, surrounded by the laurel wreath bestowed by the loving, trusting people; for Abe Lincoln was best and only loved by the very term by which the aristocrats attempted to disparage him—“the rail-splitter.” After the election of Abraham Lincoln, while he remained at Springfield, the chosen representative of the people, he was the most approachable man in America; even though at that time he must have felt the heavy weight of responsibility thrust upon him, viewing as he could the mass which, like a snowball, was increasing as it progressed under the weak administration of his predecessor. Think of the anxious hours that this man spent, knowing what the people expected of him, and seeing the number of his difficulties being added to, day by day, while those who had the burden to bear were obliged, until the fourth of the succeeding March, to sit still and watch the accumulation. Yet in those anxious hours, while receiving counsel of the mighty of the political world, many of whom were strangers to him and to whom he was a stranger, yet, still, while watching thus, the pillar of the Union, stone by stone falling away; while thus counselled, advised by those he knew not whether to trust or not; while his mind must necessarily have been weighed down with the thought of his own possible inability to meet the expectations of his friends, the people, in that great new sphere to which they had called him, Abe Lincoln still had time to grasp the hand and wish good cheer to an old friend, neighbor, or one of the people. From birth to death, his life will form a lesson that the new Chief of the people whom they have called to be President of the United States, Grover Cleveland, could well study, and Abe Lincoln’s example emulate, if he would hold the love of those who, by their votes, put him into the Presidential chair.
This man, Abraham Lincoln, represented that class of people who had been dubbed “mudsills” by the orators who represented the believers in “caste” in the South. He stood as the very personification of “mudsillism,” which, read in the light of recently written history, meant the Common People—that is, the majority; and the majority ruled after his election in 1860, even though it required the use of bullets against the aristocratic class, just as the majority will rule in 1892, after the election of Grover Cleveland as representative of the Common People.
The South sought by secession to absolve itself from the domination of the masses. It was like the patricians of Rome seeking the Sacred Hill to build a new city. It failed, as will ever the minority, representing a false idea of American society and a false conception of the spirit with which every American is imbued, do in the future. But, be it said to the credit of the believers in aristocracy in 1860, that they had the courage of their convictions, and they fought a manly battle to establish that which is impossible in America. The history of the Southerners’ sufferings and dangers, endured uncomplainingly, forms a bright and shining exception to the conduct of the typical believer in “caste.” Sham aristocracy, which has disregarded the rights and wounded the feelings of the people for the past twenty-five years, that sham aristocracy which is a direct outgrowth resulting from the suppression of the Southern aristocracy, if tested as the Southern aristocracy has been, would be found deficient in those qualities of courage and determination which made even the Southerners’ false ideas respected and respectable.
The sham aristocracy of to-day, unlike the false aristocracy of 1860, would hire bullies, outcasts, and vagrants to do their fighting, as did those magnificent illustrations of “caste” in our country, Carnegie and Frick, at Homestead, and Son-in-law Webb at Buffalo.
The advocates of “caste” in 1860, the Southerners, not alone possessed courage and determination, but, accepting the result of the conflict, have exhibited since the days of Reconstruction that wonderful degree of political acumen for which they have ever been famous. Early recognizing that in their struggle for an independent national existence, the Southern Confederacy, they had been defeated—not by the aristocracy of the North and West, but by the Common People; that is, the most powerful portion of the population of the Union—the Southerner, the secessionist, the aristocrat of 1860, submerged himself in the ocean of the Common People, the great majority, the democracy! The Secessionist, who opposed Abraham Lincoln’s administration in 1860 and used bullets to express his opposition in 1861, had firm conviction carried to his hesitating heart by the events that transpired between 1861 and 1865, that the “Common People”—the majority—must rule; and that with the freeing of his slaves he had lost the only possible foundation upon which he could rest his claim of social superiority in this country. Therefore, as the wise man that he has demonstrated himself to be, the aristocrat of 1860 has become the most earnest and patriotic member of a broad democracy in 1892; realizing from experience that upon that rock alone he can build the edifice of prosperity in his section of the country; also realizing from a sad experience that the Common People, democracy (though it was called Abraham Lincoln’s Republican party), was the crag upon which his bark of Secession was shivered in 1865.
ANDREW JACKSON.
The “People’s” President, 1828.