FOUR YEARS OF WAR
The bitter fruits of anti-slavery agitation were secession and four years of bloody war. The Federal Government waged war to coerce the seceding States to remain in the Union. With the North it was a war for the Union; the South was fighting for independence—denominated by Northern writers as "the Civil War." It was in reality a war between the eleven States which had seceded, as autonomous States, and were fighting for independence, as the Confederate States of America, against the other twenty-two States, which, as the United States of America, fought against secession and for the Union of all the States. It is true the States remaining in the Union had with them the army and the navy and the old government, but that government could not, and did not, exercise its functions within the borders of the seceded States until by force of arms in the war that was now waged it had conquered a control. It was a war between the States for such control; for independence on the one hand, and for the Union on the other. It was not, save in exceptional cases, a war between neighbor and neighbor; it was a war between States as entities, and therefore not properly a civil war. The result of the war did not change the principles upon which it was fought, though it did decide finally the issues that were involved, the right of secession primarily, and slavery incidentally.
Jefferson Davis, afterward the much-loved President of the Confederacy, in his farewell speech in the United States Senate, March 21, 1861, thus stated the case of the South: "Then, senators, we recur to the compact which binds us together. We recur to the principles upon which this government was founded, and when you deny them, and when you deny to us the right to withdraw from a Union which thus perverted threatens to be destructive of our rights, we but tread in the path of our fathers when we proclaim our independence and take the hazard. This is done not in hostility to others, not to injure any section of our country, not even for our own pecuniary benefit, but from the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights we inherited and which it is our duty to transmit unshorn to our children."
Southerners were, as Mr. Davis understood it, treading in the path of their fathers when they proclaimed their independence and fought for the right of self-government.
Professor Fite, of Yale, justifies secession on the following ground:
"In the last analysis the one complete justification of secession was the necessity of saving the vast property of slavery from destruction; secession was a commercial necessity designed to make those billions secure from outside interference. Viewed in this light, secession was right, for any people, prompted by the commonest motives of self-defence and with no moral scruples against slavery, would have followed the same course. The present generation of Northerners, born and reared after the war, must shake off their inherited political passions and prejudices and pronounce the verdict of justification for the South. Believing slavery to be right, it was the duty of the South to defend it. It is time that the words 'traitors,' 'conspirators,' 'rebels,' and 'rebellion' be discarded."[82]
These words of Professor Fite will waken a responsive echo in the hearts of Southerners, but Southerners place, and their fathers planted, themselves on higher ground than commercial considerations. The Confederates were defending their inherited right of local self-government and the Federal Constitution that secured it. It was for these rights that, as Mr. Davis had said, they were willing to follow the path their fathers trod.
The preservation of the Union the North was fighting for, was a noble motive; it looked to the future greatness and glory of the republic; but devotion to the Union had been a growth, the product largely of a single generation; the devotion of the South to the right of local self-government was an older and deeper conviction; it had been bred in the bone for three generations; it dated from Bunker Hill and Valley Forge and Yorktown. Close as the non-slave-holders of the South were to the slave-holders, of the same British stock, and with the same traditions, blood kinsmen as they were, they might not have been willing to dare all and do all for the protection of property in which they were not interested; but they were ready to, and they did, wage a death struggle to maintain against a hostile sectional majority, their inherited right to govern themselves in their own way. Added to this was the ever-present conviction of Southerners all, that they were battling not only for the supremacy of their race but for the preservation of their homes. There was a little ditty quite prevalent in the Army of Northern Virginia, of which nothing is now remembered except the refrain, but that of itself speaks volumes. It ran:
"Do you belong to the rebel band
Fighting for your home?"
Northerners had, most of them, convinced themselves that the South would never dare to secede. The danger of servile insurrections, if nothing else, would prevent it.[83]Many Southerners, on the other hand, could not see how, under the Constitution, the North could venture on coercion.
But to the South the greatest surprise furnished by the events of that era has been Abraham Lincoln—as he appears now in the light of history. What, in the minds of Southerners, fixed his status personally, during the canvass of 1860, was the statement he had made in his speech at Chicago, preliminary to his great debate with Douglas in 1858, that the Union could not "continue to exist half slave and half free." And he was now the candidate of the "Black Republican" party, a party that was denouncing a decision of the Supreme Court; that, in nearly every State in the North, had nullified the fugitive slave law, and that stood for "negro equality," as the South termed it.
There were other statements by Mr. Lincoln in that debate with Douglas that the South has had especial reason to take note of since the period of Reconstruction. At Springfield, Illinois, September 18, 1858, he said: "There is a physical difference between the white and black races which, I believe, will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality, and, inasmuch as they can not so live, while they do live together there must be the position of superior and inferior; and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having that position assigned to the white man."
The new Confederacy took the Constitution of the United States, so modified as to make it read plainly as Jefferson had expounded it in the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. Other changes were slight. The presidential term was extended to six years and the President was not to be re-eligible. The slave trade was prohibited and Congress was authorized to forbid the introduction of slaves from the old Union.
Abraham Lincoln became President, with a fixed resolve to preserve the Union but with no intent to abolish slavery. Had the war for the Union been as successful as he hoped it would be, slavery would not have been abolished by any act of his. It is clear that, when inaugurated, he had not changed his opinions expressed at Springfield, nor those others, which, at Peoria, Illinois, on October 16, 1854, he had stated thus: "When our Southern brethren tell us they are no more responsible for slavery than we are, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said the institution exists and it is very difficult to get rid of it in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I will surely not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do as to the institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves and send them to Liberia, their native land."
This, he said, it was impracticable to do, at least suddenly, and then proceeded: "To free them all and keep them among us as underlings—is it quite certain that this would better their condition?... What next? Free them and make them politically and socially our equals?" This question he answered in the negative, and continued: "It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted, but for their tardiness I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the South."
In these extracts from his speeches we find a central thread that runs through the history of his whole administration. We see it again when, pressed by extremists, Mr. Lincoln said in an open letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862: "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that."
Indeed, Congress had, in 1861, by joint resolution declared that the sole purpose of the war was the preservation of the Union. In no other way, and for no other purpose, could the North at that time have been induced to wage war against the South.
Abraham Lincoln, the President of the United States, and Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States, were both Kentuckians by birth, both Americans. In the purity of their lives, public and private, in patriotic devotion to the preservation of American institutions as understood by each of them, they were alike; but they represented different phases of American thought, and each was the creature more or less of his environment. Both were men of commanding ability, but the destiny of each was shaped by agencies that now seem to have been directed by the hand of Fate. Mr. Lincoln, by nature a political genius, was carried to Illinois when a child, reared in the North-west among those to whom, with the Mississippi River as their only outlet to the markets of the world, disunion, with its loss of their highway to the sea, was unthinkable. Lincoln became a Whig, with the Union of the States the passion of his life, and finally, by forces he had not himself put in motion, he was placed at the head of the Federal Government at a time when sectionalism had decided that the question of the permanence of the Union was to be tried out, once and forever.
Mr. Davis went from Kentucky further South. He was a Democrat, and environment also moulded his opinions. During the long sectional controversy between the North and the South, "State-rights" became the passion of his life, and when the clash between the sections came, he found himself, without his seeking, at the head of the Confederacy. He had been prominent among the Southerners at Washington, who had hoped that the South, by threats of secession, might obtain its rights in the Union, as had been done in Jefferson's days by New England. In the movement (1860-61) that resulted in secession, the people at home had been ahead of their congressmen. William L. Yancey, then in Alabama, not Jefferson Davis at Washington, was the actual leader of the secessionists. Mr. Davis feared a long and bloody war and, unlike Yancey, he had doubts as to its result.[84]
Mr. Lincoln, standing for the Union, succeeded in the war, but just as he was on the threshold of his great work of Reconstruction he fell, the victim of a crazy assassin. Martyrdom to his cause has naturally added some cubits to the just measure of his wonderful reputation.
Jefferson Davis and his cause failed; and the triumphant forces that swept the Confederacy out of existence have long (and quite naturally) sought to bury the cause of the South and its chosen leader in ignominy. But the days of hate and passion are past; reason is reasserting her sway; and history will do justice to both the Confederacy and its great leader, whose ability, patriotism, and courage were conspicuous to the end.
Mr. Davis was also a martyr—his long imprisonment, the manacles he wore, the sentinel gazing on him in the bright light that day and night disturbed his rest; the heroism with which he endured all this, and the quiet dignity of his after life—these have doubly endeared his memory to those for whose cause he suffered.
Mr. Lincoln had remarkable political tact—he seemed to know how long to wait and when to act, and, if we may credit Mr. Welles,[85] his inflexibly honest Secretary of the Navy, he was, with the members of his cabinet, wonderfully patient and even long-suffering. And although he was the subject of much abuse, especially at the hands of Southerners who then totally misunderstood him, he was animated always by the philosophy of his own famous words, "With malice towards none, with charity for all." Never for one moment did he forget, amidst even the bitterest of his trials, that the Confederates, then in arms against him, were, as he regarded them, his misguided fellow-citizens; and the supreme purpose of his life was to bring them back into the Union, not as conquered foes, but as happy and contented citizens of the great republic.
The resources of the Confederacy and the United States were very unequal. The Confederacy had no army, no navy, no factories, save here and there a flour mill or cotton factory, and practically no machine shops that could furnish engines for its railroads. It had one cannon foundry. The Tredegar Iron Works, at Richmond, Virginia, was a fully equipped cannon foundry. The Confederacy's arms and munitions of war were not sufficient to supply the troops that volunteered during the first six months of military operations. Its further supplies, except such as the Tredegar works furnished, depended on importations through the blockade soon to be established and such as might be captured.
The North had the army and navy, factories of every description, food in abundance, and free access to the ports of the world.
The population of the North was 22,339,978.
The population of the South was 9,103,332, of which 3,653,870 were colored. The total white male population of the Confederacy, of all ages, was 2,799,818.
The reports of the Adjutant-General of the United States, November 9, 1880, show 2,859,132 men mustered into the service of the United States in 1861-65. General Marcus J. Wright, of the United States War Records Office, in his latest estimate of Confederate enlistments, places the outside number at 700,000. The estimate of Colonel Henderson, of the staff of the British army, in his "Life of Stonewall Jackson," is 900,000. Colonel Thomas J. Livermore, of Boston, estimates the number of Confederates at about 1,000,000, and insists that in the Adjutant-General's reports of the Union enlistments there are errors that would bring down the number of Union soldiers to about 2,000,000. Colonel Livermore's estimates are earnestly combated by Confederate writers.
General Charles Francis Adams has, in a recently published volume,[86] cited figures given mostly by different Confederate authorities, which aggregate 1,052,000 Confederate enlistments. What authority these Confederate writers have relied on is not clear. The enlistments were for the most part directly in the Confederate army and not through State officials. The captured Confederate records should furnish the highest evidence. But it is earnestly insisted that these records are incomplete, and there is no purpose here to discuss a disputed point.
The call to arms was answered enthusiastically in both sections, but the South was more united in its convictions, and practically all her young manhood fell into line, the rich and the poor, the cultured and uncultured serving in the ranks side by side.
The devotion of the noble women of the North, and of its humanitarian associations, to the welfare of the Federal soldiers was remarkable, but there was nothing in the situation in that section that could evoke such a wonderful exhibition of heroism and self-sacrifice as was exhibited by the devoted women of the South, who made willingly every possible sacrifice to the cause of the Confederacy.
Both sides fought bravely. Excluding from the Union armies negroes, foreigners, and the descendants of recent immigrants, the Confederates and the Union soldiers were mainly of British stock. The Confederates had some notable advantages. Excepting a few Union regiments from the West, the Southerners were better shots and better horsemen, especially in the beginning of the war, than the Northerners; and the Southerners were fighting not only for the Constitution of their fathers and the defence of their homes, but for the supremacy of their race. They had also another military advantage, that would probably have been decisive but for the United States navy: they had interior lines of communication which would have enabled them to readily concentrate their forces. But the United States navy, hovering around their coast-line, not only neutralized but turned this advantage into a weakness, thus compelling the Confederates to scatter their armies. Every port had to be guarded.
In the West the Federals were almost uniformly successful in the greater battles, the Confederates winning in these but two decisive victories, Chickamauga and Sabine Cross Roads, in Louisiana. Estimating, according to the method of military experts, the percentage of losses of the victor only, Chickamauga was the bloodiest battle of the world, from and including Waterloo down to the present time. Gettysburg and Sharpsburg also rank as high in losses as any battle fought elsewhere in this long period, which takes in the Franco-German and the Russo-Japanese wars. At Sharpsburg or Antietam the losses exceeded those in any other one day's battle.[87]
The Confederates were successful, excepting Antietam or Sharpsburg and Gettysburg, and perhaps Seven Pines or Fair Oaks, in all the great battles in the East, down to the time when the shattered remnant of Lee's army was overwhelmed at Petersburg and surrendered at Appomattox. The élan the Southerners acquired in the many victories they won fighting for their homes is not to be overlooked. But the failure of the North with its overwhelming numbers and resources, to overcome the resistance of the half-famished Confederates until nearly four years had elapsed, can only be fully accounted for, in fairness to the undoubted courage of the Union armies, by the fact, on which foreign military critics are agreed, that the North had no such generals as Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Only by the superior generalship of their leaders could the Confederates have won as many battles as they did against vastly superior numbers.
But against the United States navy the brilliant generalship of the Confederates and their marvellous courage were powerless.
Accepted histories of the war have been written largely by the army and its friends, and, strangely enough, the general historians have been so attracted by the gallantry displayed in great land battles, and the immediate results, that they have utterly failed to appreciate the services of the United States navy.
The Southerners accomplished remarkable results with torpedoes with the Merrimac or Virginia and their little fleet of commerce destroyers; but the United States navy, by its effective blockade, starved the Confederacy to death. The Southern government could not market its cotton, nor could it import or manufacture enough military supplies. Among its extremest needs were rails and rolling stock to refit its lines of communication. For want of transportation it was unable to concentrate its armies, and for the same reason its troops were not half fed.
In addition to its services on the blockade, which, in Lord Wolseley's opinion, decided the war, the navy, with General Grant's help, cut the Confederacy in twain by way of the Mississippi. It penetrated every Southern river, severing Confederate communications and destroying depots of supplies. It assisted in the capture, early in the war, of Forts Henry and Donelson, and it conducted Union troops along the Tennessee River into east Tennessee and north Alabama. It furnished objective points and supplies at Savannah, Charleston, and Wilmington, to Sherman on his march from Atlanta; and finally Grant, the great Union general, who had failed to reach Richmond by way of the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, and Cold Harbor, achieved success only when the navy was at his back, holding his base, while he laid a nine months' siege to Petersburg.
That distinguished author, Charles Francis Adams, himself a Union general in the Army of the Potomac, says that the United States navy was the deciding factor in the Civil War. He even says that every single successful operation of the Union forces "hinged and depended on naval supremacy."
The following is from the preface to "The Crisis of the Confederacy," in which, published in 1905, a foreign expert, Captain Cecil Battine, of the King's Hussars, condenses all that needs further to be said here about the purely military side of the Civil War:
The history of the American Civil War still remains the most important theme for the student and the statesman because it was waged between adversaries of the highest intelligence and courage, who fought by land and sea over an enormous area with every device within the reach of human ingenuity, and who had to create every organization needed for the purpose after the struggle had begun. The admiration which the valor of the Confederate soldiers, fighting against superior numbers and resources, excited in Europe; the dazzling genius of some of the Confederate generals, and in some measure jealousy at the power of the United States, have ranged the sympathies of the world during the war and ever since to a large degree on the side of the vanquished. Justice has hardly been done to the armies which arose time and again from sanguinary repulses, and from disasters more demoralizing than any repulse in the field, because they were caused by political and military incapacity in high places, to redeem which the soldiers freely shed their blood as it seemed in vain. If the heroic endurance of the Southern people and the fiery valor of the Southern armies thrill us to-day with wonder and admiration, the stubborn tenacity and courage which succeeded in preserving intact the heritage of the American nation, and which triumphed over foes so formidable, are not less worthy of praise and imitation. The Americans still hold the world's record for hard fighting.
The great majority of the Union soldiers enlisted for the preservation of the Union and not for the abolition of slavery. But among these soldiers there was an abolition element, and very soon the tramp of federal regiments was keeping time to
"John Brown's body lies a mouldering in the ground,
As we go marching on."
Early in the war Generals Frémont and Butler issued orders declaring free the slaves within the Union lines; these orders President Lincoln rescinded. But Abolition sentiment was growing in the army and at the North, and the pressure upon the President to strike at slavery was increasing. The Union forces were suffering repeated defeats; slaves at home were growing food crops and caring for the families of Confederates who were fighting at the front, and in September, 1862, President Lincoln issued his preliminary proclamation of emancipation, basing it on the ground of military necessity. It was to become effective January 1, 1863.
And here was the same Lincoln who had declared in 1858 his opinion that whites and blacks could not live together as equals, socially and politically; and it was the very same Lincoln who had repeatedly said he cherished no ill-will against his Southern brethren. If the slaves were to be freed, they and the whites should not be left together. He therefore sought diligently to find some home for the freedmen in a foreign country. But unfortunately, as already seen, the American negro, a bone of contention at home, was now a pariah to other peoples. Most nations welcome immigrants, but no country was willing to shelter the American freedman, save only Liberia, long before a proven failure, and Hayti, where, under the blacks, anarchy had already been chronic for half a century. Hume tells us, in "The Abolitionists," that for a time Mr. Lincoln even considered setting Texas apart as a home for the negro.
Later the surrender of the Confederate armies, together with the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, consummated emancipation, foreseeing which President Lincoln formulated his plan of Reconstruction. Suffrage in the reconstructed States under his plan was to be limited to those who were qualified to vote at the date of secession, which meant the whites. The sole exception he ever made to this rule was a suggestion to Governor Hahn, of Louisiana, that it might be well for the whites (of Louisiana) to give the ballot to a few of the most intelligent of the negroes and to such as had served in the army.
The part the soldiers played, Federal and Confederate, in restoring the Union, is a short story. The clash between them settled without reserve the only question that was really in issue—secession; slavery, that had been the origin of sectional dissensions, was eliminated because it obstructed the success of the Union armies. By their gallantry in battle and conduct toward each other the men in blue and the men in gray restored between the North and the South the mutual respect that had been lost in the bitterness of sectional strife, and without which there could be no fraternal Union.
Mr. Gladstone, when the war was on, said that the North was endeavoring to "propagate free institutions at the point of the sword." The North was not seeking to propagate in the South any new institution whatever. Mr. Gladstone's paradox loses its point because both sections were fighting for the preservation of the same system of government.
The time has now happily come when, to use the language of Senator Hoar, as Americans, we can, North and South, discuss the causes that brought about our terrible war "in a friendly and quiet spirit, without recrimination and without heat, each understanding the other, each striving to help the other, as men who are bearing a common burden and looking forward with a common hope."
The country, it is believed, has already reached the conclusions that the South was absolutely honest in maintaining the right of secession and absolutely unswerving in its devotion to its ideas of the Constitution, and that the North was equally honest and patriotic in its fidelity to the Union. We need to advance one step further. Somebody was to blame for starting a quarrel between brethren who were dwelling together in amity. If Americans can agree in fixing that blame, the knowledge thus acquired should help them to avoid such troubles hereafter.
It seems to be a fair conclusion that the initial cause of all our troubles was the formation by Garrison of those Abolition societies which the Boston people in their resolutions of August 1, 1835, "disapproved of" and described as "associations instituted in the non-slave-holding States, with the intent to act, within the slave-holding States, on the subject of slavery in those States, without their consent." And further, that it was the creation of these societies, the methods they resorted to, and their explicit defiance of the Constitution that roused the fears and passions of the South and caused that section to take up the quarrel that, afterward became sectional; and that, after much hot dispute and many regrettable incidents, North and South, resulted in secession and war.
In every dispute about slavery prior to 1831, the Constitution was always regarded by every disputant as supreme. The quarrel that was fatal to the peace of the Union began when the New Abolitionists put in the new claim, that slavery in the South was the concern of the North, as well as of the South, and that there was a higher law than the Constitution. If the conscience of the individual, instead of human law, is to prescribe rules of conduct, society is at the mercy of anarchists. Czolgosz was conscientious when he murdered McKinley.
Had all Americans continued to agree, after 1831, as they did before that time, that the Constitution of the United States was the supreme law of the land, there would have been no fatal sectional quarrel, no secession, and no war between the North and South.
The immediate surrender everywhere of the Confederates in obedience to the orders of their generals was an imposing spectacle. There was no guerilla warfare. The Confederates accepted their defeat in good faith and have ever since been absolutely loyal to the United States Government, but they have never changed their minds as to the justice of the cause they fought for. They fought for liberty regulated by law, and against the idea that there can be, under our system, any higher law than the Constitution of our country. That the Constitution should always be the supreme law of the land, they still believe, and the philosophic student of past and current history should be gratified to see the tenacity with which Southern people still cling to that idea. It suggests that not only will the Southerners be always ready to stand for our country against a foreign foe, but that whenever our institutions shall be assailed, as they will often be hereafter by visionaries who are impatient of restraints, the cause of liberty, regulated by law, will find staunch defenders in the Southern section of our country.