FRENZIED FINANCE AND THE WAR OF 1861
[By J. L. Underwood.]
Was the war between the States in 1861 a war in behalf of slavery on the one side and freedom on the other? Not at all. After all the noisy and fanatical agitation on the subject, only a small minority of the Northern people had expressed any desire to have the negroes of the South emancipated at that time, and no State nor people of the South had said that slavery should be perpetual. 256 All the parties which in 1860 cast any electoral votes distinctly disavowed any intention to interfere with slavery where it existed. This was the declaration even of the Republican party which was triumphant and was now in power. Mr. Lincoln, the President-elect, repeatedly declared that slavery was not to be disturbed in the States, although he said the country could not remain “half slave and half free.” Here, then, the North and the South were thoroughly agreed that slavery within the States should continue undisturbed. As to emancipation, both sections of the country and all parties except the ultra-Abolitionists were pro-slavery. The Abolitionists admitted that under the Federal Constitution there could be no power in the national government to free the slaves. They cursed and burned the Constitution as “a compact with the devil and a league with hell,” and defiantly repudiated all laws which carried out its provisions. Under the plea of what they called “higher law,” they defied law. They were really anarchists. The Free Soil party, which had assumed the name of Republican for party purposes, secretly encouraged the Abolitionists in their mad crusade and welcomed their votes, but persistently disavowed their aims. All rational men knew that the time had not come to turn loose millions of half-civilized Africans in this country; while many, North and South, deplored the existence of slavery and would not advocate it in the abstract, yet they believed that emancipation was not best for the negro and would be accompanied by tremendous peril to the white people. The truth is that the Abolitionists of the North kept up such a blatant and fanatical agitation against the South that it was out of the question, in the excitement of the times, for conservative men, North or South, to think or speak of such an alternative as the immediate freedom of the negroes.
The Republican party, now the dominant party, and its leader, Mr. Lincoln, stood against the immediate freedom of the slaves. But this party had come into power on two ground principles which made its triumph a direct 257 attack on the rights and interests of the Southern States in the Territories.
It gloried in its free-soil doctrine, which was a declaration that the Southern States should no longer enjoy their share in the Territories of the government. It never mounted the steed of abolitionism until 1862 when the emancipation of the slaves was adopted as a war measure, and was so declared by Mr. Lincoln himself. In defiance of the decisions of the Supreme Court, the triumphant party held that Congress should not allow the Southern people the right to take their slave property, although distinctly recognized as property by the Constitution, into the Territories. The Northern legislatures deliberately defied the Supreme Court and its people denounced it and reiterated their free soil demand. Of course this was a direct insult to the South and a public outlawry of the South that no self-respecting people ought to submit to. The Territories were common property to all the States. The South held that while they were Territories the Southern people had as much right to enter and enjoy them as the people of the North, but the South was always willing that the people of the Territory, in organizing a State government, should decide for themselves as a State whether it should be admitted as a slave or free State. The new party declared that under no circumstances should another slave State be admitted. The territorial demands of the new party had been endorsed by the formal acts of a majority of Northern States in their legislatures. The catch-word of the new party was “no more extension of slavery.” The South had never brought a slave into the country, and never did propose to add another slave to it, but its rights in the common property of the Union it could not surrender to the dictation of the more numerous and populous Northern States.
Then what? Declare war? No. Simply fall back on the right of original sovereignty, on their several Constitutional rights, as the people of New England, when they were in the minority, had threatened to do, and withdraw from the Union with States who declared 258 so distinctly a purpose not to abide by the terms of Union. Then came secession, the only peaceable remedy. In it the South made no claim on territorial or other property. In fact, it was a voluntary surrender of everything not on its own soil to the remaining States. It was old Abraham’s alternative to Lot. “Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee, and between my herdsmen and thy herdsmen, for we be brethren. Is not the whole land before thee? Separate thyself, I pray thee, from me; If thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if thou depart to the right hand, then I will go to the left.” Then why should there be war? Indeed, why?
So natural and just was the step of secession that the more enlightened and conscientious Abolitionists conceded the right of South Carolina to withdraw from the Union. Horace Greeley, the powerful editor of the great Abolition organ, the New York Tribune, boldly protested against any interference with her departure. Wendell Phillips, the great lawyer and Abolition orator of Boston, said in a public speech: “Deck her brow with flowers, pave her way with gold, and let her go.” But Greeley and Phillips were not the politicians nor the party in control of the country. We have shown how the Free Soil aim of the triumphant party led the Northern States to adopt such a course as really to drive the Southern States into secession. What was the main spring of the Free Soil crusade? This brings us to tell in one word what brought on the war. What was the ground issue which held the Northern States so desperately on their crusade against the South? It was the “tariff.” New England ideas dominated the thought of the North and Northwest, and it was always a ruling New England idea to get all money possible from the government. New England never lost sight of business, and especially her own business interests. It was only by Virginia’s surrender of her vast territories that New England could be brought into the Union and it took subsidies, appropriations for internal improvement, and fishing and tariff bounties to keep her in it.
Very soon she set up a persistent demand for high duties on imports to assist in building up her increasing manufactures. The moderate protective tariffs of the twenties, the tariff of Henry Clay, did not satisfy her. Her cry up to the final passage of the trust-breeding Dingley tariff bill of our day has been that of the horse leech, “Give! give!” The Southern States were agricultural and the prevailing doctrine as to tariff duties was a “tariff for revenue only.” The old Southern Whigs, like Clay, only favored a moderate protective tariff as a compromise sop to New England in behalf of her infant industries. But New England was not satisfied with the tariff of the twenties. A little taste of incidental protection had only increased her greed. In the thirties she demanded more. The tariff of 1832 was enacted and proved such a heavy tax on the consumers for the benefit of the manufacturers that South Carolina took the bold stand of nullification against it. By the combined efforts of Clay and Calhoun a compromise was effected and the tariff modified and the country saved. In 1846 the moderate Walker tariff, the “free-trade tariff,” was adopted and under it the people of all classes and all sections enjoyed more general prosperity up to 1861 than the country has ever before or since seen.
But New England “frenzied finance” was at work. The taste for public pap had grown by what it fed on. The “almighty dollar” idea in politics was sweeping the North. The auri sacra fames had formed a league with a fanatical sectional party. The seed sowing was over; the harvest of financial politics had come. New England must have a higher tariff and votes from agricultural States meant more anti-tariff votes and the tariff advocates decreed that there should be no slave States carved out of the Territories. To secure this the Southern people with their property must be excluded from the occupancy of the Territorial soil. Frenzied finance triumphed, and in the election of Mr. Lincoln the North declared the national territory forbidden ground to the South. Free soil exclusion from their property was openly flaunted in the face of the slave States.
What could the Southern States do under such an insulting ultimatum from the triumphant North? What did they do? Why, they simply fell back on their original right of State sovereignty and, as the North had already broken the Union, peaceably seceded from it.
Then why not, as Greeley and Phillips and thousands of Northern patriots urged, why not let these States go? Frenzied Finance replied in the words of Mr. Lincoln, “If we let the South go, where will we get our revenues?” There it is. They were needed to furnish their cotton and their trade to support the North. It was the frenzied Pharoah of finance that refused to let tribute-paying, brick-making Israel go. Hence the war of subjugation.
It is a grotesque and sad bit of history that while patriots like Crittenden, of Kentucky, Bayard, of Delaware, Black, of Pennsylvania and Seymour, of New York, were anxiously trying to avert war and save the old Union, while the whole world was watching with bated breath the storm gathering around Fort Sumter, the party of frenzied finance, now in control of Congress, defiantly discarded all propositions of peace compromise and concentrated all its mighty energies on the passage of its darling Morrill Tariff Bill. The Morrill tariff bill was enacted April 2, 1861. Fort Sumter fell April 14, 1861. There is the record of cold-blood-money worship. It was not Nero “fiddling while Rome was burning” but it was the legislators of the great American Republic fiddling on a scheme for the financial gain of private business while the glorious Union that we loved and our fathers loved was falling to pieces! The laborer’s groans, the widow’s sobs, the roar of cannon and the crash of States could not drown the mad New England cry for private subsidy from the public treasury.