VINDICATION OF SOUTHERN CAUSE
[In Southern Historical Papers, pages 332-336.]
Mr. Percy Greg, the justly famous English historian, says: “If the Colonies were entitled to judge their own cause, much more were the Southern States. Their rights—not implied, assumed, or traditional, like those of the Colonies, but expressly defined and solemnly guaranteed by law—had been flagrantly violated; the compact which alone bound them, had beyond question been systematically broken for more than forty years by the States which appealed to it.”
After showing the perfect regularity and legality of the secession movement, he then says: “It was in defence of this that the people of the South sprang to arms ‘to defend their homes and families, their property and their rights, the honor and independence of their States to the last, against five fold numbers and resources a hundred fold greater than theirs.’”
He says of the cause of the North: “The cause seems to me as bad as it well could be—the determination of a mere numerical majority to enforce a bond, which they themselves had flagrantly violated, to impose their own mere arbitrary will, their idea of national greatness, upon a distinct, independent, determined, and almost unanimous people.”
And then he says as Lord Russell did: “The North fought for empire which was not and never had been hers; the South for an independence she had won by the sword, and had enjoyed in law and fact ever since the recognition of the thirteen sovereign and independent States, if not since the foundation of Virginia. Slavery was but the occasion of the rupture, in no sense the object of the war.”
Let me add a statement which will be confirmed by every veteran before me—no man ever saw a Virginia soldier who was fighting for slavery.
This letter then speaks of the conduct of the Northern people as “unjust, aggressive, contemptuous of law and right,” and as presenting a striking contrast to the “boundless devotion, uncalculating sacrifice, magnificent heroism, and unrivalled endurance of the Southern people.”
But I must pass on to what a distinguished Northern writer has to say of the people of the South, and their cause, twenty-one years after the close of the war. The writer is Benjamin J. Williams, Esq., of Lowell, Mass., and the occasion which brought forth this paper (addressed to the Lowell Sun) was the demonstration to President Davis when he went to assist in the dedication of a Confederate monument at Montgomery, Ala. He says of Mr. Davis:
“Everywhere he receives from the people the most overwhelming manifestations of heartfelt affection, devotion, and reverence, exceeding even any of which he was the recipient in the time of its power; such manifestations as no existing ruler in the world can obtain from his people, and such as probably were never given before to a public man, old, out of office, with no favors 265 to dispense, and disfranchised. Such homage is significant; it is startling. It is given, as Mr. Davis himself has recognized, not to him alone, but to the cause whose chief representative he is, and it is useless to attempt to deny, disguise, or evade the conclusion that there must be something great and noble and true in him and in the cause to evoke this homage.”
Mr. Davis, in his speech on the occasion referred to, alluded to the fact that the monument then being erected was to commemorate the deeds of those “who gave their lives a free-will offering in defence of the rights of their sires, won in the war of the Revolution, the State sovereignty, freedom and independence which were left to us as an inheritance to their posterity forever.”
Mr. Williams says of this definition: “These masterful words, ‘the rights of their sires, won in the war of the Revolution, the State sovereignty, freedom and independence which were left to us an inheritance to their posterity forever,’ are the whole case, and they are not only a statement but a complete justification of the Confederate cause to all who are acquainted with the origin and character of the American Union.”
He then proceeds to tell how the Constitution was adopted and the government formed by the individual States, each acting for itself, separately and independently of the others, and then says:
“It appears, then, from this view of the origin and character of the American Union, that when the Southern States, deeming the constitutional compact broken, and their own safety and happiness in imminent danger in the Union, withdrew therefrom and organized their new Confederacy, they but asserted, in the language of Mr. Davis, the rights of their sires, won in the war of the Revolution, the State sovereignty, freedom, and independence, which were left to us as an inheritance to their posterity forever,’ and it was in defence of this high and sacred cause that the Confederate soldiers sacrificed their lives. There was no need of war. The action of the Southern States was legal and constitutional, and history will attest that it was reluctantly taken in the extremity.”
He now goes on to show how Mr. Lincoln precipitated the war, and describes the unequal struggle in which the South was engaged in these words: “After a glorious four years’ struggle against such odds as have been depicted, during which independence was often almost secured, where successive levies of armies, amounting in all to nearly three millions of men, had been hurled against her, the South, shut off from all the world, wasted, rent, and desolate, bruised and bleeding, was at last overpowered by main strength; out-fought, never; for from first to last, she everywhere out-fought the foe. The Confederacy fell, but she fell not until she had achieved immortal fame. Few great established nations in all time have ever exhibited capacity and direction in government equal to hers, sustained as she was by the iron will and fixed persistence of the extraordinary man who was her chief; and few have ever won such a series of brilliant victories as that which illuminates forever the annals of her splendid armies, while the fortitude and patience of her people, and particularly of her noble women, under almost incredible trials and sufferings, have never been surpassed in the history of the world.”
And then he adds: “Such exalted character and achievement are not all in vain. Though the Confederacy fell, as an actual physical power, she lives, illustrated by them, eternally in her just cause—the cause of constitutional liberty.”