A little paper written years ago by a lately deceased brother of mine[1] describing the rout of the battle of Bull Run as he saw it with the eyes of a boy and a boy's love of the marvellous seems to me to possess some value historically for the intimate, unconscious picturing, along with it, of the state of the public mind on the eve of the so-called "great uprising." It seems to illustrate well the truth that the great Civil War, as a war, was really a surprise,—to the people of the North at least; that the idea persisting up to the day of the battle of Bull Run at the back of the mind of everybody was that in some way the war-cloud would blow over, that the actual shock of contending armies and the pouring out of blood of citizens in civil war would be prevented or in some way avoided. The occasion of the trip to Washington, to carry dainties to a soldier brother, the occasion of the extension of the partly sight-seeing journey to the first battle-field of the great war, the commission from the horror-struck authorities at home to find and bring back from Virginia the body of the first Massachusetts soldier to fall,—all prove the naïveté of the popular conceptions at that time of what it was to enter upon war. This Chelsea boy,[2] whose body my brother was bidden by the mayor of their native place to recover and send home at all costs, was but the first of the fated host of three hundred and sixty thousand young men about to die for their country in the ensuing four years. I remember distinctly the consternation of the community when it was found that the Chelsea company of the First Massachusetts Infantry had been in the sharp action which was the first engagement in the approaching collision of the main armies, and that men had actually been shot and killed. The sickening realization was akin to that feeling my eldest brother[3] in that regiment had confessed to me when I was visiting him at the assembling and training camp at Readville and the new army wagons in their fresh blue paint and white canvas arrived on the scene in long array. "It looks as though we were really going," he remarked ruefully.
[1] Andrew J. Clement, First Sergeant, Company M, First Massachusetts Cavalry; died at Morton, Pennsylvania, February 27, 1908.
[2] Philander Crowell, Company H, First Massachusetts Volunteers.
[3] William B. Clement, Company H; died at Chelsea, July 18, 1896.
I find a pretty complete picture of the psychology of those bewildered and dreadful weeks and months in two speeches of Wendell Phillips in that series of wonderful orations in which he rode the storm seeking to direct it to great issues. Some of these speeches I had the fortune to hear. I have been looking up certain things I heard delivered in that deliberate utterance of his with its polished periods, precise and penetrating as rifle-shots, yet freighted with passion, white-hot with intense conviction. It is only necessary to compare these two speeches of Phillips's to show how men's minds tossed and turned and agonized in those days,—the minds of honest, independent, fearless, conscientious men, too. In a speech of April 9, 1861, at New Bedford, Wendell Phillips was in Cassandra vein. Besides many other epigrammatic deliverances to similar effect, he said:
Inaugurate war, we know not where it will end; we are in no condition to fight. The South is poor; we are rich. The poor man can do twice the injury to the rich man that the rich man can do to the poor. War will start up every man whose livelihood hangs upon trade, intensifying him into a compromiser. Those guns fired on Fort Sumter are only to frighten the North into a compromise. If the Administration provokes war it is a trick,—nothing else. It is the masterly cunning of that devil of compromise, the Secretary of State. He is not mad enough to let the States run into battle. He knows that the age of bullets is over. If a gun is fired in Southern waters it is fired at the wharves of New York, at the bank-vaults of Boston, at the money of the North. It is meant to alarm. It is policy, not sincerity.
Thus in New Bedford, April 9; and no wonder that the local reporter records that the lecture was interrupted with frequent hisses. Twelve days later, on a Sunday, April 21, the same day that Fletcher Webster addressed an out-door meeting in State Street, speaking from the Old State House balcony, Phillips addressed an excited, crowded meeting in Music Hall. That day Phillips was the prophet militant. He began by saying that he gave this war a welcome "hearty and hot." He would not recant or retract anything, he said; he needed everything he had been saying to justify so momentous an evil as civil war.
I rejoice before God to-day for every word that I have spoken counselling peace; but I rejoice also with an especially profound gratitude, that now, the first time in my anti-slavery life, I speak under the stars and stripes, and welcome the tread of Massachusetts men marshalled for war. No matter what the past has been or said; to-day the slave asks God for a sight of this banner, and counts it the pledge of his redemption. Hitherto it may have meant what you thought, or what I did; to-day it represents sovereignty and justice. The only mistake that I have made was in supposing Massachusetts wholly choked with cotton-dust and cankered with gold. The South thought her patience and generous willingness for peace were cowardice; to-day shows the mistake....
All winter long I have acted with that party which cried for peace. The anti-slavery enterprise to which I belong started with peace written on its banner. We imagined that the age of bullets was over; that the age of ideas had come; ... The South opened this door [to the solution] with cannon-shot, and Lincoln shows himself at the door. The war, then, is not aggressive, but in self-defence, and Washington has become the Thermopylæ of Liberty and Justice. Rather than surrender that Capital, cover every square foot of it with a living body; crowd it with a million of men, and empty every bank vault at the North to pay the cost.[4]
[4] W. Phillips, Speeches (Boston, 1884), 396-400.
This speech was surely worth thousands of men to the government, but such is the constitutional cowardice of professional managing politicians that those of that day thought it prudent, for the sake of winning over to loyalty the so-called War Democrats, to have the speech suppressed, and all the docile daily papers did suppress it. It was circulated to the number of a hundred thousand as a supplement extra of the weekly called "The Anglo-African." Even so late as October of that year the Republican State Convention, according to an exultant editorial of the "Boston Daily Advertiser," "certainly disavowed any intention of endorsing the fatal doctrines announced by Mr. Sumner in that convention," and also buried Rev. James Freeman Clarke's resolution in favor of freeing the slaves, as the esteemed contemporary of that day predicted, "never to rise again." By another year the Emancipation proclamation had issued, and three months later Massachusetts idealists speaking through Wendell Phillips could say: "A blundering and corrupt cabinet has made it at last an inevitable necessity,—Liberty or Death. The cowardice of Webster's followers in the cabinet has turned his empty rhetoric into solemn truth; and now honest men are not only at liberty, but bound to live and die under his motto,—'Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.'" The country's baffling search to find its ground, its rising determination to yield thus far and no farther, the stand taken at last, the great defeat that first befell, the high idealism, the spirit of the hour,—all are seen in the brief, intimate account written for the family circle at home of the experiences and feelings of one representative Boston youth of twenty, soon after to be a full-fledged three years' man, a hero who rode in the First Massachusetts Cavalry from Virginia to Florida and back again.