The open sea

by Edgar Lee Masters

“No, my friend,
Our slavery was not the cause of war.
They would have Empire and the slavery
That comes from it: unlicensed power to deal
With fortunes, lives, economies and rights.
We fought them in the Congress seventy years;
We fought them at the hustings, with the ballot;
And when they shouldered guns, we shouldered guns,
And fought them to the last—now we have lost,
And so I write my book.

“What is the difference
Between a mob, an army shouting God,
Fired by a moral erethism fixed
On slaughter for the triumph of its dream,
A riddance of its hate—what is the difference
Between an army like this and a man
Who dreams God moves, inspires him to an act
Of foul assassination? None at all!
Why, there’s your Northern army shouting God,
Your pure New England with its tariff spoils,
Its banks and growing wealth, uplifting hands,
Invoking God against us till they flame
A crazy party and a maddened army,
To war upon us. But if slavery
Be sinful, where’s the word of Christ to say
That slavery is sinful? Not a word
From him who scourged the Scribes and Pharisees
For robbing widows’ houses, but no word
Against the sin of slavery. Yet behold
He found no faith in all of Israel
To equal that—of whom?—a man who owned
Slaves, as we did. I mean the Centurion.
And is this all? St. Paul who speaks for God
With equal inspiration with New England,
As I should judge, enjoins the slaves to count
Their masters worthy of all honor, that
God and his doctrine be not blasphemed.

“But
If it be wrong to hold as property
A service, even a man to keep the service—
Let us be clear and fair—then is it wrong
To hold indentures of apprenticeship?
And if, as Lincoln says, it is a right
Given of God for every man to have,
Eat if he will the bread he earns, then God
Is blasphemed in the North where labor’s paid
Not what it earns, but what it must accept,
Chained by necessity, and so enslaved.
And all these tariff laws are slavery
By which my bread is taken, all the banks
That profit by their issues, special rights,
Enslave us, in the future will enslave
Both North and South, when darkeys shall be free
To choose their masters, but must choose, no less
Take what the master hand consents to pay,
And eat what bread is given. Yes, you know
Our slavery was a gentle thing, belied
As bloody, sullen, selfish—yet you know
It was a gentle thing, a way to keep
A race inferior in a place of work,
Duly controlled. For once that race is freed
It will go forth to mingle, mix and wed
With whites and claim equality, the ballot,
Places of trust and profit, judgment seats.
Lincoln denies he favors this, no less
We’ll come to that. And all the while the mills
And factories in the North will bring to us
The helpless poor of Europe, and enslave them
By pauper wages, and enslave us all
With tariff-favored products. Slavery!
God’s curse is on us for our Slavery!
What do you think?

“They say we broke the law,
Were rebels, insurrectionists; I’ll treat
Those subjects in my book. But let us see,
They did not keep the law; they had their banks,
They had their tariffs, they infracted laws
Respecting slaves who ran away, they joined
Posses and leagues to break those laws, and we
In virtue of these breaches, were released
From this, the compact, just as Webster says.
Did Lincoln keep the law and keep his oath
The Constitution to support, obey?
He did not keep it, and he broke his oath.
Did he have lawful power to call the troops?
Did he have lawful warrant to blockade
Our southern ports? No one pretends he did.
His Congress by a special act made valid
These tyrant usurpations. Had he power
To strike the habeas corpus, gag the press?—
No power at all—he only seized the power
To reach what he conceived was all supreme,
The saving of the Union—more of this.
Well, then, what are these words: You break the law
On those who break it and confess they do?
You have two ideas: Union and Secession,
Or two republics made from one, that’s all.
And those who think secession criminal
Turn criminals themselves to stay the crime,
And shout the Union. To this end I come,
This figment called the Union, which obsessed
The brain of Lincoln.

“For the point is this,
You may take Truth or Liberty or Union
For a battle cry, kill and be killed therefor,
But if our reasons rule, if we are men,
We take them at our peril. We must stake
Our souls upon the choice, be clear of mind
That what we cry as Truth is Truth indeed,
That Liberty is Liberty, that the Union
Is not a noun, a word, a subtlety,
But is a status, substance, living temple
Reared from the bottom up on stones of fate,
Predestined. Yet the truth is only this:
The Union is a noun and nothing more,
And stands for what? A federative thing
Formed of the wills of states, not otherwise.
Existing; and to kill to save the Union
Is but the exercise of a hue and cry,
An arbitrary passion, sophist’s dream.
And Robespierre, who killed for liberty,
And Cæsar, who destroyed the Roman liberties
To have his way, are of the quality
Of Lincoln, whom I know. Take Robespierre,
Was he not by a sense of justice moved,
Pure, and as frigid as a bust of stone?
And Cæsar had devoted friends, and Cæsar,
The accomplished orator, general and scholar,
Charming and gentle in his private walks,
Destroyed the hopes of Rome.

“Now, mark me friend,
I do not think that Lincoln meant to crush
The institutions of his country—no,
His fault was this—the Union, yes the noun,
Rose to religious mysticism, and enthralled
With sentiment his soul. And his ideas
Of its formation, structure in his logic
Rested upon a subtle solecism.
And for this noun, in spite of virtues great
Of head and heart, he used his other self,
His Cæsar self, his self of Robespierre,
In the great office which he exercised,
To bring us Oak Hill, Corinth, Fredericksburg.
Think you, if when he kept the store at Salem
A humble, studious man, he had been told
He would make wails of horror, wake the cries
Of pestilence and famine in the camps,
Bring devastation, rapine, fire and death—
Had he been told this, he had said—‘My soul!
Never,’ and with Hazael said, ‘Behold,
Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?’
Power changes men! And when the people give
Power or surrender it, they scarcely know
The thing they give, surrender.

“But I ask
What is there in the Union, what indeed
In any government’s supremacy
Or maintenance that justifies these acts—
These horrors, slaughters—near a million men
Slaughtered for what? The Union. Treasure spent
Beyond all counting for the Union. When
No life had been destroyed, no dollar spent
If they had let us go, left us alone
To go our way. You see they did to us
What England did; succeeded, where she failed.
And thus you see that human life is cheap,
And suffering a sequence when a dream,
An Idea takes a man, a mob, an army.
Which makes our life a jest, our boasted Reason
An instrument too weak for savagery.
Then for the rest—you see—I think you see.—”
Sleep now was taking him. My little sparhawk
Was worn out, and his eyes began to droop,
His voice to fail him. In a moment then
He sank down in his cloak and fell asleep—
And I arose and left.

ADELAIDE AND JOHN WILKES BOOTH
(At the National Hall, Washington, April 9, 1865.)

Adelaide