The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct, Volume 1 (of 2) / A Narrative and Critical History

by George Cary Eggleston

The events of the recently preceding years had gone far to unseat conservatism, to breed a hopeless discouragement, and to induce a very general despair. The civil war in Kansas had been lawless, criminal and murderous on both sides.

It is impossible for any honest mind to approve the doings of the men on either side in that struggle, or to regard them otherwise than as criminal attempts to substitute force for law and fraud for freedom of the ballot.

Yet on each side the tu quoque argument was freely and justly used; on either side the criminal doings of the partisans of that side were regarded as a necessary offset to the criminal doings of the partisans of the other side. At the North the "free state men" were encouraged and supported by a large part of the press and pulpit. Great preachers pleaded from their sacred desks for contributions of money with which to arm the Northern men for this conflict. Great leaders of radical opinion employed the press and platform in the like behalf.

On the other hand, at the South, with a far less orderly organization of the forces that control popular opinion and action, there was an equally strong disposition manifested to support and encourage those Southern youths who had gone into Kansas to struggle for the establishment of slavery there. And on each side there was a manifest willingness to shut eyes to such lawlessness and such crime as the partisans of that side might find it necessary and convenient to commit in behalf of the "cause" they were set to serve.

Then had followed John Brown's attempt at Harper's Ferry to bring about that most terrible of all catastrophes, a slave insurrection. The attempt itself was so absurd in its lack of means conceivably adequate to the end proposed, and so clearly the work of a madman in that it involved a direct assault upon a national arsenal, making itself thus the insane challenge of a mere handful of men to the whole power of the United States, that it might have been dismissed from men's minds as men are accustomed to dismiss the vagaries of demented persons, but for one fact. The John Brown raid was seriously and earnestly approved by so many persons and pulpits and prints at the North, as was shown by funeral services and otherwise, that it was regarded at the South as a preliminary, typical, and threateningly suggestive manifestation of what Northern sentiment intended to do to the South whenever it should have the necessary power. How largely it was thus sanctioned was later shown by the fact that during the succeeding war the song that celebrated John Brown's raid made itself a national anthem declaring that in the advance of the national armies his "soul was marching on."

To the Southern people John Brown's attempt to stir up servile insurrection meant all of horror, all of slaughter, all of outrage to women and children that it is possible to conceive. It meant to them the overturning of society. It meant the dominance of a subject and inferior race outnumbering the whites in many states, a race ignorant and passionate in Virginia and Kentucky, and well-nigh savage in the cotton states. It meant rapine and murder—rape, outrage and burning.

There were still many at the South who desired and earnestly advocated the extirpation of slavery by any means that could be adopted with tolerable safety to Southern homes, but John Brown's program of abolition by servile war—a program which seemed to them to be accepted by Northern public sentiment—offered them a threat of desolation against which, if they were men, they were bound to revolt with all the force they could command. It called into instant and aggressive activity that fundamental impulse of humanity, the all-controlling instinct of self-preservation.

On the other side the increasingly insistent demand of the Southern extremists for the nationalization of slavery and their apparent ability to force such nationalization, through fugitive slave laws against which the consciences even of the most devoted lovers of the Union at the North revolted, and through the decisions of the Supreme Court, bred in that quarter a similar despair of lasting union. Hundreds of thousands who did not sympathize with the purpose to stir up servile war despairingly felt that the time had come when the demands of what was called "the slave power" must be resisted at any and all risks, and resigned themselves to the employment of any means that might be found necessary to that end. They felt that all compromises had failed, that all efforts to enable this Nation, as Mr. Lincoln phrased it, "permanently to endure half slave and half free," had been defeated and shown to be futile.

In brief, on both sides of the line of cleavage, a spirit of despairing readiness for any remedy, however drastic it might be, had been created by the inexorable circumstances of the "irrepressible conflict."

There is no doubt whatever that if the situation had been clearly understood, nine in ten of all Northern people would have shrunk with horror from such a program of destruction as that which John Brown's raid implied and intended—namely the overthrow of the United States Government and the inauguration of a servile insurrection at the South.