Jefferson Davis, afterward the much-loved President of the Confederacy, in his farewell speech in the United States Senate, March 21, 1861, thus stated the case of the South: "Then, senators, we recur to the compact which binds us together. We recur to the principles upon which this government was founded, and when you deny them, and when you deny to us the right to withdraw from a Union which thus perverted threatens to be destructive of our rights, we but tread in the path of our fathers when we proclaim our independence and take the hazard. This is done not in hostility to others, not to injure any section of our country, not even for our own pecuniary benefit, but from the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights we inherited and which it is our duty to transmit unshorn to our children."
Southerners were, as Mr. Davis understood it, treading in the path of their fathers when they proclaimed their independence and fought for the right of self-government.
Professor Fite, of Yale, justifies secession on the following ground:
"In the last analysis the one complete justification of secession was the necessity of saving the vast property of slavery from destruction; secession was a commercial necessity designed to make those billions secure from outside interference. Viewed in this light, secession was right, for any people, prompted by the commonest motives of self-defence and with no moral scruples against slavery, would have followed the same course. The present generation of Northerners, born and reared after the war, must shake off their inherited political passions and prejudices and pronounce the verdict of justification for the South. Believing slavery to be right, it was the duty of the South to defend it. It is time that the words 'traitors,' 'conspirators,' 'rebels,' and 'rebellion' be discarded."[82]
These words of Professor Fite will waken a responsive echo in the hearts of Southerners, but Southerners place, and their fathers planted, themselves on higher ground than commercial considerations. The Confederates were defending their inherited right of local self-government and the Federal Constitution that secured it. It was for these rights that, as Mr. Davis had said, they were willing to follow the path their fathers trod.
The preservation of the Union the North was fighting for, was a noble motive; it looked to the future greatness and glory of the republic; but devotion to the Union had been a growth, the product largely of a single generation; the devotion of the South to the right of local self-government was an older and deeper conviction; it had been bred in the bone for three generations; it dated from Bunker Hill and Valley Forge and Yorktown. Close as the non-slave-holders of the South were to the slave-holders, of the same British stock, and with the same traditions, blood kinsmen as they were, they might not have been willing to dare all and do all for the protection of property in which they were not interested; but they were ready to, and they did, wage a death struggle to maintain against a hostile sectional majority, their inherited right to govern themselves in their own way. Added to this was the ever-present conviction of Southerners all, that they were battling not only for the supremacy of their race but for the preservation of their homes. There was a little ditty quite prevalent in the Army of Northern Virginia, of which nothing is now remembered except the refrain, but that of itself speaks volumes. It ran:
"Do you belong to the rebel band
Fighting for your home?"
Northerners had, most of them, convinced themselves that the South would never dare to secede. The danger of servile insurrections, if nothing else, would prevent it.[83]Many Southerners, on the other hand, could not see how, under the Constitution, the North could venture on coercion.
But to the South the greatest surprise furnished by the events of that era has been Abraham Lincoln—as he appears now in the light of history. What, in the minds of Southerners, fixed his status personally, during the canvass of 1860, was the statement he had made in his speech at Chicago, preliminary to his great debate with Douglas in 1858, that the Union could not "continue to exist half slave and half free." And he was now the candidate of the "Black Republican" party, a party that was denouncing a decision of the Supreme Court; that, in nearly every State in the North, had nullified the fugitive slave law, and that stood for "negro equality," as the South termed it.
There were other statements by Mr. Lincoln in that debate with Douglas that the South has had especial reason to take note of since the period of Reconstruction. At Springfield, Illinois, September 18, 1858, he said: "There is a physical difference between the white and black races which, I believe, will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality, and, inasmuch as they can not so live, while they do live together there must be the position of superior and inferior; and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having that position assigned to the white man."