The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences: Four Periods of American History

by Hilary A. Herbert

"John Brown's body lies a mouldering in the ground,
As we go marching on."

Early in the war Generals Frémont and Butler issued orders declaring free the slaves within the Union lines; these orders President Lincoln rescinded. But Abolition sentiment was growing in the army and at the North, and the pressure upon the President to strike at slavery was increasing. The Union forces were suffering repeated defeats; slaves at home were growing food crops and caring for the families of Confederates who were fighting at the front, and in September, 1862, President Lincoln issued his preliminary proclamation of emancipation, basing it on the ground of military necessity. It was to become effective January 1, 1863.

And here was the same Lincoln who had declared in 1858 his opinion that whites and blacks could not live together as equals, socially and politically; and it was the very same Lincoln who had repeatedly said he cherished no ill-will against his Southern brethren. If the slaves were to be freed, they and the whites should not be left together. He therefore sought diligently to find some home for the freedmen in a foreign country. But unfortunately, as already seen, the American negro, a bone of contention at home, was now a pariah to other peoples. Most nations welcome immigrants, but no country was willing to shelter the American freedman, save only Liberia, long before a proven failure, and Hayti, where, under the blacks, anarchy had already been chronic for half a century. Hume tells us, in "The Abolitionists," that for a time Mr. Lincoln even considered setting Texas apart as a home for the negro.

Later the surrender of the Confederate armies, together with the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, consummated emancipation, foreseeing which President Lincoln formulated his plan of Reconstruction. Suffrage in the reconstructed States under his plan was to be limited to those who were qualified to vote at the date of secession, which meant the whites. The sole exception he ever made to this rule was a suggestion to Governor Hahn, of Louisiana, that it might be well for the whites (of Louisiana) to give the ballot to a few of the most intelligent of the negroes and to such as had served in the army.

The part the soldiers played, Federal and Confederate, in restoring the Union, is a short story. The clash between them settled without reserve the only question that was really in issue—secession; slavery, that had been the origin of sectional dissensions, was eliminated because it obstructed the success of the Union armies. By their gallantry in battle and conduct toward each other the men in blue and the men in gray restored between the North and the South the mutual respect that had been lost in the bitterness of sectional strife, and without which there could be no fraternal Union.

Mr. Gladstone, when the war was on, said that the North was endeavoring to "propagate free institutions at the point of the sword." The North was not seeking to propagate in the South any new institution whatever. Mr. Gladstone's paradox loses its point because both sections were fighting for the preservation of the same system of government.

The time has now happily come when, to use the language of Senator Hoar, as Americans, we can, North and South, discuss the causes that brought about our terrible war "in a friendly and quiet spirit, without recrimination and without heat, each understanding the other, each striving to help the other, as men who are bearing a common burden and looking forward with a common hope."

The country, it is believed, has already reached the conclusions that the South was absolutely honest in maintaining the right of secession and absolutely unswerving in its devotion to its ideas of the Constitution, and that the North was equally honest and patriotic in its fidelity to the Union. We need to advance one step further. Somebody was to blame for starting a quarrel between brethren who were dwelling together in amity. If Americans can agree in fixing that blame, the knowledge thus acquired should help them to avoid such troubles hereafter.

It seems to be a fair conclusion that the initial cause of all our troubles was the formation by Garrison of those Abolition societies which the Boston people in their resolutions of August 1, 1835, "disapproved of" and described as "associations instituted in the non-slave-holding States, with the intent to act, within the slave-holding States, on the subject of slavery in those States, without their consent." And further, that it was the creation of these societies, the methods they resorted to, and their explicit defiance of the Constitution that roused the fears and passions of the South and caused that section to take up the quarrel that, afterward became sectional; and that, after much hot dispute and many regrettable incidents, North and South, resulted in secession and war.

In every dispute about slavery prior to 1831, the Constitution was always regarded by every disputant as supreme. The quarrel that was fatal to the peace of the Union began when the New Abolitionists put in the new claim, that slavery in the South was the concern of the North, as well as of the South, and that there was a higher law than the Constitution. If the conscience of the individual, instead of human law, is to prescribe rules of conduct, society is at the mercy of anarchists. Czolgosz was conscientious when he murdered McKinley.