The greatest story in the world, period 3 (of 3)

by Horace G. Hutchinson

But the consciences of white men were not alive to these miseries then, even as they were not alive to the miseries inflicted by the industrial system on many who worked under it. When consciences did begin to be stirred, it was only in accordance with human nature that expressions of disgust with the conditions of slavery should be uttered by the people of the Northern States, who were not owners of slaves, and should be keenly resented by those in the South who did own slaves and whose sugar crops and cotton and maize were cultivated by slave labour.

Thus came division between slave States and non-slave States, that is to say, States in which slavery was the law of the land and States in which it was not. Now and again a slave would escape, and the right claimed by the master of an escaped slave to follow him and recapture him would naturally be resented in a State which did not recognise slavery.

So dissatisfaction arose, and so it grew, over this slave question, between the Abolitionists, as they were called—that is, those who favoured the abolition of slavery generally, and of the slave trade in particular—and the anti-Abolitionists. Nearly all the North was of the former, nearly all the South of the latter persuasion.

And this divergence about slavery was but one point of difference among several. The question of tariff—the duties to be paid on goods entering American ports—was another. There were Protectionists and Free-traders then and there, as there are here and now. There were States in the South that claimed the right to "nullify," as it was called, in respect of goods brought to their ports, the Act of Congress which imposed the duties. The nullifaction claim—the claim to "make nothing of" the Act—was disallowed; and thence arose more bitterness.

The War of Secession

So the embers of discontent went smouldering until active war broke out between the two sections in 1861; and it broke out over a difference, which was not actually a difference over slaves or tariffs although it originated in those questions. The point on which it broke out was this: that the Southern States claimed for themselves the right to secede, to cut themselves off, from the Union. That is why the war is called the War of Secession. They even called themselves by a distinctive name, not the "United," but the "Confederate" States. The North resisted, and refused them the right to break away and govern themselves as they wished. It was, perhaps we may think, a singular position to be taken by those United States which had lately fought so well and triumphantly to gain their own independent right to self-governance, but almost certainly it is a good thing for mankind that they did take that attitude. Had the attempted "secession" succeeded, the States of North America might have been as disunited as the States of South America; and so might never have stood, as they do, a strong force for peace in the world.

The War of Secession was waged with varying fortune, at first rather favouring the South, though always it was the South which, as the chief battlefield, had to endure the worst of the misery. It was a particularly cruel war in the divisions that it caused between friends and even between families. There were moments when the cause of the North was in great danger; but the North was able to dispose of rather larger forces and perhaps of a tougher type of soldiery, although the endurance and the aptitude for strategy and fighting seem to have been remarkable on both sides among armies of which only a small minority were soldiers by profession and training. The Northern advantages were compensated by the very remarkable military ability for war of the Southern leaders.

The sympathies of Europe and of England generally were rather with the South than with the North, and England gave some just cause of offence to the North by allowing the South to fit out privateering vessels in British ports.

It was not until after four years of fighting, that is to say, in 1865, that the end came with the surrender of General Lee's Southern army to the forces of General Grant at Appomatox in Virginia. That was the end of the fighting, and peace terms were agreed very shortly afterwards. The claim of any State or collection of States to break away from the Union has never been put forward since, and the authority of Congress was confirmed over the whole Union.

The effects of the war were grievous for the vanquished. Their fairest territories had been overrun by the troops of both sides, their crops had been ruined and, heaviest blow of all, their slaves were emancipated so that there was the less labour available to repair the losses. All the money that they might have spent in hiring labour had gone in the war, and the problems of the peace were scarcely less difficult than those of the war.