In the North, on the other hand, nothing is more striking than the persistence in good nature, the tenacity with which the theories of the erring brother and the prodigal son were clung to, despite all evidence of facts to the contrary. There was a kind of boyishness in the rumors which the newspapers circulated (not seldom with intent to dispirit), and the people believed on the authority of reliable gentlemen from Richmond, or Union refugees whose information could be trusted. At one time the Rebels had mined eleven acres in the neighborhood of Bull Bun; at another, there were regiments of giants on their way from Texas, who, first paralyzing our batteries by a yell, would rush unscathed upon the guns, and rip up the unresisting artillerymen with bowie-knives three feet long, made for that precise service, and the only weapon to which these Berserkers would condescend; again, for the fiftieth time, France and England had definitely agreed upon a forcible intervention; finally, in order to sap the growing confidence of the people in President Lincoln, one of his family was accused of communicating our plans to the Rebels, and this at a time when the favorite charge against his administration was the having no plan at all. The public mind, as the public folly is generally called, was kept in a fidget by these marvels and others like them. But the point to which we would especially call attention is this: that while the war slowly educated the North, it has had comparatively little effect in shaking the old nonsense out of the South. Nothing is more striking, as we trace Northern opinion through those four years that seemed so long and seem so short, than to see how the minds of men were sobered, braced, and matured as the greatness of the principles at stake became more and more manifest; how their purpose, instead of relaxing, was strained tighter by disappointment, and by the growing sense of a guidance wiser than their own. Nor should we forget how slow the great body of the people were in being persuaded of the expediency of directly attacking slavery, and after that of enlisting colored troops; of the fact, in short, that it must always be legal to preserve the source of the law's authority, and constitutional to save the country. The prudence of those measures is now acknowledged by all, and justified by the result; but we must not be blind to the deeper moral, that justice is always and only politic, that it needs no precedent, and that we were prosperous in proportion as we were willing to be true to our nobler judgment. In one respect only the popular understanding seems always to have been, and still to remain, confused. Our notion of treason is a purely traditional one, derived from countries where the question at issue has not been the life of the nation, but the conflicting titles of this or that family to govern it. Many people appear to consider civil war as merely a more earnest kind of political contest, which leaves the relative position of the parties as they would be after a Presidential election. But no treason was ever so wicked as that of Davis and his fellow-conspirators, for it had no apology of injury or even of disputed right, and it was aimed against the fairest hope and promise of the world. They did not attempt to put one king in place of another, but to dethrone human nature and discrown the very manhood of the race. And in what respect does a civil war differ from any other in the discretion which it leaves to the victor of exacting indemnity for the past and security for the future? A contest begun for such ends and maintained by such expedients as this has been, is not to be concluded by merely crying quits and shaking hands. The slaveholding States chose to make themselves a foreign people to us, and they must take the consequences. We surely cannot be expected to take them back as if nothing had happened, as if victory rendered us helpless to promote good or prevent evil, and took from us all title to insist on the admission of the very principle for which we have sacrificed so much. The war has established the unity of the government, but no peace will be anything more than a pretence unless it rest upon the unity of the nation, and that can only be secured by making everywhere supreme the national idea that freedom is a right inherent in man himself, and not a creature of the law, to be granted to one class of men or withheld from it at the option of another.
What have we conquered? The Southern States? The Southern people? A cessation of present war? Surely not these or any one of these merely. The fruit of our victory, as it was always the object of our warfare, is the everlasting validity of the theory of the Declaration of Independence in these United States, and the obligation before God and man to make it the rule of our practice. It was in that only that we were stronger than our enemies, stronger than the public opinion of the world; and it is from that alone that we derive our right of the strongest, for it is wisdom, justice, and the manifest will of Him who made of one blood all the nations of the earth. It were a childish view of the matter to think this is a mere trial of strength or struggle for supremacy between the North and South. The war sprang from the inherent antipathy between two forms of political organization radically hostile to each other. Is the war over, will it ever be over, if we allow the incompatibility to remain, childishly satisfied with a mere change of shape? This has been the grapple of two brothers that already struggled with each other even in the womb. One of them has fallen under the other; but let simple, good-natured Esau beware how he slacken his grip till he has got back his inheritance, for Jacob is cunninger with the tongue than he.
We have said that the war has given the North a higher conception of its manhood and its duties, and of the vital force of ideas. But do we find any parallel change in the South? We confess we look for it in vain. There is the same arrogance, the same materialistic mode of thought, which reckons the strength and value of a country by the amount of its crops rather than by the depth of political principle which inspires its people, the same boyish conceit on which even defeat wastes its lesson. Here is a clear case for the interference of authority. The people have done their part by settling the fact that we have a government; and it is for the government now to do its duty toward the people by seeing to it that their blood and treasure shall not have been squandered in a meaningless conflict. We must not let ourselves be misled by the terms North and South, as if those names implied any essential diversity of interest, or the claim to any separate share in the future destiny of the country. Let us concede every right to the several States except that of mischief, and never again be deceived by the fallacy that a moral wrong can be local in its evil influence, or that a principle alien to the instincts of the nation can be consistent either with its prosperity or its peace. We must not be confused into a belief that it is with States that we are dealing in this matter. The very problem is how to reconstitute safely a certain territory or population as States. It is not we that take anything from them. The war has left them nothing that they can fairly call their own politically but helplessness and confusion. We propose only to admit them for the first time into a real union with us, and to give them an equal share in privileges, our belief in whose value we have proved by our sacrifices in asserting them. There is always a time for doing what is fit to be done; and if it be done wisely, temperately, and firmly, it need appeal for its legality to no higher test than success. It is the nation and not a section, which is victorious, and it is only on principles of purely national advantage that any permanent settlement can be based.
The South will come back to the Union intent on saving whatever fragments it can from the wreck of the evil element in its social structure, which it clings to with that servile constancy which men often show for the vice that is making them its victims. If they must lose slavery, they will make a shift to be comfortable on the best substitute they can find in a system of caste. The question for a wise government in such a case seems to us not to be, Have we the right to interfere? but much rather, Have we the right to let them alone? If we are entitled, as conquerors,—and it is only as such that we are so entitled,—to stipulate for the abolition of slavery, what is there to prevent our exacting further conditions no less essential to our safety and the prosperity of the South? The national unity we have paid so dearly for will turn out a pinchbeck counterfeit, without that sympathy of interests and ideas, that unity of the people, which can spring only from homogeneousness of institutions. The successive advances toward justice which we made during the war, and which looked so difficult and doubtful before they were made, the proclamation of freedom and the arming of the blacks, seem now to have been measures of the simplest expediency, as the highest always turns out to be the simplest when we have the wit to try it. The heavens were to have come crashing down after both those measures; yet the pillars of the universe not only stood firm on their divinely laid foundations, but held us up also, and, to the amazement of many, God did not frown on an experiment of righteousness. People are not yet agreed whether these things were constitutional; we believe, indeed, that the weight of legal opinion is against them, but nevertheless events are tolerably unanimous that without them we should have had a fine Constitution left on our hands with no body politic for it to animate.
Laws of the wisest human device are, after all, but the sheath of the sword of Power, which must not be allowed to rust in them till it cannot be drawn swiftly in time of need. President Lincoln had many scruples to overcome ere he could overstep the limits of precedent into the divine air of moral greatness. Like most men, he was reluctant to be the bearer of that message of God with which his name will be linked in the grateful memory of mankind. If he won an immortality of fame by consenting to ally himself with the eternal justice, and to reinforce his armies by the inspiration of their own nobler instincts, an equal choice of renown is offered to his successor in applying the same loyalty to conscience in the establishment of peace. We could not live together half slave and half free; shall we succeed better in trying a second left-handed marriage between democracy and another form of aristocracy, less gross, but not less uncongenial? They who before misled the country into a policy false and deadly to the very truth which was its life and strength, by the fear of abolitionism, are making ready to misrule it again by the meaner prejudice of color. We can have no permanent peace with the South but by Americanizing it, by compelling it, if need be, to accept the idea, and with it the safety of democracy. At present we seem on the brink of contracting to protect from insurrection States in which a majority of the population, many of them now trained to arms, and all of them conscious of a claim upon us to make their freedom strong enough to protect them, are to be left at the mercy of laws which they have had no share in enacting.
The gravity of this consideration alone should make us pause. The more thought we bestow upon the matter, the more thoroughly are we persuaded that the only way to get rid of the negro is to do him justice. Democracy is safe because it is just, and safe only when it is just to all. Here is no question of white or black, but simply of man. We have hitherto been strong in proportion as we dared be true to the sublime thought of our own Declaration of Independence, which for the first time proposed to embody Christianity in human laws, and announced the discovery that the security of the state is based on the moral instincts and the manhood of its members. In the very midnight of the war, when we were compassed round with despondency and the fear of man, that peerless utterance of human policy rang like a trumpet announcing heavenly succor, and lifted us out of the darkness of our doubts into that courage which comes of the fear of God. Now, if ever, may a statesman depend upon the people sustaining him in doing what is simply right, for they have found out the infinite worth of freedom, and how much they love it, by being called on to defend it. We have seen how our contest has been watched by a breathless world; how every humane and generous heart, every intellect bold enough to believe that men may be safely trusted with government as well as with any other of their concerns, has wished us God-speed. And we have felt as never before the meaning of those awful words, "Hell beneath is stirred for thee," as we saw all that was mean and timid and selfish and wicked, by a horrible impulsion of nature, gathering to the help of our enemies. Why should we shrink from embodying our own idea as if it would turn out a Frankenstein? Why should we let the vanquished dictate terms of peace? A choice is offered that may never come again, unless after another war. We should sin against our own light, if we allowed mongrel republics to grow up again at the South, and deliberately organized anarchy, as if it were better than war. Let the law be made equal for all men. If the power does not exist in the Constitution, find it somewhere else, or confess that democracy, strongest of all governments for war, is the weakest of all in the statesmanship that shall save us from it. There is no doubt what the wishes of the administration are. Let them act up to their own convictions and the emergency of the hour, sure of the support of the people; for it is one of the chief merits of our form of polity that the public reason, which gives our Constitution all its force, is always a reserve of power to the magistrate, open to the appeal of justice, and ready to ratify the decisions of conscience. There is no need of hurry in readmitting the States that locked themselves out of the old homestead. It is not enough to conquer unless we convert them, and time, the best means of quiet persuasion, is in our own hands. Shall we hasten to cover with the thin ashes of another compromise that smouldering war which we called peace for seventy years, only to have it flame up again when the wind of Southern doctrine has set long enough in the old quarter? It is not the absence of war, but of its causes, that is in our grasp. That is what we fought for, and there must be a right somewhere to enforce what all see to be essential. To quibble away such an opportunity would be as cowardly as unwise.
THE PRESIDENT ON THE STUMP
1866
Mr. Johnson is the first of our Presidents who has descended to the stump, and spoken to the people as if they were a mob. We do not care to waste words in criticising the taste of this proceeding, but deem it our duty to comment on some of its graver aspects. We shall leave entirely aside whatever was personal in the extraordinary diatribe of the 22d of February, merely remarking that we believe the majority of Americans have too much good sense to be flattered by an allusion to the humbleness of their chief magistrate's origin; the matter of interest for them being rather to ascertain what he has arrived at than where he started from,—we do not mean in station, but in character, intelligence, and fitness for the place he occupies. We have reason to suspect, indeed, that pride of origin, whether high or low, springs from the same principle in human nature, and that one is but the positive, the other the negative, pole of a single weakness. The people do not take it as a compliment to be told that they have chosen a plebeian to the highest office, for they are not fond of a plebeian tone of mind or manners. What they do like, we believe, is to be represented by their foremost man, their highest type of courage, sense, and patriotism, no matter what his origin. For, after all, no one in this country incurs any natal disadvantage unless he be born to an ease which robs him of the necessity of exerting, and so of increasing and maturing, his natural powers. It is of very little consequence to know what our President was; of the very highest, to ascertain what he is, and to make the best of him. We may say, in passing, that the bearing of Congress, under the temptations of the last few weeks, has been most encouraging, though we must except from our commendation the recent speech of Mr. Stevens of Pennsylvania. There is a pride of patriotism that should make all personal pique seem trifling; and Mr. Stevens ought to have remembered that it was not so much the nakedness of an antagonist that he was uncovering as that of his country.