The Brothers' War

by John C. Reed

The passage just quoted most truly expresses the feelings with which the southern people stood by their cause and now look back upon the support which they gave it. In this matter their word will be taken by everybody. Their actions before, during, and ever since the war speak louder than their word. There can be no doubt that in founding the Confederate States and waging the resulting war everything they did was counselled by the most tender and enlightened conscience. Bear in mind how they clung to Davis and how they still remember him, winning the precious eulogy

“—he that can endure
To follow with allegiance a fallen lord
Does conquer him that did his master conquer,
And earns a place i’ the story.”

Bear in mind how truly they keep Memorial Day. The love which the south gives Davis and her dead soldiers protests to all the earth and heaven the righteousness of her lost cause. Calmly, serenely, confidently she awaits future judgment upon her love. It needs that all the north appreciate this fealty as the height of heaven-climbing virtue.

The real soldiers of each section—those who—to use a confederate saying—were “in the bullet department,” and fighting every day, learned great regard for their foes; and when the war ended they became at once advocates of speedy reconciliation. And the non-combatants on each side felt far less resentment towards the actual fighters of the other than they did towards its political leaders. It is a common error to overrate the accomplishment of potent and ambitious men in tumultuous times. As the world long ascribed meteorological phenomena to the mutations of the moon, conspicuous above all things else as the apparent cause, so most people now believe that revolutions are caused by the men who appear to be leading. We have explained above that the only effective leaders—even of revolutions—are those who are the most completely led by the people. To lead, the leader must keep on the tide and let it lead him. If he makes serious effort to balk it, he is at once stranded as a piece of drift thrown out of the current. All of us—both those north and those south of Mason and Dixon’s line—ought to learn this truth thoroughly. The former should correct their false judgments as to Calhoun, Toombs, Yancey, and Davis; the latter as to Sumner, Garrison, and Phillips. It was but to be expected that these false judgments would be cherished all through what we may call the era of civil fury. That begins with the excitement over the admission of California and extends to the time after the war when the project of giving a negro constituency the balance of political power in each southern State was abandoned. But now as the brothers can look back upon those evil days with at least the beginning of dispassionate calmness, the task of convincing the whole people of each section that the more prominent figures of the other in the era mentioned were all true men and patriots, should be pushed forward with his whole might by every one who loves his country. It is not demanded that we claim too much for them. To begin illustrating: Toombs’s Tremont Temple lecture on slavery is such an able and powerful defence of the south that its reputation must forever increase. Yet as we consider it now we see that what he believed with all his heart to be the perpetual pillar and weal of his community was in fact its woe and ruin. We see, as to Calhoun, that if he had but given the resources of southern slavery against the implacable oppugnancy of free labor, roused for decisive combat, the sure and marvellous vision with which he searched the innermost nature of money, he would have had to acknowledge that the proud structure of southern society was wholly builded upon sands. The rains descended and the floods beat, and we saw the great fall. Of course we must admit that had our leaders been endowed with unerring prescience they ought to have warned us, and striven heart and soul for compensated emancipation. I need merely allude to State sovereignty, treated fully above. We of the south now see that though in advocating it we showed that the fathers were with us, and thus got the better of the argument, yet that the north was right in historical fact, and right also as to the true interest and welfare of America. Thus I have indicated some important acknowledgments which we of the south must make to our brothers of the north. Now I must state some that they must make to us.

The root-and-branch abolitionists and many following their lead interpreted the statement in the declaration of independence that all men are created equal and with inalienable liberty as both intentional and actual condemnation of the slavery then existing in our country. They shut their eyes to the significant fact that the same document published to the world, as one of the causes justifying the solemn act therein proclaimed, that the king had “excited domestic insurrections amongst us”; which means he had instigated the slaves to rise against their masters. Many of the signers owned slaves then and to the end of their lives afterwards. Palpably the declaration did not mean to say that the negroes in America were unjustly held in slavery, but did mean to say that inciting them—as John Brown with the approval of Phillips, Garrison, and such, afterwards sought to do—to gain their liberty by insurrection was inhuman and atrocious. These root-and-branch abolitionists confidently alleged that slavery in America was proscribed by the christian religion. Yet Jesus, the founder, who definitely reprehended every particular sin, never once denounced slavery. Paul, or some one else, whom the canon accepts as speaking with the authority of Jesus, says: “All who are in the position of slaves should regard their masters as deserving of the greatest respect, so that the name of God, and our teaching may not be maligned. Those who have christian masters should not think less of them because they are brothers, but on the contrary they should serve them all the better, because those who are to benefit by their good work are dear to them as their fellow-christians. Those are the things to insist upon in your teaching. Any one who teaches otherwise, and refuses his assent to sound instruction—the instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ—and to the teaching of religion, is puffed up with conceit, not really knowing anything, but having a morbid craving for discussions and arguments.”[146]

The passage last quoted—to which several others from the new testament, almost as strong, can be added—demonstrates that christianity did not disapprove of slavery. Further, as I have already suggested, the slavery not rebuked by Jesus and his apostles was mainly that of kin in blood and race, of those who had been in a measure free themselves or descendants of the free. The slaves of the south were far remote in blood, and their native condition so bad that American slavery was for them elevation and great improvement.

The new testament, the declaration of independence, and the federal constitution—surely three very respectable authorities, in America at least—stand together in solid phalanx. They clearly demonstrate that the charge that southern slavery was heinously wrong in itself, and that the masters were wicked man-stealers and kidnappers, made for a long while in every corner of the north, was mere opprobrium and abuse. Both sections ought to learn that there was nothing in negro slavery to shock the moral sense, but that on the contrary it was in its general effect of the utmost beneficence to the slave. Both ought to learn also that the white-hot zeal with which the institution was fought was due mainly to these things:

1. Free labor had long been in an uncompromising hand-to-hand struggle with slave labor. Years before this commenced the employing class had subconsciously divined it was far more profitable to hire the laborer only when his work was needed, and then let him go until he was needed again. The worker with the advance of democracy had become more and more hostile to a system coercing his labor and denying him all political and civil rights. The co-operation of employer and laborer had expelled slavery of white men from Europe. The feeling towards slavery had become one of decided opposition.

2. In America the opposition to slavery was powerfully re-enforced, first, by the new cause the latter gave in competing with free labor for the unsettled public domain, and then in its operation to nationalize the south into a separate federation. With this combined the growing conception among the northern people of the negro as a man who had reached the stage of development characterizing the typical white. This huge mistake, hugged to their bosoms and championed with unflagging zeal by the ablest and most influential root-and-branch abolitionists, had a prodigious propagandic effect. It identified the cause of the negro slave, whom evolution had not yet made ready for liberty, with that of the oppressed European who had been long ready for it; and consequently that cause was continuously advocated with the passion which the French revolution had started against human inequality. The root-and-branch abolitionists at last excited a pseudo-moral paroxysm among thousands at the north and kept it increasing for a long while.

Facts which cannot now be gainsaid plainly justify me in denying that conscientious conviction was the real primary motive. The northern and southern churches split, all the wisest and best of the former standing against, all those of the latter for slavery. You must see that their moral convictions were secondary, not primary motives; that some superior power had given to one side to regard slavery as wrong and to the other to regard it as right; that it really had given the two sides differing consciences. If you but invoke the universal history of mankind this fact now under consideration will cease to appear marvellous. You will find it to be the rule that the struggle for existence develops in every community an instinct which resistlessly prompts to the maintenance of its great economic interest. This instinct is the special preserver of the family, of the neighborhood, of the country. It is not strange that that which gives sustenance and comfort to one’s family, and what he sees all the best of his neighbors using as he does, will seem unquestionably right to him. It is not strange that, in such a serious conflict of interest as the intersectional one of dividing a vast empire between such fell competitors as free labor and slave labor, each side will differ diametrically in conscience as to right and wrong. Also it is not strange that they should lose temper, shower abuse upon their opponents, and fill the land with mutual accusations of heinous moral offences.