Two Wars: An Autobiography of General Samuel G. French / Mexican War; War between the States, a Diary; Reconstruction Period, His Experience; Incidents, Reminiscences, etc.

by Samuel Gibbs French

It is not pleasant to refer to the want of information among the common people in the North and West in regard to the real relation of the bondsmen to their owners, or to the ignorance of the masses of the nations of Europe on this question. In Europe they had a foretaste of freedom in 1848; but slavery in the United States was a sealed letter to them all. For the North there is this excuse: the almost nonintercourse between the North and the South precluded personal observation, and they were taught in the schools, in the lecture room, from the rostrum and the pulpit, by the press in every village, town, and city all over the land, to believe the fabulous accounts of the ills of slavery to be true, and that the slave owners were cruel, illiterate, uncultured, and had "plantation manners," unfit for association with the immaculate people of the North. The populace of the North learned nothing from the utter failure of the advent of John Brown in Virginia, where slaves fled from him with horror and left him to his deserved fate; on the contrary, he was by the North held up as a saint who gave his life for freedom's cause.

Far and wide the abolition and free-soil party preached a crusade against the people of the South to liberate the slaves, and Mr. Beecher's picture shows to what low means they stooped to awaken enthusiasm for their cause. It spread to Europe, and when they commenced the war the illiterate masses there joined in the crusade against the South, as they did to rescue the holy sepulcher from the hands of the infidel, on which occasion, Proctor in his "History of the Crusades" says, "the Welshman forgot his hunting, the Scot his companionship with vermin, the Dane his carouse, and the Norwegian his raw fish," in their fanatical desire to reach Jerusalem; and so again the Welshman, the Scot, the Norwegian, the Dane, the German, and the rest of Europe came over here to enlist as substitutes in the Federal army in its crusade against the institution of slavery which was founded by their ancestors.

Herod the Great, an Idumean, to secure the throne of Jerusalem to the Idumean line of Jews, murdered his wife, the beautiful Mariamne, and his two sons by her. They were handsome, had been educated in Rome, were very accomplished, and beloved by the Jewish people; but as they were, through their mother, of the Asmonean line of Jews, Herod condemned them to death to secure the succession as he desired. When the war between the States ended, the white people of the Confederacy were in the way of the line of succession of the radical party to maintain office; so they were disfranchised, and a new race was made citizens to take their place: they were the late negro slaves, the pets and "wards of the nation!"

Now, when it was told to Augustus Cæsar that Herod had murdered his two sons by Mariamne, he said that "it was better to be one of Herod's pigs than one of his sons;" and so when the white people of the South were politically murdered, many of their friends said: "It were better to be a 'ward of the nation' than a son of the Confederacy." These cruel proceedings have been condemned by all the civilized nations of Europe, and will be condemned by the impartial historians of the North when passions shall have subsided.

The enslaving of the negro race in the colonies—and which was largely confined to those called Southern, and almost entirely to them after the ending of the slave trade—placed the white people of the colonies on a higher and broader plane and released them from the daily struggle after the "almighty dollar."

The busy minds of the Northern people were constantly more and more given to trade and traffic, while those of the South turned to the enjoyment of a home life; freed from restraint and care, they practiced the amenities of social life, with honor, truth, and charity to all. Strange as it may appear, a civilization—based on slave labor, that was tolerant in religion, that encouraged freedom of thought, led their minds to the contemplation of the rights given man by his Creator when he breathed the breath of life into his body as he came into this world—resulted in prompting these men to embody their views on this question of divine right in the Mecklenburg Declaration, made in Mecklenburg County, N. C., May 20, 1775, and which was substantially expressed again, July 4, 1776, in the Declaration of Independence, read in Philadelphia.

And so it was from the thoughtful minds of these quiet slave owners came these two proclamations: that man was indued, or born, with certain "inalienable rights" derived from his Maker—namely, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." These were some of the developments of a civilization based on slavery.

To secure these rights unto themselves, after the Confederation, they framed the Constitution of the United States, but unfortunately it was established on a compromise that was left for futurity to interpret; and disagreement on this matter led to secession as a solution and last resort.