The American Revolution and the Boer War, An Open Letter to Mr. Charles Francis Adams on His Pamphlet "The Confederacy and the Transvaal"

by Sydney George Fisher

I do not wish to take up too much space accumulating instances in our revolutionary history, but Franklin's conduct is perhaps worth considering. He was not what is called an enthusiast or fanatic. He was on the contrary one of the shrewd calculating kind. He had full knowledge of all the conditions. He resided in England as agent of Massachusetts and of the rebel cause in general from 1764 to 1775. It cannot be said that he did not know the power and merit of England. He admired the English political system. He was very fond of English life and preferred a residence among learned and cultivated people in England to one in America. Under these influences he at first believed that the colonists should submit after trying ordinary peaceful and so-called legal measures. In a word Franklin was at first of your opinion.

But when he returned to America in 1775 and the spirit or influence of independence touched him he became the most unrelenting, obstinate and as you would say unreasoning, fanatical and blind stickler for absolute and unqualified independence at any price or at the price of extermination.

The Continental Congress of which your ancestor was a member was, as late as the year 1780, so determined to keep up the struggle although in that year it was regarded as hopeless, that they arranged to have pictures prepared with short descriptions of what they considered British atrocities, but which were the milk of human kindness compared with Kitchener's Spanish concentration camps and other benevolences inflicted on the Boers. These pictures and descriptions were to be shown and taught to every American rebel child forever so as to burn into their minds eternal hatred and a struggle without end against the independence hating British brute.

Just at the close of the revolution Franklin was preparing to have thirty-five of these pictures designed and engraved in France "in order," as he wrote to an Englishman, "to impress the minds of children and posterity with a deep sense of your bloody and insatiable malice and wickedness." If Franklin could apply such adjectives to England's comparatively mild attempts to suppress a rebellion, what would he say to-day of her worse than inhuman efforts to destroy two independent nations. Franklin believed that the success of our revolution had destroyed forever the inherent cruelty and despotic brutishness of the English tory. But the tory has gone on developing; and even the English liberal has less of the courage, intelligence and character which were such a brilliant and saving grace to him in the days of Burke, Chatham and Barré.

I shall now consider what you say about the action of General Lee and the leaders of the confederacy. You assume that they were struggling for independence; and that is most extraordinary. It is an insult, as it seems to me, to the intelligence of the whole American people. I never before heard our civil war described in that way. That Lee or the confederacy were struggling for independence in the sense in which the American colonists of 1776, or the Boers of to-day or the Swiss or the Irish struggled for that object I most positively deny. If Lee and the confederacy had been struggling in that sense the civil war would not yet be over. The eleven southern states would be now either independent or in the condition of Ireland.

First of all the southern states were not a naturally separate people. They were contiguous territory. There was no natural boundary dividing them from the North. They were of the same race, language and social status as the north. They had taken part with the north in making the whole country independent of England and with the north they had made the National Constitution.

They had quarrelled with the north simply about the question of slavery. At one time they had disapproved of slavery in the abstract as much as the north did; but as their slaves were more profitable than slaves in the north they were slower about abolishing slavery than the north had been. Their slaves were guaranteed to them by the Constitution. The rising moral sentiment against slavery in the north, which seemed to them to threaten the abolition of slavery in the south by violence without regard to the Constitution and without compensation to owners drove them into war. Their confederacy which they formed was a mere make-shift to protect millions of dollars worth of slaves. There is no evidence of any passion for independence among them, such as has characterized the people already described, and as a matter of fact there was nothing in their unseparated situation that would cause that passion.

High strung, intelligent men such as the southerners are, will fight a long time over millions of dollars worth of slaves, if they think they are to be suddenly and unfairly deprived of them, but not as they would fight for independence, for political existence. There was so little moral righteousness in slavery and they had always known so well its unrighteousness that when the point of scientific defeat was reached, when their regularly organized armies were formally defeated they gave up the game. The inspiration of the cause was not perennial. There was none of the eternal justness in it which inspired the cause of Washington and your ancestor, which has kept the Cubans struggling for thirty years, and the Irish and the Armenians for seven hundred.

General Lee, who, as you say, set the example of giving up, was a man of peculiar views on the civil war. He was not a believer in slavery. He described it as a "moral and political evil" and "a greater evil to the white than to the colored race." He did not even believe in the right of secession. He spoke of it as an absurdity, and said that it was impossible to suppose that the framers of the Constitution could have contemplated anything of the sort. He had great misgivings and much mental struggle when Virginia seceded and he finally decided to go with his state because as he put it, "I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home." He cared little or nothing for the confederacy. It was the invasion of Virginia against which he fought and he always commanded the army in Virginia. "Save in defence of my native state," he said, "I hope I may never be called on to draw my sword."

Such a man easily dropped the contest for the confederacy when the point of scientific defeat had been reached. He fought to acquit his own honor as a man fights a duel until blood is drawn, and that done he has no more incentive for fighting.