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

There is also another point you have forgotten. The terms which General Grant offered Lee were of a liberality beyond the capacity of any British general or statesman. Lee's whole army was paroled and told to go home taking their horses with them to cultivate their farms. There were to be no punishments or executions for treason. Afterwards when some people in the north foolishly clamored for punishment, Grant sternly insisted on the fulfillment of every condition in the surrender. Under such terms it was very easy and natural for Lee to ride quietly from the surrender to his own home, walk in and shut the door, and never trouble himself about the rebellion again.

You say Lee's example influenced the other southern leaders. But it was Grant's example, the fair and honorable terms, which were the real influence, the real power that was accomplishing this result. It was very American and possible only among Americans. The English are too stupidly violent ever to achieve such a result as that.

You may remember that some months ago Botha and some of the Boer leaders met Lord Kitchener to discuss terms of peace. And what were the British terms? Compare them with Grant's. Lord Kitchener said that immunity would be given to certain of the leaders, but no immunity could be promised to certain others. Could honorable men consent to surrender themselves and escape on condition that certain of their associates were to be hung?

Suppose Grant had said to Lee, "You and your officers, if you will surrender, shall be guaranteed immunity; but Jefferson Davis, and Johnston and Beauregard are to be hung." Do you suppose Lee would have surrendered? I am inclined to think that if any such British policy had been carried out there would be guerilla war and Irish rebellion in the south to this hour.

Lord Kitchener, you will also remember, would give the Boers no promise of local self-government. It was indefinitely postponed. They asked him about giving the right to vote to the black Kaffir population. But Kitchener refused to give any promise on that point.

In other words they were asked to surrender without any agreement that the lives of the rebels in Cape Colony who had been assisting them should be spared the gallows, they had no definite promise of local self-government, and so far was the possibility of self-government removed that it was left uncertain whether or not the black Kaffir population would not be used to control them and outvote them if a sham of self-government were set up.

Now let us suppose Grant offering similar terms to Lee. Let us suppose him saying that the eleven states of the confederacy would be held as crown colonies, or presidential subject colonies for an indefinite period, and that the north reserved the right to control the south by means of giving the vote to the recently freed black slaves and withholding it from the whites. Do we not all know what Lee's answer and what the answer of the whole south would have been to those terms?

We all know what happened a few years afterwards in the reconstruction period when the blacks were to a certain extent put over the whites. We all know that the south immediately turned to guerilla methods or as they were called the Ku Klux societies, societies of secret assassination and terror, methods far worse than ordinary guerillaism. Moreover these Ku Klux methods were successful. They broke the dominion of the black man. They compelled the north to stop, to recall its carpet baggers, to reconsider its injustice; or as Mr. Page puts it the southerners reconquered their own country, and had it again under their own normal state governments. But if Lee and the other southern leaders had known all this was coming they would have begun the guerillaism at Appomatox.

The Ku Klux methods were unpleasant, atrocious, unfortunate in many ways; for as most of us can remember, they fixed upon southern life the habit of assassination, which continued for many years in a manner most revolting and shocking to northern moral sense and it has only recently begun to die out. But who was to blame? England has in the same way turned the Irish into assassins, rioters and law breakers, and then cries out that they are barbarous and uncivilized and must be "coerced" and forced into more assassination, rioting and law breaking. I place the blame where it belongs; and I venture to predict that if England continues her inhuman, morally degrading and worse than Irish policy with the Boers she will turn them into a race of assassins or law breakers. They are now the very reverse of that. They have shown a higher regard for the sacredness of human life than we have to-day in America. They have shown more self-restraint, more respect for personal rights, have dealt more fairly with their opponents than we did in our revolution. They are the superiors of both ourselves and the English and they are inferior to us and the English only in numbers.

There is a great deal of talk of England's success in ruling dependencies. She rules no doubt successfully enough over the servile, over toadies, flunkeys and weaklings or those who have no spirit or love of independence. Wherever she has attempted to rule an independence-loving people as in the case of the Irish, ourselves or the Boers, she has made a most shocking failure of it. Few people trouble themselves to read the long history of England's dealings with the South Africans for nearly a hundred years previous to the present war. It is all detailed in Theal's admirable volumes of the history of South Africa. Theal was himself an Englishman, an official in South Africa, and he prints all documents in full. I must confess I was astonished to read this long record of atrocious injustice, inhumanity, stupidity and cruelty which generation after generation has hammered the Boers into a separate people, given them a long list of martyrs and anniversaries of ferocity and built up in them a fell hatred of the English, which now astonishes men like yourself, who suppose this to be a mere sudden outbreak, and who have not the time, or will not take the trouble, to investigate the long chain of causes which led up to it.