Lives of Distinguished North Carolinians, with Illustrations and Speeches

by Unknown

Though contaminated by modern machine politics, and much hampered by the race question, the South still clings to local self-government and to the dignity of Statehood as the only sure foundation for civil liberty and perpetual Union. Long taxed unfairly, by the subtle operation of the Federal tariff and internal revenue and currency laws, out of money which has long enriched another section, in the shape of pensions, internal improvements, and "protection to home industries," the South is still the section most loyal to constitutional government, having infinitely more genuine affection for it than the pension-pampered patriotism of such as make merchandise out of "saving the Union."

These considerations are sufficient to inspire in us an effort to write our own histories, expound to our children the principles of fundamental law, and teach them the safeguards of our institutions. The collection and arrangement of the following sketches, with a few crude suggestions of my own, is what I have contributed towards this end.

Except in so far as "history is philosophy teaching by examples," I take little pleasure in it, and should be at no pains to preserve or popularize it. But seeing, as I think I see, the drift and tendencies of these times, and believing that a correct and widespread understanding of the lessons of recent events is the first postulate in determining the remedy for existing and prospective evils, I take an abiding interest in every earnest endeavor to marshal the facts and discover the theories which will explain them—for facts without theories are dead. The field of investigation is white unto harvest, but the laborers for love are few—the hirelings are many.

In order to illustrate the necessity of our reading and writing our own histories, I will undertake to show the main cause of the war between the States, indicating as I go along some of the errors called history, which are circulated and taught to the prejudice of the South.

Northern historians make the negro and the interest of their people in his welfare the underlying cause of the agitation which resulted in the war between the States. Some of them would have us believe that the Federal soldiers, a generation ago, fired with the love of liberty and humanity, came South on a great missionary tour to strike the fetters from the limbs of four million slaves. About fifty per cent. of these missionaries were foreigners, or foreign born, having but crude ideas of the nature of our government; many thousands of them could not even speak our language; some were Hessians, imported from foreign tyrannies expressly for the purpose of war. Many tens of thousands came for money, and hundreds of thousands were compelled to come by law. Not ten per cent. came to free the negro. Those acquainted with the esteem in which he is held at the North have never been deceived by this missionary theory of his emancipation. Listen to the words of De Tocqueville, written about 1835. This Frenchman certainly cannot be accused of having been biased against the Northern States. He says: "Whosoever has inhabited the United States must have perceived, that in those parts of the Union in which the negroes are no longer slaves, they have in nowise drawn nearer to the whites. On the contrary, the prejudice of the race appears to be stronger in the States which have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those States where servitude has never been known. * * * *

"The electoral franchise has been conferred upon the negroes in almost all the States in which slavery has been abolished; but, if they come forward to vote, their lives are in danger. If oppressed, they may bring an action at law, but they will find none but whites amongst their judges; and, although they may legally serve as jurors, prejudice repulses them from that office. The same schools do not receive the child of the black and of the European. In the theatres gold cannot procure a seat for the servile race beside their former masters; in the hospitals they lie apart; and, although they are allowed to invoke the same Divinity as the whites, it must be at a different altar and in their own churches, with their own clergy. The gates of Heaven are not closed against these unhappy beings; but their inferiority is continued to the very confines of the other world; when the negro is defunct his bones are cast aside, and the distinction of condition prevails even in the equality of death. The negro is free, but he can share neither the rights, nor the pleasures, nor the labor, nor the afflictions, nor the tomb of him whose equal he has been declared to be; and he cannot meet him upon fair terms in life or in death."—Democracy in America, page 339.

The negro's freedom was accidental and merely incidental to the main purpose of the war. When the alternative was secession or war, the sentiment of the most rabid abolitionists was voiced by Horace Greeley, who was willing that the "erring sisters depart in peace." Many abolitionists were sincere, though fanatical, and they had too often invoked the doctrine of secession, for the North, to consistently object when the South invoked it. Abraham Lincoln (a shrewd, practical Western countryman, put into his high office to hold the agricultural West against the agricultural South) put the war exclusively upon the ground of saving the Union. He would save the Union, he said, whether it enslaved the negro or freed him. In his inaugural address, March, 1861, he said: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." Eight days before, Sumner, the abolition leader, had said in Congress: "I take this occasion to declare most explicitly that I do not think Congress has any right to interfere with slavery in a State." Neither Lincoln nor Sumner, if they are to be credited with any sincerity, had stumbled upon the policy of freeing the negro; and, if they had, it would have been very impolitic to have then disclosed it, for all the border States would then have joined the South.

The negro was freed as a means to an end. The emancipation proclamation was a "war measure," and, as such, a master-stroke, for it took two hundred and fifty thousand laborers out of the South and put muskets into the hands of nearly two hundred thousand colored troops. This was the difference between success and failure, and was the turning point in the war, as was admitted by Lincoln in his message to Congress, in which he said: * * * * "and for a long time it had been hoped that the rebellion could be suppressed without resorting to it [the policy of emancipation] as a military measure." The negro incidentally caused the defeat of the South; and he was also incidentally a cause of the war, but not the causing cause—that lies deeper, and must be rightly understood at the peril of the nation.