But warlike casuists can't discuss,
If we beat them, or they beat us;
We swear we beat, they swear we lie—
We'll tell you more on't by and by!
THE CAUSES OF THE REBELLION.
When Jefferson Davis and his coadjutors so defiantly and with so much apparent confidence entered on the path of rebellion, they probably did not foresee the abyss into which they were about to plunge. They rushed eagerly forward at the first call to battle; but they hardly paused to consider how fearful a thing it is to light the flames of civil war among a people long accustomed to peace and security; to marshal opposing armies drawn from the late happy dwellings of the same community, arraying in deadly conflict father against son, and brother against brother; to add fiery devastation and reckless destruction of property horrid carnage and the saddest bereavements of all kinds; and to replace brotherhood of a common country, a common ancestry, and a glorious history, with the relentless enmities engendered by rebellion and revolution. What wrongs and sufferings, endured by our brethren of the South, or likely to imposed on them by the National Government, would have been sufficient to steel their hearts against the heavy calamities they have encountered and inflicted, or to justify the immense waste desolation already suffered in both sections, in consequence of this most unnatural and fratricidal war? The most ordinary charity would lead to the belief, that if the mighty woes which have followed in the bloody path of the rebellion could have been anticipated, even the bold, bad leaders, and still more the infatuated people, would have suffered much and hesitated long before assuming the dread responsibility. Hate itself, though reënforced and supported by all other passions of a fiendish nature, would have stood aghast at the overwhelming avalanche of horrors which hung ready to be precipitated on our unhappy country. It is hardly within the limits of human depravity, that evils of such magnitude, attended by such world-wide results, should be attributable to the deliberate will and arbitrary action of even the worst members of the human family. For the credit of our common humanity, let it be admitted that the authors of the fatal movement did really believe In their avowed doctrine of peaceable secession, and that they could not have had the least idea of the immense proportions the civil war was destined to assume, nor of the extent of ruin and misery it would necessarily drag in its horrid train. And if the prominent leaders did not intend all the sad consequences of their wicked act of treason, still less can they be considered personally responsible for the fatal popular enthusiasm which has so thoroughly sustained them in their section. Though full of hate and animated by a spirit of infernal mischief, they had not the capacity to stir a nation so profoundly, except from the fact that they were dealing with minds already well prepared for their impassioned appeal, and with elements which had been wrought into discord by causes long preëxisting.
In the midst of this stupendous conflict, individuals seem to be as insignificant and powerless to control it, as if they stood, awed and subdued by the warring elements of nature, and compelled to wait until these should expend their fury and of themselves subside. Thirty millions of people have been suddenly and unexpectedly divided, and the sundered parts have been thrown into fierce and deadly antagonism. Belligerent passions rage and boil among them with all the ungovernable power of the angry waves when the sea is lashed by the destructive tempest. The throes of the suffering nation are as terrible as those of the trembling earth, when, by some internal convulsion, its very foundations seem to be rocked on the fiery waves of the central abyss, and every living creature on its surface becomes agitated with profound dismay. States have been temporarily but rudely torn from their long and peaceful connections with sister States, and great rents in the political soil, filled with the bodies of slaughtered citizens, mark the lines of separation. Vast armies have been assembled and organized, and have met each other in the shock of battle, on fields made slippery with fraternal blood, where tens of thousands have fallen to rise no more—swept down by the relentless storm of iron hail with which brother has greeted brother in this most unholy war. The measured tramp of the armed hosts has shaken the continent; and the vengeful cries of the unnatural strife have disturbed the inmost peaceful recesses of its great central plains and mountains. From California to Texas; from Colorado to New Mexico; from Maine to New Orleans; from the great lakes to the coasts of the Carolinas; and along the measureless length of 'the father of waters' and his great tributaries, the gathering armies have marched or sailed, and swarmed to the beat of the drum and the sound of the trumpet. More than a million of men, on both sides, have been engaged in these tremendous movements, which unhappily correspond too well in their unexampled magnitude with the physical character of our magnificent country. Civil war has sacrilegiously usurped the mighty instrumentalities of modern peaceful life; and the bloody and destructive work of these vast armies is not less gigantic in scale than have been the ordinary operations of our wonderful industry and our ever-increasing commerce. The sacrifice of life, the destruction of property, the desolation of extensive regions of beautiful and fertile country, the vast expenditure of public means, all concur to characterize this as the grandest and most terrible phenomenon of the kind that has ever occurred in the history of man. To us, who are in the midst of it, and destined to be involved in its results, whatever they may be, it is a subject of deep and awful interest; and while the scenes of the momentous drama are continually shifting around us and presenting new spectacles of slaughter and disaster every day, it is hardly possible to maintain the calmness necessary for an impartial appreciation of the causes which have been sufficiently powerful to turn the destructive energies of so great a nation upon itself, causing it to rend and destroy its own body politic, so recently rejoicing in unexampled prosperity and happiness. Some gigantic power, wielding strength enough to produce the tremendous results already visible, must be somewhere hidden at the source of these grand phenomena. In the physical world, a small quantity of water or a few kegs of powder, flashing into steam or gas by the application of heat, may be used to overthrow the most stupendous material fabrics which the labor and genius of men have ever been able to erect. What fatal means of destruction, and what traitorous hand have been employed to drill and charge the solid columns, or to mine the deep foundations of that beautiful and majestic structure of liberty, which our fathers reared for us with so much labor and sacrifice?
There is only one force adequate to the destructive work—the force of false and mischievous ideas. Ideas have in them the elements of all power. They alone move the moral and social world. Penetrating every crevice of the social structure, they have the force of attraction and repulsion; they consolidate and strengthen, or, like frost and heat, they rend and crumble the hardest material, either slowly or suddenly, as circumstances and conditions may permit or require. They have in them all the terrible might, with all the explosive and dangerous quickness, which belong to the most destructive of physical forces. When, in any community, ideas are harmonious, they have an organizing power wholly independent of their soundness or of their ultimate stability; but when discordant and conflicting, they produce disorganization, ruin, and chaos.
Unfortunately for our country, opposite and hostile ideas have been growing up among us from the beginning of our national existence—nay, from the very hour when the first cargo of slaves was landed on our shores in the earliest days of our colonial history. Conflicting systems have naturally grown out of these hostile ideas, which have thus embodied themselves in the visible forms appropriate to their respective natures. The colonial authorities protested against the policy of importing slaves, which the mother country persisted in maintaining, until powerful interests were gathered around it, and opinions were thus nurtured to support and defend the fatal error. Slaveholding communities arose out of this sinister beginning; they flourished and became powerful States; and they finally presented the anomaly of maintaining a noble struggle for national independence, avowedly based upon the broadest principle of human right. They aggregated themselves, eventually, into a federal union—a political nationality founded on 'the corner stone' of liberty, and not of slavery. In view of all the circumstances, this was a wonderful result; but the old original opposition, which had been incapable of resisting slavery in the days of colonial infancy and weakness, had not yet been subdued on the day when the nation arrived at its majority and assumed the rights of manhood. The venerable patriots of the revolution were men of the most enlightened and liberal views on the subject; so much so, indeed, as to shame the degeneracy of their unworthy successors in those States which still retain the slave institution. With the general consent, in the Constitution of 1787, the germs of freedom were planted, while at the same time, apparently as a matter of course, the flourishing tree of slavery was effectually girdled, and the axe was already laid at its root. Three very simple provisions effectually secured this momentous result. The provision for stopping the slave trade in 1808, and the antagonist clause for opening wide the gates of our country to the immigration of free white men, together with that which restricted the representation of slave populations in the proportion of three to five—these cardinal provisions marked the certain doom of slavery. In the lapse of time, and with the operation of ordinary social causes, the result was as certain and inevitable as any other effect of natural laws. In spite of the universal prevalence of slavery at first, free labor pushed itself forward and won its way, until, in more than half the original States, slave labor had receded before it and disappeared forever. The wisdom of those great fundamental provisions of our Constitution has been fully vindicated by the results of eighty years' experience. They have worked smoothly and progressively, in perfect conformity with that universal social law which, has made slavery a temporary and transitional institution wherever it has existed among civilized nations.
That such a law exists can hardly be questioned. Its operation is apparent, not only in the partial experience of our own country, but in that of all others where the natural social tendencies have had unimpeded sway. No one has ever denied its existence among the white races; for there it has operated invariably to bring certain emancipation, whenever any nation has reached the proper position in the scale of progress. The rule is universal; history presents no exception. But it has been supposed that slavery of the African to the white man is not subject to this great historical law, on account of the difference of race, whether that difference be fundamental and ineradicable, or whether it be only the consequence of material conditions operating through successive centuries. Neither reason nor experience, however, can be invoked to sustain this supposed exception to the general law. Except in Spanish America, African slavery has disappeared from the dependencies of European powers; and even there, every one knows, the conditions of slavery are far more favorable to emancipation than in the United States. Yet here, a majority of the original thirteen colonies have wholly discarded slavery, and given themselves up to the dominion of free white men; while others among those known as border States, notwithstanding their apparent immobility, have long been unconsciously preparing to follow in the same path of safety. Even without the rebellion, it is demonstrable, we believe, that the border States could not long have resisted the necessity for gradual, but complete emancipation. The civil war makes it more speedy, not more certain.
In order to establish the principle that slavery, in any part of the United States, is destined to be an exception to that general law which decrees universal emancipation as a certain result, it would be necessary to show the negro to be incapable of improvement; for if he be destined to progressive existence at all, it follows that, sooner or later, he will reach a condition in which he no longer can or ought to be held in subjection or subordination of any kind; and this, too, without the supposition of any moral change or improvement on the part of the slave owner. Indeed, the most usual and plausible, if not also the most truly substantial of all excuses or justifications for enslaving the African, in any form, has, from the beginning, been predicated on the fact that his subordination to the superior intelligence of the white man is calculated to improve him physically, morally, and intellectually. The capacity of improvement thus admitted, the logical result must be eventual liberation. This result is bound up in the very nature of things, and must inevitably be developed at some time or other, as proved by all history, as well as by any rational analysis of human character and intellect. But, only one half the argument has been employed to bring the mind to this irresistible conclusion. We have omitted all examination of the subject in that other aspect which has reference to industrial, economical, and moral considerations affecting the vital interests of the superior race. We need not say how much the discussion of these would serve to strengthen the argument and confirm the conclusion already stated.
Now, it is apparent, this reasoning being admitted, that the attempt to perpetuate slavery, which in its nature is temporary and transitional, is contrary to the palpable laws of social existence and progress, and, if persisted in beyond a certain point, must inevitably lead to violence and disorder. Nature, the supreme authority, by her unalterable laws, wills and decrees one thing; man, in his ignorance and audacity, attempts the opposite. Conflict must necessarily follow; but the decrees of the higher power will be inexorably enforced; they will sweep away every structure, great or small, which man, in all the pride of his puny strength and glimmering wisdom, may vainly seek to place as an obstruction in their path. But, when the Southern people adopted this false idea, that slavery could be perpetuated and made the foundation of stable institutions, they not only placed themselves in conflict with the decrees of natural law, which was the most important and fatal error, but they also indicated hostility to those vital provisions of the Constitution to which reference has already been made. No thoughtful observer of events in this country will require evidence to sustain this assertion. The constant evasion of the law prohibiting the slave trade, and the impunity with which it was frequently and sometimes openly violated, as well as the known public opinion throughout the South on this subject and on that of European immigration, are quite sufficient to establish it. The violent resistance, by fraud and even bloodshed, to the settlement of the Territories by free white men, and the determined effort to establish the law of slavery in every region, against even the vote of the majority, and without any actual interest or necessity for so doing, evince too plainly that the Southern people were not prepared to accept the results of the proper workings of the Constitution, which gave preponderance, in the number of States and in Federal representation, to the ever-increasing free white men, against the relatively diminishing numbers of the slaves and their owners. This inequality of power was continually becoming greater, and evidently could not be avoided or remedied under the Constitution, without a complete reversal of the policy of its framers, and of the contemporaneous construction which they placed on it.