At the South, the individual planter, owning and possessing ten slaves, of an aggregate value, it may be, of ten thousand dollars, ranks higher, socially, is regarded indeed, in some subtile way, as a richer man, than the merchant or banker who may be worth his hundred thousand or half million of dollars, provided he has no slaves. To come to be the owner of negroes, and of more and more negroes, is the social ambition, the aristocratic purpose and pretension of the whole Southern people. It is by virtue of this mystical prestige of the institution itself; which couples the charms of wealth with the exercise of authority, or a certain show of official supremacy on the part of the master; which begins by subjugating the imagination of the poorer classes, the whites throughout the South, whose direct interests are wholly opposed to those of the slaveholding class, and ends by subjecting them, morally and spiritually, and binding them in the bonds of the most abject allegiance to the oligarchy of slaveholders. It is in this way that the South is made a unit out of elements seemingly the most incongruous and radically opposed. For a series of years past, the South has sent forth its annual caravan of wealthy planters to visit the watering places, and inhabit the great hotels of the North. Coming in intimate contact with the superior classes of our own population; floating up in the atmosphere of serene self-complacency; radiating, shedding down upon those with whom they chanced to associate, the ineffable consciousness of their own unquestionable superiority; they have communicated without effort on their part, and without suspicion on the part of those who were inoculated by their presence, the exact mould and pressure of their own slaveholding opinion. To this extent, and in this subtile and ethereal way, the North had imposed upon it, unconsciously, a certain respect, amounting to veneration, for what may be called the sanctity of slavery, as it rests in and constitutes the aromal emanation from every Southern mind. Hence not only did we begin this war with the feeling of tenderness toward the Southern man and the Southern woman as brother and sister in the common heritage of patriotism, but, superadded to this, with a special sentiment of tenderness toward that special institution for which it is known that they, our brethren, entertain such special regard.
Now all this is rapidly changing; the outrages inflicted on citizens of the North residing at the South at the opening of the war—hardly paralleled in the most barbarous ages in any other land;—their reckless and bloodthirsty methods of war; their bullying arrogance and presumption; the true exposition, in fine, of the Southern character as it is, in the place of a high-toned chivalry which they have claimed for themselves, and which the people of the North have been tacitly inclined to accord—are all awakening the Government and the people to some growing sense of the real state of the case. Still, however, we are so far dominated by these influences of the past, that we are not fighting the South upon anything like a fair approximation to equal terms. They have no other thought than to inflict on us of the North the greatest amount of evil; the animus of deadly war. We, on the other hand, fight an unwilling fight, with a constant arrière pensée to the best interests of the people whom we oppose—not even as we might construe those interests, but, by a curious tenderness and refinement of delicacy, for those interests as they, from their point of view, conceive them to be. We forbear from striking the South in their most vital and defenceless point, while they forbear in nothing, and have no purpose of forbearance.
Who doubts for a moment that a thousand mounted men, acting with the freedom which characterized the movements of the detachment of Garibaldi in the Italian war, acting with the authorization of the Government, actuated by the spirit of a John Brown or a Nat Turner, sent, or rather let go, into the mountains of Virginia, North Carolina, or Georgia, with the authority to assemble and arm the slaves, retreating whenever assailed to the fastnesses of the mountains, would cause more terror in those States; would do more, in a word, toward the actual conquest in three months' time of those rebel commonwealths, than fifty or a hundred times their number organized in the regular forms of modern warfare, operating against the whites only, and half-committed to the coöperative protection of the institution of slavery, would accomplish in a year? Who doubts for a moment that, if the South could find a like vulnerable point in the openings of our armor, she would make, with no hesitation, the most fearful and tremendous use of her advantage? The whole North is aware of its possession, in its own hands, of this immense engine of destructive power over its enemy. The whole civilized world stands by, beholding us possessed of it, and expecting, as a simple matter of course, that we shall not fail to employ it—standing by indeed, perplexed and confused at the seeming lack of any significance in the war itself, unless we make use of the power at our command in this fortuitous struggle, not only to inflict the greatest injury upon our enemy, but to extinguish forever the cause of the whole strife. Still we forbear to make the most efficient use of our advantage. We for a long time embarrassed and partially crippled ourselves in all our movements by an almost unconscious sense of responsibility for the protection of this very institution of slavery from the disastrous consequences which were liable to fall upon it as the results of the war.
True, we are slowly and gradually recovering from this perversion of opinion. The Emancipation Proclamation was probably issued as soon, or nearly as soon, as the Northern sentiment was prepared to give it even a moral support. Another term had to expire to accustom the same public mind to appropriate the spirit of that document as matter of earnest; to come to regard it as anything more than a mere brutum fulmen, a Pope's bull, as President Lincoln once called it himself, against the comet. Up to this hour, its effect on the war has been far more as a moral influence preparing for a great change of opinion and of conduct, than as a charter of efficient operations. General Thomas's action at the South, just previous to the capture of Vicksburg, began experimentally to inaugurate, on something like an adequate scale, the new programme of practical work in the conduct of the war. Even a month earlier his movement would hardly have been tolerated by the same army, which, just then beginning to appreciate the tremendous difficulty of the enterprise of conquering the South, were ready to accept anything new which promised to augment their own strength and to weaken that of the enemy. Still another term of waiting and suffering is requisite to change the habit of mind which has so long despised and maltreated the negro, before he will be put, in all respects, upon the footing of his own merit as a patriot and a soldier; and before all of his uses as the severest goad in the sides of the hostile South will be fairly appreciated.
Thus in all ways we are only now in the midst of a revolution of opinion, which, when it is accomplished, will be seen to be the greatest triumph of the war. Though we have spoken of this change as slowly and gradually occurring, yet, viewed with reference to the long periods of a nation's life, it is an immense revolution almost instantly effected. We are perhaps already one half prepared adequately to use our tremendous advantage. New disasters may be providentially requisite to quicken our education in the right direction; more punishment for our complicity in the crimes of the South; new incentives to a more perfect love of justice as a people; but every indication points to the early achievement of these substantial victories over ourselves, while, at the same time, we conquer the powerful array of Southern intrepidity and desperation, in behalf of their bad cause, upon the external battle field.
To resume the question of causes. Why is there, and why has there always been at the South this unfortunate prevalence of certain political heresies, as Nullification, Secession, and the exaggerated theory of State Rights?
The answer is still, slavery. The cause of causes, lying back of the whole wide gulf of difference in Northern and Southern politics is still, slavery. From the date of our Constitution, opinion has divided into two great currents, North and South, in behalf of paramount allegiance to the General Government at the North, and paramount allegiance to the several State Governments at the South. The resolutions of '98 and '99 began the public expression of a political heresy, which has gone on augmenting at the South from that day to this. At the North, the Government of the United States was never feared as likely to become injurious in any sense to the inhabitants of the States. Each State fell quietly and harmoniously into its true subordinate orbit, acknowledging gladly and without question the supremacy of the new Government, representative of the whole of the people, in simple accord with the spirit and intention of the Constitution and the Government which the people had formed. At the South, on the contrary, the United States Government was, from the first, looked upon with a suspicion plainly expressed in the speech, for example, of Patrick Henry, in the Virginia convention, which consented reluctantly that the State should come into the Union, lest the National Government might, in some unforeseen contingency, interfere with the interests of the institution of slavery. That fear, the determination to have it otherwise, to make the General Government, on the contrary, the engine and supporter of slavery, the propagandist of slavery, in fine; has been always, since, the animating spirit of Southern political doctrine. A doctrine so inaugurated and developed has endeavored to engraft itself by partisan alliance upon the Democratic party of the North, but always hitherto with an imperfect success. State Rights, as affirmed at the North, has never been a dogma of any considerable power, because it has rested on no substratum of suspicion against the General Government, nor of conspiracy to employ its enginery for special or local designs. At the South it has been vital and significant from the first, and it has grown more mischievous to the last. President Lincoln, in his first message, discussed, ably enough, the right of secession as a mere constitutional or legal right. Others have done the same before and since. The opinion of the lawyer is all very well, but it has no special potency to restrain the nocturnal activities of the burglar. All such discussions are, for the present behalf, utterly puerile. Secession, revolution, the bloody destruction and extinction of the whole nation, were for years before the war foregone determinations in the Southern mind, to be resorted to at any instant at which such extreme measures might become necessary; not merely to prevent any interference with the holy institution; but equally to secure that absolute predominance of the slaveholding interest over the whole political concerns of the country which should protect it from interference, and give to it all the expansion and potency which it might see fit to claim. So long as that absolute domination could be maintained within the administration of the Government, slavery and slaveholders were content to remain nominally republican and democratic—actually despots and unlimited rulers. But a contingency threatened them in the future. The numerical growth of population at the North, the moral convictions of the North—both of these united, or some other unforeseen circumstance, might withdraw the operations of the General Government from their exclusive control. To provide for that possible contingency, the doctrine of paramount allegiance to the individual States, and secondary allegiance merely to the General Government—a perpetual indoctrination of incipient treason—was invented, and has been sedulously taught at the South from the very inception of the Government. Hardly a child in attendance upon his lessons in an 'old-field' schoolhouse throughout that region but has been imbued with this primary devotion to the interests of his State; certainly, not a young lawyer commencing to acquire his profession, and riding the circuit from county court-house to court-house, but has had the doctrine drummed into his ears, of allegiance to his State; and when the meaning and importance of that teaching was inquired for, he was impressively and confidentially informed that the occasion might arise of collision between the South and the General Government on the subject of slavery; and that then it would be of the last importance that every Southern man should be true to his section. Thus the way has been prepared through three generations of instruction, for the precise event which is now upon us, flaunting its pretensions as a new and accidental occurrence.
Meantime, the North has suspected nothing of all this. Her own devotion and loyalty to the General Government have been constantly on the increase, and she has taken it for granted that the same sentiments prevailed throughout the South. Hence the utter surprise felt at the enormous dimensions which the revolt so suddenly took on, and at the unaccountable defection of such numbers of Southern men from the army and the navy at the first call upon sectional loyalty. The question is not one of legal or constitutional rights in accordance with the literal understanding of any parchment or document whatsoever. The most triumphant arguments of President Lincoln or of anybody else have had in the past, and have now, no actual relevancy to the question at the South, and might as well be totally spared. It is purely and simply that the South are in dead earnest to have their own way, unchecked by any considerations of justice or right, or any other considerations of any kind whatsoever—less than the positive demonstration of their physical inability to accomplish their most cherished designs. Even in a technical way, the question is not most intelligibly stated as one of the right of secession; it is the bald question of Paramount Allegiance; it is so understood at the South. The whole action of the South is based upon a thorough indoctrination into a political dogma never so much as fairly conceived of at the North as existing anywhere, until events now developing themselves have revealed it, and which is not now even well understood among us. Back of this indoctrination again, and the sole cause of it, is the existence of the institution of slavery; its own instinct from the first that it had no other ground of defence or hope of perpetuation but physical force; its fears of invasion and its obstinate determination to invade.
The supposition has, until quite recently, extensively prevailed in the Northern mind that slavery is or was regarded at the South as a necessary evil, borne because it was inherited from the past and because its removal had become now next to impossible. A certain school of Northern philanthropists, headed, we believe, by Elihu Burritt, had gone so far, previous to the war, as to form a society and appeal to the Northern people for aid to enable their Southern brethren, through such aid, and finally, perhaps, through the interposition of the General Government, to rid themselves of this monster evil. This handful of kindly individuals must soon have discovered, had they come into actual contact with the prevailing sentiment of the South, that their whole movement was based upon a misapprehension of that sentiment. Thirty-five years ago, and before the Northern abolition movement had taken root in the land, it was a pleasant fiction for the Southern mind to speak deprecatingly of the blame which they otherwise might seem to incur in the mind of mankind for adhering to their barbarous institution; to plead their own conviction of its entire wrongfulness, and to commiserate themselves for their utter inability to free themselves from its weight. A certain considerable freedom of discussion in relation to its abstract merits was allowed, with the tacit condition imposed, however, just as really though not as consciously as now, that slavery itself must not be disturbed. Talk which had in it any touch of genuine feeling in favor of active exertion to rid the country of the institution as an evil, was then as effectually tabooed as it is to-day, with some minor exceptions on the borders of the slaveholding region, in Baltimore, North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, etc., and with the further exception when Virginia was terrified for a few weeks or months by the results of a desperate insurrection. On the strength of these few exceptions, it has been claimed at the South, and still more persistently by Southern sympathizers at the North, that the whole drift and tendency of things at the South prior to the commencement of the abolition agitation at the North were toward gradual emancipation, and that they would have ultimated at an early day in that result. This, too, is a pleasant fiction with the least possible percentage of truth at the bottom of it.
The institution of slavery, under the stimulus given to it by the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney, and the consequent development of the cotton-growing industry—aided, curiously enough, in a certain sense, by the prohibition of the African slave trade, giving rise to the slave-rearing business in Virginia and Maryland—has all along been exhibiting a steady, sturdy, and rapid growth. By the alliance, accidentally as it were, resulting from the prohibition of the slave trade, between the Southern and the Northern slaveholding States, a robustness and consistency were given to the whole slaveholding interest which possibly it might never have had under a different policy. If the foreign importation of slaves had continued, that species of population would gradually have overrun the cotton-raising border of States—would have overrun them to an extent threatening the safety of the institution there by its own plethora—while from the southern line of North Carolina and Tennessee northward, where this extra-profitable industry could not readily be extended, the temptation to the importation of slaves would have been slight, no market existing for the home increase. The hold of the institution would have been constantly weakened there in the affections of the white population; and, in those States, there is a seeming probability that white labor and free labor would have taken the place of the present system, as it did in the States farther north. This would have deprived the Southern belt of cotton-raising and negro-holding States of that sympathy which, under existing circumstances, they have steadily had from their more northern sisters, and favored an early extinction of the system. However this might have been, as things are and have been actually, it is certain that at no period has the growth of the slaveholding institution exhibited any weakness or defect of vitality. Like an infant giant, it has steadily waxed stronger and stronger, and more and more arrogant and aggressive.