Every international dispute about rights, about principles, that could not be adjusted by diplomacy, has been settled by war. Allegiances of people, forms of government, boundaries of kingdoms and republics, all these time out of mind have been submitted to the arbitrament of the sword, and the results—treaties, not voluntary, but enforced at the cannon's mouth—have been upheld by diplomats and parliaments and courts, by every tribunal that has authority to speak for law and order and the peace of the world.
It does not lie in the mouth of him who believed in the right of a State in 1861 to secede, to deny now that the question was settled by the war, and no formal treaty was necessary as evidence of what all the world could see. We had the right as sovereign States to submit to the arbitrament of war. We did it, and, like others who have gone to war, we must abide the issue. So that now if a State should attempt to secede those who should cast their fortunes with it would be rebels.
But not so in 1861. Then the right of a State to withdraw from the Union was an open question. Nothing better illustrates the situation at that time than this incident in the life of General Lee:
General Lee's Rebuke.
When the great war was over and defeat had come to the armies Lee had led, he was visiting the house of a friend in Richmond. With that love of children that always characterized him, the old hero took upon his knee a fair-haired boy. The proud mother, to please her guest, asked the child, "Who is General Lee?" Parrot-like the expected answer came, "The great Virginian who was a patriot, true to his native State." And then came the question, "Who is General Scott?" and the reply, "A Virginian who was a traitor to his country."
Putting down the child and turning to the mother, the general said:
"Madam, you should not teach your child such lessons. I will not listen to such talk. General Scott is not a traitor. He was true to his convictions of duty, as I was to mine."
What General Lee here said and what even when the fires of the late war were still smoldering he would have the mothers of the South teach to their children was that he and General Scott were both right, because each believed himself to be right.
And that is precisely what that noble son of New England, Charles Francis Adams, himself a gallant Union soldier, has more recently said in a public address—that the North and the South were both right, because each believed itself right. And such is to be the verdict of history. We were all patriots settling on the field of battle a constitutional question that could be settled in no other way. Public opinion is already moving, and moving rapidly, to the mark of that final verdict.
With the interment of Confederate dead at Arlington much bitterness disappears. The comradeship of death is unassailable by the arguments of the living.