The Civil War was a Johnstown flood, that made everything before it look like the breaking of a mill dam on Coon Creek; but the Civil War established nothing—literally nothing. Two peoples of the same blood and ideals had merely theorized themselves apart and into a war brought on by shadows bent on holding office and hence incapable of telling the truth. The two things they thought they were fighting to decide are just as strongly fixed to-day as they then were, to wit: that the town clerk is still the man to attend to the town pump, and that white is not black and never will be.
The only thing settled was whether there should be one town pump or forty-five, and whether it were better for the white to work the black under a life lease or a yearly one. The ideals, aims, purposes and principles of the Republic are the same to-day as they were before the big fight, and that it was a family scrap in which both sides would quickly double on any meddling intruder was demonstrated to the undoing of the arrogant Spaniard, who first trampled on the Republic’s ideals until she got to the fighting point and then foolishly brought on the war, believing, among other things, that the “Southern Confederacy would rise again” and help her in the fight.
And the Confederacy arose—at Manila and Santiago.
But so much has happened since Jackson and New Orleans, and so few really knew on what a narrow thread the life of all American ideals hung in those gloomy January days of 1815, and so long has it been crowded out for meaner things that it needs telling again, that the children may know it. For the grown people of to-day, born under lucky stars, made possible by the genius of Jackson’s work and the glory of his sacrifices, have been so busy picking up dollars that they have neglected to look up, even at the stars. This story is to show them the star.
The gamest thing God ever gave to the human race was Andrew Jackson. I hesitate, in a brief story like this, to attempt to tell the hardships, sickness, sufferings, mutiny, bickerings, jealousies, insults, lies, treacheries, butcheries called battles, and starvations that he overcame to save his people and his country from Indians, Spain and England, and the Republic from that spirit of disintegration beginning with the Hartford Convention and ending with nullification. For be it known to all men and remembered, not in malice, but in forgiveness, that the first secession convention that ever assembled to dissolve this Union of States came together at Hartford, Conn., the very day Jackson was fighting to the death to save the Union at New Orleans.
The beautiful Horse Shoe Bend (Tohopcka), on the Tallapoosa River, Alabama—the last stand of the Creek Nation, and where, in a bloody fight, it was destroyed by Jackson.
(Taken April 9, 1906, for Trotwood’s Monthly by C. W. Thomas, Dadeville, Ala.)
And I say, not in malice, for there was in this, as there was in the other attempts of it in 1861, no question either of right or of wrong. Nation—Country—Republic—Empire—these are all merely abstract things bound up in the concrete idea of a home. As long as the home maximizes and the Nation minimizes, the latter is safe. But when it is reversed, when doubt and uncertainty and discontent come in, the abstract thing is lost in the struggle for the concrete. And every home idea has the right to fight for its existence.
But winning is another thing, and if they fail no man has any license to whisper traitor.