"I, A—— B——, solemnly swear, without any mental reservation or evasion, that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the laws made in pursuance thereof; and that I will not take up arms against the United States, or give aid or comfort, or furnish information, directly or indirectly, to any person or persons belonging to any of the so-styled Confederate States who are now or may be in rebellion against the United States. So help me God."
The other side of the paper contained a military pass, by authority of Lieutenant-colonel J.G. Parkhurst, Military Governor of Murfreesboro. I regarded myself as free from any possible obligation to the Confederates when discharged from their service on account of my wounds at Corinth. In voluntarily taking this oath, I trust I had some just sense of its awful solemnity, for I have never been able to look upon the appeal to God in this judicial form as a light matter. How good men can, satisfy their consciences for the deliberate violation of the oaths which so many of them have deliberately taken to support the Constitution of the United States, I know not. I know what they say in self-defence, for I have often listened to their special pleading. The πρωτον ψευδος, as my good Professor Owen of the Free Academy would term it—the foundation falsehood—of the whole Secession movement, is the doctrine of State Rights, as held by the South. "I owe allegiance to my State, and, when it commands, obedience to the United States." This idea has complete possession of the leading minds, and a belief in it accounts for the conduct of many noble men, who resisted Secession resolutely until their State was carried for the Rebellion. Whenever a State act was passed they yielded, and the people were a unit.
In addition to this fundamental error, they aver that they are engaged in a revolution, not a rebellion; and that the right of revolution is conceded, even by the North, now endeavoring to force them back into an oppressive and hated union; and that if we justify our fathers in forswearing allegiance to the British crown, we should not condemn the South in refusing obedience to a Union already dissolved. If this were as good an argument as it is a fallacious one, ignoring as it does the total dissimilarity in the two cases, and assuming falsely that the Union is already dissolved, it fails to justify the individual oath-breaking of many of the leaders in the revolt. They swore to support the Constitution of the United States at the very time they were meaning to destroy it. Some of them took the oath as Cabinet officers and members of Congress, that they might have the better opportunity to overthrow the government. The truth must be admitted—and here lies the darkest blot upon the characters of the arch-conspirators—they know not the sanctity of an oath, nor regard its solemn pledges and imprecations. They have shown, it has been eloquently said, the utmost recklessness respecting the oath of allegiance to the nation. Men who sneered at the North as teaching a higher law to God which should be paramount to all terrene statutes, have been themselves among the first to hold the supreme law of the land and their oath of fealty and loyalty to that land, abrogated by the lower law of State claims and State interests. It could not be sin in the man of the North, if God and his country ever clashed, to say, that well as he loved his country, he loved his God yet more. But what plea shall shield the sin which claims to love one's own petty State better than either country or God? They have virtually tunneled and honey-combed into ruin the fundamental obligations of the citizen. Jesuitism had made itself a name of reproach by the doctrine of mental reservation, under which the Jesuit held himself absolved from oaths of true witness-bearing, which he at any time had taken to the nation and to God, if the truth to be told harmed the interests of his own order, whose interests he must shield by a silent reservation. The lesser caste, the ecclesiastical clique, thus was held paramount to the entire nation; and oaths of fidelity to the religious order, a mere handful of God's creatures, rode over the rights of the God whose name had been invoked to witness truth-telling, and over the rights of God's whole race of mankind, to have the truth told in their courts by those who had solemnly proclaimed and deliberately sworn that they would tell and were telling it. The State loyalty as being a mental reservation evermore to abrogate the oath of National loyalty:—what is it but a modern reproduction of the old Jesuit portent?
But perjury however palliated, and whether in Old World despots or in New World anarchists, involves, in the dread language of Scripture, the being "clothed with cursing as with a garment." That terrible phrase of inspiration describes, we suppose, not merely profuse profanity, but the earthly deception which attracts the heavenly malediction, the reply of a mocked God to a defiant transgressor, vengeance invoked, and the invocation answered. "So help me God!" is a phrase so often heard in jury-boxes and custom-houses, beside the ballot-box, and in the assumption of each civil office, that we do not at all times gauge its dread depth of meaning. It is not a mere prayer of help to tell the truth, but like the kindred Hebrew words, "So do God to me and more also!" it is an invocation of His vengeance and an abjuration of all His further favor if we palter with the truth. It means, "If I speak not truly and mean not sincerely, so do I forswear and renounce henceforth all help from God. I hope not His help in the cares of life. I hope not His help for the pardon of sin. I ask not His grace,—nor hope from His smile in death,—nor help at His hand into His eternal and holy heavens. All the aid man needs to ask, all the aid which God has to the asking heretofore lent, I distinctly surrender, if He the truth-seeing sees me now truth-wresting." Now the risk of trifling with such a thunderbolt is not small. The many noble, excellent, and Christian men, who may have been heedlessly involved in this Rebellion, in spite of past oaths to the nation, it is not our task to judge. But the act itself, of disregarding such sworn loyalty to their whole country,—the act in its general principles apart from all personal partakers in it,—we may and we must ponder. Now in this respect, if these views of our national oaths be just, our present Rebellion has not been merely treasonable, but its cradle-wrappings, its very swaddling-bands, have been manifold layers of perjury,—its infancy has been "clad with cursing as with a garment."[*] Can a jealous God consolidate and perpetuate a power commenced in perjury?
[*] Rev. W. R. Williams, D.D.
After taking the oath, I told the officer that there were from seven to ten thousand Rebel cavalry at Chattanooga, a detachment of whom would surprise him some morning if he was not wide awake.
Having performed this first loyal act under my oath, I went out in search of Selim. He was not to be found in Murfreesboro, and a further search would have consumed time and thrown me back toward the Rebel lines. Overjoyed at my escape from the last danger, and not reluctant to make this contribution to the cause of my country, I turned my now buoyant steps homeward, under the protection of the Stars and Stripes. I rode into Nashville the 28th of June, with feelings widely different from those which crowded my breast when four months before I had ridden out of it in the rear of General Johnson's retreating army. I was then, though pleased with the excitement and dash of cavalry service, in a cause where my heart was not, in a retreat from my own friends, and becoming daily more identified in the minds of others with the Rebellion; now I was free from its trammels, with my face toward my long-lost home, with a wish in my heart, which has grown more intense daily, to aid my country in her perilous struggle.
A few hours at Nashville enabled me to see my father's friend, who had treated me so kindly when sick, and again thank him for his good deeds, and then I left for home.
I will not ask the reader to follow me in my rapid journey through Louisville and Cincinnati, and thence to New York. Nor need I describe my joyful, tearful, welcome reception by father, mother, sisters, and brother, as of one alive from the dead.
The story of my life in Secessiondom is ended. If the foregoing pages, beside depicting my personal experience, have given any facts of value to my bleeding country—facts as to the diabolical barbarism of Southern society in trampling upon all personal rights—facts showing the intense and resolute earnestness of the whole Southern people in the Rebellion—facts demonstrating the large resources of the Rebels in arms and men, and the absolute military despotism which has combined and concentrated their power—facts of the atrocious character of the guerrilla system organized and legalized among them—facts exhibiting the efficiency of every arm of their military service—facts showing the necessity of restrictions upon the freedom of the press in times of war—facts revealing the demoralizing influence of the doctrine of State Rights in nullifying national fealty, and disregarding the sanctities of an oath—facts which, if universally known and duly regarded, would stir the North to a profounder sense of the desperate and deadly struggle in which they are engaged than they have ever yet felt—then my time and labor will not have been spent in vain.