Slavery and Four Years of War Part 23

"I tremble for my country when I reflect that G.o.d is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever. The way, I hope, is preparing, under the auspices of Heaven, for a total emanc.i.p.ation."

The anti-slavery societies when they first met in annual convention (1804) proclaimed that

"Freedom and slavery cannot long exist together."

John Quincy Adams, in 1843, prophesied:

"I am satisfied slavery will not go down until it goes down in blood."(124)

Abraham Lincoln, at the beginning of his celebrated debate with Douglas (1858) expressed his belief that this nation could not exist "half slave and half free." He had, however, made the same declaration in a letter to a Kentucky friend to whom he wrote:

"Experience has demonstrated, I think, that there is no peaceful extinction of slavery in prospect for us... .

"On the question of liberty as a principle, we are not what we have been. When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that 'all men are created equal'

a _self-evident truth;_ but now, when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the maxim '_a self-evident lie_.' The Fourth of July has not quite dwindled away; it is still a great dy for burning fire-crackers. That spirit which desired the peaceful extinction of slavery has itself become extinct with the occasion and the men of the Revolution... . So far as peaceful, voluntary emanc.i.p.ation is concerned, the condition of the negro slave in America, scarcely less terrible to the contemplation of the free mind, is now as fixed and hopeless of change for the better as that of lost souls of the finally impenitent. The autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free Republicans, sooner than will our masters voluntarily give up their slaves.

"Our political problem now is, 'Can we as a nation continue together _permanently_--forever--half slave, and half free'? The problem is too mighty for me. May G.o.d in his mercy superintend the solution."

(Under G.o.d, within ten years after this was written, Lincoln was the instrument for the solution of the _mighty problem!_)

This was a fitting prelude to his speech on slavery at Springfield, Illinois (June, 1858), wherein he said:

"In my opinion it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and pa.s.sed. '_A house divided against itself cannot stand_.'

"I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the house to fall--but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other."(125)

Seward of New York compressed the issue between freedom and slavery into a single sentence in his Rochester speech (October 25, 1858):

"It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either an entirely slave holding nation or entirely a free labor nation."(126)

But statesmen were not the only persons who predicted the downfall of slavery in the Republic; not the only persons who contributed to that end, nor yet the only persons who foretold its overthrow in blood.

The inst.i.tution had grown to arrogant and intolerant as to brook no opposition, and its friends did not even seek to clothe its enormities.

A leading Southern journal, in 1854, honestly expressed the affection in which slavery was held:

"We cherish slavery as the apple of our eye, and we are resolved to maintain it, peaceably, if we can, forcibly, if we must."(127)

The clergy and religious people of the North came to believe slavery must, in the mill of justice, be ground to a violent death, in obedience to the will of G.o.d.

Theodore Parker, the celebrated Unitarian divine, a personal friend of John Brown, on hearing, in Rome, of his failure, trial, and sentence to the scaffold, in a letter to Francis Jackson of Boston, November 24, 1859, gave vent to what was then regarded as fanatical prophecy, but now long since fulfilled:

"The American people will have to march to rather severe music, I think, and it is better for them to face it in season. A few years ago it did not seem difficult, first to check slavery, and then to end it without bloodshed. I think this cannot be done now, nor ever in the future. All the great charters of _Humanity_ have been writ in blood. I once hoped that American _Democracy_ would be engrossed in less costly ink; but it is plain, now, that our pilgrimage must lead through a Red Sea, wherein many a _Pharoah_ will go under and perish... .

"Slavery will not _die a dry death_. It may have as many lives as a cat; at last, it will dies like a mad dog in a village, with only the enemies of human kind to lament its fate, and they too cowardly to appear as mourners."(128)

Parker was fast descending, from broken health, into the grave, but in the wildest of his dreams he did not peer into futurity far enough to see that within a single decade the "_sin of the nation_"

would be washed out, root and branch, in blood; and that in Virginia --the State that hung John Brown--at the home of its greatest Governor, Henry A. Wise, there would be seen "a Yankee school-marm"

teaching free negroes--sons of Africa--to read and write--to read the Holy Bible, and she the humble daughter of "Old John Brown."(129)

One sample of prophecy of what _disunion_ would be, we give from a speech of Henry Winter Davis of Maryland:

"It would be an act of suicide, and sane men do not commit suicide.

The act itself is insanity. It will be done, if ever, in a fury and madness which cannot stop to reason. _Dissolution_ means death, the suicide of Liberty, without a hope of resurrection--death without the glories of immortality; with no sister to mourn her fall, none to wrap her decently in her winding-sheet and bear her tenderly to a sepulchre--_dead Liberty_, left to all the horrors of corruption, a loathsome thing, with a stake through the body, which men shun, cast out naked on the highway of nations, where the tyrants of the earth who feared her living will mock her dead, pa.s.sing by on the other side, wagging their heads and thrusting their tongues in their cheeks at her, saying, 'Behold _her_ now, how _she_ that was fair among the nations is fallen! is fallen!'-- and only the few wise men who loved her out of every nation will shed tears over her desolation as they pa.s.s, and cast handfuls of earth on her body to quiet her manes, while we, her children, stumble about our ruined habitations to find dishonorable graves wherein to hide our shame. Dissolution? How shall it be? Who shall make it? Do men dream of Lot and Abraham parting, one to the east and the other to the west, peacefully, because their servants strive? That States will divide from States and boundary lines will be marked by compa.s.s and chain? Sir, that will be a portentous commission that shall settle that part.i.tion, for cannon will be planted at the corners and grinning skeletons be finger- posts to point the way. It will be no line gently marked on the bosom of the Republic--some meandering vein whence generations of her children have drawn their nourishment--but a sharp and jagged chasm, rending the hearts of commonwealths, lacerated and smeared with fraternal blood. On the night when the stars of her constellation shall fall from heaven the blackness of darkness forever will settle on the liberties of mankind in this Western World. _This is dissolution!_ If such, Sir, is _dissolution_ seen in a gla.s.s darkly, how terrible will it be face to face? They who reason about it are half crazy now. They who talk of it do not mean it, and dare not mean it. They who speak in earnest of a dissolution of this Union seem to me like children or madmen. He who would do such a deed as that would be the maniac without a tongue to tell his deed, or reason to arrest his steps--an instrument of mad impulse impelled by one idea to strike his victim. Sir, _there have been maniacs who have been cured by horror at the blood they have shed_."(130)

This eloquent, patriotic, word-picture of _dissolution_, intended to deter those who so impetuously and glibly talked of it, was not, as the sequel proved, overdrawn. When delivered it was not generally believed that a dissolution of the Union could or would be attempted.

In the Presidential campaigns of 1856 and 1860, as well as in Congress, there was much eloquence displayed in line with the above; few of the orators, however, believed that dissolution, with all the wild terrors of war, was near at hand. But there were some men in public life who early comprehended the destiny awaiting the politically storm-racked Republic, and as it approached, boldly gave the opinion that "_a little blood-letting would be good for the body politic_."(131)

The story of the war which secession inaugurated remains to be in part narrated in succeeding chapters, portraying the impetuous rush to battle; the unparalleled heroism of the mighty hosts on either side; the slaughter of men; the h.e.l.l of suffering; the bitter tears; the incalculable sorrow; the billions expended; the destruction of property; the alternating defeats and triumphs; the final victory of the Union arms; the overthrow of state-rights, nullification, secession--disunion; the emanc.i.p.ation of four million human slaves, and the annihilation in the United States of the inst.i.tution of slavery, including all its baleful doctrines, whether advanced by partisan, pro-slavery statesmen, or advocated by learned politicians, or upheld by church or clergy in the name of the prophets of Holy Writ or of Christ and his Apostles, or expounded by a tribunal clothed in the ermine, majesty, dignity, and power of the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

Abraham Lincoln, whose beautiful character is illumined in the intense light of a third of a century of heightened civilization, will be immortalized through all time as G.o.d's chiefest instrument in accomplishing the end.

In closing this chapter we desire again to remind the reader that in 1861 the Congress of the United States, by a two thirds majority in each branch, voted to so amend the Const.i.tution as to make forever unalterable its provisions for the recognition and perpetuation of human bondage; that if the amendment thus submitted had been ratified by three fourths of the States, this nation would have been the first and only one in the history of the world wherein the right to enslave human beings was fundamental and decreed to be eternal.

This amendment, guaranteeing perpetual slavery, was the tender made by Union men in 1861 to avert disunion and war. It was the humiliating and unholy pledge offered to a slave-loving people to induce them to remain true to the Const.i.tution and the Union. In the providence of G.o.d the amendment was not ratified, nor was a willingness to accept it shown by the defiant South. On the contrary, it was spurned by it with singular unanimity and deserved contempt. A nation to be wholly slave was alone acceptable to the disunionists; and to establish such a nation the hosts were arrayed on the one side; to preserve and perpetuate the Union and to overthrow the would-be slave nation, they were also, thank G.o.d, arrayed on the other.

This was the portentous issue made up--triable by the tribunal of last resort from which there is no earthly appeal.

Promptly, even enthusiastically, did the South respond to the summons to battle, and with a heroism worthy of a better cause did it devote life and property to the maintenance of the Confederacy.

But from mountain, hillside, vale, plain, and prairie, from field, factory, counting-house, city, village, and hamlet, from all professions and occupation alike came the sons of freedom, with the cry of "Union and Liberty," under one flag, to meet the opposing hosts, heroically ready to make the necessary sacrifice that the unity of the American Republic should be preserved.

The effort to establish a slave nation in the afternoon of the nineteenth century resulted in a civil war unparalleled in magnitude, and the bloodiest in the history of the human race. In the eleven seceding States the authority of the Const.i.tution was thrown off; the National Government was defied; former official oaths of army, navy, and civil officers were disregarded, and other oaths were taken to support another government; the public property of the United States was seized in the seceding States as of right, Cabinet officers of the President a.s.sisting in the plunder; Senators and Representatives in Congress, while yet holding seats, making laws, and drawing pay, plotted treason, and, later, defiantly joined the Confederacy; sequestration acts were pa.s.sed by the Confederate Congress, and citizens of the United States were made aliens in the Confederacy, and their property there was confiscated, and debts due loyal men North were collected for the benefit of the Confederate Treasury; piratical vessels, with the aid and connivance of boastful _civilized_ monarchies of Europe, destroyed our commerce and drove our flag from the high seas; above a half million of men fell in battle, and another half million died of wounds and disease incident to war; above sixty thousand Union soldiers died in Southern prisons; the direct cost of the Rebellion, paid from the United States Treasury, approximated seven billions of dollars, and the indirect cost to the loyal people, in property destroyed, etc., was at least equal to seven billions more. Fairly estimated, slaves not considered, the people of the seceding States expended and lost in the prosecution and devastations of the war more than double the expenditures and losses of the North; imagination cannot compa.s.s or language portray the suffering and sorrow, agony and despair, which pervaded the whole land. All this to settle the momentous question, whether or not human slavery should be fundamental as a domestic, social, and political inst.i.tution.

Thus far slavery has been our theme, and the war for the suppression of the Rebellion only incidentally referred to, but in succeeding chapters slavery will only be incidentally referred to, and the war will have such attention as the scope of the narrative permits.

(124) _Life of Seward_, vol. i., p. 672.

(125) A. Lincoln, _Complete Works_, vol. i., pp. 215, 240, 251.

(126) Seward's _Works_, vol. iv, p. 289.

(127) _Hist. U. S._ (Rhodes), vol. i, p. 469.

(128) _Life of Parker_ (Weiss), vol. ii., p. 172-4 (406).

(129) _Civil War in America_ (Draper), vol. i, 565-6.

(130) Speech of Henry Winter Davis, House of Representatives, Aug.

7, 1856.

(131) Zachariah Chandler, 1860.

CHAPTER II Sumter Fired on--Seizure by Confederates of Arms, a.r.s.enals, and Forts--Disloyalty of Army and Navy Officers--Proclamation of Lincoln for Seventy-Five Thousand Militia, and Preparation for War on Both Sides

The _Star of the West_, a merchant vessel, was sent from New York, with the reluctant consent of President Buchanan, by Lieutenant- General Winfield Scott, Commander-in-Chief of the army, to carry re-enforcements and provisions to Fort Sumter. As this vessel attempted to enter Charleston harbor (January 9, 1861) a shot was fired across its bows which turned it back, and its mission failed.

"Slapped in the mouth" was the opprobrious epithet used to express this insult to the United States. This was not the shot that summoned the North to arms. It was, however, the first angry gun fired by a citizen of the Union against his country's flag, and it announced the dawn of civil war. When this shot was fired, only South Carolina had pa.s.sed an Ordinance of Secession; the Confederate States were not yet formed.