The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences Part 1

The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences.

by Hilary Abner Herbert.

PREFATORY NOTE.

"Livy extolled Pompey in such a panegyric that Augustus called him Pompeian, and yet this was no obstacle to their friendship." That we find in Tacitus. We may therefore picture to ourselves Augustus reading Livy's "History of the Civil Wars" (in which the historian's republican sympathies were freely expressed), and learning therefrom that there were two sides to the strife which rent Rome. As we are more than forty-six years distant from our own Civil War, is it not inc.u.mbent on Northerners to endeavor to see the Southern side? We may be certain that the historian a hundred years hence, when he contemplates the lining-up of five and one-half million people against twenty-two millions, their equal in religion, morals, regard for law, and devotion to the common Const.i.tution, will, as matter of course, aver that the question over which they fought for four years had two sides; that all the right was not on one side and all the wrong on the other. The North should welcome, therefore, accounts of the conflict written by candid Southern men.

Mr. Herbert, reared and educated in the South, believing in the moral and economical right of slavery, served as a Confederate soldier during the war, but after Appomattox, when thirty-one years old, he told his father he had arrived at the conviction that slavery was wrong. Twelve years later, when home-rule was completely restored to the South (1877), he went into public life as a Member of Congress, sitting in the House for sixteen years. At the end of his last term, in 1893, he was appointed Secretary of the Navy by President Cleveland, whom he faithfully served during his second administration.

Such an experience is an excellent training for the treatment of any aspect of the Civil War. Mr. Herbert's devotion to the Const.i.tution, the Union, and the flag now equals that of any soldier of the North who fought against him. We should expect therefore that his work would be pervaded by practical knowledge and candor.

After a careful reading of the ma.n.u.script I have no hesitation in saying that the expectation is realized. Naturally unable to agree entirely with his presentation of the subject, I believe that his work exhibits a side that ent.i.tles it to a large hearing. I hope that it will be placed before the younger generation, who, unaffected by any memory of the heat of the conflict, may truly say:

Tros Tyriusve, mihi nullo discrimine agetur.

JAMES FORD RHODES.

BOSTON, _November_, 1911.

PREFACE

In 1890 Mr. L. E. Chittenden, who had been United States Treasurer under President Lincoln, published an interesting account of $10,000,000 United States bonds secretly sent to England, as he said, in 1862, and he told all about what thereupon took place across the water. It was a reminiscence. General Charles Francis Adams in his recent instructive volume, "Studies Military and Diplomatic," takes up this narrative and, in a chapter ent.i.tled "An Historical Residuum," conclusively shows from contemporaneous evidence that the bonds were sent, not in 1862, but in 1863, but that, as for the rest of the story, the residuum of truth in it was about like the speck of moisture that is left when a soap bubble is p.r.i.c.ked by a needle.

General Adams did not mean that Mr. Chittenden knew he was drawing on his imagination. He was only demonstrating that one who intends to write history cannot rely on his memory.

The author, in the following pages, is undertaking to write a connected story of events that happened, most of them, in his lifetime, and as to many of the most important of which he has vivid recollections; but, save in one respect, he has not relied upon his own memory for any important fact. The picture he has drawn of the relations between the slave-holder and non-slave-holder in the South is, much of it, given as he recollects it. His opportunities for observation were somewhat extensive, and here he is willing to be considered in part as a witness.

Elsewhere he has relied almost entirely upon contemporaneous written evidence, memory, however, often indicating to him sources of information.

Nowhere are there so many valuable lessons for the student of American history as in the story of the great sectional movement of 1831, and of its results, which have profoundly affected American conditions through generation after generation.

An effort is here made to tell that story succinctly, tracing it, step after step, from cause to effect. The subject divides itself naturally into four historic periods:

1. The anti-slavery crusade, 1831 to 1860.

2. Secession and four years of war, 1861 to 1865.

3. Reconstruction under the Lincoln-Johnson plan, with the overthrow by Congress of that plan and the rule of the negro and carpet-bagger, from 1865 to 1876.

4. Restoration of self-government in the South, and the results that have followed.

The greater part of the book is devoted to the first period--1831 to 1860, the period of causation. The sequences running through the three remaining periods are more briefly sketched.

Italics, throughout the book, it may be mentioned here, are the author's.

Now that the country is happily reunited in a Union which all agree is indissoluble, the South wants the true history of the times here treated of spread before its children; so does the North. The mistakes that were committed on both sides during that lamentable and prolonged sectional quarrel (and they were many) should be known of all, in order that like mistakes may not be committed in the future. The writer has, with diffidence, attempted to lay the facts before his readers, and so to condense the story that it may be within the reach of the ordinary student. How far he has succeeded will be for his readers to say. The verdict he ventures to hope for is that he has made an honest effort to be fair.

The author takes this occasion to thank that accomplished young teacher of history, Mr. Paul Micou, for valuable suggestions, and his friend, Mr. Thomas H. Clark, who with his varied attainments has aided him in many ways.

HILARY A. HERBERT.

WASHINGTON, D. C., _March_, 1912.

INTRODUCTION

The Const.i.tution of the United States attempts to define and limit the power of our Federal Government.

Lord Brougham somewhere said that such an instrument was not worth the parchment it was written on; people would pay no regard to self-imposed limitations on their own will.

When our fathers by that written Const.i.tution established a government that was partly national and partly federal, and that had no precedent, they knew it was an experiment. To-day that government has been in existence one hundred and twenty-three years, and we proudly claim that the experiment of 1789 has been the success of the ages.

Happy should we be if we could boast that, during all this period, the Const.i.tution had never been violated in any respect!

The first palpable infringement of its provisions occurred in the enactment of the alien and sedition laws of 1798. The people at the polls indignantly condemned these enactments, and for years thereafter the government proceeded peacefully; the people were prosperous, and the Union and the Const.i.tution grew in favor.

Later, there grew up a rancorous sectional controversy about slavery that lasted many years; that quarrel was followed by a b.l.o.o.d.y sectional war; after that war came the reconstruction of the Southern States.

During each of these three trying eras it did sometimes seem as if that old piece of "parchment," derided by Lord Brougham, had been utterly forgotten. Nevertheless, and despite all these trying experiences, we have in the meantime advanced to the very front rank of nations, and our people have long since turned, not only to the Union, but, we are happy to think, to the Const.i.tution as well, with more devotion than ever.

It may be further said that, notwithstanding all the bitter animosities that for long divided our country into two hostile sections, that wonderful old Const.i.tution, handed down to us by our fathers, was always, and in all seasons, in the hearts of our people, and that never for a moment was it out of mind. Even in our sectional war Confederates and Federals were both fighting for it--one side to maintain it over themselves as an independent nation; the other to maintain it over the whole of the old Union. In the very madness of reconstruction the fundamental idea of the Const.i.tution, the equality of the States, ultimately prevailed--this idea it was that imperatively demanded the final restoration of the seceded States, with the right of self-government unimpaired.

The future is now bright before us. The complex civilization of the present is, we do not forget, continually presenting new and complex problems of government, and we are mindful, too, that, for the people who must deal with these problems, a higher culture is required, but to all this our national and State governments seem to be fully alive. We are everywhere erecting memorials to our patriotic dead, we have our "flag day" and many ceremonies to stimulate patriotism, and, throughout our whole country, young Americans are being taught more and more of American history and American traditions.

The essence of these teachings presumably is that time has hallowed our Const.i.tution, and that experience has fully shown the wisdom of its provisions. In this land of ours, where there are so much property and so many voters who want it, and where the honor and emoluments of high place are so tempting to the demagogue, there can be no such security for either life, liberty, or property as those safeguards which our fathers devised in the Const.i.tution of the United States.

Our teachers of history must therefore expose fearlessly every violation in the past of our Const.i.tution, and point out the penalties that followed; and, above all, they cannot afford to condone, or to pa.s.s by in silence, the conduct of those who have heretofore advocated, or acted on, any law which to them was _higher than the American Const.i.tution_.

One of the most serious troubles in the past, many think our greatest, was our terrible war among ourselves. Perhaps, after the lapse of nearly fifty years, we can all now agree that if our people and our States had always, between 1830 and 1860, faithfully observed the Federal Const.i.tution we should have not had that war. However that may be, the crusade of the Abolitionists, which began in 1831, was the beginning of an agitation in the North against the existence of slavery in the South, which continued, in one form or another, until the outbreak of that war.

The negro is now located, geographically, much as he was then. If another attempt shall be made to project his personal status into national politics, the voters of the country ought to know and consider the mistakes that occurred, North and South, during the unhappy era of that sectional warfare. This little book is a study of that period of our history. It concludes with a glance at the war between the North and South, and the reconstruction that followed.

The story of Cromwell and the Great Revolution it was impossible for any Englishman to tell correctly for nearly or quite two centuries. The changes that had been wrought were too profound, too far-reaching; and English writers were too human. The changes--economic, political, and social--wrought in our country by the great controversy over slavery and State-rights, and by the war that ended it, have been quite as profound, and the revolution in men's ideas and ways of looking at their past history has been quite as complete as those which followed the downfall of the government founded by Cromwell. But we are now in the twentieth century; history is becoming a science, and we ought to succeed better in writing our past than the Englishmen did.

The culture of this day is very exacting in its demands, and if one is writing about our own past the need of fairness is all the more imperative. And why not? The ma.s.ses of the people, who clashed on the battlefields of a war in which one side fought for the supremacy of the Union and the other for the sovereignty of the States, had honest convictions; they differed in their convictions; they had made honest mistakes about each other; now they would like their histories to tell just where those mistakes were; they do not wish these mistakes to be repeated hereafter. Nor is there any reason why the whole history of that great controversy should not now be written with absolute fairness; the two sections of our country have come together in a most wonderful way. There has been reunion after reunion of the blue and the gray. The survivors of a New Jersey regiment, forty-four years after the b.l.o.o.d.y battle of Salem Church, put up on its site a monument to their dead, on one side of which was a tablet to the memory of the "brave Alabama boys," who were their opponents in that fight. One of those "Alabama boys" wrote the story of that battle for the archives of his own State, and the State of New Jersey has published it in her archives, as a fair account of the battle.

The author has attempted to approach his subject in a spirit like this, and while he hopes to be absolutely fair, he is perfectly aware that he sees things from a Southern view-point. For this, however, no apology is needed. Truth is many-sided and must be seen from every direction.

Nearly all the school-books dealing with the period here treated of, and now considered as authority, have been written from a Northern stand-point; and many of the extended histories that are most widely read seem to the writer to be more or less partisan, although the authors were apparently quite unconscious of it. Attempts made here to point out some of the errors in these books are, as is conceived, in the interests of history.