The Brothers' War Part 1

The Brothers' War.

by John Calvin Reed.

PREFACE

I would explain the real causes and greater consequences of the b.l.o.o.d.y brothers' war. I pray that all of us be delivered, as far as may be, from bias and prejudice. The return of old affection between the sections showed gracious beginning in the centennial year. In the war with Spain southerners rallied to the stars and stripes as enthusiastically as northerners. Reconcilement has accelerated its pace every hour since. But it is not yet complete. The south has these things to learn:

1. A providence, protecting the American union, hallucinated Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Mrs. Stowe, Sumner, and other radical abolitionists, as to the negro and the effect of southern slavery upon him, its purpose being to destroy slavery because it was the _sine qua non_ of southern nationalization, the only serious menace ever made to that union. This nationalization was stirring strongly before the federal const.i.tution was adopted. The abolitionists, as is the case with all forerunners of great occurrences, were trained and educated by the powers directing evolution, and they were constrained to do not their own will but that of these mighty powers.

2. The cruel cotton tax; the const.i.tution amended to prevent repentance of uncompensated emanc.i.p.ation, which is the greatest confiscation on record; the resolute effort to put the southern whites under the negroes; and other such measures; were but natural outcome of the frenzied intersectional struggle of twenty-five years and the resulting terrible war. Had there been another event, who can be sure that the south would not have committed misdeeds of vengeance against citizens of the north?

3. We of the south ought to tolerate the freest discussion of every phase of the race question. We should ungrudgingly recognize that the difference of the northern ma.s.ses from us in opinion is natural and honest. Let us hear their expressions with civility, and then without warmth and show of disrespect give the reasons for our contrary faith. This is the only way for us to get what we need so much, that is, audience from our brothers across the line. Consider some great southerners who have handled most exciting sectional themes without giving offence. There is no invective in Calhoun's speech, of March 4, 1850, though he clearly discerned that abolition was forcing the south into revolution. Stephens, who had been vice-president of the Confederate States, reviewed in detail soon after the brothers' war the conflict of opinion which caused it, and yet in his two large volumes he spoke not a word of rancor. When congress was doing memorial honor to Charles Sumner, it was Lamar, a southerner of southerners, that made the most touching panegyric of the dead. And the other day was Dixon's masterly effort to prove that the real, even if unconscious, purpose of the training at Tuskegee is ultimately to promote fusion, which the southern whites deem the greatest of evils. His language is entirely free from pa.s.sion or asperity. He wonders in admiration at the marvellous rise of Booker Washington from lowest estate to unique greatness. And he gives genuine sympathy to Professor DuBois, in whose book, "The Souls of Black Folk," as he says, "for the first time we see the naked soul of a negro beating itself to death against the bars in which Aryan society has caged him."

These examples of Calhoun, Stephens, Lamar, and Dixon should be the emulation of every southerner speaking to the nation upon any subject that divides north and south. This done, we will get the audience we seek. It was this which not long ago gave Clark Howell's strong paper opposing negro appointments to office in the south prominent place in _Collier's_, and which last month obtained for Dixon's article just mentioned the first pages of the _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_. When we get full audience, other such discussions as those of Howell and Dixon, and that in which Tom Watson, in the June number of his magazine, showed Dr. Booker Washington a thing or two, will be digested by the northern public, to the great advantage of the whole country.

The last I have to say here is as to differing opinions upon social recognition of prominent negroes. We of the south give them great honor and respect. Could not Mr. Roosevelt have said to us of Georgia protesting against his entertainment of Booker Washington, "Have I done worse than you did when you had him to make that address at the opening of your Exposition in 1895, and applauded it to the echo?" Suppose, as is true, that hardly a man in the south would eat at the same table with Dr.

Washington or Professor DuBois, how can that justify us in heaping opprobrium upon a northern man who does otherwise because he has been taught to believe it right? What has been said in denunciation of the president and Mr. Wanamaker for their conduct towards Booker Washington seems to me rather a hullabaloo of antediluvian moss-backs than the voice of the best and wisest southerners.

Amid all her gettings let the south get complete calmness upon everything connected with the race question--complete deliverance from morbid sensitiveness and intemperate speech in its discussion.

Now here is what the north should learn:

1. Slavery in America was the greatest benefit that any large part of the negro race ever received; and sudden and unqualified emanc.i.p.ation was woe inexpressible to nearly all the freedmen. The counter doctrine of the abolitionists who taught that the negro is equal to the Caucasian worked beneficently to save the union, but it ought now to be rejected by all who would understand him well enough to give him the best possible development. The fifteenth amendment was a stupendous blunder. It took for granted that the southern negroes were as ready for the ballot as the whites. The fact is that they were as a race in a far lower stage of evolution. Consider the collective achievement of this race, not in savage West Africa, but where it has been long in contact with civilization, in Hayti, and the south. Hayti has been independent for more than a hundred years. "Sir Spencer St. John ... formerly British Minister Resident in Hayti, after personally knowing the country for over twenty years, claims that it is ... in rapid decadence, and regards the political future of the Haytians as utterly hopeless. At the termination of his service on the island, he said: 'I now quite agree with those who deny that the negro can ever originate a civilization, and who a.s.sert that with the best of educations he remains an inferior type of man.'

"According to Sir Spencer, Hayti is sunk in misery, bloodshed, cannibalism, and superst.i.tion of the most sensual and degrading character.

Ever since the republic has been established Haytians have been opposed to progress, but of recent years retrogression has been particularly rapid."[1]

In the south, where reversion to West African society has been checked by white government, this is a full catalogue of the main inst.i.tutions evolved by the freedmen. They have provided themselves with cheaply built churches, in which their frequent and long worship is mainly sound and fury. In the pinch of crop cultivation or gathering they flock away from the fields to excursion trains and "protracted meetings." Perhaps their most noticeable inst.i.tutions are "societies," some prohibiting hiring as domestic servants, except where subsistence cannot otherwise be had, and others providing the means of decent burial. Compare these feeble negro race performances with such white inst.i.tutions, made in the same territory and at the same time, as Memorial Day, which the north has adopted; the Ku Klux Klan; enactment of stock laws when the freedmen's refusal to split rails made much fencing impossible; and the white primary.

Inst.i.tutions--what I have just called the collective achievement of a race--mark in their character its capacity for improvement, and also its plane of development. When the negro, with his self-evolved inst.i.tutions, is compared with the race which has furnished itself with fit organs of self-government all the way up from town-meeting to federal const.i.tution, and is now about to crown its grand work with direct legislation, it is like comparing the camel dressed to counterfeit an elephant, of which dear old Peter Parley told us in his school history, with a real elephant, or trying to make a confederate dollar in an administrator's return of 1864 count as a gold one.

And yet the negro, Professor Kelly Miller, replying to Tom Watson, a.s.sumes that Franks, Britons, Germans, Russians, and Aztecs have severally been in historical times as incapable as West Africans of rising from savagery and crossing barbarism into civilization. He outdoes even this--he would have it believed that Hayti is now a close second behind j.a.pan in striding progress.

Surely the good people of the north ought to learn the difference between the negro race and the white. There is a small cla.s.s of exceptional negroes which is a.s.sumed by a great many at the north to be most fair samples of the average negro of the south. Dr. Washington and Professor DuBois severally lead the opposing sections of this cla.s.s. It consists of authors, editors, preachers, speakers, some who with small capital in banking, farming, and other business, have each by Booker Washington's blazon been exalted into a national celebrity, and others. Its never-sleeping resolve, fondly cherished by the greater part, is to "break into" white society and some day fuse with it. Its members are nearly all at least half white, and many are more than half white. But when a Bourbon snub to one of them is received, as it often is, with dignity and proper behavior, Mr. Louis F. Post, and a few more, exclaim to the country, "See how this coal-black and pure negro excels his would-be superiors!" This man, almost white, is to them a coal-black, genuine, unmixed negro. Ought not attention to facts incontrovertibly cardinal to rule here as everywhere else? To what is due the great accomplishment of Dumas, Dougla.s.s, and Booker Washington--to their negro blood or to their white blood? If half negro blood can do so well, why is it that pure negro blood does not do far better?

I have seen it a.s.serted that Professor Kelly Miller is pure negro. His head has the shape of a white man's. The greyhound crossed once with the bull-dog, as Youatt tells, and each succeeding generation of offspring recrossed with pure greyhound until not a suggestion of bull-dog was visible, occurs to me. Thus there was bred a greyhound, possessing the desired trait of the bull-dog. Who can say that there is not among the professor's American ancestors one of half white blood? If there is in fact no such, he is, in his high attainment, almost a _lusus naturae_.

The north, by due attention, will discern that the small number const.i.tuting what I provisionally name the upper cla.s.s of negroes, is hardly involved in the race question.

The negroes in the south outside of the upper cla.s.s--the latter not amounting to more than five percent of the entire black population--are slowly falling away from the benign elevation above West Africa wrought by slavery. That they are here, is felt every year to be more injurious. They greatly r.e.t.a.r.d the evolution of a white-labor cla.s.s, which has become the head-spring of all social amelioration in enlightened communities. There appears to be but one salvation for them if they stay, which is fusion with the whites. Though Herbert Foster, and a few others, confidently a.s.sume that our weakening Caucasian strain would be bettered by infusion of African blood, we see that while amalgamation would bless the negro it would incalculably injure us. It would be stagnation and blight for centuries, not only to the south but to the north also. Northerners are more and more attracted to the south by climate and other advantages, and intermarriage between the natives of each section increases all the while.

The powers, protecting America, inscrutably to contemporaries kept busy certain agencies that saved the union. It seems to me that these same powers are now in both sections increasing white hostility to the blacks, of purpose to prevent their getting firm foothold and becoming desirable in marriage to poorer whites. One will think at once of the frequent lynchings in the south. But let him also think of how the strikers in Chicago were moved to far greater pa.s.sion by the few black than the many white strike-breakers, the late inexplicable anti-negro riot in New York City, and the negro church dynamited the other day in Carlisle, Indiana.

These powers, who have protected our country from the first settlement of the English upon the Atlantic coast down to the present time, appear to speak more plainly every day the fiat, "If Black and White are not separated, Black shall perish utterly." I am convinced that at the close of the century, if this separation has not been made long before, Professor Willc.o.x's apparently conservative estimate of what will then be their numbers will prove to be gross exaggeration. In my judgment he comes far short of allowing the anti-fusion forces their full destructiveness.

Let the north purge itself from all delusion as to the negro, and help the south do him justice and loving kindness, by transplanting him into favorable environment.

2. It is high time that the Ku Klux be understood. When in 1867 it was strenuously attempted to give rule to scalawags and negroes, the very best of the south led the unanimous revolt. Their first taste of political power incited the negroes to license and riot imperilling every condition of decent life. In the twinkling of an eye the Ku Klux organized. It mustered, not a.s.sa.s.sins, thugs, and cutthroats, as has been often alleged, but the choicest southern manhood. Every good woman knew that the order was now the solitary defence of her purity, and she consecrated it with all-availing prayers. In Georgia we won the election of December, 1870, in the teeth of gigantic odds. This decisive deliverance from the most monstrous and horrible misrule recorded among Anglo-Saxons was the achievement of the Ku Klux. Its high mission performed, the Klan, burning its disguises, ritual, and other belongings, disbanded two or three months later. Its reputation is not to be sullied by what masked men--bogus Ku Klux, as we, the genuine, called them--did afterwards. The exalted glorification of Dixon is not all of the Klan's desert. It becomes dearer in memory every year. I shall always remember with pride my service in the famous 8th Georgia Volunteers. I was with it in the b.l.o.o.d.y pine thicket at First Mana.s.sas, where it outfought four times its own number; at Gettysburg, where, although thirty-two out of its thirty-six officers were killed or wounded, there was no wavering; and in many other perilous places, the last being Farmville, two days before Appomattox, where this regiment and its sworn brother, the 7th Georgia, of Anderson's brigade, coming up on the run, grappled hand-to-hand with a superior force pushing back Mahone, and won the field. But I am prouder of my career in the Ku Klux Klan. The part of it under my command rescued Oglethorpe county, in which the negroes had some thousand majority, at the presidential election of 1868,--the very first opportunity,--and held what had been the home of William H. Crawford, George R. Gilmer, and Joseph H. Lumpkin, until permanent victory perched upon the banners of the white race in Georgia.

3. I observe that the north begins in some sort the learning of the two lessons above mentioned. But now comes one which seems hard indeed.

Calhoun, Toombs, Davis, and the other pro-slavery leaders, ought to be thoroughly studied and impartially estimated. They were not agitators, nor factionists, nor conspirators. They were the extreme of conservatism.

Their conscientious faithfulness to country has never been surpa.s.sed.

Their country was the south, whose meat and bread depended upon slavery.

The man whose sight can pierce the heavy mists of the slavery struggle still so dense cannot find in the world record of glorious stands for countries doomed by fate superiors in moral worth and great exploit. In their careers are all the comfort, dignity, and beauty of life, supreme virtue, and happiness of that old south, inexpressibly fair, sweet and dear to us who lived in it; and in these careers are also all the varied details of its inexpressibly pathetic ruin. What is higher humanity than to grieve with those who grieve? Brothers and sisters of the north, you will never find your higher selves until you fitly admire the t.i.tanic fight which these champions made for their sacred cause, and drop genuine tears over their heart-breaking failure.

The foregoing summarizes the larger obstacles which bar true sight of the south and the north. The devastation attending Sherman's march beyond Atlanta, the alleged inhumanity at Andersonville, and many other things that were bitterly complained of during the brothers' war, and afterwards, by one side or the other, seem to me almost forgotten and forgiven.

Brothers who wore the gray with me, brothers who wore the blue against me, I would have all of you freed from the delusions which still keep you from that perfect love which Webster, Lincoln, and Stephens gave south and north alike. I am sure that you must make the corrections indicated above before you can rightly begin the all-important subject of this book. With this admonition I commit you to the opening chapter, which I hope you will find to be a fit introduction.

JOHN C. REED.

ATLANTA, GA., September, 1905.

THE BROTHERS' WAR

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

The inhabitants of the English colonies in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are all of the same race, language, religion, and inst.i.tutions of government. Such h.o.m.ogeneousness, as has long been recognized, works powerfully for the political coalescence of separate communities. With the adjacent ones of the colonies just mentioned there has always been trend to such coalescence, as is impressively ill.u.s.trated by the recent establishment of the Australian Federation. The thirteen colonies out of which the United States developed were likewise English, and there was the same h.o.m.ogeneousness in their population, which made in due time, and also maintained for a few generations, a union of them all--a continental union. But there had crept in a heterogeneity, overlooked for many years, during which time it acquired such force that it at last overcame the h.o.m.ogeneousness just emphasized and carried a part of the inhabitants of the United States out of the continental union. African slavery dying out in the north, but prospering in the south, was this heterogeneity. By a most natural course the south grew into a nation--the Confederate States--whose end and purpose was to protect slavery, which had become its fundamental economical interest, against the north standing by the original union, and which having gained control of the federal government was about to use its powers to extirpate slavery. The continental or Pan-American nation--the American union, as we most generally think of it--could not brook dismemberment, nor tolerate a continental rival, and consequently it warred upon and denationalized the Confederate States. The last two sentences tell how the brothers' war was caused, what was its stake on each side, and the true result. This compendious summary is to serve as a proposition, the proof of which we now purpose to outline.

Our first step is to emphasize how the free-labor system which prevailed in the north, and the slave-labor system which prevailed in the south, were utterly incompatible. Free labor is far cheaper and more efficient than slave labor. It had consequently superseded slavery in the entire enlightened world. But certain exceptional peculiarities of climate, soil, and products planted made slavery profitable in the south.

To maintain the market value of the slaves two things were needed: (1) the compet.i.tion of free labor and the import of cheap slaves must be rigorously prevented; (2) a vast reserve of virgin soil, both to replace the plantations rapidly wearing out and to afford more land for the multiplying slaves. The fact last mentioned made it vital to the south to appropriate such parts of the soil of the Territories as suited her cotton and other staples. Therefore whenever she made such an appropriation she turned it into a slave State; for thus the compet.i.tion of free labor would be effectually excluded therefrom. The much more rapid increase of her population made appropriation of lands in the Territories likewise vital to the north. Hers were all free-labor interests, as the south's were all slave-labor interests; and whenever the former appropriated any of the Territories, she made a State prohibiting slavery in order to protect her free-labor interests. The north was not excluded by nature from any part of the public domain as the other section was. Her free labor could be made productive everywhere in it, and she really needed the whole.

Thus the brothers of the north and the brothers of the south commenced to strive with one another over dividing their great inheritance. The former wanted lands for themselves, their sons, and daughters in all the Territories possible made into States protecting their free-labor system; the latter wanted all of the Territories suiting them made into States protecting their slave-labor system. What ought especially to be recognized by us now is that this contention was between good, honest, industrious, plain, free-labor people on one side, and good, honest, industrious, plain, slave-labor people on the other, those on each side doing their best, as is the most common thing in the world, to gain and keep the advantage of those of the other. It was natural, it was right, it was most laudable that every householder, whether northerner or southerner, should do his utmost to get free land for himself and family.

This fact--which is really the central, foundation, and cardinal one of all the facts which brought the brothers' war--must be thoroughly understood, otherwise the longer one contemplates this exciting theme the further astray from fact and reasonableness he gets.

The foregoing shows in brief how there came an eager contention for the public lands between parents, capitalists, workers, employers, manufacturers, and so forth, bred to free labor and hostile to slavery on the one side--that is, in the northern States; and the same cla.s.ses bred to slavery and hostile to free labor on the other side--that is, in the southern States. The contention grew to a grapple. As this waxed hotter the combating brothers became more and more angry, called one another names more and more opprobrious; and at last each side, in the height of righteous indignation, denounced their opponents as enemies of country, morality, and religion. Here the root-and-branch abolitionist and the fire-eater begin their several careers, and get more and more excited audience, the former in the north and the other in the south. Both were emissaries of the fates who had decreed that there must be a brothers'

war, to the end that slavery, the only peril to the American union, be cast out.

Under the necessity of defending slavery against free labor there came early an involuntary concretion of the southern States. This was very plainly discernible when the epoch-making convention was in session. It was the beginning of a process which has been well-named nation-making.

After a while--say just before Toombs takes the southern lead from Calhoun--it had developed, as we can now see, from concretion into nationalization--not nationality, yet--of the south. It was bound, if slavery was denied expansion over the suitable soil of the Territories and the restoration of its runaways, to cause in the ripeness of time secession and the founding of the Confederate States. But there was another nationalization, older, of much deeper root and wider scope--what we have already mentioned as the continental or Pan-American. Its origin was in an involuntary concretion of all the colonies--both the northern and the southern--antedating the commencement of the southern concretion mentioned a moment ago. While southern nationalization was the guardian of the social fabric, the property, the occupations, the means of subsistence of the southern people, the greater nationalization was not only the guardian of the same interests of the northern people, but it had a higher office. This was in due time to give the whole continent everlasting immunity from war and all its prospective, direct, and consequential evils, by federating its different States under one democratic government--this higher office was to perpetuate the American union. This continental nationalization had probably ripened into at least the inchoate American nation by 1776. It was this nation, as I am confident the historical evidence rightly read shows, that made the declaration of independence and the articles of confederation, carried the Revolutionary war on to the grandest success ever achieved for real democracy, and then drafted and adopted the federal const.i.tution. The const.i.tution was not the creator of this nation, as lawyers and lawyer-bred statesmen hold, but the union and the const.i.tution are both its creatures. This nation is constantly evolving, and as it does it modifies and unmakes the const.i.tution and system of government of the United States, and the same of each State, as best suits itself. Why do we not trace our history from the first colonial settlements down to the present, and learn that the nation develops in both substance and form, in territory, in aims and purposes, not under the leading hand of conventions, congress, president, State authority, of even the fully decisive conquest of seceding States by the armies of the rest, but by the guidance of powers in the unseen, which we generally think of as the laws of evolution? To ill.u.s.trate: For some time after I had got home from Appomattox I was disheartened, as many others were, at the menace of centralization. A vision of Caleb Cushing's man on horseback--the coming American Caesar--seared my eyeb.a.l.l.s for a few years. But after the south had been actually reconstructed I was cheered to note that the evolutionary forces maintaining and developing local self-government were holding their own with those maintaining and developing union. To-day, you see the people of different localities all over the north--in many cities, in a few States--driven forward by a power which they do not understand, in a struggle which will never end till they have rescued their liberties from the party machine wielded everywhere by the public-service corporations.

To resume what we were saying just before this short excursion. Of course when the drifting of the south toward secession became decided and strong, Pan-American nationalization set all of its forces in opposing array. As soon as the southern confederacy was a fact, the brothers' war began. I emphasize it specially here that this war was mortal rencounter between two different nations.

The successive stages by which her nationalization impelled the south to secession are roughly these:

1. The concretion mentioned above probably pa.s.ses into the beginning of nationalization when the south was aroused by the resistance of the free-labor States to the admission of Missouri as a slave State. With a most rude shock of surprise she was made to contemplate secession.

Although there was much angry discussion and the crisis was grave, you ought to note that the root-and-branch abolitionist and fire-eater had not come. That crisis over, which ended the first stage, there was apparently profound peace between the free-labor communities and the slave-labor communities for some while.

2. The south rises against the tariff which taxes, as she believes, her slave-grown staples for the profit of free-labor manufacturers. Here the next stage begins. Perhaps the advent of nullification, proposed and advocated by Calhoun as a union weapon with which a State might defend itself against federal aggression, signalizes this stage more than anything else.