The Ifs of History Part 7

IF ORSINI'S BOMB HAD NOT FAILED TO DESTROY NAPOLEON III

Edward A. Freeman wrote, after the fall of the second Bonaparte empire: "The work of Richelieu is utterly undone, the work of Henry II and Louis XIV is partially undone; the Rhine now neither crosses nor waters a single rood of French ground. As it was in the first beginnings of northern European history, so it is now; Germany lies on both sides of the German river." This was not by any means the whole of the work wrought by that adventurer on an imperial throne, Napoleon III, through his disastrous war against a united Germany. He accomplished also the slaughter of five hundred thousand men, and the impoverishment of millions. He sounded the death knell of monarchical adventuring in France, which was indeed one good result of the Napoleonic _debacle_, but he also fastened militarism, in the form of excessive and progressively increasing peace armaments, upon Europe, and magnified public debts and taxation to the limit of endurance.

Every event here mentioned was a direct development, not of Napoleon III's original seizure of the French throne, but of the final years, and the eventual overthrow of his power--the overthrow itself due to the Franco-Prussian war. A single event, criminal in its character, might have prevented these results. That great benefits sometimes eventuate from men's crimes is no news, and no longer a marvel, to the philosopher, who, when good comes of evil, is apt to repeat the words, "G.o.d moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform."

The evil deed to which I have here referred, which would have saved the lives of five hundred thousand people and left the river Rhine still washing the confines of France, was the aiming of Orsini's bomb on the evening of the 14th of January, 1858. This bomb was designed to take the life of the emperor of the French. If the attempt had succeeded, and Napoleon had died as Alexander II of Russia and King Humbert of Italy afterward died, there would have been no Franco-German war. The throne of the baby Napoleon IV, who was then less than two years old, very likely would not have endured long; but whether the third republic had immediately arisen, or whether the Orleans Bourbons had been restored to the throne, it would have been found easy to preserve the peace with Prussia and Germany.

For Napoleon III deliberately, and with malignant ingenuity, provoked war with Germany in 1870. There is now no doubt that Bismarck desired such a war. He afterward confessed that he deceived the aged King William in such a way that all chance of peace at Ems was lost. But nevertheless the provocation of Napoleon was direct and deliberate.

His grievance was that the Hohenzollern prince, Leopold, had consented to become a candidate for the vacant throne of Spain. King William withdrew Prince Leopold's candidature. This really destroyed Napoleon's pretext for bringing on a war. But he desired a foreign war in order to forestall revolutionary opposition at home, which threatened to become irresistible. Napoleon thereupon caused his amba.s.sador, Benedetti, insolently, and in a manner quite unbearable, to demand personally from King William a declaration that no Hohenzollern should ever be permitted to become king of Spain. King William treated this insolence as it deserved, and France, thereupon, declared war against Prussia.

What followed, the world knows. The consequences were tremendous. France was maimed of Alsace and Lorraine. Half a million of the flower of the manhood of both nations perished. France taxed herself with five millions of francs of indemnity, and though she has paid the debt to Germany, she still owes it to her own citizens. The difficulties of French government and finance were increased prodigiously and indefinitely by the war and the empire's delinquencies.

And all as a result contingent upon the failure of a criminal act!

Felice Orsini meant to kill Napoleon III, and he and his two companions did kill ten innocent persons, and did wound one hundred and fifty others. Yet the man for whom their bombs were intended--the adventurer who had once been their comrade as a member of the Italian secret society, the Carbonari, but who had afterward betrayed the cause of Italian independence by leading an army into the peninsula and restoring the papal power--escaped unharmed, to wind the trail of his infamous conspiracies through European politics for twelve years longer. If the bomb had done its direful work, one man, utterly without character or conscience, would have died, and five hundred thousand men, mostly honest, good and true, would have lived. As it happened, the one man was spared, to make a vast holocaust of human life twelve years later.

It is, indeed, strange that the averting of a single crime may sometimes precipitate a myriad of other crimes.

CHAPTER XX

IF PRESIDENT BUCHANAN HAD ENFORCED THE LAW IN NOVEMBER, 1860

Speaking of the lighting of the fires of civil war in this country in the years 1860 and 1861, Charles Francis Adams said, in 1873, "One single hour of the will displayed by General Jackson would have stifled the fire in its cradle." The metaphor in the last phrase is peculiar, and strangely Celtic for a Yankee, but the history is true.

Montgomery Blair expressed the idea with greater plainness and vividness in that same year, 1873, in these words, "If we could have held Fort Sumter, there never would have been a drop of blood shed." Both these remarks were made by men who had been in some sense actors in the events to which they referred, and made after years of reflection upon the circ.u.mstances.

It does not seem to Americans of the present generation that there was ever a moment, after the election of Abraham Lincoln, when the Civil War could have been averted. It appears, in retrospect, to have been absolutely inevitable. Yet there was certainly one moment when, if President Buchanan had had the courage to apply the general views which he himself advanced in his annual message to Congress of December 3, 1860, and his special message of January 8, 1861, which explicitly denied the right of secession, a halt might have been called to the growing rebellion.

The secession movement was at first concentrated in the State of South Carolina. That State, all through the winter of 1860-1861, was presenting to the rest of the South an object lesson of successful nullification.

In 1833 South Carolina had ordained nullification, but its ordinance was so instantly and heavily repressed by President Andrew Jackson that the State was absolutely unable to carry it out, or to move hand or foot.

But now, in 1860, it did not merely ordain nullification--it enacted it.

Every Federal judge, every judicial servant, and nearly every Federal official, in South Carolina, resigned, and the nation was left without an agent to enforce its laws, for no new ones were sent in. The United States authority in the State was at an end, save for the custom house at Charleston and Fort Moultrie in Charleston harbor.

As long as South Carolina was let alone, her case plainly said to all the other slave States, "You see we can withdraw from the Union; we have withdrawn from the Union; and the Union takes no step to keep us in; you can do the same thing."

At this time North Carolina and Virginia were opposed to secession.

Governor Sam Houston, of Texas, stood like a rock against it. Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, never seceded. Other States were wavering. A great deal depended on the degree of success which South Carolina, the leader in the revolt, might have. And it was Buchanan who permitted South Carolina's success to become apparently complete, though in the message to which I have referred the president declared that secession was "wholly inconsistent with the Const.i.tution," that "no human power could absolve him (the president) from his duty to enforce the laws," and that the danger of national disruption was upon the country. Buchanan, in his December message, actually quoted Jackson's solemn denunciation of the doctrine that a State had a right to separate itself from the Union.

But while he was making these terrible admissions of his own duty, what was Buchanan doing? Instead of holding up the hands of the nation's representatives in South Carolina, he was weakening them. Instead of strengthening the Federal garrison in Charleston harbor, he permitted it to dwindle until it was powerless to take a single step. Not one act, indeed, did he perform, but contented himself with calling on Congress for legislation to meet the emergency. And out of Congress, of course, he could get nothing, for the Southern representatives would vote for no such legislation, and the Republican members were bent upon waiting until Lincoln, who had been elected president, came in in March, and the northern Democrats were paralyzed with pusillanimity.

So South Carolina went on proving to the other slave States that it could "go it alone." One after another these other States seceded from the Union. Northern a.r.s.enals were stripped of arms. Southern officers went out of the army one by one, and made ready to organize the army of the new Confederacy which was forming under the president's nose.

It was a time for the strong arm, and for quick, decisive, Jacksonian, and not at all squeamish, action. But no such action was taken. The golden moment was lost, and when, three months afterward, Lincoln came in at last, war, with all its horrors, was upon the country.

If the young rebellion had been truly nipped in the bud, as it might have been, by a rigid enforcement, in November and December, 1860, of Federal judicial processes in South Carolina; if the laws of the United States had been enforced in that State at the point of the bayonet, if need be; if a Federal functionary, sustained by an ample force of United States troops, had torn South Carolina's ordinance of secession into shreds on the steps of the capitol at Columbia, with no tender regard for South Carolina's interpretation of the Const.i.tution, is it likely that South Carolina's sister States would have been so prompt at seceding?

Very likely it might not have been necessary to do any of these things.

If Buchanan had merely stood up and said, as Jackson did in 1833, "I shall enforce the laws of the United States in spite of any and all resistance that may be made," there might well have been no more of secession in 1860 or 1861 than there had been of real nullification in 1833.

And if this step had been taken, and there had been no war, what then?

What about slavery? it may be asked. Is it conceivable that northern sentiment would have permitted chattel slavery to continue? Was not war inevitable on that main question alone? Let us see. The sentiment for absolute and sudden emanc.i.p.ation was the product of the war. Lincoln was not an Abolitionist. The Republican party was not Abolitionist.

Without war, but with the Southern States held within the Union, sentiment in the North would have been favorable to a compromise which would have prevented the extension of slavery; and events would surely have brought about a gradual liberation of the blacks in the South, as events soon ended slavery in Brazil and Cuba. The inst.i.tution was doomed, morally and economically.

But there would have been no negro suffrage. That was enforced by conditions which grew out of the war. The South would not have been impoverished, and it could have afforded a gradual education of the negro in such a way as to fit him for free industry, and, in a limited way, for the exercise of the suffrage. There would have been no disturbing reversal of the position of the two races, to be followed by a violent restoration of white supremacy and an accompanying development of inveterate hostility between whites and blacks. The sections would not have drifted apart in industrial conditions and social const.i.tution as they did under the influence of the war; we should not have had, perhaps, a money-mad North to counterbalance a ruined, desolated, disheartened South.

And where, at Antietam, at Gettysburg, at Fredericksburg, at Chattanooga, and on many humbler fields, the flags wave over the even ranks of myriads of soldier graves, the mocking-birds would sing in thickets which the bullet's hiss and the shriek of the sh.e.l.l had never profaned, while their teeming populations of dead men would either be alive to-day or entombed among their loved ones after lives of peaceful usefulness.

CHAPTER XXI

IF THE CONFEDERATES HAD MARCHED ON WASHINGTON AFTER BULL RUN

There have been a great many attempts to excuse or minimize the failure of General Joseph E. Johnston to follow up the tremendous Confederate victory won by his second in command, General G. T. Beauregard, at Bull Run, July 21, 1861. That the Federal army was beaten literally to a pulp there can be no doubt. General Irwin McDowell, who commanded the Union forces, officially reported, after the battle, that all his troops were in flight "in a state of utter disorganization." "They could not," he wired on July 22d, "be prepared for action by to-morrow morning even were they willing. The larger part of the men are a confused mob, entirely demoralized." They were actually running away in such a state of panic that they could not get away, for commissary and ammunition wagons, congressmen's and other spectators' horses and carriages, artillery and sutlers' wagons were blocking the road, and panicstricken soldiers were falling over one another. When General McClellan came to take command after McDowell had been superseded, he reported this state of affairs: "I found no army to command--a mere collection of regiments cowering on the banks of the Potomac, some perfectly raw, others dispirited by defeat."

To reach the spot where the beaten raw recruits were thus cowering, General Johnston and General Beauregard had to advance only twenty miles, over a road every foot of which was well known to them. That the Federal army was in ignominious flight they were well aware, for they reported it joyfully to the government at Richmond. Why did they settle down into utter inaction and allow McClellan to fortify the capital and organize, drill and inspire with hope and confidence a great army?

There are a good many "ifs" in connection with the actual fighting of the battle of Bull Run, but this "if" that comes after it--if the elated and triumphant Confederate army had immediately advanced to the Potomac, invested the intrenchments at Arlington Heights and, very likely, effected a crossing above or near the Great Falls of the river, and flanked the capital of the Union--is the greatest and most interesting of them all.

General Beauregard actually commanded at the battle on the 21st, because General Johnston, who ranked him, had but just arrived on the scene and was unfamiliar with the ground and the disposition of the troops. But he, Johnston, became responsible for the further prosecution of the campaign, once the battle was won. It was in large measure his fault that the fruits of victory were not reaped.

The commonly accepted explanation of the matter is that the Confederates were "almost as much disorganized by victory as the Federals were by defeat;" that they had no fresh troops and no cavalry with which to pursue, and that Arlington Heights were too well fortified to be attacked.

But General Beauregard, sore at the attempt to rob him of the laurels of victory, has been able to show that all of the Confederate brigades of Ewell, Holmes, D. R. Jones and Longstreet, and two regiments of Bonham's brigade, were perfectly fresh and unharmed after the fight; that Early's brigade had hardly been under fire; that new regiments had come up during the day; that the fresh troops in all numbered at least fifteen thousand; that more than half the Confederate army, in fact, had not been engaged--a very unusual proportion after an important battle. "The remaining forces, after a night's rest," says Beauregard himself, "would have been instantly reorganized and found thoroughly safe to join the advance."

Apparently nothing but shame on the Northern side, and an unwillingness on the Southern side to discredit their great generals, has prevented a full acknowledgment of the fatal tactics which prevented an advance on the Potomac after Bull Run.

Now let us see what would have resulted from a Confederate investment of Washington in the summer of 1861. Federal troops had already been attacked in the streets of Baltimore. That city was preponderantly disloyal, and had to be garrisoned with Union troops. Missouri had not yet been won to the Union. Maryland, Delaware and Kentucky, all of which were necessary to the maintenance of the Northern position, were slave States, and their loyalty was doubtful. If the capital of the Union had been taken, all these States, in spite of their previous unwillingness to join the secession movement, would probably have been impelled by strong self-interest to range themselves on the side of the other slave States; and the Confederacy would have been strengthened by the addition of at least four States.

There was an important party among the Confederates from the western Southern States--it was led by Postmaster-General John H. Reagan and included General Albert Sidney Johnston--who believed in advancing at the very outset into Kentucky and making the Ohio River the first line of Southern defense. The plan was rejected by Davis and his advisers. It was an unfortunate rejection. The Confederacy was finally beaten because it was flanked in the west and cut in two at Vicksburg. But if Washington had been captured or invested after Bull Run, it is certain that the Confederate line would have been pushed to the Ohio, and it would probably have been held there. The advantage gained by McClellan in West Virginia would have been lost, for he would practically have found himself within the Confederate lines and would have been compelled to withdraw into Pennsylvania.

Even as matters were, the position of the Union was highly precarious all through the summer and autumn of 1861. There were signs of a demand for peace in the North. Lincoln's own party was turning against him. The sympathy of Europe was rapidly pa.s.sing over to the Confederacy. But so long as Lincoln stood firm in the White House and Congress sat at the capital, "the government at Washington still lived," and the people felt it. The truce so kindly, so inexplicably permitted by Davis and Lee and Johnston enabled McClellan to organize and drill a great army, to fortify the capital, to spread renewed confidence in the North, and, in short, to establish a fulcrum for future victory.

This was not the last time that opportunity knocked at the door of the Confederacy. It knocked again, and loudly, as will be shown in the next chapter, the same year. Either event, taken alone, appears decisive. For as we contemplate the events of the 21st of July, 1861, it quite appears as if the flag of two republics--three, perhaps, and conceivably four--might have been flying over this great American domain to-day if Johnston had pressed his advance down the Warrenton turnpike early Monday morning, July 22d. Wars, divisions, European intrusion, retrogression and darkness would have been America's fate, instead of that imperial advance, with liberty and union, which has dazzled and heartened the whole world.

CHAPTER XXII