Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War
than in demanding that Russian conspirators should be tried by jury.
Nor was the philanthropy of the Northern people, generally speaking, of
an enthusiastic nature. The majority regarded slavery as a necessary
evil; and, if they deplored the reproach to the Republic, they made
little parade of their sentiments. A large number of Southerners
believed it to be the happiest condition for the African race; but the
best men, especially in the border States, of which Virginia was the
principal, would have welcomed emancipation. But neither Northerner nor
Southerner saw a practicable method of giving freedom to the negro.
Such a measure, if carried out in its entirety, meant ruin to the
South. Cotton and tobacco, the principal and most lucrative crops,
required an immense number of hands, and in those hands—his negro
slaves—the capital of the planter was locked up. Emancipation would
have swept the whole of this capital away. Compensation, the remedy
applied by England to Jamaica and South Africa, was hardly to be
thought of. Instead of twenty millions sterling, it would have cost
four hundred millions. It was doubtful, too, if compensation would have
staved off the ruin of the planters. The labour of the free negro,
naturally indolent and improvident, was well known to be most
inefficient as compared with that of the slave. For some years, to say
the least, after emancipation it would have been impossible to work the
plantations except at a heavy loss. Moreover, abolition, in the
judgment of all who knew him, meant ruin to the negro. Under the system
of the plantations, honesty and morality were being gradually instilled
into the coloured race. But these virtues had as yet made little
progress; the Christianity of the slaves was but skin-deep; and if all
restraint were removed, if the old ties were broken, and the influence
of the planter and his family should cease to operate, it was only too
probable that the four millions of Africans would relapse into the
barbaric vices of their original condition. The hideous massacres which
had followed emancipation in San Domingo had not yet been forgotten. It
is little wonder, then, that the majority shrank before a problem
involving such tremendous consequences.
A party, however, conspicuous both in New England and the West, had
taken abolition for its watchword. Small in numbers, but vehement in
denunciation, its voice was heard throughout the Union. Zeal for
universal liberty rose superior to the Constitution. That instrument
was repudiated as an iniquitous document. The sovereign rights of the
individual States were indignantly denied. Slavery was denounced as the
sum of all villainies, the slave-holder as the worst of tyrants; and no
concealment was made of the intention, should political power be
secured, of compelling the South to set the negroes free. In the autumn
of 1860 came the Presidential election. Hitherto, of the two great
political parties, the Democrats had long ruled the councils of the
nation, and nearly the
whole South was Democratic. The South, as regards population, was
numerically inferior to the North; but the Democratic party had more
than held its own at the ballot-boxes, for the reason that it had many
adherents in the North. So long as the Southern and Northern Democrats
held together, they far outnumbered the Republicans. In 1860, however,
the two sections of the Democratic party split asunder. The
Republicans, favoured by the schism, carried their own candidate, and
Abraham Lincoln became President. South Carolina at once seceded and
the Confederacy was soon afterwards established.
It is not at first sight apparent why a change of government should
have caused so sudden a disruption of the Union. The Republican party,
however, embraced sections of various shades of thought. One of these,
rising every day to greater prominence, was that which advocated
immediate abolition; and to this section, designated by the South as
“Black Republicans,” the new President was believed to belong. It is
possible that, on his advent to office, the political leaders of the
South, despite the safeguards of the Constitution, saw in the near
future the unconditional emancipation of the slaves; and not only this,
but that the emancipated slaves would receive the right of suffrage,
and be placed on a footing of complete equality with their former
masters.[1] As in many districts the whites were far outnumbered by the
negroes, this was tantamount to transferring all local government into
the hands of the latter, and surrendering the planters to the mercies
of their former bondsmen.
It is hardly necessary to say that an act of such gross injustice was
never contemplated, except by hysterical abolitionists and those who
truckled for their votes. It was certainly not contemplated by Mr.
Lincoln; and it was hardly likely that a President who had been elected
by a minority of the people would dare, even if he were so inclined, to
assume unconstitutional powers. The Democratic party, taking both
sections together, was still the stronger;
and the Northern Democrats, temporarily severed as they were from their
Southern brethren, would most assuredly have united with them in
resisting any unconstitutional action on the part of the Republicans.
If, then, it might be asked, slavery ran no risk of unconditional
abolition, why should the Southern political leaders have acted with
such extraordinary precipitation? Why, in a country in which, to all
appearances, the two sections had been cordially united, should the
advent to power of one political party have been the signal for so much
disquietude on the part of the other? Had the presidential seat been
suddenly usurped by an abolitionist tyrant of the type of Robespierre
the South could hardly have exhibited greater apprehension. Few
Americans denied that a permanent Union, such as had been designed by
the founders of the Republic, was the best guarantee of prosperity and
peace. And yet because a certain number of misguided if well-meaning
men clamoured for emancipation, the South chose to bring down in ruin
the splendid fabric which their forefathers had constructed. In thus
refusing to trust the good sense and fair dealing of the Republicans,
it would seem, at a superficial glance, that the course adopted by the
members of the new Confederacy, whether legitimate or not, could not
possibly be justified.[2]
Unfortunately, something more than mere political rancour was at work.
The areas of slave and of free labour were divided by an artificial
frontier. “Mason and
Dixon’s line,” originally fixed as the boundary between Pennsylvania on
the north and Virginia and Maryland on the south, cut the territory of
the United States into two distinct sections; and, little by little,
these two sections, geographically as well as politically severed, had
resolved themselves into what might almost be termed two distinct
nations.
Many circumstances tended to increase the cleavage. The South was
purely agricultural; the most prosperous part of the North was purely
industrial. In the South, the great planters formed a landed
aristocracy; the claims of birth were ungrudgingly admitted; class
barriers were, to a certain extent, a recognised part of the social
system, and the sons of the old houses were accepted as the natural
leaders of the people. In the North, on the contrary, the only
aristocracy was that of wealth; and even wealth, apart from merit, had
no hold on the respect of the community. The distinctions of caste were
slight in the extreme. The descendants of the Puritans, of those
English country gentlemen who had preferred to ride with Cromwell
rather than with Rupert, to pray with Baxter rather than with Laud,
made no parade of their ancestry; and among the extreme Republicans
existed an innate but decided aversion to the recognition of social
grades. Moreover, divergent interests demanded different fiscal
treatment. The cotton and tobacco of the South, monopolising the
markets of the world, asked for free trade. The manufacturers of New
England, struggling against foreign competition, were strong
protectionists, and they were powerful enough to enforce their will in
the shape of an oppressive tariff. Thus the planters of Virginia paid
high prices in order that mills might flourish in Connecticut; and the
sovereign States of the South, to their own detriment, were compelled
to contribute to the abundance of the wealthier North. The interests of
labour were not less conflicting. The competition between free and
forced labour, side by side on the same continent, was bound in itself,
sooner or later, to breed dissension; and if it had not yet reached an
acute stage, it had at least
created a certain degree of bitter feeling. But more than all—and the
fact must be borne in mind if the character of the Civil War is to be
fully appreciated—the natural ties which should have linked together
the States on either side of Mason and Dixon’s line had weakened to a
mere mechanical bond. The intercourse between North and South, social
or commercial, was hardly more than that which exists between two
foreign nations. The two sections knew but little of each other, and
that little was not the good points but the bad.
For more than fifty years after the election of the first President,
while as yet the crust of European tradition overlaid the young shoots
of democracy, the supremacy, social and political, of the great
landowners of the South had been practically undisputed. But when the
young Republic began to take its place amongst the nations, men found
that the wealth and talents which led it forward belonged as much to
the busy cities of New England as to the plantations of Virginia and
the Carolinas; and with the growing sentiment in favour of universal
equality began the revolt against the dominion of a caste. Those who
had carved out their own fortunes by sheer hard work and ability
questioned the superiority of men whose positions were no guarantee of
personal capacity, and whose wealth was not of their own making. Those
who had borne the heat and burden of the day deemed themselves the
equals and more than equals of those who had loitered in the shade;
and, esteeming men for their own worth and not for that of some
forgotten ancestor, they had come to despise those who toiled not
neither did they spin. Tenaciously the Southerners clung to the
supremacy they had inherited from a bygone age. The contempt of the
Northerner was repaid in kind. In the political arena the struggle was
fierce and keen. Mutual hatred, fanned by unscrupulous agitators,
increased in bitterness; and, hindering reconciliation, rose the fatal
barrier of slavery.
It is true that, prior to 1860, the abolitionists were not numerous in
the North; and it is equally true that by
many of the best men in the South the institution which had been
bequeathed to them was thoroughly detested. Looking back over the years
which have elapsed since the slaves were freed, the errors of the two
factions are sufficiently manifest. If, on the one hand, the
abolitionist, denouncing sternly, in season and out of season, the
existence of slavery on the free soil of America, was unjust and worse
to the slave-owner, who, to say the least, was in no way responsible
for the inhuman and shortsighted policy of a former generation; on the
other hand the high-principled Southerner, although in his heart
deploring the condition of the negro, and sometimes imitating the
example of Washington, whose dying bequest gave freedom to his slaves,
made no attempt to find a remedy.[3]
The latter had the better excuse. He knew, were emancipation granted,
that years must elapse before the negro could be trained to the