Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War
responsibilities of freedom, and that those years would impoverish the
South. It appears to have been forgotten by the abolitionists that all
races upon earth have required a protracted probation to fit them for
the rights of citizenship and the duties of free men. Here was a
people, hardly emerged from the grossest barbarism, and possibly, from
the very beginning,
of inferior natural endowment, on whom they proposed to confer the same
rights without any probation whatsoever. A glance at the world around
them should have induced reflection. The experience of other countries
was not encouraging. Hayti, where the blacks had long been masters of
the soil, was still a pandemonium; and in Jamaica and South Africa the
precipitate action of zealous but unpractical philanthropists had
wrought incalculable mischief. Even Lincoln himself, redemption by
purchase being impracticable, saw no other way out of the difficulty
than the wholesale deportation of the negroes to West Africa.
In time, perhaps, under the influence of such men as Lincoln and Lee,
the nation might have found a solution of the problem, and North and
South have combined to rid their common country of the curse of human
servitude. But between fanaticism on the one side and helplessness on
the other there was no common ground. The fierce invectives of the
reformers forbade all hope of temperate discussion, and their
unreasoning denunciations only provoked resentment. And this resentment
became the more bitter because in demanding emancipation, either by
fair means or forcible, and in expressing their intention of making it
a national question, the abolitionists were directly striking at a
right which the people of the South held sacred.
It had never been questioned, hitherto, that the several States of the
Union, so far at least as concerned their domestic institutions, were
each and all of them, under the Constitution, absolutely
self-governing. But the threats which the Black Republicans held out
were tantamount to a proposal to set the Constitution aside. It was
their charter of liberty, therefore, and not only their material
prosperity, which the States that first seceded believed to be
endangered by Lincoln’s election. Ignorant of the temper of the great
mass of the Northern people, as loyal in reality to the Constitution as
themselves, they were only too ready to be convinced that the
denunciations of the abolitionists were the first presage of the storm
that was presently to overwhelm them, to reduce their States to
provinces, to wrest from them the freedom they had
inherited, and to make them hewers of wood and drawers of water to the
detested plutocrats of New England.
But the gravamen of the indictment against the Southern people is not
that they seceded, but that they seceded in order to preserve and to
perpetuate slavery; or, to put it more forcibly, that the liberty to
enslave others was the right which most they valued. This charge, put
forward by the abolitionists in order to cloak their own revolt against
the Constitution, is true as regards a certain section, but as regards
the South as a nation it is quite untenable, for three-fourths of the
population derived rather injury than benefit from the presence in
their midst of four million serfs.[4] “Had slavery continued, the
system of labour,” says General Grant, “would soon have impoverished
the soil and left the country poor. The non-slave-holder must have left
the country, and the small slave-holder have sold out to his more
fortunate neighbour.”[5] The slaves neither bought nor sold. Their
wants were supplied almost entirely by their own labour; and the local
markets of the South would have drawn far larger profit from a few
thousand white labourers than they did from the multitude of negroes.
It is true that a party in the South, more numerous perhaps among the
political leaders than among the people at large, was averse to
emancipation under any form or shape. There were men who looked upon
their bondsmen as mere beasts of burden, more valuable but hardly more
human than the cattle in their fields, and who would not only have
perpetuated but have extended slavery. There were others who
conscientiously believed that the negro was unfit for freedom, that he
was incapable of self-improvement, and that he was far happier and more
contented as a slave. Among these were ministers of the Gospel, in no
small number, who, appealing to the Old Testament, preached boldly that
the institution was of divine origin, that the coloured race
had been created for servitude, and that to advocate emancipation was
to impugn the wisdom of the Almighty.
But there were still others, including many of those who were not
slave-owners, who, while they acquiesced in the existence of an
institution for which they were not personally accountable, looked
forward to its ultimate extinction by the voluntary action of the
States concerned. It was impossible as yet to touch the question
openly, for the invectives and injustice of the abolitionists had so
wrought upon the Southern people, that such action would have been
deemed a base surrender to the dictation of the enemy; but they trusted
to time, to the spread of education, and to a feeling in favour of
emancipation which was gradually pervading the whole country.[6]
The opinions of this party, with which, it may be said, the bulk of the
Northern people was in close sympathy,[7] are perhaps best expressed in
a letter written by Colonel Robert Lee, the head of one of the oldest
families in Virginia, a large landed proprietor and slave-holder, and
the same officer who had won such well-deserved renown in Mexico. “In
this enlightened age,” wrote the future general-in-chief of the
Confederate army, “there are few, I believe, but will acknowledge that
slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil. It is useless
to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it a greater evil to the
white than to the coloured race, and while my feelings are strongly
interested in the latter, my sympathies are more deeply engaged for the
former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in
Africa—morally, socially, and physically. The painful discipline they
are undergoing is necessary for their instruction as a race, and, I
hope, will prepare them for better things. How long their subjection
may be necessary is known and ordered by a merciful Providence. Their
emancipation will sooner result from the mild and
melting influence of Christianity than from the storms and contests of
fiery controversy. This influence, though slow, is sure. The doctrines
and miracles of our Saviour have required nearly two thousand years to
convert but a small part of the human race, and even among Christian
nations what gross errors still exist! While we see the course of the
final abolition of slavery is still onward, and we give it the aid of
our prayers and all justifiable means in our power, we must leave the
progress as well as the result in His hands, who sees the end and who
chooses to work by slow things, and with whom a thousand years are but
as a single day. The abolitionist must know this, and must see that he
has neither the right nor the power of operating except by moral means
and suasion; if he means well to the slave, he must not create angry
feelings in the master. Although he may not approve of the mode by
which it pleases Providence to accomplish its purposes, the result will
nevertheless be the same; and the reason he gives for interference in
what he has no concern holds good for every kind of interference with
our neighbours when we disapprove of their conduct.”
With this view of the question Jackson was in perfect agreement. “I am
very confident,” says his wife, “that he would never have fought for
the sole object of perpetuating slavery. . . . He found the institution
a responsible and troublesome one, and I have heard him say that he
would prefer to see the negroes free, but he believed that the Bible
taught that slavery was sanctioned by the Creator Himself, who maketh
all men to differ, and instituted laws for the bond and free. He
therefore accepted slavery, as it existed in the South, not as a thing
desirable in itself, but as allowed by Providence for ends which it was
not his business to determine.”
It may perhaps be maintained that to have had no dealings with “the
accursed thing,” and to have publicly advocated some process of gradual
emancipation, would have been the nobler course. But, setting aside the
teaching of the Churches, and the bitter temper of the time, it should
be remembered that slavery, although its
hardships were admitted, presented itself in no repulsive aspect to the
people of the Confederate States. They regarded it with feelings very
different from those of the abolitionists, whose acquaintance with the
condition they reprobated was small in the extreme. The lot of the
slaves, the Southerners were well aware, was far preferable to that of
the poor and the destitute of great cities, of the victims of the
sweater and the inmates of fever dens. The helpless negro had more
hands to succour him in Virginia than the starving white man in New
England. The children of the plantation enjoyed a far brighter
existence than the children of the slums. The worn and feeble were
maintained by their masters, and the black labourer, looking forward to
an old age of ease and comfort among his own people, was more fortunate
than many a Northern artisan. Moreover, the brutalities ascribed to the
slave-owners as a class were of rare occurrence. The people of the
South were neither less humane nor less moral than the people of the
North or of Europe, and it is absolutely inconceivable that men of high
character and women of gentle nature should have looked with leniency
on cruelty, or have failed to visit the offender with something more
than reprobation. Had the calumnies[8] which were scattered broadcast
by the abolitionists possessed more than a vestige of truth, men like
Lee and Jackson would never have remained silent. In the minds of the
Northern people slavery was associated with atrocious cruelty and
continual suffering. In the eyes of the Southerners, on the other hand,
it was associated with great kindness and the most affectionate
relations between the planters and their bondsmen. And if the
Southerners were blind, it is most difficult to explain the remarkable
fact that throughout the war, although thousands of plantations and
farms, together with thousands of women and children, all of whose male
relatives were in the Confederate armies, were left entirely to the
care of the negroes, both life and property were perfectly secure.
Such, then, was the attitude of the South towards
slavery. The institution had many advocates, uncompromising and
aggressive, but taking the people as a whole it was rather tolerated
than approved; and, even if no evidence to the contrary were
forthcoming, we should find it hard to believe that a civilised
community would have plunged into revolution in order to maintain it.
There can be no question but that secession was revolution; and
revolutions, as has been well said, are not made for the sake of
“greased cartridges”. To bring about such unanimity of purpose as took
possession of the whole South, such passionate loyalty to the new
Confederacy, such intense determination to resist coercion to the
bitter end, needed some motive of unusual potency, and the perpetuation
of slavery was not a sufficient motive. The great bulk of the
population neither owned slaves nor was connected with those who did;
many favoured emancipation; and the working men, a rapidly increasing
class, were distinctly antagonistic to slave-labour. Moreover, the