According to the Duke of Wellington himself, the success of the allies at the Battle of Waterloo turned on an amazingly slight contingency, namely, the closing of a gate or door of wood in the wall of a building. This fact was conclusively brought out when, years after the battle, an English clergyman, Rev. Mr. Narcross of Framlingham, died and left in his will the sum of five hundred pounds simply "to the bravest man in England." The executors of the estate were completely nonplussed. Whowas the bravest man in England? Doubtless many would have come forward gladly to claim the distinction and the legacy, but who was worthy of them? In their trouble, the executors applied to the Duke of Wellington for an answer to the question.
The Iron Duke was not a man to be beaten by any question whatsoever, least of all by a military one. He went back a little in his recollections—until he came to the battle of Waterloo. Then he wrote to the executors of the Framlingham parson that that battle was the greatest that had been fought in recent times. "The success of it," he went on to say, "turned upon the closing of the gates of Hugomont; these gates were closed in the most courageous manner, at the very nick of time, by Sir James Macdonnel; and he is the man to whom you should pay the five hundred pounds."
Thereupon the executors went to Sir James with the money; but hesaid to them: "I cannot claim all the credit of closing the gates of Hugomont. My sergeant, John Graham, seeing with me the importance of the step, rushed forward to help me; and by your leave I will share the legacy with him." The request was granted, and the fact was to this extent judicially established that Sir James Macdonnel and John Graham had closed the gates of Hugomont Castle, thereby settling the issue of the battle and the fate of Europe.
Let us see what events hinged upon this act, and how they depended on it. The army with which the great Napoleon faced the miscellaneous assortment of British, Prussians, Hanoverians, Dutch and Belgians at Waterloo was smaller than that of the Allies, but vastly more efficient as a whole. Most of the troops of the Allies were raw, and some of them were poor stuff indeed. Napoleon's soldiers were hardened,practiced, brave and splendidly commanded.
Napoleon had forced the Allies back at Quatre Bras. He captured their position at La Haye Sainte. He perceived that the strategic key to the whole field of battle was the hill crowned by the old stonechâteauof Hugomont. If that could be taken, Napoleon would be able to attack and turn Wellington's right flank. That accomplished, a junction of Blücher and his Prussians with the English would be prevented; the forces of the Allies would be split in two, and Napoleon would in all probability defeat them in detail, according to his time-honored method. The emperor could easily have finished off the Austrians in their turn, as he planned to do; and the combined European attempt to oust him would have been frustrated. Thus the Corsican would have been, probably for so long as he lived, the master of France at the least, even if the checkshe had already received had restricted his mastery of the rest of the continent.
Knowing well that upon this cast his fate was staked, Napoleon hurled his best troops, under Prince Jerome, against the little oldchâteauon the hill. Again and again they assaulted it. Twelve thousand men were launched against the half-dilapidated castle, which had been pierced with loopholes for the British riflemen. And now and here came the crucial incident whose importance was rated so high by Wellington. At a moment when the chief defence of thechâteauwas entrusted to the Coldstream Guards, under Colonel James Macdonnel, the French were within a hair's breadth of taking it. They pushed against the gate of the castle, and had actually forced it open, when the Coldstream Guards charged out with their bayonets, forcing the advance rank of the French back a little.
But the French were pouring up,and could no longer be held back at the point of the bayonet. It was at this instant, when a slight leeway had been gained, that Colonel Macdonnel and Sergeant Graham, under a galling fire from the French, stepped forward and with their own hands closed thechâteaugates, barricaded them, and thus enabled the troops to resume their fierce rifle fire from within.
After this the French made many more assaults on the heavy gates, but could not force them open again. Wellington meanwhile commanded a general advance, following a fresh repulse of the French onset; and the French line was thrown into confusion. He knew that Blücher was now at hand—it was by this time half-past seven in the evening—to support him. Blücher, indeed, arrived, and attacked and crushed the broken French right, forcing Napoleon to retreat in disorder. Thus was completed the victory which the heroicdefence of Hugomont had made possible.
The crushing of the British right wing on this occasion, had Napoleon been able thus to effect it, would have reversed a vast deal of history. It is not necessary to take an extreme view of the situation to realize this. On the immediate field, the British, Dutch and Hanoverians must have been forced back upon Brussels, and Blücher would have been unable to maintain a front against the French. Even if the remnants of the allied armies had escaped, and made another stand, Napoleon must instantly have regained a degree of prestige and position that would have enabled him to consolidate his power at home and make excellent terms abroad. Even after Leipsic, when he had seemed to be utterly beaten, the powers had been willing to give him France's "natural frontiers"—namely, the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees.
It is likely that Leipsic and Elba had already taught the emperor wisdom which would have deterred him from attempting to carry the boundaries of his domain once more to the Baltic, or to parcel out the rest of Europe among his relatives and dependents. But within the frontiers I have named, and west of the Rhine, he must have remained impregnable; and all the momentous consequences which resulted from his defeat must have been thwarted and turned aside.
Out of the victory of the Allies at Waterloo came, first, the banishment and early death of Napoleon Bonaparte; the placing of Louis XVIII on the throne of France; the complete subduing of the Revolution; the creation of the joint kingdom of Holland and Belgium (which meant the modern intensely industrialized Belgian state, and Leopold, and the Congo); the aggrandizement and lasting leadership of Prussia in Germany; the foundation of the modernItaly through, the annexation of the Genoese republic to the Piedmont kingdom; the enlargement of Switzerland by three cantons taken from France; the taking of Norway from Denmark and its bestowal upon Sweden; the absorption of what was left of Poland by Russia—and some other reparceling of territory in an arbitrary sense which has nevertheless for the most part endured. There is scarcely a political articulation in Europe to-day which does not date from Waterloo; new tendencies still operate which had their inception then!
Indirectly the consequences were momentous. The aggrandizement of Prussia prepared the way for the unification of Germany and the gradual atrophy of Austria as a German state. As I have said, the enlargement of Piedmont foretokened a united Italy, and built up another power which has contributed to the enforced shrinkage of Austria. The two great constructiveEuropean statesmen of the nineteenth century, Bismarck and Cavour, were both the children of Waterloo.
All these tendencies might have been working just the other way if Colonel Macdonnel had not succeeded in closing thechâteaugates! Yet more still was in store. Moral and intellectual consequences of greater moment, perhaps, than the political results, impended. The victory of the Allies was followed by a period of severe repression of popular tendencies in Europe. The Holy Alliance, which became a league of Continental monarchs against liberal ideas, was a direct consequence. It inaugurated reaction everywhere. And reaction bred in its turn new and insidious radicalisms. Lassalle, Marx, St. Simon, and Fourier, Socialists, and Bakunin and Proudhon, first of the Anarchists, were the offspring of the Holy Alliance, nurtured in the dark corners of Repression's jail.
The course of events in Europe would have been far otherwise indeed if Napoleon's veterans, forcing their way into Hugomont and splitting the British strength in two, had prepared the way for a long lease of the power of that adroit and calculating master, who knew so well how to meet popular demands and still hold his personal sway. In its practical expression, his system was liberal. Every peasant proprietor in France to-day holds his acres by virtue of Napoleonic legislation.
That does not mean that all would have been good in France; far from that. A strange falsity, a theatric insincerity, lay beneath all the Napoleonic sentiments and ideals. These qualities color the thought of France still. Will she ever be able to escape them? These tendencies would have been many times more powerful if Napoleon had entrenched himself upon the throne. More than that, they must have passed to other countries. Theshadow of his eagles might lie athwart even our America, his insidious ideas expressing themselves in our politics and our intellectual and moral life, if that moment's vast contingency had gone Napoleon's way at Waterloo.
The two sections in the Civil War in America were led by two men, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, the one President of the United States and the other President of the Confederate States, who were born within about one hundred miles of each other in the State of Kentucky, and within nine months of each other in point of time. For it was in June, 1808, that Jefferson Davis first saw the light in Christian County, Kentucky, and in February, 1809, that Abraham Lincoln was born in Hardin County, in the same State.
Samuel Davis, the father of Jefferson Davis, and Thomas Lincoln, the father of Abraham Lincoln, were men of the same English-American origin, and the families were originally of virtually the same class, though Thomas Lincoln, doubtless as the result of the death of his father at the hands of the Indians, when Thomas was a child, had fallen somewhat in the social scale. Both men became dissatisfied with material conditions in Kentucky at about the same time, and both emigrated with their families. But Samuel Davis went southward into Mississippi, while Thomas Lincoln went northward into Indiana.
That the sons of both these Kentuckians had in them the fire of genius, the history of their country has abundantly proved. Each was destined by the compelling force of his character and gifts to play a great part. Like all other men, each was molded by his environment. The illiterate Thomas Lincoln was creditedby his immortal son with the intention, in emigrating, to escape from a slave State. But is it not probable that the son, deeply preoccupied as he was in later years with the subject of the emancipation of the slaves, had projected backward, by a psychologic habit common to all mankind, this idea from his own mind into that of his father? In all probability no other motive than that of accident or convenience—for Thomas Lincoln was a poor and rather "shiftless" man—impelled Abraham Lincoln's father to go to Indiana instead of following the trail which so many of the more enterprising Kentuckians were taking to Mississippi or Louisiana. It was to that section that enterprise beckoned, for agriculture was carried on in the Southwest upon a large scale, and broader plantations were open to the adventuring settler. Indiana, on the other hand, was a "poor man's country."
What if Thomas Lincoln had possesseda little more energy, and a few more shillings, and had gone to Mississippi instead of to Indiana and afterwards to Illinois? What if he had become a plantation and slave owner, and had thus subjected his boy Abraham to the overmastering influence of a southern environment? So far as I can recall, Mississippi never produced an anti-slavery man.
In this event, there would have been for the national cause, for the saving of the Union, for the emancipation of the slaves, no Abraham Lincoln. On the other hand, the tremendous power and patience of Lincoln's nature, the majesty and greatness of his character, the resources of his intellect, would in all likelihood have been added to the sum of the statesmanship which was enlisted on the Southern side.
It is even conceivable that Lincoln, rather than Davis, would have been the president of the Southern Confederacy. Only a combination of themost extraordinary circumstances made him the nominee of the Republican party for the presidency in 1860. If he had been the leading statesman and politician of Mississippi, his path to the Confederate presidency, as the success of Davis proved, would have been comparatively easy.
Without Lincoln, the anti-slavery agitation would have gone on just the same. The Republican party would have been constituted just the same. Everything up to the 18th day of May, 1860, when Lincoln was nominated for president at the Wigwam in Chicago, would have gone on just the same. But lacking Lincoln, what a world of things afterward would have happened differently!
In the first place, it is probable that Seward would have been nominated for president. Very likely he would not have been elected; and as it was Lincoln who "smoked out" Douglas, it is probable that Douglaswould have prevailed over all other Democratic candidates and been nominated at Charleston and elected president.
In which case there would have been no secession, and very likely no war, either at that time or later. Slavery would have become intrenched, to yield, perhaps, in the end only to economic influences, the operation of which had already doomed it.
But if Seward had been nominated and elected, secession would have taken place and war would have resulted. The sort of leader that the Union would have had in Seward may be inferred with perfect certainty from the famous, or rather infamous, proposition entitled, "Some Thoughts for the President's Consideration," which Seward solemnly laid before Lincoln less than a month after his inauguration. This extraordinary document, one of the most senseless and wicked programmesever prepared by a man of state, advocated a change of the national issue from slavery to a foreign war; it advised that war be at once declared against France and Spain, and "explanations demanded" from Great Britain and Russia! In order that this, brilliant programme might be carried out successfully, Seward suggested that he himself be made Dictator!
This scheme, I repeat, illustrated the sort of alternative material that we should have had, lacking Lincoln. Chase, indeed, who was also a leading candidate for the presidency, would have been wiser. But in no position that he ever held, after 1860, did Chase bring forth any of the fruits of genius. Cameron, of Pennsylvania, was a greater man, but did not command general support. Neither did Edward Bates, of Missouri, also a western candidate for the presidency.
The great soldiers who finally triumphedin the field as the instruments of Lincoln's policy and fought their way to victory for the Union—Grant, Sherman, Thomas, Meade, Sheridan—would have been ranged on the Northern side just the same whether Lincoln or another had been at the head of affairs. But it is doubtful whether another president would have found them out. Lincoln made his own grave mistakes regarding men. But he put forward no general because that general washis man. He observed and waited. A man of the people himself, grandly simple, he somehow nosed out the men of the same type. All the generals who proved great were his discoveries.
The structure of Lincoln's achievements was not, however, the result of negative circumstances. It did not rise because things were not just so and so. It was a positive thing—the result of the active operations of a powerful genius, which the peoplerecognized before the politicians and the writers did. In the people's mind, the war was "Old Abe's" war. It was Old Abe who stood at the helm. Congress did not know it, but it was really working Lincoln's will. The cabinet did not always know it, but it was Lincoln who really had his way. He kept his own counsel. He carried out his plans.
The people were right. It was Old Abe who was doing things. And without him the most important things would have gone undone. He was an original creation—as Lowell said, a "new birth of our new soil, the first American." Nature, for him, threw aside her old-world molds,
And, choosing sweet clay from the breastOf the unexhausted West,With stuff untainted shaped a hero new,Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true.
And, choosing sweet clay from the breastOf the unexhausted West,With stuff untainted shaped a hero new,Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true.
Yet what could be clearer than that Abraham Lincoln, who by birth and inheritance was of the South,not the West, might have turned his strength to the support of quite a different cause if the accident of fate had sent him southward, not northward, in his childhood?
Toward the end of the year 1850, Captain Jennings, of the American barkAuckland, trading in Asiatic waters, picked up the shipwrecked crew of a Japanese fishing vessel, somewhere off the coast of Japan. The captain was then bound for the new port of San Francisco, which the California gold-diggings had already made an important city. He continued on his course, and in due time—that is to say, very early in the year 1851—landed at San Francisco with his party of refugees.
Here the bright little Orientals weremore than a nine days' wonder. Few Americans had ever before seen a Japanese. That country was at the time more a "hermit nation" than Korea herself. Whalers and other sailors who had been wrecked on the Japanese coast had been put to cruel deaths. No white men except the Dutch had been permitted to trade with any of the Japanese cities, and the Dutch trade had fallen into decay. Japan seemed as far from our lives as is the planet Mars.
But the Japanese whom Captain Jennings had humanely rescued were kindly treated by him, and on the homeward voyage they had endeared themselves to him and his crew. He landed them at San Francisco with very favorable reports of their character, conduct and intelligence. The free-handed miners of that town wanted nothing better than somebody or something to lionize. So for a considerable time the shipwrecked Japanese had the best of everything inSan Francisco, until an opportunity arose to send them, fat and happy, back to their own country.
A full account of the incident and of the refugees was published in one of the San Francisco papers. It fell into the hands of just one man who was capable of perceiving the momentous possibilities that lay in the occurrence. This man was a commodore in the United States navy; and his name was not Perry, as the reader may at first surmise, but John H. Aulick. He was a Virginian, then in his sixty-second year; he had had a long and very honorable service, and was keen and statesmanlike in his ideas.
What Commodore Aulick saw in the incident was this: The kind and friendly reception of the Japanese waifs in America, contrasted with the ordinary treatment of white refugees in Japan, might be taken advantage of to open friendly relations with Japan. To effect this result, a navalexpedition should be sent to Japan. If properly conducted, the expedition not only might secure friendly treatment of American whalers on the Japanese coasts, but might open up trade relations with the country which would be highly profitable.
Filled with his idea, which was really a great one, Commodore Aulick obtained permission to lay it before the secretary of state, who was none other than Daniel Webster. He had an interview with Mr. Webster at Washington on the 9th day of May, 1851.
Webster saw the point at once. At his instance, President Fillmore ordered the navy department to prepare a small expedition for the voyage to Japan; and when the ships were ready—they were headed by the sloop of warMississippi—Commodore Aulick was put in command. He actually sailed on the voyage; but he was entrusted with the task of taking the Brazilian minister as far as RioJaneiro on the way, and some trouble having arisen with this functionary for which Commodore Aulick was blamed, he was superseded in command of the expedition by Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, in command of theHartford.
It was Perry, therefore, who "opened up Japan." His name will be associated, as long as the story of the two nations is told, with the event. But it was Aulick's idea, not Perry's; and it all hung upon the luck which those Japanese fishermen, waifs upon a boundless ocean, had in being picked up by a generous Yankee skipper, and in finding their way to so wholehearted and so hospitable a city toward "Mongolian" wanderers as San Francisco was—then!
If this incident had not suggested and been followed by the Aulick-Perry expedition, what then? Russian authorities have claimed that Russia was preparing a similar expedition at the time when Secretary Webster—"toozealous," according to their view—sent the United States ships on their way. There is good reason to believe that the Russian government would have been slow in making such an infinitely clever move as the Perry expedition constituted. Yet if the United States had not taken the step, Russia would have stood next in the line of logical inheritance to the idea. And if Japan had been opened under Russian auspices, its doors, instead of standing open toward the East, and consequently towardourWest, would have opened toward the Asiatic continental West, which would have meant toward St. Petersburg.
If the Japanese had, under Russian initiative, adopted the material adjuncts of western civilization, as they finally did under ours, that civilization would have taken on a distinctly Muscovite color. The Japanese would never, indeed, have been able, under such auspices, to organize an effective resistance to Russian arms, for longbefore they had acquired the requisite training they must have been held firmly in the grip of the Russian military system.
That is to say, Japan would have been, step by step, annexed to the Russian empire. The Russo-Japanese war would never have been, since there would have been neither hope nor occasion for it. Most of the rich fruits of Japanese art and industry would have drifted toward Russia. The Russian empire would have been enormously enriched by the Japanese trade, and the importance of that empire immensely magnified in the history of our epoch. A reflex orientalizing influence would have rolled over Russia itself, and the course of Russian internal development altered in a degree now almost incalculable.
If Russia had not been reasonably prompt to take the step, the eyes of British statesmen must sooner or later have been opened to the opportunity. The method by which Britishintervention proceeds in Asiatic countries is well known. It has always had but slight regard for native sovereignty, no matter how high the state of social or artistic or intellectual development on the part of the native races affected. British administrators, or, if Japan had retained its nominal sovereignty, British "residents" or agents, would really have governed the country through the Tycoon or the Mikado, or both—preferably the Tycoon, for he was a military ruler, and affairs could have been handled more readily through him.
Events in Japan must have anticipated the subsequent history of Egypt, on a much more magnificent scale. Again, though there would have been a readier entrance for American and European trade than in the case of Russian intervention, the best of everything Japanese would certainly have gone to England. And once again, the free, independent,powerful, masterful Japanese empire of the present day, thrilling with a new life in which all the civilization of the Occident is made the handmaid of an ancient and undaunted Asiatic people, would not have been.
In the unlikely event that the Japanese, in default of Perry's expedition, had been left quite alone for another generation or two, their case would not have been better in the long run. They would simply have missed the chance they got. Left a "hermit nation," they would sooner or later have fallen under the influence of one Western country or another, and been so seriously retarded in the race of civilization that they could never have caught up.
America was the only country that could have opened to them the wonderful career that they have had. The high noon of the nineteenth century was the golden moment for the commencement of their development along the line of Western civilization.If the hour had not struck then for them it would not have struck at all. Time, the helping hand, the protecting influence of an unselfish friend among the nations, and the golden gift of destiny, were all represented for Japan in the rescuing sails of Skipper Jennings's bark, that lucky day in the wide Pacific.
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 waragainst 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 Napoleonicdébâcle, 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 aptto repeat the words, "God 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 ambassador, Benedetti, insolently, and in a manner quite unbearable, to demand personally from King William a declaration that no Hohenzollern should ever be permittedto 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 hadonce 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.
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 beena 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 circumstances.
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, waspresenting 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 theUnion 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 Constitution," 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 theUnion. Northern arsenals 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 intoshreds on the steps of the capitol at Columbia, with no tender regard for South Carolina's interpretation of the Constitution, 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 emancipation 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 institution 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 restorationof 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 constitution 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 shell 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.
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," hewired 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 ofwhich 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 theground 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 hadcome 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 yetbeen 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 passing over to the Confederacy. But so long as Lincoln stood firm in the White House and Congress sat at the capital, "the governmentat 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'sfate, instead of that imperial advance, with liberty and union, which has dazzled and heartened the whole world.
In the preceding chapter I have noted the disastrous consequences of the rejection of John H. Reagan's plan, urged at Montgomery at the very foundation of the Confederacy, for the prompt occupation of the south bank of the Ohio River as the advanced line of defense, and the equally unfavorable result of the failure of Johnston to press on to the Potomac after the great success at Manassas. Gettysburg was a pivotal combat, also; for if Lee had been supported by Stuart's cavalry on thatoccasion, there is at least a possibility that the war's tide might have been turned then and there.
But there was a narrower contingency than either one of these. To a positively decisive extent, the success of the National forces in subjugating the Southern States turned on the sea power. The conquest of the Confederacy was in fact a matter of supreme difficulty as it was; and if the South had possessed a respectable navy, and had been able to keep its ports open and steadily exchange its cotton in Europe for the materials and munitions of war, the conquest would not have been possible at all.
The chance for the establishment of such a navy lay within the grasp of the Confederate statesmen, and was by them let slip. Neither they, nor any one else at the time, realized how easy the thing would have been.
It is first necessary to explain in what situation the National government was, at the outset of the war,in the matter of a naval force. Nominally the United States navy consisted of ninety vessels, but of these fifty were utterly obsolete and unusable except as supply ships. Of the other forty, twenty were in a state of hopeless unreadiness. Several of the best ships were in the remotest corners of the world. The home squadron was composed of twelve ships, of which only seven were steamers! Nearly fifty years after the invention of steam navigation, the United States depended principally upon sailing vessels for its defense. Only three trustworthy warships were left in Northern waters for the defense of such ports as New York, Boston and Philadelphia.
As between the North and the South, the chance to wield the sea power lay with the one of the two rival governments which should first put on the water even a very small fleet of ironclad, steam-driven vessels. The Confederacy proved afterwardwhat power could be exerted in this direction with but one single ironclad, when theMerrimacdestroyed or scattered all the ships in Hampton Roads, for a moment threatened Washington and the Northern cities with ravage, and was checked at last only by the almost providential appearance of another ironclad, Ericsson's littleMonitor, on the scene. And theAlabama'sarmor of chains made her for a time almost a match for the United States navy.
By what means could the Confederacy have forestalled the North in the provision of a really effective navy? The chance, as I have said, was offered, and declined, with fatal want of foresight. It lay in the ten steamships of the English East India Company, which in 1861 was winding up its affairs. These ships were offered to the Confederacy at a fair valuation. They were very good vessels, and capable of prompt armoring in at least as effective a style as thatin which theAlabamawas afterwards armored. The East India Company was prepared to make such terms as the Confederate government could have met.
British outfitters were perfectly willing to trust the Southern statesmen. The ships could have been armed in a few weeks; there was nothing to prevent their entrance into Southern ports, for the blockade was not made effective until one year after the war broke out. TheOtero, renamed by the Confederates theFlorida, had no difficulty in taking on her men and guns in the Bahamas.
Possessed of ten good steam vessels, commanded by such men as Maury, Maffitt of theFlorida, and Semmes of theAlabama, the Confederacy could have quickly overcome its lack of mechanics and workshops by importation from Europe. It was the command of the Mississippi, the Cumberland and the Tennessee rivers which "broke the back of the Confederacy";and does any one imagine that the wooden ships of Farragut could have entered the Mississippi, compelled the abandonment of New Orleans, and secured the possession of not only the seacoast but the inland river waters which commanded the Confederacy from the rear, if there had been any good ships to resist him?
The start which these ten ships would have given a Confederate navy would have more than put the South even with the North on the sea. It must be remembered that up to 1862, even as it was, the South could do better in the courts and exchanges of Europe than the Union could. Why? Because the South had the cotton, upon which the mills of Europe depended. The continued chance to market cotton would have saved the situation for the South.Alabamasin any requisite number would have issued from British shipyards.
As it was, several powerful ramswere under construction for the Confederacy in 1861 and 1862 in the yards of the Lairds. But the continued insistence of Minister Adams on the unlawfulness of this proceeding, joined with the fact that the Confederates had no recognizable navy to back up their purchases, at last compelled the British government to take these rams over and add them to its own sea power.
President Jefferson Davis declined the offer of the East India ships for the apparent reason that the military necessities of the Confederacy pressed hard upon the financial resources of the new government. Every member of his government was quite thoroughly convinced that the National power could not successfully invade the South, provided a strong army were quickly put into the field. The ready material for good soldiers was much more abundant in the South than in the North; nearly all Southern men were horsemen, hunters,marksmen, out-of-door men. On the other hand, the first levies from the North were mostly city men, unaccustomed to firearms, strangers to exposure, flabby of physique. Manassas amply illustrated the great superiority as soldiers of the first comers from the South over the first comers from the North.
The Confederate leaders counted upon making permanent the advantage which they were confident of gaining in the field at the outset. To purchase out of hand ten steamships, from resources that were yet to be created, and with the manhood of seven States demanding to be armed, looked, indeed, like madness. And yet this was the very card which, if played, would have saved the Confederacy's game.
Conceive for a moment the Union navy debarred from entrance into the James or any of the navigable waters of Virginia, to support military operations in the direction of Richmond.Conceive Wilmington, N. C., which was an easily defensible port, and which really remained open to the blockade runners for almost two years after the beginning of the war, rendered a fairly safe point of departure for European trade throughout the war. Conceive the Mississippi, from Cairo southward to its mouth, continuously under the power of the Confederacy, with a fleet of river gunboats backed up by a Gulf squadron. Does any one imagine that in that case the North could have made either any warlike or commercial use of the Ohio, the Cumberland, the Tennessee, or even the Mississippi from Cairo up to St. Louis?
Freed from the unceasing coast menace and from the danger of being cut in two along the rivers, the effectiveness of the land forces would have been more than doubled. Leaving out of the account the possibility of offensive operations against Washington and the cities of the North, thedefense of the seceded States could have been made so secure that the people of the North would have called loudly for peace; the border slave States would have cast in their lot with the Confederacy, and England and France would have openly sided with the South; secession would have triumphed definitely before the end of the year 1863.
With the English East India Company, it was a case of "take our ships or leave them." The South left them, and with them it left its chance for independence and for putting two mediocre American republics in the place where one great one, after that decisive moment, was bound to stand forever.