CHAPTER VTHEIR CAUSE

246CHAPTER VTHEIR CAUSE

INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO “THEIR CAUSE”

In no sense does the author offer the suggestions in this section as an apology for the course of Southern women or men in the war between the States. They are presented simply as a part of history, showing the political principles which guided and moved the South in the momentous struggle. They explain the lofty zeal and heroic fortitude of the Confederate women. They cannot be attributed to partisanship or sectional bias on the part of the author, for sufficient quotations are herewith presented from well-known Northern, English, and Continental public men to show that if there is an extreme Southern view it is held by other people as well as by our own.

Right or wrong, each Southern man in the field and each woman at home, toiled in that war with amens sibi conscia recti. It was a movement of the people. In the ranks of the army were found hundreds of college graduates and men carrying muskets whose property was valued at a hundred thousand dollars, and at home the rich and the poor women toiled with equal zeal for the cause so dear to their hearts.

“WHEN THIS CRUEL WAR IS OVER”

Mrs. W. W. Gordon, of Savannah, the wife of the brave ex-Confederate officer who was commissioned brigadier general by President McKinley, and served with distinguished gallantry in the Spanish War, had kindred in the Federal army, which under Sherman captured Savannah. As the troops were entering the city she stood with her children watching them as they marched under the windows of her Southern home. Just then the splendid brass band at the head of one of the divisions247began to play the old familiar air, “When this cruel war is over.” Just as soon as the notes struck the ear of her little daughter this enthusiastic young Confederate exclaimed, “Mamma, just listen to the Yankees. They are playing, ‘When this cruel war is over,’ and they are just doing it themselves.”

NORTHERN MEN LEADERS OF DISUNION

In 1860 it was plain to the world that the people of the North were determined to spurn the compact of union with the Southern States and to deny to those States all right to control their own affairs. Here are the sentiments of the Northern leaders:

“There is a higher law than the Constitution which regulates our authority over the domain. Slavery must be abolished, and we must do it.”—Wm. H. Seward.

“The time is fast approaching when the cry will become too overpowering to resist. Rather than tolerate national slavery as it now exists, let the Union be dissolved at once, and then the sin of slavery will rest where it belongs.”—New York Tribune.

“The Union is a lie. The American Union is an imposture—a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. We are for its overthrow! Up with the flag of disunion, that we may have a free and glorious republic of our own.”—Wm. Lloyd Garrison.

“I look forward to the day when there shall be a servile insurrection in the South; when the black man, armed with British bayonets, and led on by British officers, shall assert his freedom and wage a war of extermination against his master. And, though we may not mock at their calamity nor laugh when their fear cometh, yet we will hail it as the dawn of a political millennium.”—Joshua Giddings.

“In the alternative being presented of the continuance of slavery or a dissolution of the Union, we are for a248dissolution, and we care not how quick it comes.”—Rufus P. Spaulding.

“The fugitive-slave act is filled with horror; we are bound to disobey this act.”—Charles Sumner.

“TheAdvertiserhas no hesitation in saying that it does not hold to the faithful observance of the fugitive-slave law of 1850.”—Portland Advertiser.

“I have no doubt but the free and slave States ought to be separated. * * * The Union is not worth supporting in connection with the South.”—Horace Greeley.

“The times demand and we must have an anti-slavery Constitution, an anti-slavery Bible, and an anti-slavery God.”—Anson P. Burlingame.

“There is merit in the Republican party. It is this: It is the first sectional party ever organized in this country. * * * It is not national; it is sectional. It is the North arrayed against the South. * * * The first crack in the iceberg is visible; you will yet hear it go with a crack through the center.”—Wendell Phillips.

“The cure prescribed for slavery by Redpath is the only infallible remedy, and men must foment insurrection among the slaves in order to cure the evils. It can never be done by concessions and compromises. It is a great evil, and must be extinguished by still greater ones. It is positive and imperious in its approaches, and must be overcome with equally positive forces. You must commit an assault to arrest a burglar, and slavery is not arrested without a violation of law and the cry of fire.”—Independent Democrat, leading Republican paper in New Hampshire.

THE UNION VS. A UNION

[J. L. Underwood.]

Early in the war a son of the Emerald Isle, but not himself green, was taken prisoner not far from Manassas Junction. In a word, Pat was taking a quiet nap in the shade; and was aroused from his slumber by a Confederate249scouting party. He wore no special uniform of either army, but looked more like a spy than an alligator and on this was arrested.

“Who are you?” “What is your name?” and “Where are you from?” were the first questions put to him by the armed party.

Pat rubbed his eyes, scratched his head, and answered: “Be me faith, gintlemen, them is ugly questions to answer, anyhow; and before I answer any of them, I be after axing yo, by yer lave, the same thing.”

“Well,” said the leader, “we are out of Scott’s army and belong to Washington.”

“All right,” said Pat. “I knowed ye was a gintleman, for I am that same. Long life to General Scott.”

“Ah ha!” replied the scout. “Now you rascal, you are our prisoner,” and seized him by the shoulder.

“How is that,” inquired Pat, “are we not friends?”

“No,” was the answer; “we belong to General Beauregard’s army.”

“Then ye tould me a lie, me boys, and thinking it might be so, I told you another. An’ now tell me the truth, an’ I’ll tell you the truth too.”

“Well, we belong to the State of South Carolina.”

“So do I,” promptly responded Pat, “and to all the other States uv the country, too, and there I am thinking, I hate the whole uv ye. Do ye think I would come all the way from Ireland to belong to one State when I have a right to belong to the whole of ’em?”

This logic was rather a stumper; but they took him up, as before said, and carried him for further examination.

This Irishman’s unionism is a fair sample of what sometimes passes in this country as broad patriotism. “We don’t believe in so much State and State’s right. We want a nation and we want it spelt with a big N.” This is the merest twaddle. From the very nature of the formation of our government there can be no organized Nation. Alexander Hamilton wrote, “The State governments are essentially necessary to the form and spirit of the general system. * * * They can never250lose their powers till the whole of America are robbed of their liberties.” It is a Union of States and can be made nothing else. Bancroft, the great historian, says: “But for Staterights the Union would perish from the paralysis of its limbs. The States, as they gave life to the Union, are necessary to the continuance of that life.”

Madison wrote as follows: “The assent and ratification of the people, not as individuals composing the entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they belong, are the sources of the Constitution. It is therefore not a National but a Federal compact.”

The Irishman could only belong to the “whole of ’em” by belonging to one of them. No man can love all the other States without loving his own State. A Swiss loves Schwyz or Unterwalden or some other canton before he loves the Confederation of Cantons. The loyal Scotchmen love Scotland before they love the British Empire. The Union man loves the Union through his immediate part of Union. Daniel Webster loved the Union, but his speeches show how he loved Massachusetts first. Calhoun loved the Union, but he loved it as a Federal Union with his beloved Carolina. Many of the best people of the North loved their several States and in loyalty to them took sides against the South.

The Southern people, Whigs and Democrats, were devoted to the Union of the fathers as long as it was a reality. But as soon as they realized that it had become only a confederation of the Northern majority States, with the protecting features of the old Constitution directly discarded, the love for their own States led them heart and soul into the Confederate cause. Our Irishman might be satisfied with A Union, but nothing but THE Union of the fathers could satisfy Southern men. They loved the definite Union of 1789; they fought the indefinite Union of 1861. The former was a union on a Constitution without a flag; the latter was a mere sentimental union under a flag without a Constitution. The Constitution had been thrown away.

The writer’s father, a plain old farmer-merchant of251Alabama, was a fair specimen of the staunchest Southern Union man. A Whig all his life, he almost adored Henry Clay and idolized the Union. The great old Union paper, theNational Intelligencer, of Washington City, was his political Bible, and he made it follow his son all through school and college. Like all other Whigs, he believed in the right of secession, but did not think the time had come for such a step. He opposed with all his might the secession of Alabama. But when it was an accomplished fact, he wrote sadly to his son, who was then a student in a foreign land:

Alabama has seceded. She has the right to do so, but I didn’t want her to exercise it. I belong to my State, and I secede with her. And I know the other States have no right to coerce her. My son, your old father is like a Tennessee hog, he can be tolled, but he can’t be driven.

Savoyard tells us truly that no State embraced secession with more reluctance than North Carolina, and yet no State supported the Southern cause with more heroism or fortitude. When the news flashed over the wires that President Lincoln had issued a call for volunteers to coerce the sovereign Southern States, Zebulon B. Vance was addressing an immense audience, pleading for the Union and opposing the Confederacy. His hand was raised aloft in appealing gesture when the fatal tidings came, and in relating the incident to a New England audience a quarter of a century later, he said:

When my hand came down from that impassioned gesticulation it fell slowly and sadly by the side of a secessionist. I immediately, with altered voice and manner, called upon the assembled multitude to volunteer, not to fight against but for South Carolina. If war must come, I preferred to be with my own people. If we had to shed blood I preferred to shed Northern rather than Southern blood.

North Carolina took her favorite son at his word, turned secessionist with him, and volunteered for the conflict.

Robert E. Lee felt in Virginia just like Zeb Vance felt in North Carolina. The women of the South were the women of Lee and Vance and Alex. Stephens and Judah252P. Benjamin, Charles J. Jenkins and Ben Hill. They loved the Union, but when it was gone, they, with their States, opposed what, to them, was only a Union of invading, coercing States.

“We were not the first to break the peaceThat blessed our happy land;We loved the quiet calm and ease,Too well to raise a hand,Till fierce oppression stronger grew,And bitter were your sneers.Then to our land we must be true,Or show a coward’s fears!We loved our banner while it wavedAn emblem of our Union.The fiercest dangers we had bravedTo guard that sweet communion.But when it proved that ‘stripes’ aloneWere for our Sunny South,And all the ‘stars’ in triumph shoneAbove the chilly North,Then, not till then, our voices roseIn one tumultuous wave:‘We will the tyranny oppose,Or find a bloody grave.’”

“We were not the first to break the peace

That blessed our happy land;

We loved the quiet calm and ease,

Too well to raise a hand,

Till fierce oppression stronger grew,

And bitter were your sneers.

Then to our land we must be true,

Or show a coward’s fears!

We loved our banner while it waved

An emblem of our Union.

The fiercest dangers we had braved

To guard that sweet communion.

But when it proved that ‘stripes’ alone

Were for our Sunny South,

And all the ‘stars’ in triumph shone

Above the chilly North,

Then, not till then, our voices rose

In one tumultuous wave:

‘We will the tyranny oppose,

Or find a bloody grave.’”

It was Southern devotion to the Union which led so many men of Kentucky and Tennessee into the Federal army. It was the same traditional love for the Union of the fathers that held back Virginia and the other border States from secession too long. It led them to make the mistake of the crisis. The writer, like nearly all the Southern men of his ultra Unionism, at the time thought South Carolina made the mistake of too much haste in her secession. He does not think so now. He has not thought so since calmly and thoroughly studying the history of those times.

The new party in the North was in a triumphant majority and was determined to deprive the minority States of the South of their share in the government. Delay on the part of Southern border States did no good. It did harm. It misled the Northern people as to the true feeling in Virginia and the other border States. Had they all seceded on the same day with South Carolina there would have been no war.

Now that the Northern people, through the broad, patriotic administrations of Cleveland, McKinley and Roosevelt, have restored the Union, and Florida is again a coequal State with New York, and Texans once more253fellow-citizens with Pennsylvanians, what section shows more loyalty to the Union and the common country than the South?

Our patriot mothers and grandmothers of 1860 loved the Union. Those who yet survive, and their children, love the Union in 1905. No State is under the ban now. The captured battle flags of Confederate States have been restored to the States by a Republican Congress. The Federal government volunteers to take care of Confederate soldiers’ graves. President, and Congress and Army and Navy follow General Wheeler’s coffin to an honored grave. A Republican President publicly avows his attachment to Confederate veterans and shows his faith by his appointments. Thank God, our Union to-day is againtheUnion of equal States.

THE NORTHERN STATES SECEDE FROM THE UNION

[By J. L. Underwood.]

The denial of the equal rights of the Southern States in the public territorial domain, and the nullification by the Northern States of the acts of Congress and the decisions of the Supreme Court on territorial questions, and the formation and triumph of a party pledged to hostility to the South, were not the only considerations that convinced the Southern States that their only honorable course lay in secession. The compact of the written Constitution was the only Union that had existed. A breach or repudiation of that compact was a breach of the Union. It was secession without its name.

In 1850, after a violent sectional agitation, which shook the country, over the admission of California as a free State, a compromise measure, proposed by Mr. Clay and advocated by Webster and Calhoun, was adopted by Congress. It was known as the “omnibus bill.” It provided, among other things, that California should be a free State; that the slave trade should be abolished in the District of Columbia, and that slaves escaping from254their owners, from one State into another, could be arrested anywhere and returned to their owners. Article four, section two of the Federal Constitution makes this provision in the plainest of terms. It was similar to the New England Fugitive Slave law of 1643 enacted by Massachusetts, Connecticut, Plymouth and New Haven. Mr. Webster in his great speech in Faneuil Hall in Boston, in defense of his vote for the “omnibus bill,” read the words of the Constitution and showed that the fugitive slave section of the omnibus bill was almost a literal reiteration of the constitutional provision.

The majority of the Northern States repudiated this feature of the act of Congress and declared that it should not be enforced. Here was the boldest nullification, the most direct breaking up of the old Union. Here was the arch rebellion of the century. The question was not what should be done with the fugitive slaves, but whether the Northern States would do what, in the Constitution, they had agreed to do. The South waited for the Northern States to revoke such a flagrant disregard of their rights under the Constitution and such a bold repudiation of the original terms of Union. Patriotic little Rhode Island did rescind her action in the matter, but she was alone. Most of the other States had become desperate in their hostility to the South and, when the South, seeing all hope of justice, all vestige of the old Union, all prospect of peace, hopelessly gone, resorted to quiet, peaceable withdrawal from these domineering States, the resolution was formed and carried out by the party in power, to subjugate the Southern States to the will of the majority States, and keep them in what was called the Union against their will.

The South in seceding made no threat, and contemplated no attempt to invade a Northern State in pursuit of slaves, but simply sought to sever all connection with the States and people who were so determined to ignore her rights, and who nullified their own plighted terms of union. She did not secede in the interest of slavery nor for the purpose of war. The Southern States seceded to take care of the fragments of a broken Union.255Slavery, it is true, was the occasion of the rupture. Peaceable secession on the one hand and coercion on the other was the issue of the war. Emancipation was adopted as a war measure two years later by the Northern administration and finally consummated in 1865 as a punitive measure to further crush the conquered South. Such was the public opinion at the time of the fall of Fort Sumter that not a regiment could have been raised at the North to invade Virginia if it had been distinctly called out for the purpose of setting the negroes free. Fanatics by the thousands made a demigod of the murderous John Brown, but it was not fanatics who were in control at Washington. It was the politicians, not working from humanitarian sentiment, true or false, but impelled by a determination to cripple the South and break up her controlling influence in national politics,—a preeminence which had existed from the first days of the government. The politicians shrewdly employed the anti-slavery excitement to gain power for themselves and especially to aggravate the South into secession, and then, smothering every whisper of war for the freedom of the negroes, they raised the rallying cry of “Save the Union” and marshalled the Northern hosts for subjugation. President Davis justly said to a self-constituted umpire visiting him in Richmond, “We are not fighting for slavery; we are fighting for independence. The war will go on unless you acknowledge our right to self-government.”

FRENZIED FINANCE AND THE WAR OF 1861

[By J. L. Underwood.]

Was the war between the States in 1861 a war in behalf of slavery on the one side and freedom on the other? Not at all. After all the noisy and fanatical agitation on the subject, only a small minority of the Northern people had expressed any desire to have the negroes of the South emancipated at that time, and no State nor people of the South had said that slavery should be perpetual.256All the parties which in 1860 cast any electoral votes distinctly disavowed any intention to interfere with slavery where it existed. This was the declaration even of the Republican party which was triumphant and was now in power. Mr. Lincoln, the President-elect, repeatedly declared that slavery was not to be disturbed in the States, although he said the country could not remain “half slave and half free.” Here, then, the North and the South were thoroughly agreed that slavery within the States should continue undisturbed. As to emancipation, both sections of the country and all parties except the ultra-Abolitionists were pro-slavery. The Abolitionists admitted that under the Federal Constitution there could be no power in the national government to free the slaves. They cursed and burned the Constitution as “a compact with the devil and a league with hell,” and defiantly repudiated all laws which carried out its provisions. Under the plea of what they called “higher law,” they defied law. They were really anarchists. The Free Soil party, which had assumed the name of Republican for party purposes, secretly encouraged the Abolitionists in their mad crusade and welcomed their votes, but persistently disavowed their aims. All rational men knew that the time had not come to turn loose millions of half-civilized Africans in this country; while many, North and South, deplored the existence of slavery and would not advocate it in the abstract, yet they believed that emancipation was not best for the negro and would be accompanied by tremendous peril to the white people. The truth is that the Abolitionists of the North kept up such a blatant and fanatical agitation against the South that it was out of the question, in the excitement of the times, for conservative men, North or South, to think or speak of such an alternative as the immediate freedom of the negroes.

The Republican party, now the dominant party, and its leader, Mr. Lincoln, stood against the immediate freedom of the slaves. But this party had come into power on two ground principles which made its triumph a direct257attack on the rights and interests of the Southern States in the Territories.

It gloried in its free-soil doctrine, which was a declaration that the Southern States should no longer enjoy their share in the Territories of the government. It never mounted the steed of abolitionism until 1862 when the emancipation of the slaves was adopted as a war measure, and was so declared by Mr. Lincoln himself. In defiance of the decisions of the Supreme Court, the triumphant party held that Congress should not allow the Southern people the right to take their slave property, although distinctly recognized as property by the Constitution, into the Territories. The Northern legislatures deliberately defied the Supreme Court and its people denounced it and reiterated their free soil demand. Of course this was a direct insult to the South and a public outlawry of the South that no self-respecting people ought to submit to. The Territories were common property to all the States. The South held that while they were Territories the Southern people had as much right to enter and enjoy them as the people of the North, but the South was always willing that the people of the Territory, in organizing a State government, should decide for themselves as a State whether it should be admitted as a slave or free State. The new party declared that under no circumstances should another slave State be admitted. The territorial demands of the new party had been endorsed by the formal acts of a majority of Northern States in their legislatures. The catch-word of the new party was “no more extension of slavery.” The South had never brought a slave into the country, and never did propose to add another slave to it, but its rights in the common property of the Union it could not surrender to the dictation of the more numerous and populous Northern States.

Then what? Declare war? No. Simply fall back on the right of original sovereignty, on their several Constitutional rights, as the people of New England, when they were in the minority, had threatened to do, and withdraw from the Union with States who declared258so distinctly a purpose not to abide by the terms of Union. Then came secession, the only peaceable remedy. In it the South made no claim on territorial or other property. In fact, it was a voluntary surrender of everything not on its own soil to the remaining States. It was old Abraham’s alternative to Lot. “Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee, and between my herdsmen and thy herdsmen, for we be brethren. Is not the whole land before thee? Separate thyself, I pray thee, from me; If thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if thou depart to the right hand, then I will go to the left.” Then why should there be war? Indeed, why?

So natural and just was the step of secession that the more enlightened and conscientious Abolitionists conceded the right of South Carolina to withdraw from the Union. Horace Greeley, the powerful editor of the great Abolition organ, the New YorkTribune, boldly protested against any interference with her departure. Wendell Phillips, the great lawyer and Abolition orator of Boston, said in a public speech: “Deck her brow with flowers, pave her way with gold, and let her go.” But Greeley and Phillips were not the politicians nor the party in control of the country. We have shown how the Free Soil aim of the triumphant party led the Northern States to adopt such a course as really to drive the Southern States into secession. What was the main spring of the Free Soil crusade? This brings us to tell in one word what brought on the war. What was the ground issue which held the Northern States so desperately on their crusade against the South? It was the “tariff.” New England ideas dominated the thought of the North and Northwest, and it was always a ruling New England idea to get all money possible from the government. New England never lost sight of business, and especially her own business interests. It was only by Virginia’s surrender of her vast territories that New England could be brought into the Union and it took subsidies, appropriations for internal improvement, and fishing and tariff bounties to keep her in it.

259

Very soon she set up a persistent demand for high duties on imports to assist in building up her increasing manufactures. The moderate protective tariffs of the twenties, the tariff of Henry Clay, did not satisfy her. Her cry up to the final passage of the trust-breeding Dingley tariff bill of our day has been that of the horse leech, “Give! give!” The Southern States were agricultural and the prevailing doctrine as to tariff duties was a “tariff for revenue only.” The old Southern Whigs, like Clay, only favored a moderate protective tariff as a compromise sop to New England in behalf of her infant industries. But New England was not satisfied with the tariff of the twenties. A little taste of incidental protection had only increased her greed. In the thirties she demanded more. The tariff of 1832 was enacted and proved such a heavy tax on the consumers for the benefit of the manufacturers that South Carolina took the bold stand of nullification against it. By the combined efforts of Clay and Calhoun a compromise was effected and the tariff modified and the country saved. In 1846 the moderate Walker tariff, the “free-trade tariff,” was adopted and under it the people of all classes and all sections enjoyed more general prosperity up to 1861 than the country has ever before or since seen.

But New England “frenzied finance” was at work. The taste for public pap had grown by what it fed on. The “almighty dollar” idea in politics was sweeping the North. Theauri sacra fameshad formed a league with a fanatical sectional party. The seed sowing was over; the harvest of financial politics had come. New England must have a higher tariff and votes from agricultural States meant more anti-tariff votes and the tariff advocates decreed that there should be no slave States carved out of the Territories. To secure this the Southern people with their property must be excluded from the occupancy of the Territorial soil. Frenzied finance triumphed, and in the election of Mr. Lincoln the North declared the national territory forbidden ground to the South. Free soil exclusion from their property was openly flaunted in the face of the slave States.

260

What could the Southern States do under such an insulting ultimatum from the triumphant North? What did they do? Why, they simply fell back on their original right of State sovereignty and, as the North had already broken the Union, peaceably seceded from it.

Then why not, as Greeley and Phillips and thousands of Northern patriots urged, why not let these States go? Frenzied Finance replied in the words of Mr. Lincoln, “If we let the South go, where will we get our revenues?” There it is. They were needed to furnish their cotton and their trade to support the North. It was the frenzied Pharoah of finance that refused to let tribute-paying, brick-making Israel go. Hence the war of subjugation.

It is a grotesque and sad bit of history that while patriots like Crittenden, of Kentucky, Bayard, of Delaware, Black, of Pennsylvania and Seymour, of New York, were anxiously trying to avert war and save the old Union, while the whole world was watching with bated breath the storm gathering around Fort Sumter, the party of frenzied finance, now in control of Congress, defiantly discarded all propositions of peace compromise and concentrated all its mighty energies on the passage of its darling Morrill Tariff Bill. The Morrill tariff bill was enacted April 2, 1861. Fort Sumter fell April 14, 1861. There is the record of cold-blood-money worship. It was not Nero “fiddling while Rome was burning” but it was the legislators of the great American Republic fiddling on a scheme for the financial gain of private business while the glorious Union that we loved and our fathers loved was falling to pieces! The laborer’s groans, the widow’s sobs, the roar of cannon and the crash of States could not drown the mad New England cry for private subsidy from the public treasury.

THE RIGHT OF SECESSION

[In Southern Historical Papers, Volume 31, pages 87-88.]

It may not be amiss, however, to call attention to the fact that the North already admits that the people of the261South were honest in their contentions, and that they at least thought they were right. Furthermore, it is even conceded that the South was not without great support for its contentions from legal, moral and historical points of view. For instance, Professor Goldwin, of Canada, an Englishman, a distinguished historian, resident of and sympathizing with the North during the civil war, recently said:

Few who have looked into the history can doubt that the Union originally was, and was generally taken by the parties to it to be, a compact; dissoluble, perhaps most of them would have said, at pleasure, dissoluble certainly on breach of the articles of Union.

To the same effect, but in even stronger terms, are the words of Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge, now a Senator from Massachusetts, who said in one of his historic works:

When the Constitution was adopted by the votes of States at Philadelphia, and accepted by the votes of States in popular conventions, it is safe to say that there was not a man in the country from Washington and Hamilton on the one side to George Clinton and George Mason on the other, who regarded the new system as anything but an experiment entered upon by the States and from which each and every State had the right peaceably to withdraw, a right which was very likely to be exercised.

As far back as 1887, General Thomas C. Ewing, of Ohio, said in a speech in New York:

The North craves a living and lasting peace with the South; it also asks no humiliating conditions; it recognizes the fact that the proximate cause of the war was the constitutional question of the right of secession—a question which, until it was settled by the war, had neither a right side nor a wrong side to it. Our forefathers in framing the Constitution purposely left the question unsettled; to have settled it distinctly in the Constitution would have been to prevent the formation of the Union of the thirteen States. They, therefore, committed that question to the future, and the war came on and settled it forever. And, right here, let me say that the South has accepted that settlement in good faith, and will forever abide by it as loyally as the North, although we will never admit that our people were wrong in making the contest.

This question was calmly and logically discussed by Mr. Charles Francis Adams in a late speech delivered in Charleston, S. C., when he said:

When the Federal Constitution was framed and adopted, “an indestructible union of imperishable States,” what was the law of262treason, to what or to whom in case of final issue did the average citizen own allegiance? Was it to the Union or to his State? As a practical question, seeing things as they were then—sweeping aside all incontrovertible legal arguments and metaphysical disquisitions—I do not think the answer admits of doubt. If put in 1788, or indeed at any time anterior to 1825, the immediate reply of nine men out of ten in the Northern States, and ninety-nine out of a hundred in the Southern States, would have been that, as between the Union and the State, ultimate allegiance was due to the State.

THE CAUSE NOT LOST

[From Memorial Day, pages 30-31.]

A few weeks ago Dr. E. Benjamin Andrews, president of Brown University, a leading institution of learning in a New England State, in a lecture delivered in the city of New Orleans upon the life and character of the General of the Confederate armies, uttered this language:

People are prone to allude to all Lee fought for as the “Lost Cause.” Yet, like Oliver Cromwell, Lee has accomplished what he fought for, and more than could have been accomplished had he been victorious. At the close of the war we find the Supreme Court of the United States deciding the status of individual States, and the result is found to be that while the Union is declared to be indestructible, each State is regarded as an indestructible unit of that nation. Who would dare to wipe out to-day a State’s individuality? And do we not find to-day, instead of centralized power in Congress adjudicating things pertaining to the States, the States themselves settling these matters?Inasmuch as the war brought out these utterances with regard to the States of the Union upon matters then in question, who can say that Lee fought in vain?

Inasmuch as the war brought out these utterances with regard to the States of the Union upon matters then in question, who can say that Lee fought in vain?

SLAVERY AS THE SOUTH SAW IT

[Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens, in War Between the States, page 539.]

The matter of slavery, so called, which was the proximate cause of these irregular movements on both sides, and which ended in the general collision of war, was of infinitely less importance to the seceding States than the recognition of the great principles of constitutional liberty. There was with us no such thing as slavery in the263true and proper sense of that word. No people ever lived more devoted to the principles of liberty, secured by free democratic institutions, than were the people of the South. None had ever given stronger proofs of this than they had done. What was called slavery amongst us was but a legal subordination of the African to the Caucasian race. This relation was so regulated by law as to promote, according to the intent and design of the system, the best interests of both races, the black as well as the white, the inferior as well as the superior. Both had rights secured and both had duties imposed. It was a system of reciprocal service and mutual bonds. But even the two thousand million dollars invested in the relations thus established between private capital and the labor of this class of population under system, was but the dust in the balance compared with the vital attributes of the rights of independence and sovereignty on the part of the several States.

VINDICATION OF SOUTHERN CAUSE

[In Southern Historical Papers, pages 332-336.]

Mr. Percy Greg, the justly famous English historian, says: “If the Colonies were entitled to judge their own cause, much more were the Southern States. Their rights—not implied, assumed, or traditional, like those of the Colonies, but expressly defined and solemnly guaranteed by law—had been flagrantly violated; the compact which alone bound them, had beyond question been systematically broken for more than forty years by the States which appealed to it.”

After showing the perfect regularity and legality of the secession movement, he then says: “It was in defence of this that the people of the South sprang to arms ‘to defend their homes and families, their property and their rights, the honor and independence of their States to the last, against five fold numbers and resources a hundred fold greater than theirs.’”

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He says of the cause of the North: “The cause seems to me as bad as it well could be—the determination of a mere numerical majority to enforce a bond, which they themselves had flagrantly violated, to impose their own mere arbitrary will, their idea of national greatness, upon a distinct, independent, determined, and almost unanimous people.”

And then he says as Lord Russell did: “The North fought for empire which was not and never had been hers; the South for an independence she had won by the sword, and had enjoyed in law and fact ever since the recognition of the thirteen sovereign and independent States, if not since the foundation of Virginia. Slavery was but the occasion of the rupture, in no sense the object of the war.”

Let me add a statement which will be confirmed by every veteran before me—no man ever saw a Virginia soldier who was fighting for slavery.

This letter then speaks of the conduct of the Northern people as “unjust, aggressive, contemptuous of law and right,” and as presenting a striking contrast to the “boundless devotion, uncalculating sacrifice, magnificent heroism, and unrivalled endurance of the Southern people.”

But I must pass on to what a distinguished Northern writer has to say of the people of the South, and their cause, twenty-one years after the close of the war. The writer is Benjamin J. Williams, Esq., of Lowell, Mass., and the occasion which brought forth this paper (addressed to the LowellSun) was the demonstration to President Davis when he went to assist in the dedication of a Confederate monument at Montgomery, Ala. He says of Mr. Davis:

“Everywhere he receives from the people the most overwhelming manifestations of heartfelt affection, devotion, and reverence, exceeding even any of which he was the recipient in the time of its power; such manifestations as no existing ruler in the world can obtain from his people, and such as probably were never given before to a public man, old, out of office, with no favors265to dispense, and disfranchised. Such homage is significant; it is startling. It is given, as Mr. Davis himself has recognized, not to him alone, but to the cause whose chief representative he is, and it is useless to attempt to deny, disguise, or evade the conclusion that there must be something great and noble and true in him and in the cause to evoke this homage.”

Mr. Davis, in his speech on the occasion referred to, alluded to the fact that the monument then being erected was to commemorate the deeds of those “who gave their lives a free-will offering in defence of the rights of their sires, won in the war of the Revolution, the State sovereignty, freedom and independence which were left to us as an inheritance to their posterity forever.”

Mr. Williams says of this definition: “These masterful words, ‘the rights of their sires, won in the war of the Revolution, the State sovereignty, freedom and independence which were left to us an inheritance to their posterity forever,’ are the whole case, and they are not only a statement but a complete justification of the Confederate cause to all who are acquainted with the origin and character of the American Union.”

He then proceeds to tell how the Constitution was adopted and the government formed by the individual States, each acting for itself, separately and independently of the others, and then says:

“It appears, then, from this view of the origin and character of the American Union, that when the Southern States, deeming the constitutional compact broken, and their own safety and happiness in imminent danger in the Union, withdrew therefrom and organized their new Confederacy, they but asserted, in the language of Mr. Davis, the rights of their sires, won in the war of the Revolution, the State sovereignty, freedom, and independence, which were left to us as an inheritance to their posterity forever,’ and it was in defence of this high and sacred cause that the Confederate soldiers sacrificed their lives. There was no need of war. The action of the Southern States was legal and constitutional, and history will attest that it was reluctantly taken in the extremity.”

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He now goes on to show how Mr. Lincoln precipitated the war, and describes the unequal struggle in which the South was engaged in these words: “After a glorious four years’ struggle against such odds as have been depicted, during which independence was often almost secured, where successive levies of armies, amounting in all to nearly three millions of men, had been hurled against her, the South, shut off from all the world, wasted, rent, and desolate, bruised and bleeding, was at last overpowered by main strength; out-fought, never; for from first to last, she everywhere out-fought the foe. The Confederacy fell, but she fell not until she had achieved immortal fame. Few great established nations in all time have ever exhibited capacity and direction in government equal to hers, sustained as she was by the iron will and fixed persistence of the extraordinary man who was her chief; and few have ever won such a series of brilliant victories as that which illuminates forever the annals of her splendid armies, while the fortitude and patience of her people, and particularly of her noble women, under almost incredible trials and sufferings, have never been surpassed in the history of the world.”

And then he adds: “Such exalted character and achievement are not all in vain. Though the Confederacy fell, as an actual physical power, she lives, illustrated by them, eternally in her just cause—the cause of constitutional liberty.”

NORTHERN VIEW OF SECESSION

[Charles L. C. Minor’s Real Lincoln.]

W. H. Russell, the famous correspondent of theLondon Times, in his diary (page 13) quotes Bancroft, the historian, afterwards Minister to England, for the opinion, in 1860, that the United States had no authority to coerce the people of the South; and Russell reports the267same opinion prevailing in March, 1861, in New York and in Washington.

The life of Charles Francis Adams, Lincoln’s Minister to England, says that up to the very day of the firing on the flag the attitude of the Northern States, even in case of hostilities, was open to grave question, while that of the border States did not admit of a doubt; that Mr. Seward, the member of the President’s Cabinet, repudiated not only the right but the wish even to use armed force in subjugating the Southern States.

Morse’s Lincoln (Volume I, page 131) makes the following remarkable statement: “Greeley and Seward and Wendell Phillips, representative men, were little better than secessionists. The statement sounds ridiculous, yet the proof against each one comes from his own mouth. TheTribunehad retracted none of these disunion sentiments of which examples have been given.”

Even so late as April 10, 1861, Seward wrote officially to Charles Francis Adams, Minister to England:

“Only an imperial and despotic government could subjugate thoroughly disaffected and insurrectionary members of the State.”

On April 9th, the rumor of a fight at Sumter being spread abroad, Wendell Phillips said:

“Here are a series of States girding the gulf who think that their peculiar institutions require that they should have a separate government; they have a right to decide the question without appealing to you and to me. * * * Standing with the principles of ’76 behind us, who can deny them that right?”

Woodrow Wilson’s Division and Reunion says (page 214) that President Buchanan agreed with the Attorney General (Hon. Jere Black, of Pennsylvania) that there was no constitutional means for coercing a State (as his last message shows beyond a doubt) and adds that such for the time seemed to be the general opinion of the country.

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