The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct. Volume 1 of 2

Thus while the historical argument was clearly with those who maintained the right of the states to assert their authority as superior to that of the Union, that argument was addressed in large part to ears that had been rendered deaf to it by the echoes of the national glory. While the Union had indeed been at the first a hesitating experiment, it had become by time and by national achievement a nationality for the maintenance of which vast populations were ready and willing and even eager to risk their lives.

If we would understand the war and the conditions in which it came about, we must first clearly realize the change that had occurred in popular sentiment, and especially the growth of that national feeling which had slowly but surely replaced the old hesitation and jealousy of the states. Only the circumstance that slavery existed and was defended in one part of the Union and that it was antagonized in the other part on grounds of policy, conviction, and morality, kept alive the old sentiment of state sovereignty and made the war possible. That sentiment of the dominant right of the states was strongly asserted on both sides and insisted upon both in behalf of slavery and in antagonism to it until war resulted. The history of that controversy must be the subject of a separate chapter, in which its irritating character as well as the difficulties that statesmanship encountered in dealing with it, may be set forth without undue elaboration but with sufficient detail to render the result easily enough understood.

CHAPTER III

The "Irrepressible Conflict"

There is no possibility of doubt that, but for the slavery controversy, that growth of an intense national feeling which has been mentioned would have rendered the war of 1861–65 impossible.

That intensely patriotic feeling of nationality was all pervasive, except in so far as the slavery controversy impaired it as it did, both North and South. If that one cause of disagreement had not existed, if there had been no negro slaves in the United States, the sentiment of union and nationality which had grown with the Nation's growth and strengthened with its strength, would unquestionably have overborne all the quibbles and all the logical refinements of the earlier time. The decisions of the Supreme Court, especially those of John Marshall, which in effect rewrote the Constitution and successfully claimed for the courts the right to annul any and all acts of Congress that were not in accordance with the Constitution, had created a new and effective barrier against possible aggression by the Federal power upon the autonomy of the states and had at the same time established the Federal authority securely. When Marshall decided in Marbury vs. Madison, that an act of Congress assuming to do by national authority anything reserved to the states in the constitutional grant of power to the General Government, is no law at all but an act null and void, which the courts will on no account enforce, there was an end of all danger of wanton Federal encroachment upon the reserved rights of the states. And, as we have seen, that fear died out of men's minds, except in so far as questions relating to slavery from time to time revived it. But for those questions it need never again have arisen to vex the Republic and set its people by the ears.

But slavery involved questions of prejudice, questions of passion, questions of morality, questions of labor, questions of principle, and questions of pride, of sentiment, of conscience, of religion, of conviction. It stirred the passions of men, excited their prejudices, and appealed to their interests as no other question of policy has done in our modern times. Incidentally it revived, as no other issue could have done, all the old jealousies between the Union and the several states which the progress of the Republic had so strongly tended to allay. It set the history of the formation of the Union against the history of the Union itself as implacably antagonistic historical arguments in behalf of conflicting contentions.

Let us see how all this came about.

When the colonies achieved their independence, slavery existed, in greater or less degree, in all of them. The negro was then nowhere regarded as a man, so far at least as the generalizations of the Declaration of Independence and other formal settings forth of human rights were concerned. There was a strong desire to be rid of slavery, a deep seated conviction of the impolity of that institution, but, except among the Quakers and a very few others, there seems to have been no thought anywhere that the holding of negroes in bondage was a violation of that fundamental doctrine of human rights upon which the Republic had been established.

Indeed the desire to be rid of slavery seems at that time, and for a long time afterwards, to have been stronger at the South, where the institution was general, than at the North where it existed only in a scant and inconsequent way. As early as 1760, the South Carolina colony had sought to limit the extension of the system by passing an act forbidding the further importation of slaves, but the British Government had vetoed the measure. Twelve years later Virginia sought to protect her people against the black danger of slavery by imposing a prohibitory tariff duty upon imported slaves. Again the home government in London forbade the act to have any force or effect.

When Thomas Jefferson, a Virginian, wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, one of the strongest counts in his splendid indictment of the British King was the charge that in these and other cases he had forbidden the people of the colonies to put any legal check upon the growth of this stupendous evil.

But when the Declaration was adopted by Congress and signed as the young Republic's explanation of its revolutionary action, rendered in obedience to "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind," the great Virginian's arraignment of the King for having thus fostered slavery in colonies that desired to be rid of it, did not appear in that supreme document of state. We have Jefferson's own testimony that it had been stricken out in deference to the will of those New England merchants and capitalists whose ships and money found astonishingly profitable employment in the slave trade between the coast of Africa and the southern part of our country.

Thus while the holding of slaves in the more northerly colonies had proved to be unprofitable and had to a great extent ceased at the time of the Revolution, the traffic in slaves from Africa to the southern parts of this country was so profitable an industry that even the Declaration of Independence must be emasculated of one of its most virile features in deference to the greed of gain.

And this dominance of interest over principle continued for long years afterward. When the great convention that framed the Constitution was in session, it was at first proposed to put an end to the slave trade from Africa in the year 1800. An amendment was offered, extending the license of that infamous traffic to the year 1808, and this eight years' extension was adopted by a vote which included in the affirmative every New England state represented in the convention, Virginia voting steadfastly against it.

Those votes for the extension of the slave trade were given undoubtedly in behalf of the mercantile interest of the maritime states of the northeast, and they reflected no moral conviction whatsoever. For there was at that time no moral conviction of the wrongfulness of slavery anywhere in the country. The thought that the negro was a man, endowed by his Creator with an unalienable right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," had not yet been born in America.

And even after thirty odd years, and a dozen years after the constitutional prohibition of the African slave trade had gone into effect, that unlawful traffic in human beings was still so gainful an occupation to merchants and shipmasters, that Mr. Justice Joseph Story, himself a New Englander and a judge of the Supreme Court of the United States, was bitterly denounced by the New England press and public as a judge who deserved to be "hurled from the bench," because he had instructed grand juries that it was their sworn duty to indict the men who were still engaged in the nefarious business of transporting slaves, under conditions of unspeakable cruelty, from Africa to these shores. The offense of that great jurist lay in the fact that he regarded the demands of the constitution and the law as more binding upon his character and conscience than the demands of the New England slave traders whose very profitable business his insistence upon the rigid enforcement of the law threatened to embarrass and destroy.

As there are now no advocates of slavery in our free land; as all of us, North and South alike, are agreed that the institution was a curse the maledictions of which endure to the present day in vexatious "race problems;" it is possible and proper now to record all facts respecting it with impartiality and without controversial intent. It is of supreme importance to any clear understanding of this matter to bear in mind the fact that our modern conceptions of human rights did not exist in the earlier times; that the recognition of the negro as "a man and a brother" is the birth of comparatively recent thought; that the traffic in black human beings, captured in Africa and brought hither for sale as laborers, excited no impulse of antagonism, offended no moral sentiment, and seemed to nobody in the earlier times a violation of those fundamental doctrines of human right upon which this Republic is based. All that has been a glorious after-thought, and it is solely with an expository purpose and not at all as a tu quoque that these facts of history are here set forth.

Surely the time is fully ripe in which men of the North and men of the South may sit together in an impartial study of the causes of a quarrel that brought them into armed conflict more than a generation ago and may calmly consider without offense the sins of their forefathers on either side, making due allowance for the lack of modern light and leading as a guide to those forefathers. We must do this in this spirit, if we would be fair. Still more imperatively must we do it if history is ever to be written.

The period of controversy is past. The time of reckoning has come. The time has come when the advocate holding a brief for the one or the other party to the controversy should give place to the historian intent only upon the task of discovering and recording fact. The circumstance that there was grievous wrong on both sides does not rob either of the credit due for the right that it supported.

After the revolution the great statesmen of our land manifested a determined eagerness to free the country from slavery. John Adams and Alexander Hamilton were not more energetic in this cause than were Jefferson and other Southerners. When Virginia ceded to the Federal Government all her claims to the territory northwest of the Ohio river, it was Thomas Jefferson, the Virginian slaveholder, who insisted upon writing into the deed of cession a provision that slavery should never be permitted in any part of that fair land which now constitutes the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.

George Wythe, under whose tuition Henry Clay studied law, was by all odds the greatest jurist that Virginia ever produced, with the single exception of John Marshall. George Wythe was one of those whom Mr. Carl Schurz has in our own times characterized as "the Revolutionary abolitionists." They were the men of the South who regarded slavery as an imposed and hereditary curse to be got rid of by any means that did not threaten the social fabric with destruction and the country itself with chaos and black night. George Wythe absolutely impoverished himself – born to vast wealth as he was – in setting free the negroes whom he had inherited as slaves and in providing them with the means of establishing themselves in bread-winning ways. For, as he expressed it, "I have no right to set these people free to starve."

He gave them their liberty and with it a piece of land for each, on which with ordinary industry and thrift they could surely make a living for themselves and their families. Then he set to work, a man stripped of all his ancestral possessions and impoverished by his own act of justice, to earn a living as a Virginian lawyer. So far from having offended his fellow Virginians by his act of emancipation, he had won their esteem and their reverence. He became their chancellor and the most honored judge upon their bench.

Thousands of other Virginians of lesser note than George Wythe did substantially the same thing, though less conspicuously. Under the law after a time they could not set their slaves free without sending them beyond the borders of the state. Many of them found this condition a paralyzing one. They must pay off the hereditary debts of their estates and they must buy in the West little but sufficient farms for their inherited negro slaves to live upon if they would set those slaves free. These things many of them did at cost of personal impoverishment, while many others, like-minded, found conditions beyond their control. If the whole story of that Virginian effort to be rid of slavery by individual and grandly self-sacrificing effort could be told here or elsewhere, the angels of justice and mercy would rejoice to read the page on which the wonder tale was written. But the heroes who did these deeds of self-sacrifice for principle were mainly obscure men of whose names there remains no record. Only here and there a great name like that of George Wythe appears. Among these is the name of John Randolph of Roanoke, – most insistently cantankerous of Southerners – who left a will freeing all his slaves on grounds of human right. And though that will was defeated of its purpose by a legal technicality, it is immeasurably valuable as a fact in history which reflects the sentiment of that time among those who had inherited and who held slaves and even among those who, like Randolph, are commonly regarded as the special champions of slavery.

And this desire of Southern men to be rid of slavery did not cease until the very end. Very many Southerners whose consciences dominated their lives, deliberately and painstakingly educated their negroes for freedom in the hope and assurance that sooner or later, by one means or by another, freedom would come to them. There were planters not a few who used their authority as the masters of slaves to compel their negroes to cultivate little fields of their own and to put aside the proceeds thereof, as a fund with which to meet the surely coming freedom face to face, with no fear of starvation as a circumstance of embarrassment.

Henry Clay studied law under Virginia's great chancellor, George Wythe. From his distinguished Virginian teacher he learned the lesson that slavery – forced upon an unwilling people in the Southern part of this country by kingly and corporate greed, and still further forced upon those regions by the greed of merchants and shipmasters, even after the traffic that fed it had been prohibited by the Constitution and by the law – was an evil and a curse, a wrong to the black man and a demoralizing influence to the white. He saw clearly that it was the task of all good men to exterminate that evil root and branch, by such means as might be found available, without the destruction of society as a necessary incident or consequence. In the young state of Kentucky Henry Clay began his political career as an advocate of rational and gradual emancipation, and to his dying day – involved as he was in all the strenuous controversies to which the slavery issue gave rise in national politics – he never lost his interest in this behalf or abated his efforts to secure its accomplishment. A plea for the extermination of slavery was the first plea he ever presented to the people whom he asked to support him for public office. A plea for the extirpation of slavery was well-nigh the last that he ever urged upon the people of his state after all that was possible of honor had been conferred upon him by their approving will.

So enduring was this sentiment at the South that John Letcher, the Democratic war governor of Virginia, the man who set Lee to organize the state's forces for the Confederate war, the man who created the Army of Northern Virginia and made possible all its splendid achievements, was in fact elected governor because of his abolitionist sentiments.

Mr. Letcher was strongly imbued with that conviction which had dominated the best minds of Virginia from colonial days, that slavery was a curse to be got rid of and not at all an institution to be defended upon its merits. He had publicly urged the necessity of getting rid of it. He had explained to his fellow Virginians, in public utterances, its demoralizing influence upon the young white men of that commonwealth. Finally, so eager was he to rid his native state of the incubus that he deliberately proposed the one thing most offensive to the Virginian mind, namely, the division of the "Old Dominion" into two states in order that the western half of it at least might be free from slavery. When he stood as a candidate for governor in the last election before the war, all these facts were used against him to the utmost by the advocates of slavery and they undoubtedly deprived him of many thousands of votes east of the Alleghenies. The first returns indicated the election of his adversary, William L. Goggin, by an overwhelming majority. But when the figures came in from the western part of the state, where slavery scarcely at all survived, John Letcher was elected. Thus the anti-slavery sentiment gave to the foremost state of the Southern Confederacy its singularly earnest and efficient war governor.

But side by side with this anti-slavery sentiment in the South, there grew up a pro-slavery sentiment which was buttressed by every impulse of gain that it is possible for the human mind to conceive.

Near the end of the eighteenth century, Eli Whitney made slavery enormously profitable by his invention of the cotton-gin. Before that time slavery had been of more than doubtful profit to the people of the states that permitted it. It was not at all an economical labor system. It required the master to give to the laborer, in lieu of wages, such food, habitation, clothing, nursing in illness and care in infancy and old age, as no laboring population in the world has ever before or since received in return for its labor. It involved pension as well as payment. It imposed upon the employer obligations such as no employer in all the world, before or since, has been willing to assume.

But Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton-gin made the payment of such wages possible and profitable. It made it possible for a plantation owner to grow rich while feeding, housing, clothing and caring for his negroes as no other employer has fed, housed, clothed and cared for his working people since the foundations of the world were laid.

Eli Whitney's invention made illimitable cotton a substitute for costly and narrowly limited linen and in a great degree for good. It made it possible for every man in all the world to put a shirt on his back, a pair of sheets on his bed, a case on his pillow, and to clothe his wife in calico and his children in cottonade where before all these luxuries were denied to him and his by inexorable laws of economics. But incidentally that invention made slavery enormously profitable, where before it had been doubtfully profitable. Eliza Lucas of South Carolina, afterwards Eliza Pinckney, had sought to find profitable employment for her slaves by cultivating indigo. Other enterprising experimenters had explored other avenues of earning, but not one of them had found a way of making profitable the ownership of slaves until Eli Whitney devised a machine by the use of which any ignorant negro could remove the seed from three thousand pounds of cotton in a single day, where before one negro man or woman could remove the seed from only one pound or at the most a few pounds. From that hour forward, negro slavery became profitable in the South, and from that hour forth it stood as a "vested interest" with its influence as such in politics.

Let us not misunderstand. The cultivation of cotton by free labor has exceeded in its productiveness by more than two to one, that cultivation under the slave system. As has already been set forth in these pages, the greatest cotton crop ever grown before the war with which we here have to deal amounted only to 4,669,770 bales, while under free labor the annual production rose to an average of more than 11,000,000 bales in the closing years of the century which saw the extinction of slavery.

Yet there is no doubt or possibility of doubt that Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton-gin near the end of the eighteenth century made negro slavery profitable as it had never been before in this country. It enabled the planter to grow rich upon the proceeds of the labor of negro slaves whose industry had before produced scarcely more than enough to support themselves. It created a new era. It inaugurated a new epoch. It instigated a new sentiment in favor of slavery, where before the sentiment had been tending the other way.

In considering human affairs historically it is very necessary to bear in mind that men ordinarily have no opinions. If by "opinions" we mean well considered judgments, founded upon an orderly reasoning from accepted premises, then opinions are the very rarest of human possessions. If we are told that a particular person was born and bred in Spain, we know without further inquiry what his religious convictions are. If we learn that he is a Turk we perfectly know his so-called opinions upon the subject of matrimony. We take for granted the views of the Puritans' sons and daughters concerning religion. We know, without asking, what the "opinions" of any American are with respect to the Declaration of Independence. We know that, with the exception of a very few men, all the people of the South were firmly convinced that the cause of the South in the Confederate war was a just one; that the National Government had no conceivable right to coerce recalcitrant states; that secession was an absolute right of the states, and all the rest of it. On the other hand we know that the Northern boy who had declaimed Webster's reply to Hayne was fully imbued with the conviction that "Liberty and Union" were "now and forever, one and inseparable."

In other words, with here and there an exception, men's opinions are determined by geography, tradition, circumstance, self-interest and the like.

Thus when New England's chief interest was maritime and commercial, Daniel Webster was the most radical of free-traders. He held up to ridicule and contumely Henry Clay's protective "American system" and showed conclusively that nothing in the world could be more utterly un-American. But a few years later, when New England's interests were centered in manufactures, Daniel Webster's opinions became those of an extreme protectionist. In the same way he opposed a national bank so long as New England disliked that institution and favored it the moment New England desired its continuance. In like manner John C. Calhoun began by clamoring for the tariff protection of Southern industries and developed into the chief apostle of nullification as a means of escaping protective tariffs. Similarly Clay began by making so absolutely conclusive an argument against a national bank that Andrew Jackson afterwards quoted it as the best possible plea he could offer in support of his warfare upon that institution after Clay had become its chief apostle.

Men ordinarily have no opinions except so far as self-interest, geography, and circumstance determine them and in considering matters of history it is of the utmost importance to recognize that truth.

In the last analysis, therefore, Southern opinion was determined in behalf of slavery by the cotton-gin. And yet the greater number of Southern men were not slaveholders and so had no personal interest in the institution. Their opinions were merely a reflection of the sentiment that surrounded them. That sentiment was born of self-interest on the part of a small but dominant class and it drew to itself the sentiment of that much more numerous class – the white man who owned no negroes. Of the white men in the Confederate army, who made so unmatched a fight for Southern independence, not one in five had ever owned a slave or expected to own one.