The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 1, January, 1864

'We have reserved to the last the consideration of that possible outcoming of the war which is looked upon with most dread, both at the South and the North; from which both sections almost equally shrink as the possible issue; but which, nevertheless, may be forced on them by the logic of events, and that, too, at an earlier day than has been indicated by the expectations of either. While we write, the startling announcement is made from St. Louis that Major-General Fremont has been forced, by the threatening progress of the Southern armies, to declare martial law for the whole State of Missouri, coupled with the offer of freedom to the slaves. A military critic, writing from the Potomac and the lower counties of Maryland, is urging the application of the same policy to that region, as a means of defeating the contemplated passage of the river by the forces of the South. Whether the rumor so announced prove to be literally correct or not, it is hardly possible that the war can continue long, and grow desperate and earnest on any territory where slavery exists, without leading to this result. Tenderness and deference are sentiments which must soon give place to the stern struggle for life between hostile and desperate men. Already the South has not hesitated, in some instances, to muster her slaves into armed regiments, and in all cases to avail herself of their brawny arms as equally valuable assistants in the work of fortification, camp service, and all the other incidents of war. Still further, as a great body of laborers, undisturbed by the war, quietly conducting the general industry at home, and providing the means of sustaining immense armies in the field, the slaves are, in effect, an important auxiliary of the enemy's power. Already the Congress of the United States has passed a law for the confiscation of all property so used, so stringent in its terms that, without much strain of legal ingenuity, it might be made to cover the whole case. The threatened continuance of disaster to Northern arms may at any moment force upon our generals the military necessity of declaring emancipation within a given district or State, and finally, it may be incumbent on the Government to resort to the same policy in reference to the whole South. The contest is one of life and death for the greatest human interests ever brought face to face in hostile array. But a single step is wanting, and we may at any moment be forced over the boundary which hitherto has prevented it from being a conflict avowedly for the utter extinction of the institution of slavery on the North American continent, on the one hand, and for the triumphant establishment of the policy and power of that institution over the whole land on the other.

'In case such an event as that above alluded to should occur, a new disappointment will probably, to some extent, break upon the Northern mind. It will be found that the slaves of the South are not, as a body, so desirous of freedom, not so consciously intent upon the attainment of that boon, as ardent philanthropists at the North have supposed. The great masses of that population are too far depressed in the scale of humanity to avail themselves earnestly and at once, of even the most favorable means which should be placed at their disposal to secure their own emancipation from thraldom.

'To progress, even from slavery to freedom, is progression, nevertheless; and, as such, it is beset with all the hindrances and prejudices from ignorance and superstition which the advancement of the race meets always and at every step. Those among the slaves who fully appreciate the disadvantages of their position, and are earnestly intent upon the achievement of freedom, are a minority—the vigorous thinkers and reformers of the slave-population. The great masses are stupid and conservative, in the midst of the evil which they endure, until aroused by circumstances or the appeals of their more enterprising leaders. Even John Brown, knowing as much as he did of the South and of the negro character, miscalculated the readiness of the slaves of Virginia to fly to his standard, judging them by his knowledge of the readiness of Missouri slaves upon the Kansas border, who, through a few years of local agitation, had come to be on the alert and ready to move.

'In case, therefore, of the proclamation of emancipation in any slaveholding districts by our military chiefs, it will not be surprising if, for a time, the results of that step shall seem to be feeble, and shall be disproportionate to the expectations based upon it.

'The course of events will probably be this: The emancipation of slaves by the proclamation of Northern generals will be followed by a partial tendency on the part of the slave-population to flock to their camps in a way similar to what has already happened in the neighborhood of Fortress Monroe; and this, again, by mustering them into our service, arming and drilling them as part of the regular and effective force of our armies, after the example of General Jackson in the defence of New Orleans, and other Southern generals on various occasions in the South. A step like this will be met by a nearly or precisely similar expedient of desperate necessity by the military chieftains of the South. Either with or without the offer of emancipation, they will muster the blacks in great numbers into their army, arming, equipping, and drilling them as thoroughly as the same offices are performed for the white soldiers.

'Things may seem to stand much upon this footing, and no great advantage have been gained by the North through emancipation, until, in the event of some great battle, or successively through a series of local contests, the blacks in the Southern army will fraternize with those of the North, and go over in a body to their Northern allies, so soon as the course of events shall have informed them somewhat of the true state of the case, and have given them confidence in the earnest intention of the Northern troops to stand by them in the assertion of their freedom. A defection of this kind would carry dismay and insure defeat throughout the whole South, especially if it were vigorously followed up by the same policy and by adequate military skill on the part of the North; and the result of a war so inaugurated could hardly fail to be the rapid and complete disorganization of the whole system of Southern industry and the total revolution and final submission of the Southern States.

'No man can exactly foresee the consequences of so great a conflict, nor predict with any certainty the course of events through such an untried and tremendous pathway; but it is next to impossible to conceive that the Southern war-spirit could in any way long survive the disasters inevitably consequent upon the general prevalence of a claim to freedom by the slaves, upon any legal basis, suddenly diffused throughout the South. Should the alternative be forced upon the people of that region, of submission, or servile in addition to civil war, their troubles will thicken upon them to a degree calculated to calm their over-excited imaginations, and to subdue their vaulting ambition. Panic will come to their own doors with a new and all-pervading significance, such as the North hardly knows how to conceive. The North should abstain to the last moment from thrusting even enemies into calamity so dire. But, if the arrogance and madness of the South shall force on us, now or later, this terrific resort, the world may witness, as the result of this war, the most tremendous retribution for national and organic sin which any people has ever yet been called on to endure. The Nemesis of History may, perhaps, impress the darkest record of her terrible sanctions on the page which records the termination of the great American Rebellion.

'In the event last supposed, that is to say, if the war shall end in the entire extinction of American slavery, the state in which the Southern country, with its diverse populations, will find itself placed; the future destiny of the cotton-growing region, of the South generally; of our whole country, and of the continent, under this immense change of our condition as a nation, are subjects of sufficient importance to demand, on some future occasion, a distinct consideration. Enough points have been crowded, in this article, upon the reflections of the reader. History must not be too audaciously anticipated. The phases of the great crisis, already developed and developing, are sufficiently grave and numerous for the present occasion. Let the future withdraw her own veil from our eyes, while we reverentially await the revelation of coming events.

'All the forbearance hitherto on the part of the North, may have had in it an element of wisdom. It is not the object of this paper to criticize or complain of the past conduct of the war, nor to urge on the Government to convert a war, begun for the resistance of a violent and fraudulent dismemberment of the Union, into a war against slavery or a crusade in behalf of human rights. There is no present purpose on the part of the writer to conduct the discussion—far less to attempt the decision—of so grave a question of national policy at this eventful and critical epoch in the affairs of our national life. No doubt the subject stands as yet complicated in the minds of statesmen with the possibilities of the early and frank submission of the South, and the consequent early reëstablishment substantially of the status quo ante bellum; with the dread of inflicting measureless calamity upon those who are at heart faithful to our cause in the South; and, most of all, with the interests and feelings of the population of the few slaveholding States remaining faithful to the Union. The object of the present article is simply to lay open the true state of the case; to reveal to the Northern mind in a clearer light, if possible, the causes emanating from the South, which have gone and which go still to the formation of Northern opinion adversely to the spirit of our own institutions, and begetting, unconsciously in ourselves, a secret treasonable sympathy at the bottom of our own hearts; a sympathy which is the parent of that otherwise unaccountable tenderness on our part in respect to the patent weakness of the enemy's defences. It is not that we counsel, for the present, a change in the tenor of the war, but that we wish, as the logic of circumstances shall force this question upon us, that we may come to the consideration of it, in the future, disabused of any preconceived prejudices in favor of that which is the vital source of all the trouble which exists, and fully armed by a complete understanding of the subject.'

So ended the original paper, the same, with a few changes of the tense-forms to adapt it to the present time, as the Part One, published in the last number of The Continental, and Part Two of this series up to this point. The document was written for publication at that time, more than two years ago, but no periodical was found then ready to indulge in such bold speculations on the future. What has now in great part become history, was deemed too audacious for the public ear then. Perhaps no better gauge of the progress of events and opinion could have happened. A magazine article, rejected so recently, as too radical or wild in its prognostications, now stands in danger of being thought tame, in the light of the changes already effected. Thrown into a drawer as refuse matter, it has been like the log of a ship thrown overboard, and remaining quiescent, while the winds, the waves, and the current have combined to surge the vessel onward in her course; and, hauled in by the line at this hour, it may serve to chronicle the rate of our speed.

Events hurry forward in this age with tremendous velocity. Great as has been the progress of our arms, numerous as our warlike achievements and advantages, the real victories we have won are, in the truest method of judging, the victories of opinion which have occurred and are now occurring. Our greatest conquest, as a people, is, and is to be, the conquest over our own prejudices; our highest attainment the readiness to be just, and to act with the boldness and vigor which justice requires.

Taking things as they now are, let us again try to penetrate the future, or at least to sketch different alternatives of what may happen. Let us then try to catch the spirit of each alternative, and so be prepared to draw from the event such of good, and to guard against such of evil as each may involve.

As a first alternative, we may now speedily conquer the South. Insurrection may spring up in the South, against the insurrection there, and in aid of our arms. New vigor and new fortune may attend our own military operations; and our future military task may—somewhat contrary to our expectations, we confess—prove easy, and its conclusion close at hand. In that event, dangers of another kind, dangers already alluded to as existing at the commencement of the war, and hardly less to be apprehended now than then, hardly less, indeed, than the indefinite continuance of war, threaten the future of our political horizon. We may see in a few months' time the very men who are leading the armies and the councils of the Southern confederacy again cracking the whip of their sharp and arrogant logic about the ears of the men who had conquered them in the field of battle; claiming to dictate every political measure; forcing the mould of their thought upon every form of opinion, and, by astute political combinations, wielding the destiny of the nation in behalf of slavery and despotism, and against the principle of freedom. Do not imagine for an instant that any considerations of modesty or humiliation on the one hand, nor of haughtiness or pride on the other, would stand in the way of the immediate participation of those men in our affairs. Let there be no delusions either, with regard to the ability of the same leading class of men to keep themselves in the saddle at the South, through all political changes not involving the absolute destruction of slavery, and the complete and consolidated establishment of other institutions and habits of life among the people at large;—the virtual creation, in fact, of a new and different population, by the blending of our own Northern men and manners with the feeble indigenous freedom-loving growth. The return of this dominant class of cotton lords among the common masses of a Southern population anywhere, on any terms short of the utter extinction of their basis of wealth and distinction, will be the return of an armed overseer to a cowering mob of insubordinate slaves. The mere assertion of their authority will be its instant acceptance, and the most abject submission by the people. They will only have to demand reëlection to the National Congress, and to every place of power, to be reinstated in precisely their old position, their arrogance and self-assertion only augmented by their having met and survived every disaster short of the destruction of the source of their superiority.

Already schemes to restore the old State governments are rife, in respect to Louisiana, Mississippi, and other of the rebel States, now again brought within our military lines. Let this be done upon the old footing at an early day, for these States and for the others, which under the hypothesis now under consideration, will soon be subjugated; let the Emancipation Proclamation fall into desuetude; let the military authority of our army officers be withdrawn, and there is nothing in the character of the Southern slaveholding aristocracy, and no other power on earth, to prevent their flocking in crowds and at the very first general election back to Washington, reuniting their forces with the old body of profligate political hacks at the North, and flaunting with increased presumption and activity the pretensions of slavery to dictate the whole policy of the land. In that event, a strong party, more distinctively proslavery and Southern than ever before, will be organized; more openly and shamelessly than ever devoted to the destruction of the last remnant of American liberty. Of course there will be a new reaction against the new usurpation. The conflict will be renewed, beginning precisely where the first war began, with the only exception that the issue will be then more distinctly understood, the conflict more desperate, and the result more definitive.

It is of the utmost importance that the true nature of the case be understood: that this war is no accident of the hour, no merely political or national event even. It is a death struggle between two antagonist civilizations; if indeed one of them can be called a civilization, and not rather a conspiracy against the very idea of civilization. Again, the men involved in that conspiracy are not hidalgos, ancien régime, nor any of the proud aristocracies of the old world, who, when beaten, retire upon their dignity and hide their time. They are, on the contrary, an enterprising gang of desperadoes, who for the nonce may find it convenient to play the rôle of high life and dignified pretension, but who, on the slightest change of circumstances, are ready for any shift, any seeming degradation or humiliation, any temporary lowering of their claims, in order to rise higher on the next wave. There is also enough of the savage and barbarous element of character remaining in the Southern bogus chivalry to make them, like the Chinaman or the Japanese, incapable of appreciating magnanimity. All conciliation or clemency will be construed into weakness; generosity and forbearance into poltroonery. These are sad truths; but being truths, the failure to know them in season may cost us another and a more desperate war, with more doubtful and dangerous results.

Let us once surrender, through national verdancy, sentimental commiseration, misunderstanding of the nature and purposes of our enemy, or any or all of these causes combined with others, the dear-bought advantages we have won, and disasters untold involve the future of the land. Terrible beyond description will be, in that event, the condition of the Union and emancipationist party now incipiently developing itself at the South;—abandoned and deserted by the withdrawal of the actual presence and protection of Northern arms. No barbarism on earth, no savagism extant, is so barbarous or so savage as the ruthless vengeance with which this hybrid civilization of the South is ready at any time to visit the crime of abolitionism; and seven times hotter than usual will the furnace of their wrath be heated against Southern men who under the ægis of Northern protection shall have exhibited some sympathy with freedom.

That a powerful Northern party will immediately arise in behalf of the simple readmission of the Southern States, upon precisely the old basis, when the war shall end by the suppression of the rebellion, is certain. The existence of such a party will rest, in part, upon a real sympathy with the South and the rebellion; partly upon interested political motives of a more ordinary and short-sighted character; and, in still greater part than either of these, upon the easy credence and insufficient information of the great mass of the Northern people; somewhat, indeed, upon a magnanimity highly creditable to their character as men, but unwise and dangerous in the extreme, in any exercise of it which should surrender a vital advantage.

It does not require even that the complete reconquest of the South should be awaited in order that the question of the return of subdued States into the Union upon the old terms should be sprung upon the nation, and perhaps decided, by a precedent, before the attention of the country can be thoroughly directed to the momentous nature of the step proposed. The New York Herald has been hitherto a steady and consistent advocate of this policy, and a powerful agitator in its behalf. The following extract from its columns indicates the imminence of the issue, as well as the simple and seemingly reasonable political machinery by which the whole thing is to be effected:

'It appears from the correspondence to which we have referred that certain citizens of New Orleans, some of whose names are given elsewhere, have resolved to restore Louisiana to the Union, and that they intend to do this in the manner pointed out by Secretary Seward in his famous reply to the intervention despatch of M. Drouyn de Lhuys. That is to say, they intend to set the State Government in motion, elect members of the Legislature, and send loyal representatives to Congress. These gentlemen assert—and the Tribune does not deny—that Mr. Seward and Mr. Bates indorse this idea, and that Mr. Etheridge, as Clerk of the House of Representatives, has consented to receive the loyal members from Louisiana, upon their own credentials, until the House is organized. They also say—and the Tribune does not deny—that Mr. Etheridge has a perfect right to do this upon the precedent established by the Broad Seal controversy, some twenty years ago. Under these circumstances, the Union men propose to hold an election for five members of Congress—one from each district and one on the general ticket—and also for members of the State Senate and Assembly. 'They are anxious,' says the Tribune correspondent, 'that Louisiana shall take the lead in this matter, and there is no doubt but Mississippi and the other States will, in due time, follow.' So far, the patriotic reader will search in vain for any objection to a plan which promises so much good for the Union, and will be at a loss to know upon what grounds the Tribune can oppose it with any show of loyalty.'

It is no part of the object of this writing to discuss the legality or the constitutionality of any course of proceeding in the premises. What can be done and what cannot be done under the law, as it stands, is a question for lawyers and judges. How far, if at all, the exigency has annulled or modified the law; how far the axiom, inter arma silent leges ('in war the laws are silent'), shall be stretched to cover the case, is a question for statesmen and military commanders. The writer of these strictures speaks from none of those points of view, but as a social philosopher, viewing the drifts of inevitable consequence from one or the other grand policy in respect to the national destiny—irrespective of the minor measures by which it may be executed. A course utterly suicidal, viewed from this higher platform of observation, may proceed with the most unimpeachable subserviency to all the forms of the law; or, contrariwise, a policy replete with the highest prosperity and happiness of the coming ages, may chance to have its foundations laid in some startling deviation from all considerations of precedent and routine.

In other words, what can be done or cannot be done under the law, or without violence to the law, is not now the question under consideration. What must be done, whether under the law or above the law,12 to secure certain great ends of human progression, and to avoid positions of utter disaster to the life of the American people of the future, is so.

Whether the theory of Mr. Sumner, that the revolted States are, by the operation of the revolt, or should be by the action of the Government, remanded to the territorial condition, holds good; whether the theory of Mr. Owen, that the machinery of the State Governments at the South remains unaffected by the insurrection, but that the inhabitants, being traitors, are incapable of administering it, until they are purged of their treason by the action of the United States Government, is held to be the better opinion; or, whether, in fine, the easy and simple theory of the Herald is the law of the subject—none of these points is the point of the present investigation. We seek to fix attention on the consequences of the act of an early readmission of the revolted States, and, what would be the same thing, of the old and governing set of slaveholding politicians, from those States, into the administration of our national affairs, no matter what should be the method of its accomplishment. In that event, the war will not be ended, but smothered merely, and left smouldering. It will burst out again, and all that has been done hitherto will have to be done over again, or fail to be accomplished, and the consequences of failure endured.

Let no ordinary and superficial method of reasoning obfuscate the public mind on this subject. It is becoming popular to say and to think that slavery at the South is already a dead or a dying institution, by the operation of the war. This opinion has in it, undoubtedly, the value of a prophecy, provided the war be continued to its legitimate termination; provided all the measures against slavery hitherto adopted are firmly maintained; provided the incipient anti-slavery sentiment now being developed in the South, be wisely fostered and protected by the strong arm long enough, or until new institutions and new methods of thinking and acting have time to consolidate. But, whoever supposes that slavery is as yet even essentially weakened, provided, for any reason, our forces and the influence of Northern sentiment were suddenly withdrawn from the South, and the ocean waves of the old despotism were for a moment even permitted to surge back over those portions of the territory which have been partially redeemed, has no adequate idea of the tremendous vitality of that institution.