The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863

We will grant, they may say, that the South is altogether wrong; nevertheless it wishes to separate, it can no longer live with the people of the North. The war alone, whatever may be its origin, is a new cause of disunion. By what right can twenty millions of men force ten millions (of those ten millions there are four millions of slaves whose will is not consulted in the least) of their countrymen to continue a detested alliance, to respect a contract which they wish to break at any price? Is it possible to imagine that after two or three years of fighting and misery, conquerors and conquered can be made to live harmoniously together? Can a country two or three times the size of France be subjugated? Would there not always be bloodshed between the parties? Separation is perhaps a misfortune, but now it is an irreparable one. Let us grant that the North has law, the letter and spirit of the Constitution on her side; there always remains an indisputable point—the South wishes to govern itself. You have no right to crush a people that defends itself so valiantly. Give it up!

If we were less enervated by the luxury of modern life and by the idleness of a long peace, if there still lingered in our hearts some remnant of that patriotism which, in 1792, urged our forefathers to the banks of the Rhine, the answer would be simple; to-day I fear it will not be understood. If the south of France should revolt to-morrow and demand a separation; if Alsace and Lorraine should wish to withdraw, what would be, I will not say our right only, but our duty? Would we count voices to see if a third or a half of the French had a right to destroy our nationality, to annihilate France, to break up the glorious heritage our sires bought for us with their blood? No! we would shoulder our muskets and march. Woe to the man who does not feel his country to be sacred, and that it is a noble act to defend it, even at the price of extreme misery and every danger!

'America is not like France; it is a confederation, not a nation.' Who says this? It is the South, and to justify its faults; the North asserts the contrary, and for two years she has declared, by numberless sacrifices, that the Americans are one people, and that no one shall divide their country. This is a grand and noble sentiment, and if anything astonishes me, it is that France can witness this patriotism unmoved. Is not love of country the crowning virtue of the Frenchman?

What is this South, and whence does it derive this right of secession it proclaims so loudly? Is it a conquered nation which resumes its independence, as Lombardy has done? Is it a distinct race which will not continue an oppressive alliance? No! it is a number of colonies, established on the territory of the Union by American hands. Take a map of the United States. Except Virginia, the two Carolinas and Georgia, which are old English colonies, all the rest of the South is situated on lands purchased and paid for by the Union. This proves that the North has sustained the greatest part of the expense. Ancient Louisiana was sold to the Americans, in 1804, by the first consul at a price of fifteen millions of dollars; Florida was bought from Spain, in 1820, for five millions; and it required the war with Mexico, a payment of ten millions, and heavy losses besides, to acquire Texas. In a few words, of all the rich countries which border on the Mississippi and Missouri, from their sources to their mouths, there is not one inch of ground for which the Union has not paid, and which does not belong to her. The Union has driven out or indemnified the Indians. The Union has built fortifications, constructed shipyards, light-houses, and harbors. It is the Union that has made all this wilderness valuable and rendered its settlement possible. It is the men of the North as well as those of the South who have cleared and planted these lands, and transformed them from barren solitudes to a flourishing condition. Show us, if you can, in old Europe, where unity is entirely the result of conquest, a title to property so sacred, a country which is more the common work of one people! And shall it now be allowed to a minority to take possession of a territory which belongs to all, and, moreover, to choose the best portion of it? Shall a minority be permitted to destroy the Union, and to imperil those who were its first benefactors, and without whom it would never have existed? If this does not constitute an impious revolt, then any whim that seizes a people is just and right. It is not only political reasons that oppose a separation; geography, the positions of places force the United States to form a single nation. Strabo, meditating on this vast country now called France, said, with the certainty of genius, that, to look at the nature of the territory, and the course of the waters, it was evident that the forests of Gaul, inhabited by a thinly scattered people, would become the abode of a great people. Nature has disposed our territory to be the theatre of a great civilization. This is also true of America, which is really but a double valley, whose place of separation is imperceptible, and which contains two large water courses, the Mississippi, and the St. Lawrence. There are no high mountains which isolate and separate the people, no natural barriers like the Alps and Pyrenees. The West cannot live without the Mississippi; it is a question of life and death to the Western farmers to hold the mouth of the river. The United States felt this from the first day of their existence. When the Ohio and Mississippi were yet but streams lost in the forest, when the first planters were only a handful of men scattered in the wilderness, the Americans already knew that New Orleans was the key of the house. They would not leave it either to Spain or France. Napoleon understood this; he held in his hands the future greatness of the United States; he was glad to cede this vast territory to America, with the intention, he said, 'to give to England a maritime rival which sooner or later would lower the pride of our enemies.' (Here the author refers to his pamphlet, entitled, Les Etats Unis et la France, and to L'histoire de la Louisiane, by Barbé Marbois.) He could have satisfied the United States by only giving up the left bank of the river, which was all they asked for then; he did more (and in this I think he was very wrong), with a stroke of his pen he ceded a country as large as the half of Europe, and renounced our last rights on this beautiful river which we had discovered. Sixty years have quickly passed since this cession. The States which are now called Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Oregon, and the territories of Nebraska, Dacotah, Jefferson and Washington, which will soon become States, have been established on the immense domain abandoned by Napoleon. Without counting the slaveholding population which wishes to break up the Union, there are ten millions of free citizens between Pittsburg and Fort Union, who claim the course and mouth of the Mississippi as having been ceded to them by France. It is from us that they hold their title and their possession. They have a right of sixty years, a right consecrated by labors and cultivation, a right which they have received from a contract, and, better still, from nature, and from God.

See what it is they are reproached for defending; they are, forsooth, usurpers and tyrants, because they wish to hold what is their own, because they will not place themselves at the mercy of an ambitious minority. What would we say, if, to-morrow, Normandy, rising, should pretend to hold for herself alone Rouen and Havre, and yet what is the interest of the Seine compared to that of the Mississippi, which has a course of two thousand two hundred and fifty miles, and which receives all the waters of the West?

To possess New Orleans is to command a valley which embraces two thirds of the United States.

They say 'we will neutralize the river.' We know what such promises are worth. We have seen what Russia did at the mouth of the Danube; the war of the Crimea was necessary to give to Germany the free use of her great river. If a new war were to break out between Austria and Russia, we might be sure that the possession of the Danube would be the stake played for. It could not be otherwise in America, from the day the Mississippi would flow for more than three hundred miles between two foreign servile banks: the effect of the war has already been to prevent the exportation of wheat and corn, the riches of the West. In 1861 it was necessary to burn useless harvests, to the great prejudice of Europe, who profited by their exportation. The South itself feels the strength of its position so well that its ambition is to separate the valley of the Mississippi from the Eastern States, and to unite itself to the West, consigning the Yankees of New England to a solitude which would ruin them. With the Mississippi for a bait, the Confederates hope to reestablish to their profit, that is, to the profit of slavery, the Union which they have broken for fear of liberty6. We now see what is to be thought of the pretended tyranny of the North, and if it is true that it wishes to oppress and to subjugate the South. On the contrary, the North only defends itself. In maintaining the Union, it defends its rights, and it is its very life that it wishes to save.

Thus far I have only spoken of the material interests—interests which are lawful, and which, founded on solemn titles, give sacred rights; but if we examine moral and political interests which are of a superior order, we will understand better still that the North cannot give up without destroying itself. The United States is a republic, the most free, and at the same time the mildest and most happy form of government the world has ever seen. Whence comes this prosperity of the Americans? Because they are alone upon an immense territory; they have never been obliged to concentrate their power and enfeeble liberty in order to resist the jealousy and ambition of their neighbors. In the United States there was no standing army, no naval force; the Americans employed the immense sums which we expend to avert or to sustain war, in opening schools, and in giving to all their citizens, poor or rich, that education and that instruction which form the moral greatness and the true riches of the people. Their foreign policy was comprised in this maxim: 'Never to mingle in the quarrels of Europe on the sole condition that Europe will not interfere with their affairs, and will respect the liberty of the seas.' Thanks to these wise principles, which Washington left them in his immortal testament, the United States have enjoyed, for eighty years, a peace which has only been disturbed by Europe when, in 1812, they were forced to resist England and sustain the rights of neutrals. We must count by hundreds of millions those sums that we have used during the last seventy years in the upholding our liberty in Europe; these hundreds of millions the United States have employed in improvements of every description. Here is the secret of their prodigious fortune; it is their perfect independence which makes their prosperity.

Let us now suppose the separation finally accomplished, and that the new confederation comprises all the Slave States; the North has at once lost both its power and the foundations of that power. The Republic has received a mortal blow. There are in America two nations, side by side, two jealous rivals who are always on the point of attacking each other. Peace will not remove their antipathies; it will not efface the memory of the past greatness of the Union now destroyed; the victorious South will, without doubt, be quite as friendly toward slavery, and as fond of domination as ever. The enemies of slavery, now masters of their own policy, will certainly not be soothed by the separation. What will the Southern confederacy be to the North! It will be a foreign power established in America, with a frontier of one thousand five hundred miles, unprotected on every side, and consequently continually threatening or menaced. This power, hostile, because of its vicinity alone, and still more so by its institutions, will possess a very considerable portion of the New World; it will have half the coasts of the Union; it will command the Gulf of Mexico, an inland sea one third the size of the Mediterranean; it will be the mistress of the mouths of the Mississippi, and can ruin at its pleasure the inhabitants of the West. The fragments of the old Union will have to be always ready to defend themselves against their rivals. Questions of customs and of frontiers; rivalries, jealousies, in fact all the scourges of old Europe will overwhelm America at once and together; she will have to establish custom houses over an extent of five hundred leagues; to build and arm forts on this immense frontier, to keep on foot large standing armies, to maintain a naval force; in other words, she will have to renounce her old Constitution, to weaken her municipal independence by the centralization of power. Farewell to the old and glorious liberty! Farewell to those institutions which made America the common refuge of all who could not exist in Europe! The work of Washington will be destroyed; the situation will be full of dangers and difficulties. I understand how the prospect of such a future can delight those who have never been able to forgive America her prosperity and greatness; history is full of such sad jealousies. Still better I understand and approve of this, that a people accustomed to liberty should risk its last man and give its last dollar to preserve the inheritance of its fathers. I do not understand why there are persons in Europe who believe themselves liberal when they reproach the North for its generous resistance by advising her disgracefully to relinquish her rights. War is certainly a frightful evil, but from war a durable peace may issue, the South may tire of a struggle which exhausts its strength, the old Union may again arise in its glory, and the future may be saved. What but endless war and numberless miseries can result from a separation? This dismemberment of a country is an irreparable evil; no people, no nation, will submit to such a calamity until it no longer has any power to resist.

Up to this time I have reasoned in the supposition that the South would remain an independent power. But unless the West joins the confederates, and the Union reestablishes itself against New England, this independence is a chimera: it might last for some time; but in ten or twenty years, when the free population of the West would have doubled or trebled itself, how would the South, necessarily much enfeebled by slave culture, compare with a people, thirty millions in number, enclosing it on two sides? To resist successfully, the South would be forced to rely on Europe; it could only live when protected by a great naval power, and England is the only one in a condition to guarantee for it its sovereignty. Here is a new danger for free America and for Europe. The South has no commercial marine, nor with slavery ever will have; England will at once seize the monopoly of cotton, and will furnish capital and vessels to the South. In two words, the triumph of the South is the reinstatement of England on the continent, whence the policy of Louis XVI and Napoleon has driven her; it is enfeebled neutrality; it is France plunged anew into all the questions concerning the liberty of the seas, which have already cost her two centuries of struggles and suffering. In defending its own rights, the American Union assured the independence of the ocean. The Union once destroyed, the English will again resume their preponderance, peace will be exiled from the world, and a policy will return which has only benefited our rivals.

This is what Napoleon felt; this is what is forgotten to-day. It would seem that history is but a collection of frivolous tales, good enough, perhaps, to amuse children; it would seem that no one wishes to understand the lessons of the past. If the experience of our fathers were not lost on our ignorance, we would see that, while fighting for her independence, while upholding her national unity, the North is defending our cause as well as her own. All our prayers should be for our old and faithful friends. The weakness of the United States will be our weakness, and on the first quarrel with England, we will too late regret having abandoned a policy that for forty years has been our security.

In writing these pages, I do not expect to convert those persons who have in their hearts an innate love of slavery; I write for those honest souls who allow themselves to be captivated by the grand visions of national independence which are continually shown to them in order to dazzle and mislead. The South has never been menaced, and at this late hour can return to the Union even with her slaves [the reader will remember that this article was published in December, 1862], and is only required not to destroy the national unity, and not to ruin political liberty. It cannot be repeated too often that the North is not an aggressor—it only defends what every true citizen will defend—the national compact, the integrity of the country. It is very sad that it should have found so little sympathy in Europe, and, above all, in France. It counted on us, its hopes were in us; we have forsaken it, as if those sacred words Country and Liberty no longer found an echo in our breasts. Where is the time when all France cheered the young Lafayette giving his sword to serve the Americans? Who has imitated him? Who has recalled this glorious memory? Have we become so old that our memory has failed?

It is impossible to foresee what will be the issue of this war. The South may succeed; the North may split up, and wear itself out in internal struggles. Perhaps the Union is already but a great memory. But, whatever fortune may have in the future, it is the plain duty of every man who has not allowed himself to be carried away by present successes, to sustain and encourage the North to the last, to condemn those whose ambition threatens the most beautiful and patriotic work the world has ever beheld, to remain faithful until the end of the war, and even after defeat, should it come, to those who will have fought to the last for the right and for liberty.

THE HUGUENOTS OF VIRGINIA

The warmer climes of the South induced many Huguenots to settle in the colony of Virginia, and their neat little cottages, covered with French grapevines, and the wild honeysuckle, might be seen scattered along James river, not far above Richmond. One writer of that day, says: 'Most of the French who lived at that town (Monacan) on James river, removed to Trent river, in North Carolina, where the rest were expected daily to come to them, when I came away, which was in August, 1708.' In 1690, King William sent to Virginia many of the Huguenot Refugees, his followers, who had taken shelter in England. Here they were naturalized by an especial act in 1699. Six hundred more came over, conducted by their pastor, Philip de Richebourg, locating themselves, about twenty miles above Richmond, on lands formerly occupied by a powerful tribe of Indians. There is a church now near the spot, retaining its Indian name to this day. In 1700, the Virginia assembly exempted these French settlers from taxation, and fully protected their rights.

We have seen a curious relic of the Huguenots in Virginia, which was found in the family of a descendant. It is entitled: 'A register, containing the baptisms made within the church of the French Refugees, in the Manakin town, in Virginia, within the parish of King William, in the year of our Lord 1721, the 25th of March. Done by Jacques Soblet, clerk.' This manuscript contains about twenty-five pages of foolscap paper, and remains a standing evidence of the fidelity of the Virginia Huguenots to their Christian duties and ordinances. As a specimen of their entries, we copy the following, literally, not even correcting their orthography:

'Jean Chastain fils de Jean ett de Marianne Chastain les pere et mere nee le 26 Septembre, 1721, est baptise le 5 Octobre, par M. Fountaine. Ils ava pour parun et marene Pierre David et Anne sa femme le quels ont declaree que cest enfan nee le jour et an que deshus.

SegneeJacque Soblet,Clerk.'

John Chastain, son of John Chastain and of Marianne Chastain, the father and mother, born the 26th of September, 1721, was baptized the 5th of October, by Mr. Fontaine. He had for godfather and godmother Peter David and Anne, his wife, who have declared that this infant was born the day and year aforesaid.

Signed, Jacque Soblet, Clerk.

Two or three of the pages contain records of deaths. Here is one:

'Le 29 de Janvier, 1723-4, morut le Sieur Authonoine Trabue, agee danviron sinquaint six a sept annees fut en terree le 30 du meme moy.

J. Soblett, Clerk.'

Jan. 29th, 1723-4, died Sir Anthony Trabue, aged about fifty six or seven years. He was buried the 30th of the same month.

J. Soblett, Clerk.

Huguenot names found in this old register of baptism:

'Chastain, David, Monford, Dykar, Neim, (Minister) Dupuy, Bilbo, Dutoi, Salle, Martain, Allaigre, Vilain, Soblet, Chambou, Levilain, Trabu, Loucadon, Harris, Gasper, Wooldridge, Flournoy, Amis, Banton, Ford, Laisain, Lolaigre, Givodan, Mallet, Dubruil, Guerrant, Sabbatie, Dupre, Bernard, Amonet, Porter, Rapine, Lacy, Watkins, Cocke, Bondurant, Goin, Pero, Pean, Deen, Robinson, Edmond, Brook, Brian, Faure, Don, Bingli, Reno, Lesuer, Pionet, Trent, Sumpter, Moiriset, Jordin, Gavain.

Names of Negroes: Thomberlin (Northumberland), Ivan, Jaque, Janne, Anibal, Guillaume, Jean, Pierre, Olive, Robert, Jak, Julienne, Francois, Susan, Primus, Moll, Chamberlain, Dick, Pegg, Nanny, Tobie, Dorole, Agar, Agge, Pompe, Frank, Cæsar, Amy, Joham, Debora, Tom, Harry, Cipio, Bosen, Sam, Tabb, Jupiter, Essek, Cuffy, Orange, Robin, Belin, Samson, Pope, Dina, Fillis, Matilda, Ester, Yarmouth, Judy, and Adam.'

We find in Beverly's 'History of Virginia,' a very interesting account of the Manakin French Refugees: 'The assembly was very bountiful to those who remained at this town, bestowing on them large donations, money and provisions for their support; they likewise freed them from every public tax for several years to come, and addressed the governor to grant them a brief to entitle them to the charity of all well-disposed persons throughout the country, which, together with the king's benevolence, supported them very comfortably, till they could sufficiently supply themselves with necessaries, which they now do indifferently well, and begin to have stocks of cattle, which are said to give abundantly more milk than any other in the country. I have heard that these people are upon a design of getting into the breed of buffaloes, to which end they lay in wait for their calves, that they may tame and raise a stock of them; in which, if they succeed, it will in all probability be greatly for their advantage; for these are much larger than other cattle, and have the benefit of being natural to the climate. They now make many of their own clothes, and are resolved, as soon as they have improved that manufacture, to apply themselves to the making of wine and brandy, which they do not doubt to bring to perfection.' The Rev. J. Fontaine, a Calvinistic clergyman, first preached to his Refugee French brethren in England and Ireland (1688). Then his sons emigrated to Virginia, and became settled ministers. From this stock alone, including his son-in-law, Mr. Maury, have descended hundreds of the best citizens of that commonwealth—ministers, members of the bar, legislators, and public officers. The Rev. Dr. Hawks estimates the relations of these Fontaine families, in the United States, at not less than two thousand.

A few years ago, he found in a family under his parochial charge, a manuscript autobiography of one of its ancestors. This was a James Fontaine, who was a persecuted Huguenot, and endured much for the sake of his religion. The work has been translated and published, and is full of interest—'A Tale of the Huguenots; or, Memoirs of a French Refugee Family, with an Introduction, by F. L. Hawks, D.D.'

M. Fontaine was a noble example of a true Huguenot. In his early life, he was accustomed to the enjoyments of wealth, education, and refined society; but, for conscience' sake, he was stripped of them all, and forced to leave his native land. An exile in England, ignorant of its language, and unaccustomed to labor, he soon accommodated himself to his altered circumstances. He became a skillful artisan, and worked successfully at his trade; at first he opened a little store, with a school also, to teach the French language, and he says: 'We were in great hopes, that with both together we should be able to pay our way.' M. Fontaine next undertook the manufactory of worsted goods, which he profitably carried on for some time, but became tired of the business. He was anxious to unite with a French church, and, knowing that there were many Refugees in the land, went to Cork in 1695.