The American Nation E-Book

French Ensor Chadwick

• Herausgeber: Charles River Editors
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 402

Beschreibung

The Pergamum Collection publishes books history has long forgotten. We transcribe books by hand that are now hard to find and out of print.

Das E-Book The American Nation wird angeboten von Charles River Editors und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
harpers ferry; confederate; jefferson davis; john brown; slavery; twelve years a slave

Leseprobe

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

The most dramatic and most momentous episode in the history of the United States is undoubtedly the Civil War, into which the country slowly drifted for nearly ten years, but which burst out with amazing suddenness and unexpectedness. From one point of view all the volumes of the American Nation, after the Revolutionary period, deal with the friction between the North and the South. Hart, Slavery and Abolition (Volume XVI.), specifically discusses the controversy over slavery and anti-slavery. Smith, Parties and Slavery (American Nation, XVIII.), brings out the political divergences. In the first four chapters of this volume. Admiral Chadwick intentionally restates this discussion in the light of the intense sectional rivalry and mutual dislike revealed over the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency; and he shows the economic importance of slave-grown products and the significance of the political theory of state rights at the time of the outbreak. The narrative begins where Professor Smith’s volume leaves off in 1859, with the John Brown raid (chapter v.). In the next chapter the political events of 1859 and 1860 are described. Chapters vii. and viii. are on the election of 1860. 1860. The process of secession and the attitude of Buchanan occupy chapters ix. and x. Chapter xi. deals with the first and utterly unsuccessful attempt at compromise. In chapters xii. to xv. there is a thorough discussion of the status of the Federal forts in the South, and of the attitude of Buchanan’s administration, culminating in the episode of the Star of the West. Chapter XVI is upon the second attempt at compromise, in February, 1861. With chapter xvii. begins Lincoln’s administration and the development of its policy. Chapter xix. in detail expounds the final outbreak in the fall of Fort Sumter

A West Virginian by birth, a graduate of the Naval Academy in 1864, and acquainted with many of the principal actors in this great drama, Admiral Chadwick brings an impartial spirit to his difficult task. The question of responsibility for the Civil War is one which cannot be settled off-hand, and no two writers, even occupying about the same stand-point, will agree as to the character of all individuals or the question of aggression; but the author has aimed in moderate phrase to state the results of a careful study of the men and the principles involved. The volume leads directly to the story of the events of the war in Hosmer’s Appeal to Arms and Outcome of the Civil War (American Nation, XX. and XXI.).

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

In preparing this volume I have had in mind throughout, both the limitations of space and the extent of the field described by its title. By “Causes of the Civil War,” I understand those events, principles, and personalities, which were finally focussed in the exciting period from 1859 to 1861; but it is not possible to bring out the significance of all those influences in a narrative confined to those two years, however eventful. The subject is one of such long continued and deep nationalistic and psychologic influences, that I have devoted several preliminary chapters to the state of mind of those who took the responsibility for the final arbitrament of civil war. No such crisis can be explained in any other way than as a slow development; and though I have in those introductory chapters freely referred to earlier volumes of this series, and have so far as possible avoided going over the ground which they have traversed, I have aimed to make the volume self-explanatory, even at the risk of some slight repetition in the work as a whole.

The crisis of the secessionist movement was in the government’s attitude in the questions of Forts Sumter and Pickens; this part of the subject has thus been dealt with in especial detail.

Many friends have given information, or made suggestions on text and maps. I beg to express my obligations to them, and particularly to the officials of the War and Navy Department Libraries, of the Libraries of Congress, of the United Libraries of New York City, of Brown and Harvard Universities, of the Boston Public Library, and the Redwood Library, Newport, whose courtesy and helpfulness have lightened the task of preparation.

F. E. Chadwick.

CAUSES OF THE CIVIL WAR

CAUSES OF THE CIVIL WAR

CHAPTER I.DRIFT TOWARDS SOUTHERN NATIONALIZATION.(1850-1860)

Seventy-two years after the adoption of the Constitution, called into being to form “a more perfect union,” and eighty-five years after the declaration of independence (a space completely covered by the lives of men then still living), a new confederacy of seven southern states was formed, and the great political fabric, the exemplar and hope of every lover of freedom throughout the world, was apparently hopelessly rent. Of these seven states but two were of the original thirteen—Louisiana and Florida had been purchased by the government of the Union; a war had been fought in behalf of Texas; two states, Alabama and Mississippi, lay within original claims of Georgia, but had been ceded to the Union and organized as Federal territories.

April II, 1861, found a fully organized separate government established for these seven states, with a determination to form a separate nation, most forcibly expressed by the presence of an army at Charleston, South Carolina, which next day was to open fire upon a feebly manned fort, and thus to begin a terrible civil war. The eight other slave states were in a turmoil of anxiety, leaning towards their sisters of the farther South through the common sympathy which came of slavery, but drawn also to the Union through tradition and appreciation of benefits, and through a realization by a great number of persons that their interests in slavery were much less than those of the states which had already seceded.

The North, in the middle of April, was only emerging from a condition of stupefied amazement at a condition which scarcely any of its statesmen, and practically none of the men of every-day life, had thought possible. It was to this crisis that the country had been brought by the conflicting views of the two great and strongly divided sections of the Union respecting slavery, and by the national aspirations which, however little recognized, were working surely in each section, but upon divergent lines.

In the period of the Revolution the four most southerly states were the only ones deeply interested in slavery from an economic point of view. The general sentiment in other states, among statesmen, at least, was averse to slavery, though the objection was rather philosophic than practical. Even the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1772 petitioned against the traffic, but was resisted by the British crown. In the Articles of Association drawn up by the first Continental Congress, October 20, 1774, it was agreed that the United Colonies would “neither import nor purchase any slave” and would “wholly discontinue the slave trade.”

The North Carolina and Virginia Conventions sending delegates to that congress pledged themselves not to import slaves and not to purchase them when imported by others. And Congress itself, April 6, 1776, resolved, without opposition, that “no slaves be imported into any of the thirteen United Colonies.”  Though this action was directed against British commerce, it was an indication of a general feeling of opposition to the traffic. No mention, however, was made of the subject in the Articles of Confederation submitted November 15, 1777; the farther South had begun to look to its supposed interests, and the results were the compromises of the Constitution, a necessity to the formation and immediate well-being of the Union, but fatal to its later peace.

The almost universal deprecation of slavery by the public men of the eighteenth century need not be repeated here. The author of the Declaration of Independence, which declared all men created free and equal; the Virginia orator whose impassioned declamations had done so much to forward it; the great man and the great general whose lead was so indispensable to its success; and yet another Virginian who aided in making and expounding the Constitution, all declared their abhorrence of the system, but continued to hold their slaves. On the other hand, many northerners and Englishmen stood by the system. Even Jonathan Edwards left, as part of his property, two negroes, a man and a woman. Whitefield regarded slavery as arranged by Providence for the instruction and salvation of the blacks; he had no doubt of the “lawfulness of keeping slaves,”  and died owning seventy-five, who, classed among his goods and chattels, were bequeathed to Lady Huntingdon. Lord Thurlow, in 1799, could denounce the proposal to abolish the slave-trade as “altogether miserable and ridiculous.”

In the face of these facts it is not surprising that probably the great majority of lesser men. North as well as South, regarded slavery as no sin. It was not until a great psychological wave of religious and altruistic enthusiasm swept over the North shortly after the Missouri contest that deprecation of slavery took a concrete form which made its destruction but a question of time. And this would have spread southward but for the simultaneous development of an immense and overpowering interest through the demand for cotton, the invention of the cotton-gin, and the consequent expansion on a gigantic scale of cotton production. This gave the slave a money value which it was hardly in human nature to ignore; and it gave an exultant feeling of superiority over the North in possessing a commercial monopoly. As put by a southern writer: “The cotton culture, then, and negro civilization, have grown up rapidly and equally together and their interests are now inseperable; whatever injures the one injures the other, and it is impossible to destroy the one without destroying the other. This alliance between the negroes and cotton, we venture to say, is now the strongest power in the world; and the peace and welfare of Christendom absolutely depend upon the strength and security of it. The whole world is under the heaviest bonds to promote and strengthen this connection.”  The supply of slaves could not keep pace with the demand; the more cotton, the more negroes needed. Every additional three and a half bales meant an additional field-hand, so that in round numbers 1,400,000 more were employed in the cotton-fields in 1860 to produce 5,400,000 bales than to produce the 450,000 bales of 1820.

In these forty years cotton had become not only the support of the South and the main-stay of our foreign commerce, but an equal necessity to England, the home of the cotton manufacture. There was then a basis for the belief, held without reserve, that without slavery there could be no cotton. The results of freedom in Haiti and Jamaica afforded good grounds for such a view, and in any case the South had full belief that the result of a general emancipation would be totally to destroy the cotton industry by the refusal of the blacks to labor; thus reducing the region to the depressed condition of these islands. This feeling was a powerful element in the political situation. None foresaw that in less than forty years from 1860 the crop of cotton would be more than doubled under free negro labor. Could they have done so, politics would have taken a different aspect. The change of conditions effected by the rapidly increasing demand for cotton was by 1830 a great economic revolution.

Cotton cultivation rolled like a car of Juggernaut over every lesser industry, and marched into new territory as an invading army. Public lands to the amount of 20,242,017 acres were sold from 1833 to 1840 in the Gulf states, Arkansas, and Tennessee. The cotton crop rose from 1,070,438 bales in 1833 to 1,801,497 bales in 1838. Almost the whole of the increase was in the new slave states, whose slave population increased in the decade 1830-1840 by nearly four hundred thousand, proving how great had been the shifting of blacks from farther North, Virginia showing an actual decrease of nearly twenty-three thousand, and Maryland of over thirteen thousand. The natural effect of cheap land, the necessity of continually seeking fresh soil for unchanging crops, could have but one effect: there could be no careful cultivation, “no adequate system of fertilization, southern husbandry was, for the most part, a reckless pillage of the bounty of nature.”

Southern slavery wore a more humane aspect than the slave societies which preceded it. By the partial closure of the African slave-trade the supply was limited, and the economic well-being of the planter required such treatment of the slaves as would insure not only a good labor efficiency, but, still more important, would tend to a rapid increase in numbers. Says the excellent southern authority just quoted: “The southern slaves, regarded as property, were the most desirable investment open to the generality of people that has ever been known. . . . Their labor was richly remunerative; their market value was constantly rising; they were everywhere more easily convertible into money than the best securities; and their natural increase was so rapid that a part of it could be squandered by a shiftless owner every year to make both ends meet, and he still be left enough of accumulation to enrich him steadily. And so the plantation, or, rather, the slave system, swallowed up everything else.”

To preserve this system meant to extend and give it at least political equality, if not actual preponderance in the Union; this became the aim and demand of the South; to restrict it became the equally fixed resolve of the North. Failing preponderance in the Union, the only course of the South was to nationalize itself in correspondence with its peculiar social and economic organization, and face the world as a nation whose corner-stone was negro slavery.

The outward manifestations in the history of the separation of the North and the South stand out in strong relief: the Missouri question; the protective tariff and South Carolina nullification; the abolition attacks which wrought the South into a frenzy suicidal in character through its impossible demands upon the North for protection; the action of the southern statesmen in the question of petitions; the passage of a fugitive-slave law which drove the North itself to nullification; the Kansas-Nebraska act and its outcome of civil war in the former territory; the recognition, in the dicta of the supreme court in the Dred Scott case, of the South’s contention of its constitutional right to carry slavery into the territories, and the stand taken by the North against any further slavery extension. To these visible conflicts were added the unconscious workings of the disruptive forces of a totally distinct social organization. The outward strifes were but the symptoms of a malady in the body politic of the Union which could have but one end, unless the deep, abiding cause, slavery, should be removed.

The president and vice-president of the Southern Confederacy, in their elaborate defences written after the war, have endeavored to rest the cause of the struggle wholly on constitutional questions. Stephens, whose book, not even excepting Calhoun’s utterances, is the ablest exposition of the southern reading of the Constitution, says: “The struggle or conflict . . . from its rise to its culmination, was between those who, in whatever state they lived, were for maintaining our Federal system as it was established, and those who were for a consolidation of power in the central head.”  Jefferson Davis is even more explicit. “The truth remains,” he says, “intact and incontrovertible that the existence of African servitude was in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident. In the later controversies . . . its effect in operating as a lever upon the passions, prejudices, or sympathies of mankind, was so potent that it has been spread like a thick cloud over the whole horizon of historic truth.”

This is but begging the question. The constitutional view had its weight for the South in 1860 as it had for New England in the Jefferson-Madison period, Jefferson’s iron domination of the national government during his presidency, a policy hateful to New England, combined with the fear of being overweighted in sectional influence by the western extension through the Louisiana purchase, led to pronounced threats of secession by men of New England, ardently desirous of escaping from what Pickering, one of its most prominent men, termed the Virginian supremacy. Exactly the same arguments were used, mutatis mutandis, later by the South.

As we all know, the movement, which never had any real popular support and which had its last spasm of life in the Hartford Convention at the close of the War of 1812, came to naught. Freed by the fall of Napoleon and the peace with England from the pressure of the upper and nether mill-stones which had so ground to pieces our commerce, a prosperity set in which drowned the sporadic discontent of the previous twenty years. The fears of the eastern states no longer loomed so high and were as imaginary in fact, and had as slight a basis, as were, in the beginning of the era of discord, those of the South. Could slavery have been otherwise preserved, the extreme decentralizing ideas of the South would have disappeared with equal ease, and Stephens’s causa causans—“the different and directly opposite views as to the nature of the Government of the United States, and where, under our system, ultimate sovereign power or paramount authority properly resides,” would have had no more intensity of meaning in 1860 than today.

Divergence of constitutional views, like most questions of government, follow the lines of self-interest; Jefferson’s qualms gave way before the great prize of Louisiana; one part of the South was ready in 1832 to go to war on account of a protective tariff; another, Louisiana, was at the same time demanding protection for her special industry. The South thus simply shared in our general human nature, and fought, not for a pure abstraction, as Davis and Stephens, led by Calhoun, would have it, but for the supposed self-interest which its view of the Constitution protected. Its section, its society, could not continue to develop in the Union under the northern reading of the document, and the irrepressible and certain nationalization, so different from its own tendencies, to which the North as a whole was steadily moving.

Slavery drove the South into opposition to the l>road, liberal movement of the age. The French Revolution; the destruction of feudalism by Napoleon; the later popular movements throughout Europe and South America; the liberalizing of Great Britain; the nationalistic ideas of which we have the results in the German empire and the kingdom of Italy, and the strong nationalistic feeling developing in the northern part of the Union itself had but little reflex action in the South because of slavery and the South’s consequent segregation and tendency to a feudalistic nationalization.

As pointed out by one, himself a distinguished son of the South, “In 1789 the states were the creators of the Federal Government; in 1861 the Federal Government was the creator of a large majority of the states. In 1789 the Federal Government had derived all the powers delegated to it by the Constitution from the states; in 1861 a majority of the states derived all their powers and attributes as states from Congress under the Constitution. In 1789 the people of the United States were citizens of states originally sovereign and independent; in 1861 a vast majority of the people of the United States were citizens of states that were originally mere dependencies of the Federal Government, which was the author and giver of their political being.”

These words of a southern orator convey a serious truth. The conditions of settlement were instigators of national feeling, as well as the tendencies of the century and the general conditions of American life. The immigrant, the traveller abroad, the commercial world, the great merchant fleet of the country, the army and navy, knew no state. But the South, except for its representatives in the military and naval services, was outside the pale of these influences; it had no merchant marine; its only travellers were from among the very few who owned slaves; it clung necessarily, through slavery, to agriculture, and lived the secluded and separate life of the husbandman; and when attacked by abolitionism it bent all its energies to the preservation of the only life it knew. It was not touched, except in a remote way, by the wonderful industrial change which came over the world with steam; its spirit not being commercial, it did not strive to link itself with the great West, as did New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Its harbors were few and mostly shallow, and though of depth sufficient for the ships of the period, its distance from Europe was so much greater when the steamship began to be the carrier and took a direct route, independent of trade-winds and Gulf Stream, that this distance became an important element in the change from busy to deserted ports.

The impulses working in the North and West, liberal, industrial, and national, were thus unfelt in the South, which planted and gathered in 1860 much as it did in 1820. Its illiteracy was very great, its reading public small. There was less movement between North and South than between the southern East and West, and the sections grew in painful ignorance of each other; an ignorance which increased as intercourse diminished through the sensitiveness of slavery. There was left but one kinship—that of blood. All other bonds disappeared in the gulf of economic interest, the outcome of its special form of labor, the preservation of which became an obsession. Under the circumstances there was but one step finally for the South to take—to set up a nationality of its own. It was impossible for it to remain under a polity almost as divergent from its sympathies as the Russian autocracy of that period was from the United States of to-day.

CHAPTER II.THE SLAVE-HOLDING SOUTH (1850-1860)

Slavery followed the natural law of every vice or disease—of moving towards health or towards dissolution. To denounce it now seems, in the words of a distinguished historian, “like trampling on a grave” ; the system is in the limbo of the inquisition and of witchcraft; a generation has sufficed to still much of the passion and hush the arguments which fifty years ago possessed the minds of the great majority of the South and many of the North. They can now only serve to illustrate the extraordinary psychologic aberrations to which the best of men are prone and teach the charity which all of us are so unapt to extend to the opinions of our fellow-man. Its study leads to the feeling that in this instance the mantle of charity cannot be too broad; it needs to be stretched over both North and South. For all slave-owners were not vicious; all anti-slavery men were not enemies or wishers of evil to the South. Nor were all slaves under the incessant application of the lash; families were not always torn apart, though there were enough such instances to point a moral.

Almost all Americans now agree with Clay’s dictum that slavery was “a curse to the master and a wrong to the slave,” but the wrongs of the latter had many alleviations, and in the main the great body of negroes in slavery enjoyed the happiness of an ignorant and unprogressive race to which to-day is much more than the morrow. It was a race which in its native land, though in contact with the highest civilizations through thousands of years, had not risen beyond the savagery which enslaved, destroyed, and sacrificed its kind; perhaps the most ancient of mankind, and which has come down to us unchanged through the ages in company with the gigantic and wonderful fauna of its mysterious continent.

Few of the southern blacks of the period of 1860 were far removed from their ancestral state by an interval of more than a hundred and fifty years, a short time in which to change the nature of any race of men; and the traditions also of the old life were kept alive by the steady influx of new African blood, seventy thousand being considered a “very moderate and even low” estimate of these importations into the United States so late as the decade 1850 to 1860. To the credit side of slavery must be placed this transplantation into conditions where the characteristic imitativeness of the race had an opportunity. It was the African’s one real stepping-stone to better things.

Slowly there grew up among all classes of the North the feeling which had always existed among the few, that slavery was an immense wrong. The twenty years from 1835 to 1855, which may be taken as the special period of this growth, saw also, as natural outcome of an attack, the development of a fierce defence, through which the mind of the southern states became almost completely unified in a belief that slavery was a positive good. This feeling, even of God-fearing, upright, and conscientious people in the South, of whom there was as large a proportion as in the North, is expressed in the reminiscences of a southern lady; “We never raised the question for one moment as to whether slavery was right. We had inherited the institution from devout Christian parents. Slaves were held by pious relatives and friends and clergymen to whom we were accustomed to look up. The system of slave holding was incorporated in our laws, and was regulated and protected by them. We read our Bible and accepted its teachings as the true guide in faith and morals. We understood literally our Lord’s instructions to His chosen people and applied them to our circumstances and surroundings.” The Old and New Testaments were regarded as impregnable buttresses of their faith and practice, and diligently and triumphantly quoted as full authority for the social regimen of the South. This reliance on Biblical authority permeated the South and is epitomized by Alexander H. Stephens in a speech on the Mexican War. “Until Christianity be overthrown, and some other system of ethics be substituted, the relation of master and slave can never be regarded as an offence against the Divine laws.”

While the slaves enjoyed, on the face of it, none of the essentials of manhood named in the Declaration of Independence, they probably thought very little on the subject, and then vaguely; while the certainty of freedom from want, from care for the future, from many of the demands of the law which touch society in general, went far to make up for the loss of liberty and brought them at least content. That the mass of negroes in the South were not dissatisfied with their condition would appear almost self-evident from the fact that during the four years of civil war none sought to change their condition by insurrection. This was due partly to their affection for their masters, partly to their childlike simplicity of mind and their ignorance and fear of the unknown; all of which last was a portion of the psychical make-up which had in the first instance doomed them to slavery, which continued to hold them in its all-powerful grasp, and is still far from having let go its hold.

The fifteen slave-holding states, including Delaware, with 1798 slaves and 19,829 free colored, and Maryland, with 87,189 slaves and 83,942 free colored, had, in 1860, a total population of 12,240,000, of whom 8,039,000 were whites, 251,000 free colored, and 3,950,000 slaves. This was a gain of the whole southern population in ten years of 2,627,000, or 27.33 per cent. The slaves advanced in numbers 749,931, or 23.44 per cent., the lowest rate for many decades. The nineteen free states (including Kansas) and seven territories, together with the Federal district, contained 19,201,546 persons (including 27,749 Indians), of whom 18,936,579 were white and 237,218 free colored, a smaller number of the latter, it should be observed, than in the South. The northern increase in the decade was 5,598,603, or 41.16 per cent. The population of the South was thus but little more than two-fifths that of the North. Calhoun foresaw, as did others, that if a struggle was to come it should come early if the South was to have a hope of victory.

The area of the fifteen slave states was 882,245 square miles; of the free, 824,622. But it was clear by 1860 that all the territories would be added to the list of the free states, making a free area of 1,903,204 square miles, or much more than twice the extent of the slave, and in this lay the crux of southern discontent.

Virginia, in 1790 the most populous of the states, with 748,308 people, of whom 293,427 were slaves, had dropped to the fifth place, with 1,596,318 inhabitants, of whom 490,865 were slaves. New York, with but 340,120 in 1790, had in 1860 the first place, with 3,880,735, of whom all but 49,005 were whites. The one state had more than doubled; the other had increased more than ten times. Of the whites, the increase in Virginia had been 137 per cent.; South Carolina, 108; North Carolina, 119; Maryland, 147. Georgia, however, had increased in this period from 52,886 whites to 591,588, a ratio of 11.18, the only one of the original thirteen states of the South to make a showing in any degree comparable with that of the more important states of the North. In all the border slave states the white population was gaining steadily upon the black. The census of 1810 was the last which showed an increase of the slaves in Maryland; they reached their maximum, 111,502, in 1810, and slowly decreased to 87,189 in 1860; the white population had nearly doubled. The whites in Virginia increased more than twice as fast as the slaves. The ratio of whites to slaves in Kentucky had risen steadily from three-fourths in 1830 to four-fifths in 1860.

The rapid proportionate increase of whites in Missouri should have convinced thoughtful minds that the fierce struggle for the extension of slavery in the territories then included under the name of Nebraska was lost effort, even had it been successful in, the first instance. The note of alarm was sounded loudly by De Bow, who nevertheless makes the error of ascribing the decline to the troubles in Kansas instead of to the immigration of foreigners. Between 1851 and 1856 the increase of slaves in Missouri was 12,492, and of whites 205,703; in ten counties adjoining Iowa they had gained 238 against an increase of whites of 31,691; in twenty-five counties the slaves had actually decreased 4412. In 1860 Missouri was nine-tenths white. It is not surprising to have De Bow, who had become eager for disunion, write: “Surrounded on three sides by non-slaveholding communities, can any one in his right mind expect to see slavery maintain itself in Missouri? Under the present Union the border states must all in a short time be lost to us. Were the Union at an end, the South would become at once a unit, and continue such for perhaps a century. The terms of a new confederation would secure this. The Union may be and doubtless is on a thousand accounts, very valuable; but let it be understood that this is one of the items of the price that is paid for it.”

The system was a serfdom to both races; to the black chiefly physically only; but a severe mental servitude to the six millions of whites who had no connection with slave-holding and who formed more than three-fourths of the white population of the South. To the vast majority of these people slavery was a complete closure to the higher reaches of social and financial well-being; for white labor would not compete with slave labor, but was relegated to the cultivation of petty farms, from which a bare subsistence was extracted and a peasantry brought into being wretchedly housed, isolated, and living a life which through generations was almost wholly without civilizing influences. In the lowlands this class, by its mere proximity to slave labor, sank to lowest depths of ignorance and unthrift, despised by the negro himself, too isolated to be able to hold his own against the deadening influences of his surroundings, and with no chance of entering into the knowledge of the world, since he was reached by neither book nor schoolhouse.

Scattered over the plains and foot-hills from North Carolina south were not less than two and a half millions of such people, for whom under slavery there was no hope; who had no place in southern polity or society; who aimed at nothing because there was nothing to aim at, and who are only now emerging into the light under the influence of the new industrial world which has risen in their midst. These people, however, were fiercely southern in feeling through the ever-present need of asserting the superiority of their white blood, which was all they had to differentiate them in social consideration from the lowliest black; and it was these men, never owning a slave, or hoping to own one, who, led by the slave-owner, made the military power of the South and fought the fierce and manly fight of the Civil War.

The condition of this great mass was the direct outcome of its segregation from the social organization of the slave-owning class of the South by its isolation through want of roads, through want of schools, through want of interest on the part of the planter in any laboring class but the slave, with whom in the large slave-owning districts the poor whites would not work, and with whom it was not desired to have them work. Where slaves were smaller in number this last difficulty disappeared through a reversal of conditions. On numbers of farms in Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia, in districts where slaves were few, whites and blacks frequently worked together in good-fellowship and harmony; the owner of hundreds of acres, but of very few—perhaps three or four—slaves, himself a gentleman and perhaps a member of the legislature or justice of the peace, lending a hand in the fields if occasion needed.

In a district larger than the German empire, stretching in the Appalachian region from the northern part of West Virginia into Georgia and Alabama, a great bay of mountain and valley reaching into the heart of the South, a region in which there are thirty-seven peaks higher than Mount Washington, there dwell to-day over two millions of people whose earlier conditions of isolation was physical and not social, as was that of their lowland brothers of like degree. They are the aftermath of the great “crossing,” stranded through stopping “to make a crop” to support the family through a coming winter. Their vast region was without roads, without navigable rivers, but with an enchanting scenery of wild and heavily wooded mountains, beautiful brooks, and valleys elevated into one of the most delightful summer climates of the world.

The mountaineer, though his life was necessarily one of a rude half-savagery through its lonely isolation, retained the independence and hardihood of his ancestry. Slavery was almost unknown among these men, and when the war came they took largely the opposite side from that taken by the poor whites of the lowlands, with whom they had nothing in common but poverty. Abraham Lincoln, himself a product of the mountain race and of the lowliest of them, is a startling example of their possibilities under changed opportunities. In his case it was transplantation which gave him growth; but education, enlightenment, and contact with the rest of the world, all of which were for generations denied them, will yet work similar miracles in this great mass. The blood of the people of the Appalachian region is of the best; it is the blood of Boone, of Harrod, of Clark, of the pioneers who gained for us the empire of the West, who under Jackson—himself one of them—won the victory of New Orleans, and under Clark, through the Kaskaskia campaign, enabled our negotiators to make the Mississippi our boundary in 1783; above all, it is the blood of the mighty and heroic man who saved the Union.

Neither would nor could the laborers of Europe, entering our doors by the hundred thousand, bring themselves to a competition with great numbers of slaves, more than the poorer whites bred in the South. Of a foreign-born population of 4,136,175 in 1860, but 118,585 were south of the border slave states. South Carolina had but 9986; Georgia, 11,671; Alabama, 12,352; Mississippi, 8588; Louisiana, 81,029, and Texas, 43,422. Missouri had nearly as many (160,541) as all the cotton states together, a fact which itself should have shown the South the impossibility of preserving it a slave state.

Everywhere throughout the South the small farmer was very markedly in the ascendant. In Louisiana there were 10,794 farms under 106 acres to 6487 larger, of which but 1532 were plantations of over 500 acres, and but 371 really great plantations of over 1000 acres. In Georgia 31,482 out of 53,897 farms were less than 100 acres, and there were but 902 places of over 1000 acres, though 1000 acres of fair land could be readily bought for $5000, and frequently for much less.

While the South was so strictly agricultural, the low value of slave labor became apparent in results. It produced in 1860, in comparison with the North, but one-eightieth the cheese, one-fourth the wheat, one-fifth the oats, one-tenth the hay. On the other hand, it produced somewhat more than half the Indian-corn, two-thirds the swine, five-sixths the tobacco, all the cane sugar (40,000,000 pounds of maple-sugar were produced in the North), and all the cotton. But the hay alone brought more money to the northern farmer than did cotton, sugar, and tobacco combined to his fellow-farmer of the South.

There was a like great difference in the manufactures of the two sections. Taking the more important industries in the two sections about to be formed—the Southern Confederacy of eleven states and the remaining twenty-three states of the Union in 1861—the relative values of production. North and South, were (in millions): agricultural implements, 16, against 1½; iron (pig and other), 39, against 2½; steam machinery, 43, against 4; iron-founding, 26, against 2½; coal, 19, against ½; lumber, 78, against 18; flour and meal, 193, against 30; cotton goods, 108, against 7; woollen goods, 68½, against 2½; leather, 59, against 4; boots and shoes, 86, against 2¾. The North, in these industries, the most important in sustaining the demands of a great war, was thus producing at its outbreak to the value of 735½ millions, against 751 of the South. In the great aggregate of manufactures, the value of productions of the two sections stood $1,730,330,000 in the North, against $155,531,000 in the eleven southern states of the coming Confederacy. The enormous disproportion of two and a half times the fighting men, and a manufacturing productivity eleven times as great, showed, had it taken time to think, a hopeless outlook for the South should its contention end in war. A close blockade, such as was to come, could only mean death to Confederate aspirations. The facilities for interior transportation were also greatly disproportionate; the Southern Confederacy contained 8947 miles of the total 31,196 of the railways of the whole Union; nearly all of this, both North and South, was east of the Mississippi; the North had about three times as much mileage per square mile as the South.

The great importance of cotton rested not so much in its money value as in the fact that it was the principal export of the United States and the main basis of supply both to Europe and America. Of the cotton consumed by the mills of Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States in the five years ending August 31, 1860, the growth of the South supplied an average of 84½per cent. Two-thirds of the values exported from the United States were thus from the South. The North had not as yet become a very great exporter of food stuffs or manufactures, but sent quantities of both to the South, to be paid for chiefly by the income from cotton. In 1855, excluding specie, the total exports amounted to $192,751,000, of which $67,626,000 were from the North and $125,124,000 from the South, $88,143,000 being in cotton alone. If the cotton in manufactures exported by the North be added (400,000 bales valued at $2,000,000), the value of cotton exported would have exceeded the total values exported by the North by $13,000,000. There was thus much ground for the belief of the South that cotton was king. It was difficult for any one to understand how it would be possible for the spinning world to get on without its American supply, how the United States could, manage its foreign exchanges without the eighty to a hundred millions balance supplied by cotton, or how the northern farmer or manufacturer could withstand the loss of his southern market; for the North not only clothed the South, supplied its furniture and agricultural implements, but in a very considerable degree supplied the food, the large planters finding it cheaper to buy supplies for the slaves in the northern markets than to raise it at home.

The impression of some writers of southern birth that there was in the southern county towns a decided anti-slavery sentiment and sense of rivalry to the planters has little or no basis. The anti-slavery sentiment, instead of increasing, had diminished. A strong pro-slavery sentiment existed among men who had no personal interest whatever in slavery by reason of ownership of slaves; nor does there appear, from the census records at least, that there had been such considerable growth of “handsome and fairly enterprising and prosperous county towns.” The census of 1860 could find only fifteen in Alabama worth mentioning, and of these nine had less than a thousand inhabitants, dwindling to as few as 117. But two towns in Arkansas rose in degree above the merest villages, one having only eighty people. Of the thirty-six “cities and towns” in Georgia, seventeen were of the same insignificant character; Louisiana had but three towns of over two thousand population, besides New Orleans (including Algiers) and its capital, Baton Rouge. All but five of the towns enumerated in Mississippi were small villages. It was the same in North and South Carolina, the latter state having but three towns, besides Charleston, of over one thousand population, and neither of these three having as many as seventeen hundred. Virginia, as is well known, was a state of petty villages, the locale of the court-house having often so slight a population that it had no other popular designation, and the census notes places in this state with as few as thirty-nine people.

It is of great importance that there should not be a false impression of the economic and social conditions of the South of that period. The usual descriptions of southern life presented a glamour of general well-being and luxury, an impression of constant house-to-house visiting, a life of feudal dignity and impressiveness, all this pictured by pens guided by minds much too imaginative and far from the rather prosaic facts. Some of the southern estates had handsome houses, a considerable degree of comfort, and, in comparatively rare cases, luxury. The life of the largest establishments was, in the main, of a somewhat rude plenty, with abundant service, and the horses and carriages, without which the life would have been imprisonment. Along with this there was the hospitality to their kind which such a life naturally demands. But it was not a life of ease even to the master and still less to the mistress. The latter supervised the clothing, the doctoring, the nursing of a great family, sometimes of hundreds, of a people who never grew out of childish ways and simplicity. The master had an overseer, and his province was mainly the fields, but the master’s wife was a woman of many and varied burdens, whose life was as far as possible from frivolity and ease; and the greater the estate the greater the burdens. There was a spirit of self-sacrifice and acceptance of the hard duties of the situation, a serious recognition of obligation to the childlike race committed to their care, for which the women of the South should have the highest meed of praise. It was the cultivation of a noble life, and made the brightest side of slavery.

How few were the well-to-do is shown by the fact that only 10,781 families held as many as fifty or more slaves in 1860, and these may, without great error, be taken as representing the number of the larger productive estates of the South. The great plantations in rice, cotton, or sugar were held by the 1733 owners of as many as 100 slaves. Of the 52,128 slave-holders in Virginia, one-third held but one or two slaves; half held one to four; there were but 114 persons in the whole state who owned as many as 100 each, and this out of a population of over a million whites. On the supposition that each slave-holder in the Union represented a family of five persons, there were in the whole South in 1860 less than two million persons, old and young, directly interested in slavery through ownership, as against over six million whites who had no slave property or interests, and whose own interest it would be supposed would be felt to be directly antagonistic to the system through competition in all branches of labor and through the social inferiority, that most galling of feelings to the American man, and more especially to the American woman, which non-ownership of slaves involved. Even a South Carolina journal, itself of secessionist views, could quote the following with approval from another paper of the same state: “The white mechanic is forced to eke out half a living beside the sturdy negro who fattens upon a price for his labor at which a white man cannot work with anything like an effort to maintain the distinction to which he should aspire. He is not only forced to labor for the same remuneration as the slave mechanic, but oftentimes finds difficulty in securing work enough to keep him employed on account of the plenitude of negro mechanics and the accommodating terms upon which they may be obtained.”

That this body of three-fourths the white men of the whole South should have fought stubbornly for four years to fasten more completely bonds which restricted them to every inferiority of life is one of the extraordinary facts of history. It was a disfranchised population almost as fully as the negro, in so far as any part in the higher and directive life of the country was concerned. No one of them ever appeared in any office of importance unless returned from the sections where slavery had slight hold. But this was no small part of the South; in the counties of Virginia now forming West Virginia, with a population of 376,886 (about one-third that of the entire state), there were but 18,497 slaves, of whom 11,235 were in the nine counties bordering on what is now Virginia. The northwestern part of the state, with a white population of 175,006, had but 1797 slaves, or one to every 100 whites. The eastern parts of Tennessee and Kentucky, the western region of North Carolina and northern Georgia, while not so marked, were akin to this in conditions. In fact, West Virginia and parts of the states just mentioned had, as had Delaware, the attributes practically of free states.