CHAPTER XLIV.

PROPER LIMIT OF THE NARRATIVE OF THE WAR.-A GLANCE AT ITS POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES, -GENERAL CONDITION OF THE SOUTH AFTER THE WAR.-ALTERNATIVE OF POLICIES AT WASHINGTON.-HIDEOUS PROGRAMME OF THE RADICALS.—THE POLICY OF RECONCILIATION.-ENLIGHTENED LESSON OF HISTORY. THE PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION."COINCIDENCE OF MODERATE REPUBLICANS WITH THE CONSERVATIVE PLAN.-POSITION OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON.-ESTIMATE OF THE VIEWS AND CHARACTER OF THE NEW PRESIDENT. -HIS SCHOOL OF POLITICS, MIDWAY BETWEEN THOSE OF CALHOUN AND HAMILTON.—A HAPPY POSITION.THE GREAT HISTORICAL ISSUE.-SERIES OF RADICAL MEASURES IN CONGRESS. THE BLINDNESS OF DESPOTISM.-PLAIN CONSEQUENCES OF THE RADICAL POLICY. THE residuum OF STATE RIGHTS CLAIMED BY THE SOUTH.-PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S DECLARATION OF ANOTHER WAR.--HAVE THE AMERICANS A GOVERNMENT ?—difFERENCES OF OPINION IN THE SOUTH, CORRESPONDENT TO THE DIVISION OF PARTIES IN THE NORTH.-A SMALL AND DETESTABLE FACTION OF TIME-SERVERS.-NOBLE DECLARATION OF EX-PRESIDENT DAVIS.-ELOQUENT APPEAL OF HENRY A. WISE.-BASIS FOR A NEW SOUTHERN PARTY. THE SOUTH TO SURRENDER ONLY WHAT THE WAR CONQUERED. —WHAT THE WAR DETERMINED, AND WHAT IT DID NOT DETERMINE. THE NEW ARENA OF CONTEST AND THE WAR OF IDEAS."-COARSE AND SUPERFICIAL ADVICE TO THE SOUTH ABOUT MATERIAL PROSPERITY.-AN ASPIRATION OF GOV. ORR OF SOUTH CAROLINA. -THE SOUTH SHOULD NOT LOSE ITS MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL DISTINCTIVENESS AS A PEOPLE. QUESTIONS OUTSIDE THE PALE OF THE WAR.-RIGHTS, DUTIES AND HOPES OF THE SOUTH.-WHAT WOULD BE THE EXTREMITY OF HER HUMILIATION.

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THE record of the war closes exactly with the laying down of the Confederate arms. We do not design to transgress this limit of our narrative. But it will not be out of place to regard generally the political consequences of the war, so far as they have been developed in a formation of parties, involving the further destinies of the country, and in the light of whose actions will probably be read many future pages of American History.

The surrender of Gen. Lee's army was not the simple act of a defeated and overpowered General; it was not the misfortune of an individual. The public mind the South was fully represented in that surrender.

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The people had become convinced that the Confederate cause was lost; they saw that the exertions of four years, misdirected and abused, had not availed, and they submitted to what they conceived now to be the determined fortune of the war.

That war closed on a spectacle of ruin, the greatest of modern times. There were eleven great States lying prostrate; their capital all absorbed; their fields desolate; their towns and cities ruined; their public works torn to pieces by armies; their system of labour overturned; the fruits of the toil of generations all swept into a chaos of destruction; their slave property taken away by a stroke of the pen; a pecuniary loss of two thousand millions of dollars involved in one single measure of spoliation—a penalty embraced in one edict, in magnitude such as had seldom been exacted unless in wars synonymous with robberies.

As an evidence of the poverty of the South, produced by the war, we may cite the case of the State of South Carolina. By the census of 1860, the property of the State was value at $400,000,000. Of this, it has been estimated that the injury to the banks, private securities, railroads, cities, houses, plantations, stock, etc., amounted to $100,000,000. There were, by the same census, 400,000 slaves, valued at $200,000,000. This left only $100,000,000 for the value of all the property left in the State; and the principal portion of this consisted of lands, which had fallen in value immensely.

The close of the war presented the Government at Washington with the alternative of two distinct and opposite policies, with reference to the subdued Southern States. One was the policy of the restoration of the Union with reconciliation: the other the policy of restriction. The party that favoured the latter was not long in developing the full extent of its doctrine, which involved universal confiscation at the South, a general execution of prominent men, the disfranchisement of men who acted or sympathized with the Confederates, and the granting of the right of voting to the freed blacks. This hideous programme was announced not only as a just punishment of "rebels," but as a security for the future, and the indispensable condition of the public peace.

But to men who had read the lessons of history it was clearly appar ent that this policy would be destructive of the very ends it proposed; that it would increase the acerbity of feeling at the South; that it would deliver the two races over to the most violent discord; and that it would be the occasion of immeasurable chaos and interminable anarchy. It was the immortal BURKE who uttered the great philosophical truth of history: that "liberty, and not despotism, was the cure of anarchy ;" and who proposed as the speedy and sovereign remedy for the disorders of the Col onics, that they should be "admitted to a share in the British Con stitution."

It was precisely this enlightened lesson which those who agreed in the sentiment of clemency, proposed to apply to the condition of the Southern States. It was this party which took its instruction from exalted schools of statesmanship; which looked at the situation from the eminence of History; and which desired to bind up with the Federal authority the rights, peace, and prosperity of all parts of the country.

Obviously the policy of this party, with reference to what was called "Reconstruction," was to consider the Southern States as in the Union, without any ceremonies or conditions other than what might be found in the common Constitution of the country. What may be designated generally as the Conservative party in the North, had long held the doctrine that, as the Union was inviolable and permanent, secession was illegal, revolutionary, null, and void; that it had no legal validity or effect; that it was the act of seditious individuals, and did not affect the status of the States purporting to secede. This branch of their doctrine was accepted by a large number of the Republican party; among them Mr. Seward, the Secretary of State. President Lincoln had acted upon this theory when it became necessary to reorganize States overrun by Federal armies. It was held by the Conservative party, against all rational dispute, that the business of the Federal Government, with respect to the insurgent States, was simply to quell resistance, and to execute everywhere the Constitution and laws. Its contest was not with the States, but with the illegal powers within the States engaged in resisting its authority. When the resistance of these persons ceased, the work was done; and the States were eo instante, ipso facto, as much within the Union as ever; no act of re-admission being necessary. It only remained for the judiciary to proceed by indictment and legal trial, under the forms of law, against the individuals who had resisted the authority of the Union to test the fact of treason, and to vindicate the reputation of the Government. And this was the whole extent to which the policy of penalities could be insisted

upon.

On this opinion there was soon to be a sharp and desperate array of parties at Washington. When, by the tragical death of President Lincoln, in a public theatre, at the hands of one of the most indefensible but courageous assassins that history has ever produced, the Executive office passed to the Vice-President, Andrew Johnson, the Southern people ignorantly deplored the change as one to their disadvantage, and the world indulged but small expectations from the coming man. The new President was sprung from a low order of life, and was what Southern gentlemen called a "scrub." In qualities of mind it was generally considered that he had the shallowness and fluency of the demagogue; but in this there was a mistake. At any rate, it must be confessed, Mr. Johnson had no literature and but little education of any sort; in his agrarian

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speeches in the Senate, he quoted "the Lays of Ancient Rome" as "translated by Macaulay;" and he was constantly making those mistakes in historical and literary allusions which never fail to characterize and betray self-educated men. Before his elevation to the Presidency, Mr. Johnson was considered a demagogue, who seldom ventured out of common-places, or attempted anything above the coarse sense of the multitude, successful, industrious, a clod-head, a "man of the people," that peculiar product of American politics. But there are familiar instances in history where characters apparently the most common-place and trifling, have been suddenly awakened and elevated as great responsibilities have been thrust upon them, and have risen to the demands of the new occasion. An example of such change was afforded by plain Andrew Johnson, when he stepped to the dignity of President of a restored Union, with all its great historical trusts for him to administer in sight of the world. From that hour the man changed. The eminence did not confound him; he saw before him a part in American history second only to that of George Washington; he left behind him the ambitions and resentments of mere party; he rose as the man who has been secretly, almost unconsciously, great-a commonplace among his neighbour, the familiar fellow of the company-suddenly, completely to the full height and dignity of the new destiny that called him. The man who had been twitted as a tailor and condemned as a demagogue, proved a statesman, measuring his actions for the future, insensible to clamour and patient for results.

President Johnson belonged to an intermediate school of politics, standing between the doctrines of Mr. Calhoun and those of Alexander Hamilton. He was never an extreme State-Rights man; he had never recognized the right of nullification, or that of secession; but he was always disposed to recognize, in a liberal degree, the rights of the States, and to combat the theory that the Federal Government absorbed powers and privileges, which, from the foundation of the republic, had been conceded to the States.

It was fortunate that the Chief Magistrate of the country, who was to administer its affairs and determine its course on the close of the war, occupied this medium ground in politics-the one that suggested the practicability of compromise, and assured a conservative disposition in a time of violent and critical dispute. It was natural that on the close of hostilities the tide of public opinion should have set strongly in favour of Consolidation; and that men should apply the precedent of powers used in the war, to the condition of peace. The great question which the war had left, was as to the form and spirit of the Government that ensued upon it-in short, the determination of the question whether the experience of the past four years had been a Constitutional Revolution, or the mere decision of certain special and limited questions. This was the great historical issue. The

political controversies which figured in the newspapers were only its incidents; and the questions which agitated Congress all sounded in the great dispute, whether the war had merely accomplished its express and particu lar objects, or given the American people a change of polity, and dated a new era in their Constitutional history.

At the time these pages are committed to the press, a series of measures has already been accomplished or introduced by the Radical party in the Congress at Washington that would accomplish a revolution in the American system of government, the most thorough and violent of modern times. Propositions have been made so to amend the Constitution as to deprive the States of the power to define the qualifications of electors; propositions to regulate representation by the number of voters, and not of population; propositions to declare what obligations assumed by the States shall be binding on them, and what shall be the purposes of their taxation. What is known as the Civil Rights Bill (passed over the Presi dent's veto) has not only established negro equality, but has practically abolished, on one subject of jurisdiction at least, State laws and State courts. In short, the extreme Black Republican party at Washington has sought to disfranchise the whole Southern people, to force negro suffrage upon the South, to prevent the South from being represented in Congress so as to perpetuate the power of the Radicals, and afford them the means of governing the Southern States as conquered and subjugated territories.

The practical fault of all Despotism is that it takes too little into ac count the sentimentalism which opposes it, and attempts to deal with men as inanimate objects, to which the application of a certain amount of force for a desired end is decisive. It never considers feelings and prejudices. It does not understand that in the science of government there are elements to conciliate as well as forces to compel. The Northern radicals look to the dragoon with his sword, the marshal with his process of confiscation, and the negro thrust into a false position as the pacificators of the country and the appropriate sentinels of the South. They never reflect on the results of such measures upon the feelings of the Southern people; they do not estimate the loss in that estrangement which makes unprofitable companions; they do not imagine the resentments they will kindle; they do not calculate the effect of a constant irritation that at last wears into the hearts of a people, and makes them ready for all desperate enter prises.

If on this subject the Northern people are best addressed in the language of their interests, they may be reminded that the policy of the Radicals is to detain and embarrass the South, not only in the restoration of her political rights, but in her return to that material prosperity, in which the North has a partnership interest, and the Government itself its most important financial stake. The Southern people must be relieved from the