Filled forever and forever by the shining light of Him Through thy lovely gates the nations of the saved in triumph stream, Chanting praise above all praises love of love their holy theme! They no more shall thirst, or hunger; they no more with heat shall faint; Christ for tears will give them gladness-blissful rest for sore com plaint. Blessed they who do His bidding! cries the Angel, day and night; They shall find abundant entrance they shall walk with Him in white! ARTICLE VI. THE SOUTHERN INSURRECTION: ITS ELEMENTS AND ASPECTS. It is difficult for contemporary observers correctly to interpret important social changes. These require to be looked at through a more colorless light than the atmosphere which first surrounds them furnishes. The arena on which they are wrought out has too much of the dust and smoke of a battlefield, figuratively and perhaps literally, for steady and accurate vision. We were amused lately on reading an advertisement by a popular and prolific clerico-historical author, in one of our weekly papers, for material out of which to construct the record of our present conflict with southern rebellion. It would doubtless be easy to string together immeasurable columns of reëdited news-letters from more or less reliable sources, and, interspersing these with illustrative wood-cuts, call it a history of the North American Civil War. It might fulfil the bookseller's contract which produced it, and have a run if cleverly done. But we remember that only just now the stories of our own separation from the mother-country, and of the earlier Dutch struggle for independence, are getting a relation in a way to satisfy careful and inquisitive readers. Fifty years hence, possibly the same service may be as intelligently rendered to the interior history of these two great years in our annals, which are not only drawing on us the close regard of the entire world, but (far more serious to think of) are turning the whole direction of our national life to other issues than any of us conjectured a very short time ago. We say this, not to depreciate any thoughtful discussion of passing events; we purpose to essay this very thing as our limits shall allow. But we wish to record our confession at the outset, that the objects which we fain would accurately measure move through the mist rather as ill-proportioned human shadows than as well shapen and behaving men. So do we judge it is with those of the review-fraternity who have recently spread upon their pages their speculations and vaticinations upon this shifting, many-sided topic. We have read most of these deliverances with interest and instruction. Following in their train, we shall not probably agree entirely with any one of them. Yet, we are farthest from expecting to strike out any new idea on the much handled questions involved. Our ambition is modest. We shall accomplish its aim if succeeding to cull out and recompose such thoughts already put forth upon our public affairs as we deem to be true and timely. Less than two years have converted us from a hard-working, money-making people into the most military nation of existing Christendom. Not far from a hundred battles have been fought between sections of the land which number on their musterrolls a million and a half of men under arms. Our own force thus marshalled must be largely over one half that number. Our thoughts have learned to flow in a channel red with blood. Our literature has taken on the same sanguinary hue. The toga has given place to arms. We are settling down to the fact that our country, in almost any event, must put itself upon a military footing as a permanent status. The piping days of a palmy, industrial prosperity, we fear, are over for many years to come. We are fighting on a gigantic scale, at the cost of not far from a thousand and a half millions of dollars already expended, a formidable fraction of which stands charged to the public account as a rapidly increasing debt. But no one is concerned about it, nor thinks a moment of staying the outlay, or stanching the stream of death. Quiet villagers come together in town-meeting, and without debate freely vote themselves into a loan of ten and twenty thousand dollars to pay the bounties of men who will volunteer into the army, and, when it is done, go home wondering what they would have said if some mad clairvoyant, a few years ago, had foretold any such looseness of the purse-strings. Nobody now would second the rhymer: "I hate the drum's discordant sound, Parading round, and round, and round." It is music to the dullest heart as it stirs our sons, and brothers, and husbands to the great consecration of the hour. These are the tokens and tide-marks of the revolution which is heaving the depths of thought, feeling, action, in this northern zone to the bottom. We see it, know it; but no one realizes it, or can, in any degree commensurate with its stupendous significance. A deluge is floating us, like another vessel of gopherwood, on the surface of new seas, and above the tops of all the old mountains. And God, in a wonderfully solemn sense, has shut us in. Our southern neighbors are yet more thoroughly and universally aroused. With thirty years the start of us in their purpose and plans of political revolt and national dismemberment, they have at length plunged into the torrent with no thought but of the other shore. They have disembarked upon the coast of secession, and burned their ships behind them. While we have put some vigor and devotion into the work of their subjugation, they have put all of their energy and heart into the assertion of their separate existence. While we have set our hand to the plough, and spent months of our time in looking back, they have forsaken houses and lands, wives and children, pleasures and profits, almost en masse, to do this one thing of sustaining, with the worst of spirit and measures, the worst cause for which civilized men ever girded on the sword. They have been no imitators of the doughty chiefs of "Sleepy Hollow." Often, (says the legend,) in secluded and quiet parts of that valley, where the stream is overhung by dark woods and rocks, the ploughman, on some calm and sunny day, as he shouts to his oxen, is surprised at hearing faint shouts from the hill-sides in reply-being, it is said, the spell-bound warriors, who half start from their rocky couches and grasp their weapons, but sink to sleep again. Whoever may thus have held his post in this conflict, they can be charged with no such inactivity. They have shown a gospel self-abandonment to an absolutely anti-christian, anti-humane enterprise, all the while persuading themselves that they are doing God service as well as men. One of the hardest tasks which the future historian of this period is destined to encounter will be to philosophize in any satisfactory way upon this strange commingling of earnest conscientiousness with undeniable barbarism in eight millions of the American people of this nineteenth century of grace. We include in this reckoning the upholders of this rebellion at the South, and their more or less covert allies at the North. The secret of this insurrection is not questionable. We care not much to adjust the point of precedence between these two forces of southern society whether the slave institution or the aristocratic spirit lies farthest back in the line of causes which have precipitated this rupture. We hold them to be inseparable parts of the mischievous agency which has destroyed our peace. If slave-owning has intensified the aristocratic feeling of the South, the original demand for this species of personal property sprung from the indolent thriftlessness and hereditary self-conceit of the class of colonists which at first sought those milder regions as the home of an easy subsistence. The two are connatural to each other, as both are a violence to a true human and social growth. This violence has engendered innumerable others, until its last monstrous birth is stalking before us in the horrid front of civil war. It is a war with which pride has more to do than any other single motive. It is the old feudal self-assertion again arming itself to crush the thrifty, frugal commons whom it hates with a congenital hostility in which is more of envy than it chooses to acknowledge. Time has brought around one of its great cycles of political reaction. The South has armed itself to maintain the same factitious, arbitrary interests which used, in darker ages, to hurl down from castellated cliffs the mail-clad baron and his serf retainers upon the free towns of the Baltic and the Rhine; which kept Europe in a blaze of battle for centuries, while old oppressive prerogative held its slackening grasp upon the throat of rising, strengthening, conquering liberty. It is this throe of nature in another terrible birth and death struggle, let partisans deny it as they may, which is renewing along the Mississippi and the Potomac the bloody spectacles of renascent France and Germany. The temper of a Carolinian or Virginian planter is essentially the same with that of those titled freebooters of the elder time; not necessarily less cruel, except as special, Christian influences have so modified it; certainly less chivalrously magnanimous; intensified in its baser attributes by the absolutism of the tenure which holds a score or a hundred dependants in abject bondage. We are writing with the last twelve months' commentary under our eye. to man This has made the war which rends us asunder. For a full generation the conflict has been brewing and seething; now it has flooded us with its scalding wave. It is a war of class pretensions and demands, a war of antagonist social states, a war of ideas, a doctrinal warfare to its most central impulse. Pride and long-permitted power still claim indulgence to do what they will with what they call their own; more than this age as it pleases them the joint concerns of the country; or, as the bold presumption has been sternly met, to sever the bond which held in uneasy alliance these contrary states of free and slave labor. But not only to sever this is the determination of our enemies. Even thus disjoined, they must secure a supremacy of power on the theatre of our former union, if they are to have a separate nationality equal to their ambition. None know this better than the men who are now expounding the dogmas of Calhoun and McDuffie, and the more recent creed of the southern church, through the hoarse tubes of British cannon smuggled into Confederate ports through our coast blockade. And this similarity of oligarchical interests helps us in part to an explanation of the sympathy of the English government and nobility with the seceding planters of the South. |