CHAPTER V.

RESPONSIBILITY OF THE SOUTHERN CHURCH FOR THE REBELLION AND THE WAR.

IN charging the full responsibility for the rebellion upon the South, we must go back of the public actors on the political arena to find a proper lodgment for a large share of it.

Immediately upon the result of the Presidential election of 1860 being made known by the electric flash, the treasonable work began.

Upon the sixth of November (the day of the election) [says Dr. Palmer, speaking of the people of the seceded States generally], these masses went to bed as firmly attached to the Union as they had ever been, and awoke on the seventh, after Mr. Lincoln's election, just as determined upon resistance to his rule. The revolution in public opinion was far too sudden, too universal, and too radical, to be occasioned by the craft and jugglery of politicians. It was not their wire-dancing upon party platforms which thus instantaneously broke up the deep foundations of the popular will, and produced this spontaneous uprising of the people in the majesty of their supremacy; casting party hacks aside, who shall have no control over a movement not having its genesis in their machinations.

The substantial truthfulness, in good part, of what is here related, suggests the most painful and humiliating feature which the three years' progress of the rebellion exhibits. The above was published in April, 1861, in the Southern Presbyterian Review, of Columbia, South Carolina, before the attack upon Fort Sumter. At that time the secession of seven States had occurred. As stated in a former chapter, it is well known that a majority of the

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people in nearly every one of the seceded States was at first against secession; that in fact many of the States were carried out by violence, and in direct opposition to the will of the people; and that, as regards the most of them, their ordinances of secession were not submitted to a popular vote. Dr. Palmer's language is therefore altogether too sweeping, as to the suddenness and universality of the change in the popular sentiment of even the seven States to which he refers. It did not become "universal" and "radical" for secession till long afterwards, even if there has not always been, as indeed facts assure us, a strong Union element in the seceded States. Writing in the spring of 1861, he gives the impressions which things then occurring about him made upon his enthusiastic nature, rather than the facts as they existed immediately after the Presidential election.

The Gulf States had then seceded; the Provisional Government at Montgomery had been inaugurated; the batteries of his own native Carolina were thickly gathering around beleagured Sumter; their opening upon the devoted fortress was anxiously awaited, to bring the Old Dominion and other States into the ranks of treason; and already Southern orators were painting the visions of coming glory which would soon burst in full-orbed splendor upon the great Slave Empire of the Gulf. The eloquent divine was too much dazzled by that bewildering present and its glowing future to be a safe chronicler of the events of even the then recent past.

But admitting substantially what he declares on this point (only with abatement as to time), and freely conceding that "the revolution in public opinion" was by no means “occasioned by the craft and jugglery of politicians," we are then led to inquire, what mysterious and potent agency it was which "broke up the deep foundations of

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the popular will," and which, if it did not assume, by casting party hacks aside," absolute control over a movement not having "its genesis in their machinations,” did at least furnish the intellectual and moral pabulum upon which the popular appetite was feasted, and the popular strength nerved for the dark deeds which were before it? We would know who is to be held chiefly responsible, when we are told that "the deep foundations of the popular will" were broken up in a single night, and that the great popular heart, hitherto "firmly attached to the Union," was so suddenly, by a "spontaneous uprising of the people in the majesty of their supremacy," brought to abjure the Union, and to love all that was treacherous and perjured and vile!

There must have been some powerful cause for this, of which he does not inform us. The people never act without leaders, in a revolution or in any other great movement. We have no difficulty in finding the secret which perhaps Dr. Palmer's modesty would withhold. His own teachings, in good part, and the teachings of others of his own profession, furnish the mournful answer to these astounding questions.

The real truth of the case deliberately and solemnly holds the Southern Church and the Southern ministry,—or the Southern ministry, with a few influential laymen, leading the Southern Church, and they together leading the more influential portion of the Southern millions,—to a vastly higher responsibility for the inception, advocacy, progress, and the consequences resulting, of this treason and rebellion, than any other class among the Southern people; and, in asserting this, we but agree with Southern statesmen, whose testimony, to be given in due time, corroborates what the palpable facts so fully and lamentably declare.

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EARLY AGENCY OF LEADING DIVINES.

To substantiate this grave indictment, it is only necessary to notice events in the order of their occurrence, at the beginning of the rebellion and for the few months which immediately succeeded. The Presidential election occurred on the sixth of November, 1860, and the ferment in South Carolina commenced immediately after, and soon spread into other States. The State authorities of South Carolina,-who, we presume, are included by Dr. Palmer among those that on the sixth of November "went to bed as firmly attached to the Union as they had ever been (for thirty years at least), and awoke on the seventh, after Mr. Lincoln's election, just as determined upon resistance to his rule,”—were not at least then so taken up with "their wire-dancing upon party platforms," that they could not think upon their schemes with what we must charitably suppose was some little serious concern; and so they appointed a State Fast for the twenty-first of November, just fifteen days after the election. We have the sermon which was preached on that day by Dr. Thornwell, at Columbia, the State capital.

REV. JAMES H. THORNWELL, D. D., AIDS THE REBELLION.

All who have known the preacher, and the reputation he had, know that he was a man of master mind and commanding influence. He combined logical acuteness, strength in argument, perspicuity of style, and oratorical power, as they are found in but very few men. He was idolized and honored both in and out of the Church, in his native State and elsewhere, for his great natural abilities, profound attainments, and ripe scholarship. We cannot detract from his fair fame in any of these respects, nor have we the least disposition to do so. He was in all

In the South he was called
He had been President of

respects a very eminent man. "the Calhoun of the Church." the State College at Columbia, had often preached before the South Carolina Legislature, at their request, and was, at the time the rebellion began, a Professor in the Theological Seminary of the Presbyterian Church at Columbia.

As his work is done on earth, and he has departed this life, we cannot say any thing disparaging to his memory, further than a condemnation of his sentiments and great influence, as giving early and efficient aid to a most wicked rebellion, may be construed as doing so. We know of no principle in ethics, however, which would justly condemn a candid examination at the present time of what he wrote and published, and the holding of the influence which he exerted in favor of the rebellion to its just measure of responsibility, which would not also condemn the animadversion of the historian a hundred years hence. In what we say, therefore, here and elsewhere, we shall exhibit no squeamishness in dealing with his views. We admired him when living, and for the same qualities we admire him now, dead; and simply of the man we can sincerely say, Requiescat in pace. But his published sentiments. upon the rebellion, as upon every other subject, are the property of the public.

This sermon of Dr. Thornwell, preached so soon after the Presidential election, and only wanting a day of one. full month before the secession of the State of South Carolina and the assembling of her Convention, enters into and urges the whole doctrine of secession on the ground of Constitutional right, the alleged encroachment upon slavery being given as the justifying cause. We need not say that this work was done with ability. It could not be done otherwise, when the preacher attempted to lay out his strength. We give only a sentence or two from this