CHAPTER XII GRANT LEAVES GALENA FOR THE WAR T §1 HE South confronted the North with the insolence of poetry defying prose. The new Confederate States government began its life in a cloud of romantic prophecies. Everybody believed that "Cotton is King" -a phrase that Southern men shouted to each other as they went their ways. Think of it! There were four hundred thousand cotton factory operatives in England alone. They would all be out of work and starving if the stream of cotton should stop . . . and the Confederate States had the power to stop it. England and France must soon recognize the Confederacy. The world could not afford to let the cotton-planting South be ruined. These were mere dreams, but the leading minds of the Confederacy considered them facts. The high intelligence of the South at the breaking out of the war was provincial in its limitations, deficient in economic knowledge, and almost entirely ignorant of the motivating forces of the modern world. The Confederate Government stopped the exportation of cotton absolutely. The purpose of this measure was to force England to recognize the new government, but the English mill-owners had cotton enough already to keep their factories going for a year. The last thing in the world that English cotton-spinners wanted at that time was to have the cotton trade opened again. They were making fortunes hand over fist, as the price of raw cotton went up day by day-together with the price of cotton cloth-while the Davis, the Neurotic wages of labor remained at a standstill. 169 There was no scarcity of cotton in England until 1862. During the latter part of 1861 cargoes of cotton were actually sent back from England and sold in New York. The Confederate States copied the United States Constitution bodily and took it for their own, with a few interpolated clauses. One of these added clauses made property in slaves a constitutional right, but the importation of African negroes was forbidden. The levying of a tariff "to promote or foster any branch of industry," or for any other purpose except to provide revenue, was declared unconstitutional. In the center of things sat Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States, "a slight, light figure, little exceeding middle height," holding himself erect and straight in his chair. "He was dressed in a rustic suit of slate-colored stuff," says W. H. Russell, correspondent of the London Times, "with a black silk handkerchief around his neck; his manner is plain, and rather reserved and drastic; his head is well-formed, with a fine full forehead, square and high. . . . The expression of his face is anxious; he has a very haggard, careworn, and pain-drawn look, though no trace of anything but the utmost confidence and the greatest decision could be detected in his conversation." Davis was a scholarly, bookish man who appears to have learned everything he knew in a library, although he had been in public life for more than twenty years, and had met almost everybody of importance in the United States. He believed in the power of words; of phrases; in sharp, subtle interpretations of the simplest social phenomena. He was the kind of man who thinks that when a problem is once solved on paper the job is nearly done. He reminds me of Charles Sumner in many ways. Both Davis and Sumner were idealists—or visionaries, I should say—and both of them played with words as if words were things. They were both incurable neurotics, moody and irritable, and both were men of culture. In the presence of Jefferson Davis one became hypnotized by the high and noble quality of his mind. He dealt habitually in philosophical generalizations, pleasant to contemplate, but rather remote from the sweat and worry of life. His ideas were the regurgitations of ancient thought, put in precise and elegant form. He could talk with a fiery and cultured earnestness on almost any subject: On Homer, on loggerhead turtles, on astronomy, on Roman law, on cowhides, on the Italian poets, on the American Revolution; yet everything he said seemed to be rigid, definite and settled for good. In his mind there was neither flexibility nor humor. He did not argue with people; he gave them information and set them right. He possessed "All things except success, all honesty Except the ultimate honesty of the earth, No wonder he looked careworn in the early spring of 1861, for the secession movement was holding together by the thinnest of threads, and threatened to go to pieces at any time, notwithstanding the confident assertions of its leaders. Lincoln, who understood the common mind far better than Davis, or any other public man of the time, said: "It may well be questioned whether there is to-day a majority of the legally qualified voters of any state, except perhaps South Carolina, in favor of disunion. There is much reason to believe that the Union men are the majority in many, if not in every other one, of the so-called seceded states." Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas had not yet left the Union. In Louisiana the question of secession had been put to a popular vote, and on this show-down it had a majority of only three thousand . . . twenty thousand for secession and seventeen thousand against it. In Alabama and Georgia the secession leaders had not dared to risk the issue Hysterical New York 171 by a vote of the people. Those states were taken out of the Union by conventions which were skillfully manipulated.} $2 The confusion of ideas and impulses in the South was equaled by the hysterical state of the North in the face of actual secession. The abolitionists, or most of them, thought that nothing at all ought to be done to bring back the seceded states. They felt that the Northern people should thank God that secession had helped the Union to get rid of slavery. Horace Greeley wrote ponderously in the New York Tribune that secession was justifiable, and that he was glad the slave states were saying good-by. Wendell Phillips delivered an impassioned, erratic speech in which he declared that a war against the South could end only in disaster. The people of the North would not fight, he said, and the only result of a war would be the conquest of the North by the South, with slavery fastened on the country forever. New York City was a center of disunion sentiment. Its mayor, Fernando Wood, proposed in black and white that, in case of hostilities, the metropolis should dissociate itself from the Union and become a free and neutral city. The bankers and politicians whom W. H. Russell met in New York on his arrival from England held similar views. "They told me," he wrote in the London Times, "that the majority of the people of New York, and all the respectable people, were disgusted at the election of such a fellow as Lincoln to be President, and would back the Southern states if it came to a split." Lincoln had, at this time, only one plank in his personal platform; he was for the preservation of the Union. He said, "If I could save the Union by emancipating all the slaves I would do so; if I could save it by emancipating none of them I would do it; if I could save it by emancipating some and not others, I would do that too." That sounds plain and forthright; it might have been made the basis of a get-together program. But as a statesman Lincoln was extremely inept during the early part of his administration. He was inexperienced in statecraft and was surrounded by people whom he did not know. At that periodand later even after he had learned the business of being President-he was hesitating and evasive. He liked to express himself indirectly and by roundabout methods. His favorite method of conveying an idea was to relate an anecdote that included what he wanted to say, but left him uncommitted to anything definite. I do not mean to imply that he was two-faced or hypocritical; he was far too great a man to be a hypocrite. The essential feature of his character is that he was not a leader of men, but a highly sensitive reflector of public opinion. Whenever he felt that he had public opinion at his back his indecisiveness vanished. Jesse Macy, in his Political Parties in the United States, sums up Lincoln's character admirably. He says: Lincoln was thoroughly original and peculiar in his genuine and controlling belief in democracy. Thousands before him had professed to believe in it, tens of thousands had hoped that the democratic theory would prove the correct one, millions had traditionally accepted the name of democrat, but few indeed had been the men who really believed in democracy as did Abraham Lincoln. The mature, ripened political judgment of the people he accepted as absolutely final. In that type of democracy in which Lincoln believed, what the people actually think becomes for the statesman the ultimate determining fact. His most outstanding defect was his inability to dominate, to take command, to make his voice be heard from the sky. |