RECONSTRUCTION

DURING THE CIVIL WAR IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY

Withdrawal of southern senators from the Senate of the United States Personality of the states; the Senate - Representation of the people; the House of Representatives - Contrast between the northern and the southern peoples-The compromise element in the Constitution-Equality of the states.

ON the twenty-first of January, 1861,1 the most impressive and painful scene in the annals of the United States of America was witnessed in the Senate Chamber. The rumor had gone abroad that the senators of several of the states which had seceded were about to withdraw from the Senate. The chamber was filled with members and with those who had the privilege of the floor, and the galleries were crowded with spectators. Every state was present except South Carolina; her senators had not come to the capitol, but had sent in their resignations in writing before the session began, and when the time came the chairs of these senators were empty. The first state to turn its back upon the Union was Florida, one which had been among the latest to be wel1 Cong. Globe, 484 et seq.

comed with open arms by the sisterhood of states; it was also one of the weakest. Rising in his place, Yulee set forth briefly the reasons which had led his state to secede, and then he bade adieu to the Senate. He was followed by the other senator from this state, Mallory, who alluded to the fidelity with which the South had clung to the Union throughout her patient endurance of insult and wrong, and in the same breath announced that Florida had come into the Union only fifteen years before, and that, from the Union as their fathers had made it, there breathed not a secessionist upon the soil of this state. In spite of the solemnity of the moment, the inquiry forced itself upon the mind of the onlooker: Why did Florida enter the Union, if merely to share the insult and wrong of the other southern states? And, having accepted such a fate with her eyes open, with what consistency did she now turn her back upon a Constitution which she had been glad to accept, and which was the same at this moment as it had been when she had sought its protection? Censoriousness and argument were overwhelmed beneath the anguish which convulsed the breast of every listener, and which was augmented by the recital of each sister, who, through her representatives, uttered her sense of injury. Alabama followed Florida, and Mississippi, Alabama. The story of their griefs was told by these states in subdued and measured tones; the time for threat and defiance had gone by, the very parting itself had come, and the pain which wrung northerner and southerner alike was betrayed by twitching lips and by deep silence.

Every eye and every ear was intent upon Jefferson

SECESSION AND NULLIFICATION.

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Davis when he rose. to this alone could be attributed any faltering or agitation. There was none: this was the crowning hour of his existence, and he approached the culmination of his life-work with calmness and dignity. All his life long, he had maintained the right of a state to withdraw from the Union, and this as an attribute of sovereignty coequal with the right under which the state had entered into the Union. He was no nullifier; nullification implied union, and he was no unionist. To nullify was to parry, to palliate; it was to confess a right, yet to avoid its obligations. Nullification and secession were incompatible principles. Davis neither parried, nor compromised, nor sulked; he believed that the states were sovereign and unaccountable, and where there had been aggression he would not acknowledge superior power, but he was for meeting aggression on the threshold by denying the superiority; therefore, to Union he opposed dis-Union; to aggression, resistance. There was no middle course; so long as a state was a member of the Union, it was bound to obey the law that was common to all; if it would not obey, it must leave the Union, and of the necessity of such a course, there was no judge but the sovereign state. No one had the right to question, or to sit in judgment upon a sovereign, and unqualified obedience was the sole duty of the children of a state. This doctrine he had taught his people in season and out of season, and the hour had now come when he was reaping what he had sown. His eyes were beholding the success long striven for; the states were going out; he was seeing them take their departure ; he was hearing them saying good-by; and, above all,

He was not in good health, but

he was beholding the deep emotion of those who were left behind. His tone was not exultant, neither did his voice falter; his manner was gentle, firm, determined.

Heretofore Davis had been the teacher, the seer, the leader of his people; but when he was made king he ceased to be prophet and priest. As President of the Confederate States, he became merely the official head, a figure-head of a government; he played a part which other men could have filled with equal benefit to his cause; he was no longer the soul of the South. In passing from the legislature to the field, the work of maintaining secession fell into other hands: and true it is, that, when Jefferson Davis bade farewell to the United States, he bade farewell to the real work of his life. He found but a barren sceptre in his gripe, and when he left the Senate Chamber he took the course, which he pursued with heroic resolution and with Promethean defiance of his enemies, until, a fugitive, his flight was ended in the woods of Georgia by the hand of a common soldier.

But prominent as this man was, and impressive as might be the personality of one upon whom men looked as being the embodiment of a cause, the spectacle owed its significance and solemnity to something deeper than that with which it was invested by one man. The departures from the House of Representatives were mostly signified by written missives, but there departure did not convey the intense and deeply moving force that it did in the Senate. For in the House it was representatives merely who were turning their backs upon their fellows, but in the Senate it was sovereign states that were deserting the common

DEPARTURE OF THE STATES.

hearth. The states were going out.

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All that ever

had been feared, or derided as improbable, or defied as impossible, or talked against, written against, prayed against, all this had actually come to pass, and in the visible physical forms of the departing senators, the states were leaving, never to return. Impenetrable gloom, foreboding, and thick darkness settled upon the Senate Chamber, and the soul was troubled: each man searched his heart to find if it were he who had dishonored his fathers, and had shortened the days of the land which the Lord his God had given him. The onlookers thought of Webster and his prayer, that his dying eyes, as they sought the sun, might not behold it shining upon a torn and rent land, and they cursed the hour in which they themselves were witnessing the dissolution of the Union. Woe worth the day!

When the scene was over and the open air had been reached, those who had been looking on this spectacle heaved a long breath and betook themselves to their homes. As the crowds streamed along the Avenue, it was apparent that something great, something direful, had happened. The southerners walked with their heads in the air, and talked in excited and defiant tones; the northerners had their heads down, and spoke in fitful and bated breath; then they tried to shake off their forebodings, and to throw the burden of the day upon the seceders. They recalled the ungracious conduct of Florida, who, with scarcely time enough to warm herself by the council fire, had been the first to reproach her fellows with inhospitality: how wrong it had been in her to come into the Union, knowing the unhappy condition of feeling which ex