CHAPTER XXIII.

SECESSION.

"The necessity to be obsequious to the many, induces flattery to popular passions, and leads thereby to public demoralization."

-Johannes von Müller.

WE think the time has come (1879) when the causes and events of the late war (1861-65) may be presented in the way which a judge would use, when, after having heard the arguments of both parties, he sums up the law to the jury. Whether a citizen of a northern state, who has been an unwilling, but to neither side hostile witness of the conflict, which he tried in vain to prevent, is capable to be thus impartial? is a question, which the reader must decide after reading this chapter. We believe, that we have closely observed the facts, patiently studied the law, and are disposed to do justice to the subject. And though deeply wounded in our feelings before, during, and since the war, know, that we have no resentment left. And we hope that with others the passions and prejudices of the hour have also died away, so that we may now reason together. At one time it was deemed treason to be unbiassed on this question, and to have an equal fraternal feeling to both contestants; but as we were not then intimidated from avowing our convictions, so are we not now afraid to speak the truth, and to say that the war came, because neither the South nor the North had the high-toned regard for each other, which is necessary to a healthy Union: they had drowned it in their party feelings.

Nevertheless must we not forget, that, while the sections were, as bodies-politic, at war with each other, there were individuals in both, who were mutually at peace, and who sympathized with neither of the belligerents in their hostilities. Let us also remember, that there was not before the war, nor during it, and that there is not even now, a political party in America, that was not oftener wrong, than right. It becomes, therefore, all of us to confess that, in expressing our graduallyripened convictions, we break the staff over many idealities of

both friend and foe. The most ultra-absolutism, the extremest anarchy, the most fine-spun casuistry found advocates, between 1861-72, while the voice of reason and scientific research was almost suppressed. There were many philosophic minds, that desired to know and to express the truth, but they were overruled by the vast majority in each section. They were determined to go it blind! The will of majorities was the plea for wrong in both sections!

The public men of the land had gone to school to their parties, and had been disciplined in obsequiousness to the many, so that their votes might be won; hence sophistry had the mastery. And if there were any experts in social and political science, who had the public ear at that time, they have escaped our eye, after diligent search. The public mind was in a condition, that made it easy and profitable for the popular leaders to put their own selfishness into the mouth of the people, and thus to escape responsibility for crimes.

We think it would be difficult to find in history any wrong, despotic, yet reinless public rule, that was not, in some form, reproduced by the authorities of America between 1861-66. All the false tax systems, every species of unjust money, all kinds of financial misdirection, every sort of military outrage, tyrannic arrests, cruel executions, confiscations, espionages, even pressgangs and wholesale devastations were resorted to under the plea of patriotism. The legal, medical, and theological professions, those sources of good jurisprudence, humanity, and religion, were ominously silent as to truth, and fearfully loquacious as to untruths. There were no statesmen (in authority) that could sift the kernels of truth out of the mass of chaff, that was put forth. Lincoln tried sincerely, but lacked the culture and mental discipline for the work. All! all! were either zealots or victims to the great American Moloch-partisanism. At every election the people hastened to testify to their own madness and folly! But it would be self-deception to assume, that the popular infatuation was like that of the crusaders-an outburst of the sentimentalities that had been cultivated during many preceding centuries; or, like that of the Boors' war (1476-1525), a revolt against intolerable oppression; or, like the French Revolution, the spasmodic upheaving of the people for higher social conditions. No! it was an infatuation fanned by party purposes and designs, of whose ingrained unrighteousness all were more or less conscious. And it was this semi-consciousness, that prevented the North from being more cruel, and the South from doing the utmost for its cause. There was much sincere, but more professed patriotism,

humanitarianism, and fortitude; but like the words: "Egalité, Fraternité, Liberté," engraven in 1848 on the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, they came out in derision, amidst the flames that flared up in a fratricidal war. America had to learn, that the lips of her politicians overflow most with kindness, when they intend to be most unjust, and that they fan popular enthusiasm with the more zeal, the more excuse they need for the bad governing, which they mean to perpetrate. Both secessionists and their opponents used plausible surmises and imputations for the justification of their acts; and they misled public opinion at home and abroad, so that both North and South were praised where they deserved blame, and were censured where they deserved approval. The existence of slavery had precluded any way an impartial judgment of the cause of the South, while the mere fact, that the North was fighting slave-holders, predisposed contemporaries favorably to this section. Had the full truth and all the attending circumstances been known and considered; and the world's judgment would have been both more kind as well as more severe, yet more just; they would have meditated more and cavilled less. Good people may get into situations, in which all the appearances are against them, and bad people may take advantage thereof; but impartial men, if they are wise, will know, that in human affairs there is never a positively right side; that there is always alongside of wrong elements an intermixture of right ones.

The slavery question got into federal politics soon after the beginning of the Union, because the slave states asked and obtained for it a fostering care from the federal government, which could not be long sustained by the free public will of the country. Not foreseeing the gradual abandonment of proslavery feeling, and not wisely anticipating the inevitable consequences that would flow therefrom, was the great error of the South. It was comparatively free from it during the first thirty years of the Union; for it allowed its great men to adopt the Ordinance of 1787, to agree to the abolition of the slave trade by 1809, to originate colonization to Liberia in 1821, and to crowd slavery south-westward with a view to gradual expatriation. Then it was anxious to let mankind understand, that it did not regard slavery and negroism as permanent institutions of America. But when cotton and sugar-planting made slaves extra valuable, it engendered in the South popularities, which were opportunities for political (partisan) appeals. Immigration had in the meantime, as Maryland predicted in 1786, changed the relations of representation and public power; and as this could be counteracted

only by concentrating the political forces in the South, the statesmen of that section took up with the slavery question as means for this purpose; and were ever urging courses of conduct for combining southern strength, as well as for fortifying it, by extending slavery to new territories. It was an uphill business even in the South, for it run counter to the old idea of the temporariness of slavery and negroism.

The golden moment for an intelligent, virtuous, and wise common understanding on the slavery question was in 1816, when Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Monroe, and Gallatin were still alive, and could command public opinion; when their old party feelings had nearly died out; and when the new animosities, that grew up between J. Q. Adams, Clay, Webster, Calhoun, Van Buren, Clinton, and Jackson, had not commenced. But it was allowed to pass by, and the poet's words became true for America

66 A moment lost, Eternity itself cannot bring back."

The Missouri question came, and was only half settled; for the dividing line agreed upon, did not carry with it a settlement for all future acquisitions of territory, and this left an open question for a future generation, that was less wise and more partisan in its public opinion. The annexation of Texas and California, and the Oregon imbroglio, came at such a time, and fed the smouldering fires, which burst into flames, on the meanest of public acts-the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. And thus an issue, that should have been settled by the highest civic forecast in 1816, became the object of contention between men of very low ambition in 1854. It raised such a commotion, that when Lincoln proposed by special message, March 6, 1862, about, what should have been adopted in 1816, his proposal was outsounded by the noise and confusion incident to the then prevailing war. America had to have in 1862, what France had in 1848, a "Too late!"

And why too late? Because the subject-matter had passed away, from an objective discussion, to an issue on a rule of construction of the Constitution that was not argued under the light of federal jurisprudence, but upon party sophistries. The writings of standard jurists, never much consulted in the United States because Americans believed themselves to have invented the last best model of a federal Union, were now entirely set aside, and carrying elections became the sole ruling motive. The elections were, however, mere measurements of partisan strength, and could not be decisive on public policies;

because there was but little argument in them, and what there was, came incidentally, and not, because it was intended to elucidate the question.

The effect of permanent parties was the same in the United States, which it has ever been in church and state; they took up public questions, not to solve them, but to use them as means of agitation. When, therefore, Lincoln proposed, in 1862, to renew, in a new and better form, the gradual abolition of slavery and extinction of negroism, he was met in each party with prevarication, and the measure was shelved; because it would not fit into the belligerent disposition of the public mind. Even Lincoln himself could not free himself entirely from the noxious party influences; how much less the others, that were nothing, the moment their electioneering hobbies were withdrawn? Had there been an honest disposition to see the right, and it would have been inquired for and found; for it lay near them all, and could easily have been ascertained and established.

The doctrines advocated by both parties were, abstractly speaking, right enough; the only trouble was, they did not apply to the case, then being tried. That of the North would have met the actual issue, if only there had not been any states recognized as co-authorities in the Constitution; and that of the South would have been applicable, if there had never been a supreme federal government established. The South had to relearn the latter fact through defeat; it took the North, deceived as it was by victory, until 1877 to refind its actualities. Then it needed states to count-in a President; it saw a party necessity, but not that of the country. Mr. Jefferson admitted that the Constitution of 1787 constituted "a nation as to foreign concerns;" but had he analyzed in his own mind what this word, as well as the phrase American People, meant, and he would have perceived, that the object of the Constitution was the erection of a superior national (ethical) public will, for something more than only the foreign concerns. The moral duty to constitute such an authority existed before the Union was formed, and all the Constitution of 1787 did, was to add the binding force of constitutional law to a pre-existing moral duty. The formation of the Union in 1787 was not a mere incident, nor an act done on compulsion; it was the free-will of sovereign states. And it provided for the continuous evolution of a better and stronger public will, than the states had evolved or could evolve by any separate action of their own. This legal recognition of a pre-existing moral duty, solemnly recorded in the Constitution, was now an