INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO "THEIR CAUSE"
In no sense does the author offer the suggestions in this section as
an apology for the course of Southern women or men in the war between
the States. They are presented simply as a part of history, showing
the political principles which guided and moved the South in the
momentous struggle. They explain the lofty zeal and heroic fortitude
of the Confederate women. They cannot be attributed to partisanship or
sectional bias on the part of the author, for sufficient quotations
are herewith presented from well-known Northern, English, and
Continental public men to show that if there is an extreme Southern
view it is held by other people as well as by our own.
Right or wrong, each Southern man in the field and each woman at home,
toiled in that war with a _mens sibi conscia recti_. It was a movement
of the people. In the ranks of the army were found hundreds of college
graduates and men carrying muskets whose property was valued at a
hundred thousand dollars, and at home the rich and the poor women
toiled with equal zeal for the cause so dear to their hearts.
"WHEN THIS CRUEL WAR IS OVER"
Mrs. W. W. Gordon, of Savannah, the wife of the brave ex-Confederate
officer who was commissioned brigadier general by President McKinley,
and served with distinguished gallantry in the Spanish War, had
kindred in the Federal army, which under Sherman captured Savannah. As
the troops were entering the city she stood with her children watching
them as they marched under the windows of her Southern home. Just then
the splendid brass band at the head of one of the divisions began to
play the old familiar air, "When this cruel war is over." Just as soon
as the notes struck the ear of her little daughter this enthusiastic
young Confederate exclaimed, "Mamma, just listen to the Yankees. They
are playing, 'When this cruel war is over,' and they are just doing it
themselves."
NORTHERN MEN LEADERS OF DISUNION
In 1860 it was plain to the world that the people of the North were
determined to spurn the compact of union with the Southern States and
to deny to those States all right to control their own affairs. Here
are the sentiments of the Northern leaders:
"There is a higher law than the Constitution which regulates our
authority over the domain. Slavery must be abolished, and we must do
it."--_Wm. H. Seward._
"The time is fast approaching when the cry will become too overpowering
to resist. Rather than tolerate national slavery as it now exists, let
the Union be dissolved at once, and then the sin of slavery will rest
where it belongs."--_New York Tribune._
"The Union is a lie. The American Union is an imposture-
-a covenant
with death and an agreement with hell. We are for its overthrow! Up
with the flag of disunion, that we may have a free and glorious
republic of our own."--_Wm. Lloyd Garrison._
"I look forward to the day when there shall be a servile insurrection
in the South; when the black man, armed with British bayonets, and led
on by British officers, shall assert his freedom and wage a war of
extermination against his master. And, though we may not mock at their
calamity nor laugh when their fear cometh, yet we will hail it as the
dawn of a political millennium."--_Joshua Giddings._
"In the alternative being presented of the continuance of slavery or a
dissolution of the Union, we are for a dissolution, and we care not
how quick it comes."--_Rufus P. Spaulding._
"The fugitive-slave act is filled with horror; we are bound to disobey
this act."--_Charles Sumner._
"The _Advertiser_ has no hesitation in saying that it does not hold to
the faithful observance of the fugitive-slave law of 1850."--_Portland
Advertiser._
"I have no doubt but the free and slave States ought to be separated.
* * * The Union is not worth supporting in connection with the
South."--_Horace Greeley._
"The times demand and we must have an anti-slavery Constitution, an
anti-slavery Bible, and an anti-slavery God."--_Anson P.
Burlingame._
"There is merit in the Republican party. It is this: It is the first
sectional party ever organized in this country. * * * It is not
national; it is sectional. It is the North arrayed against the South.
* * * The first crack in the iceberg is visible; you will yet hear it
go with a crack through the center."--_Wendell Phillips._
"The cure prescribed for slavery by Redpath is the only infallible
remedy, and men must foment insurrection among the slaves in order to
cure the evils. It can never be done by concessions and compromises.
It is a great evil, and must be extinguished by still greater ones. It
is positive and imperious in its approaches, and must be overcome with
equally positive forces. You must commit an assault to arrest a
burglar, and slavery is not arrested without a violation of law and
the cry of fire."--_Independent Democrat_, leading Republican paper in
New Hampshire.
THE UNION VS. A UNION
[J. L. Underwood.]
Early in the war a son of the Emerald Isle, but not himself green, was
taken prisoner not far from Manassas Junction. In a word, Pat was
taking a quiet nap in the shade; and was aroused from his slumber by a
Confederate scouting party. He wore no special uniform of either
army, but looked more like a spy than an alligator and on this was
arrested.
"Who are you?" "What is your name?" and "Where are you from?" were the
first questions put to him by the armed party.
Pat rubbed his eyes, scratched his head, and answered:
"Be me faith,
gintlemen, them is ugly questions to answer, anyhow; and before I
answer any of them, I be after axing yo, by yer lave, the same
thing."
"Well," said the leader, "we are out of Scott's army and belong to
Washington."
"All right," said Pat. "I knowed ye was a gintleman, for I am that
same. Long life to General Scott."
"Ah ha!" replied the scout. "Now you rascal, you are our prisoner,"
and seized him by the shoulder.
"How is that," inquired Pat, "are we not friends?"
"No," was the answer; "we belong to General Beauregard's army."
"Then ye tould me a lie, me boys, and thinking it might be so, I told
you another. An' now tell me the truth, an' I'll tell you the truth
too."
"Well, we belong to the State of South Carolina."
"So do I," promptly responded Pat, "and to all the other States uv the
country, too, and there I am thinking, I hate the whole uv ye. Do ye
think I would come all the way from Ireland to belong to one State
when I have a right to belong to the whole of 'em?"
This logic was rather a stumper; but they took him up, as before said,
and carried him for further examination.
This Irishman's unionism is a fair sample of what sometimes passes in
this country as broad patriotism. "We don't believe in so much State
and State's right. We want a nation and we want it spelt with a big
N." This is the merest twaddle. From the very nature of the formation
of our government there can be no organized Nation.
Alexander Hamilton
wrote, "The State governments are essentially necessary to the form
and spirit of the general system. * * * They can never lose their
powers till the whole of America are robbed of their liberties." It is
a Union of States and can be made nothing else.
Bancroft, the great
historian, says: "But for Staterights the Union would perish from the
paralysis of its limbs. The States, as they gave life to the Union,
are necessary to the continuance of that life."
Madison wrote as follows: "The assent and ratification of the people,
not as individuals composing the entire nation, but as composing the
distinct and independent States to which they belong, are the sources
of the Constitution. It is therefore not a National but a Federal
compact."
The Irishman could only belong to the "whole of 'em" by belonging to
one of them. No man can love all the other States without loving his
own State. A Swiss loves Schwyz or Unterwalden or some other canton
before he loves the Confederation of Cantons. The loyal Scotchmen love
Scotland before they love the British Empire. The Union man loves the
Union through his immediate part of Union. Daniel Webster loved the
Union, but his speeches show how he loved Massachusetts first. Calhoun
loved the Union, but he loved it as a Federal Union with his beloved
Carolina. Many of the best people of the North loved their several
States and in loyalty to them took sides against the South.
The Southern people, Whigs and Democrats, were devoted to the Union of
the fathers as long as it was a reality. But as soon as they realized
that it had become only a confederation of the Northern majority
States, with the protecting features of the old Constitution directly
discarded, the love for their own States led them heart and soul into
the Confederate cause. Our Irishman might be satisfied with A Union,
but nothing but THE Union of the fathers could satisfy Southern men.
They loved the definite Union of 1789; they fought the indefinite
Union of 1861. The former was a union on a Constitution without a
flag; the latter was a mere sentimental union under a flag without a
Constitution. The Constitution had been thrown away.
The writer's father, a plain old farmer-merchant of Alabama, was a
fair specimen of the staunchest Southern Union man. A Whig all his
life, he almost adored Henry Clay and idolized the Union. The great
old Union paper, the _National Intelligencer_, of Washington City, was
his political Bible, and he made it follow his son all through school
and college. Like all other Whigs, he believed in the right of
secession, but did not think the time had come for such a step. He
opposed with all his might the secession of Alabama. But when it was
an accomplished fact, he wrote sadly to his son, who was then a
student in a foreign land:
Alabama has seceded. She has the right to do so, but I didn't want
her to exercise it. I belong to my State, and I secede with her.
And I know the other States have no right to coerce her. My son,
your old father is like a Tennessee hog, he can be tolled, but he
can't be driven.
Savoyard tells us truly that no State embraced secession with more
reluctance than North Carolina, and yet no State supported the
Southern cause with more heroism or fortitude. When the news flashed
over the wires that President Lincoln had issued a call for volunteers
to coerce the sovereign Southern States, Zebulon B.
Vance was
addressing an immense audience, pleading for the Union and opposing
the Confederacy. His hand was raised aloft in appealing gesture when
the fatal tidings came, and in relating the incident to a New England
audience a quarter of a century later, he said: When my hand came down from that impassioned gesticulation it fell
slowly and sadly by the side of a secessionist. I immediately,
with altered voice and manner, called upon the assembled multitude
to volunteer, not to fight against but for South Carolina. If war
must come, I preferred to be with my own people. If we had to shed
blood I preferred to shed Northern rather than Southern blood.
North Carolina took her favorite son at his word, turned secessionist
with him, and volunteered for the conflict.
Robert E. Lee felt in Virginia just like Zeb Vance felt in North
Carolina. The women of the South were the women of Lee and Vance and
Alex. Stephens and Judah P. Benjamin, Charles J. Jenkins and Ben
Hill. They loved the Union, but when it was gone, they, with their
States, opposed what, to them, was only a Union of invading, coercing
States.
"We were not the first to break the peace That blessed our happy land;
We loved the quiet calm and ease,
Too well to raise a hand,
Till fierce oppression stronger grew,
And bitter were your sneers.
Then to our land we must be true,
Or show a coward's fears!
We loved our banner while it waved
An emblem of our Union.
The fiercest dangers we had braved
To guard that sweet communion.
But when it proved that 'stripes' alone Were for our Sunny South,
And all the 'stars' in triumph shone
Above the chilly North,
Then, not till then, our voices rose
In one tumultuous wave:
'We will the tyranny oppose,
Or find a bloody grave.'"
It was Southern devotion to the Union which led so many men of
Kentucky and Tennessee into the Federal army. It was the same
traditional love for the Union of the fathers that held back Virginia
and the other border States from secession too long. It led them to
make the mistake of the crisis. The writer, like nearly all the
Southern men of his ultra Unionism, at the time thought South Carolina
made the mistake of too much haste in her secession. He does not think
so now. He has not thought so since calmly and thoroughly studying the
history of those times.
The new party in the North was in a triumphant majority and was
determined to deprive the minority States of the South of their share
in the government. Delay on the part of Southern border States did no
good. It did harm. It misled the Northern people as to the true
feeling in Virginia and the other border States. Had they all seceded
on the same day with South Carolina there would have been no war.
Now that the Northern people, through the broad, patriotic
administrations of Cleveland, McKinley and Roosevelt, have restored
the Union, and Florida is again a coequal State with New York, and
Texans once more fellow-citizens with Pennsylvanians, what section
shows more loyalty to the Union and the common country than the
South?
Our patriot mothers and grandmothers of 1860 loved the Union. Those
who yet survive, and their children, love the Union in 1905. No State
is under the ban now. The captured battle flags of Confederate States
have been restored to the States by a Republican Congress. The Federal
government volunteers to take care of Confederate soldiers' graves.
President, and Congress and Army and Navy follow General Wheeler's
coffin to an honored grave. A Republican President publicly avows his
attachment to Confederate veterans and shows his faith by his
appointments. Thank God, our Union to-day is again _the_
Union of
equal States.
THE NORTHERN STATES SECEDE FROM THE UNION
[By J. L. Underwood.]
The denial of the equal rights of the Southern States in the public
territorial domain, and the nullification by the Northern States of
the acts of Congress and the decisions of the Supreme Court on
territorial questions, and the formation and triumph of a party
pledged to hostility to the South, were not the only considerations
that convinced the Southern States that their only honorable course
lay in secession. The compact of the written Constitution was the only
Union that had existed. A breach or repudiation of that compact was a
breach of the Union. It was secession without its name.
In 1850, after a violent sectional agitation, which shook the country,
over the admission of California as a free State, a compromise
measure, proposed by Mr. Clay and advocated by Webster and Calhoun,
was adopted by Congress. It was known as the "omnibus bill." It
provided, among other things, that California should be a free State;
that the slave trade should be abolished in the District of Columbia,
and that slaves escaping from their owners, from one State into
another, could be arrested anywhere and returned to their owners.
Article four, section two of the Federal Constitution makes this
provision in the plainest of terms. It was similar to the New England
Fugitive Slave law of 1643 enacted by Massachusetts, Connecticut,
Plymouth and New Haven. Mr. Webster in his great speech in Faneuil
Hall in Boston, in defense of his vote for the "omnibus bill," read
the words of the Constitution and showed that the fugitive slave
section of the omnibus bill was almost a literal reiteration of the
constitutional provision.
The majority of the Northern States repudiated this feature of the act
of Congress and declared that it should not be enforced.
Here was the
boldest nullification, the most direct breaking up of the old Union.
Here was the arch rebellion of the century. The question was not what
should be done with the fugitive slaves, but whether the Northern
States would do what, in the Constitution, they had agreed to do. The
South waited for the Northern States to revoke such a flagrant
disregard of their rights under the Constitution and such a bold
repudiation of the original terms of Union. Patriotic little Rhode
Island did rescind her action in the matter, but she was alone. Most
of the other States had become desperate in their hostility to the
South and, when the South, seeing all hope of justice, all vestige of
the old Union, all prospect of peace, hopelessly gone, resorted to
quiet, peaceable withdrawal from these domineering States, the
resolution was formed and carried out by the party in power, to
subjugate the Southern States to the will of the majority States, and
keep them in what was called the Union against their will.
The South in seceding made no threat, and contemplated no attempt to
invade a Northern State in pursuit of slaves, but simply sought to
sever all connection with the States and people who were so determined
to ignore her rights, and who nullified their own plighted terms of
union. She did not secede in the interest of slavery nor for the
purpose of war. The Southern States seceded to take care of the
fragments of a broken Union. Slavery, it is true, was the occasion of
the rupture. Peaceable secession on the one hand and coercion on the
other was the issue of the war. Emancipation was adopted as a war
measure two years later by the Northern administration and finally
consummated in 1865 as a punitive measure to further crush the
conquered South. Such was the public opinion at the time of the fall
of Fort Sumter that not a regiment could have been raised at the North
to invade Virginia if it had been distinctly called out for the
purpose of setting the negroes free. Fanatics by the thousands made a
demigod of the murderous John Brown, but it was not fanatics who were
in control at Washington. It was the politicians, not working from
humanitarian sentiment, true or false, but impelled by a determination
to cripple the South and break up her controlling influence in
national politics,--a preeminence which had existed from the first
days of the government. The politicians shrewdly employed the
anti-slavery excitement to gain power for themselves and especially to
aggravate the South into secession, and then, smothering every whisper
of war for the freedom of the negroes, they raised the rallying cry of
"Save the Union" and marshalled the Northern hosts for subjugation.
President Davis justly said to a self-constituted umpire visiting him
in Richmond, "We are not fighting for slavery; we are fighting for
independence. The war will go on unless you acknowledge our right to
self-government."
FRENZIED FINANCE AND THE WAR OF 1861
[By J. L. Underwood.]
Was the war between the States in 1861 a war in behalf of slavery on
the one side and freedom on the other? Not at all. After all the noisy
and fanatical agitation on the subject, only a small minority of the
Northern people had expressed any desire to have the negroes of the
South emancipated at that time, and no State nor people of the South
had said that slavery should be perpetual. All the parties which in
1860 cast any electoral votes distinctly disavowed any intention to
interfere with slavery where it existed. This was the declaration even
of the Republican party which was triumphant and was now in power. Mr.
Lincoln, the President-elect, repeatedly declared that slavery was not
to be disturbed in the States, although he said the country could not
remain "half slave and half free." Here, then, the North and the South
were thoroughly agreed that slavery within the States should continue
undisturbed. As to emancipation, both sections of the country and all
parties except the ultra-Abolitionists were pro-slavery.
The
Abolitionists admitted that under the Federal Constitution there could
be no power in the national government to free the slaves. They cursed
and burned the Constitution as "a compact with the devil and a league
with hell," and defiantly repudiated all laws which carried out its
provisions. Under the plea of what they called "higher law," they
defied law. They were really anarchists. The Free Soil party, which
had assumed the name of Republican for party purposes, secretly
encouraged the Abolitionists in their mad crusade and welcomed their
votes, but persistently disavowed their aims. All rational men knew
that the time had not come to turn loose millions of half-civilized
Africans in this country; while many, North and South, deplored the
existence of slavery and would not advocate it in the abstract, yet
they believed that emancipation was not best for the negro and would
be accompanied by tremendous peril to the white people.
The truth is
that the Abolitionists of the North kept up such a blatant and
fanatical agitation against the South that it was out of the question,
in the excitement of the times, for conservative men, North or South,
to think or speak of such an alternative as the immediate freedom of
the negroes.
The Republican party, now the dominant party, and its leader, Mr.
Lincoln, stood against the immediate freedom of the slaves. But this
party had come into power on two ground principles which made its
triumph a direct attack on the rights and interests of the Southern
States in the Territories.
It gloried in its free-soil doctrine, which was a declaration that
the Southern States should no longer enjoy their share in the
Territories of the government. It never mounted the steed of
abolitionism until 1862 when the emancipation of the slaves was
adopted as a war measure, and was so declared by Mr.
Lincoln