The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866. Various
That backer does not necessarily believe that his side will be the winner, but only signalizes that that side is his." The evasion came too late; persons who had inconvenient memories saw through the shuffling of a pseudo-prophet, who only managed to cast a retrospective gleam of insincerity over his fortune-telling, to convert blunder into bad faith, and to stultify his present along with his past position. The leek had to be eaten at last: why, after so many "prave 'ords" of superiority and defiance, confess that the eating of it had been more than half foreseen all along?
6th. The party which believed in the eventual success of the South, but doubted or disbelieved its right, must have been pretty considerable, if my previous estimates are true; for I have already advanced the conjecture that more than half the nation sided with the North, while four fifths believed for a long time in the success of the South. This fact alone, if correctly alleged, furnishes tolerable evidence of the persistency and influence of pro-Southern papers and partisans, and their ingenuity in so misreading the facts,
"Chè il no e il sì nel capo ci tenzona."
The event has proved that the chances of success were really very much on the side of the North. The superiority in material resources, and certain solid and undeniable successes obtained at and early stage of the war, such as the capture of New Orleans, were known to be on the same side. Slighter grounds would in most cases have sufficed to persuade minds predisposed by sympathy that this side would win; yet the Southern advocates shuffled and played the cards well enough to induce an opposite conclusion in numerous instances. And no doubt many who began by simply believing that the South would succeed went on to think that the North deserved to lose,—partly because, upon such an assumption, the personal superiority must have been very largely with the South, and partly because a combatant who has no fair chance of winning ought to give in, and not persist in shedding blood in vain. If a big man fights a little one, and turns out upon experiment to have next to no chance of beating him, one soon gets angry with the big one for "pegging away," even though one may at first have perceived him to be in the right. Such seemed to many English observers to be the condition of the case in America. They were mistaken, but excusable; but for the error in their premise, their deduction would have been correct, or at least not irrational.
7th. The party which covertly or avowedly, justified slavery was incomparably larger than any Englishman would have dreamed of a week before the secession took place. Till then, I doubt whether any writer of credit, except one, had ventured deliberately to affirm that American slavery is, under limitations, an allowable and advantageous thing. That exception is assuredly a most illustrious one, perhaps the strongest head and stoutest heart in the British dominions, and our living writer of the most exalted and durable fame,—Thomas Carlyle. His "Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question," published some years ago, ruffled and outraged the anti-slavery mind, which then, and for some while before and since, might fairly be termed the mind of all England. That Discourse staggered some readers, and roused others,—roused them to contemplate the whole question from a more fundamental and actual, a less traditional and prejudged point of view, than had been in vogue since our own abolition movement gained the ascendency. It became apparent to various thinkers that the humanitarian view of the question was not its be-all and end-all; that some facts and considerations per contra had to be taken into account; and that what one train of thought and feeling denounced as a mere self-condemned wrong might, according to another, be even regarded as a higher right. Still, this "new light" upon slavery was received more or less fully by only a very few minds, as compared with the general mass of British conviction,—a few thorough-going believers in Carlyle, a few hardy and open-minded speculators; hardly more, perhaps, in all, than those who would join Mr. John Stuart Mill in saying that the right form of Parliamentary suffrage is universal suffrage, open to women as well as men. No ordinary English newspaper would have thought of professing at that time, nor any ordinary English reader of tolerating, the theory that slavery is right. (It is no part of my plan or business to discuss this question of slavery: I will simply say, to avoid misapprehension, that, while recognizing the profound good sense of much that Carlyle has said on this and cognate matters, my own instinct of right and habits of opinion rebel against the pro-slavery theory, and never allowed me to doubt which side I was on, when the question came to its supreme practical issue in the civil war.) Such, then, appears to me to have been the state of English opinion on this subject when the secession occurred. On one ground or another, a large proportion of our population and our writers sided with the South. At first I fancy that no journal and no average Englishman affirmed that slavery is justifiable; but, as events progressed, it became more and more difficult to say that the South was right, and yet that slavery was wrong. "No man can serve two masters," not even such a couple as Jefferson Davis and Wilberforce. The British sympathizers, who had determined to "hold to the one," were reduced to the logical necessity of "despising the other." It was a surprising spectacle. The dogmas and traditions of half a century snapped like threads, when it became their office to constrain a penchant. Ethnologists and politicians were equally ready to find out that the negro was fit for nothing but enforced servitude. Parsons, marchionesses, and maiden aunts received simultaneous enlightenment as to Christian truth, and discovered that slavery was not prohibited, but was even countenanced, in the Bible. The inference was inevitable: what Moses did not condemn in Jews thirty-three centuries ago must be the correct thing for Anglo-Americans to uphold at the present day. Did not St. Paul tell Onesimus to return to his master? etc., etc. Many Secessionist organs of public opinion, no doubt, declined to commit themselves to pro-slavery views: they started with the assumption that slavery is an evil and a crime, and they continued protesting the same creed. How far this creed was compatible with so rabid an advocacy of the Southern cause,—how far it was possible for genuine abominators of slavery to continue unfaltering their Southern palinodes and Northern anathemas, after such acts on the part of the South as the refusal to include colored troops among exchangeable prisoners of war, and the massacre at Fort Pillow, and such acts on the part of the North as the Emancipation Proclamation, and the introduction of the Constitutional Amendment for abolition,—these are questions which appear deserving of an answer; yet one may be quite prepared to find that the spirit of party, which made such an anomaly possible, is blind to the fact of its being anomalous, and has an answer pat. My own belief about the matter is this. When the Secession began, there were two sects among the English partisans of the South: the Carlylese apologists of slavery,—a very small sect; and the political advocates of Secession, who, partly with full conviction, partly as a mere matter of unchallenged use and wont, repudiated slavery,—a very large sect. The Southern partisanship of the former sect was perfectly logical; that of the latter unable to stand the wear and tear of discussion, as the progress of events made it more and more manifest that slavery or abolition was the real issue. With this latter sect the political or other liking for the South was a much stronger and more active feeling than the humanitarian or other dislike of slavery; the first feeling, indeed, soon developed into a passion, the second into a self-reproachful obstruction. Thus the logical view, that slavery as well as the slaveholding interest was right, exercised a powerful centripetal attraction; and many minds were betrayed into adopting it as a truth, or using it for a purpose, without probing the depth of apostasy to their own more solid convictions, or of moral disingenuousness, which the practice involved. The South had to be justified, and here were at hand the means of justification. Now that the contest is over, I have no doubt that a large residuum of tolerance for slavery, much larger than seemed possible for Englishmen before the Secession, is left behind; but also that this tolerance was in most instances factitious and occasional, and is cleared or clearing away, and will leave the British reprobation of slavery, in a little while, pretty nearly where it used to be of old. The orange has been squeezed: what use can the rind be of? It rests with the re-United States, by a just and successful treatment of the still formidable negro question,2 to persuade unreluctant minds in the Old Country that slavery is, in very deed, the unmitigated wrong and nuisance which they used to reckon it; and those who have sympathized with the North look confidently for this ultimate result.
As a corollary to all that I have been saying in this slight analysis of English opinion during the war, I should add,—what, indeed, American writers have abundantly observed,—that the knowledge of American affairs possessed by the great mass of English partisans was extremely superficial. I will not now speak of our newspapers
As some time may have elapsed, and some change in the state of facts occurred, before this article appears in print, I add that it was completed early in October.