The Brothers' War - The Original Classic Edition. John Calvin
make or change investment; of wills manumitting slaves; and a thousand other relevant matters. The course of legislation as to slaves from the first to the end is also important. From these, from local literature such as "Georgia Scenes," "Simon Suggs," biography,
and various pamphlets, and other[Pg 14] original sources,--far better historical evidence than any which is now generally invoked,--
can be learned the real facts as to the growth of slavery; and especially how in its economic potency consequent upon the invention
9
of the gin it supplanted or made dependent upon itself all other property, and became the solitary foundation of every kind of production and mode of making a living; so that even by 1820 to abolish slavery would have been almost to beggar the southern people for two or three generations. It is to be hoped that Professor Brown, finding the opportunity which he desires, may yet exhaust not only the sources I have mentioned, but also important ones that I have not even thought of, and give the true ante-bellum history of the lower south. Some such work is necessary to explain the active principle, the raison d'etre of southern nationalization.
How north and south were sundered by the different nationalizations is yet to be told in full detail without any censure of the people of either. Practically every American was born into an occupation or way of life connected with or founded upon either slave or free labor interests, and so was born into one or the other of these two nationalizations, and his conscience coerced him to stay with it. These nationalizations made two different publics and two different countries in the United States. After the slavery agitation had become active the masses in either public knew but little of the other, and cared for it less; and when war broke out between the two countries every man, woman, and child was ready to die, if there was need, for his own. When the history of the times has been impartially and adequately written the world will recognize that the patriotism and moral worth of neither side excels that of the other, and it will crown both.
[Pg 15]The evolution indicated above produced not only the two hostile peoples, but also their leaders and representatives of every class. I have taken pains in a relevant chapter to show how the fire-eaters and the root-and-branch abolitionists were at last brought upon the stage. Every fierce controversy in history has had their like on each side. Their coming is late. The antagonists have become excited. The intelligence guiding evolution deceives them as to the parts they must play. They believe that their mission is to arouse the public conscience in order to right some alleged moral wrong. Their real mission is to excite to angry action. Cicero condemns
the Peripatetics for asserting that proneness to anger has been usefully given by nature.[2] He overlooked the fact that the outbreak
of the passion is intended to spur us into doing something important for our own protection; and that it is therefore an indispensable weapon in our self-defensive armory. These fanatics, as we often call them, instigated north and south to quarrel more and more fiercely, and finally to fight. The purpose of the powers in the unseen in causing the fight has already been stated.
What especially concerns us here is that we avoid adhering to the mistakes of these partisans which still have injurious effect upon opinion. Thus the fire-eater could see no good whatever in the yankees, as he called them, denying them honesty, trustworthiness, and other elementary virtues; accusing them of robbing us by the tariff and other measures, and hating us for the prosperity and comfort which the slavery system had blessed us with. Other of his false charges are still lodged in the memory of some influential southerners. But the fire-eater's predictions were all completely falsified by the result of the war; and he has become so much [Pg 16] discredited as an authority, there is no very great need for consuming much time and effort in correcting his misstatements. On the other hand the decisive success of their side has kept thousands at the north fully believing the wildest fabrications of the root-
and-branch abolitionists. The latter believed that the African slave of the south was just such a human being, ready for liberty and
self-government in all particulars, as civilized and enlightened whites. They believed that the condition of his immediate ancestors in West Africa was one of high physical, mental, moral, and social development, and that if there was in him now any inferiority
to his master it was entirely due to the sinister influence of American slavery. They also believed that the system was fraught with such cruelties as frequent separation of man and wife and of mother and young children, under-feeding and clothing, and grinding overwork,--that, in short, the average slave was daily exposed to something like the torture of the Inquisition. All this was invention. American slavery found the negro gabbling inarticulately and gave him English; it found him a cannibal and fetishist and gave him
the Christian religion; it found him a slave to whom his savage master allowed no rights at all, and it gave him an enlightened master bound by law to accord him the most precious human rights; it found him an inveterate idler and gave him the work habit; it found him promiscuous in the horde and gave him the benign beginning of the monogamic family,--in short, as now appears very strongly probable, American slavery gave him his sole opportunity to rise above the barbarism of West Africa.
These tremendous mistakes of fact, after knitting the north in solid phalanx against dividing the Territories with the south and restoring fugitive slaves and thus[Pg 17] hasting forward the war, prompted that folly of follies the fifteenth amendment, and have ever since kept the north from understanding the race question.
I am sure that it is high time that we of each section should school ourselves into impartially appreciating the civil leaders of the other side. The south has made more progress towards this than the north. Certain causes have operated to help her onward. One of these is that practically all of us recognize it is far better for the section that the union side won. Another is that the great mass have learned that slavery both effeminated and paralyzed the whites and was a smothering incubus upon our due social and material development. It is natural that although we give our pro-slavery political leaders and the confederate soldiers increasing love, we should more and more commend the pro-union and anti-slavery activity of the northern statesmen. Nothing like this has led the north to revise the reprobation which in the heat and passion of the conflict it bestowed upon the public men of the south. If I ever read a good word from a northern writer as to them, it is for something in their careers disconnected with the southern cause. Even Mr. Rhodes, the ablest and most impartial of northern historians of the times, finds in Calhoun only a closet spinner of utterly impractical theories. Further, I could hardly believe it when I read it--and it is hard for me to believe it yet--that, citing some flippant words
10
of Parton in which a slander of contemporary politics is toothsomely repeated as his voucher, he flatly charges the lion-hearted knight of the south with playing the coward in the most heroic episode of his grand career. My faith is strong that this mode of treating the good and great southern leaders will soon go out of fashion.
I am greatly in earnest to vindicate these [Pg 18]leaders--especially Calhoun, Toombs, and Davis. Much of the public life of each one was concerned with matters of national interest. To this I give special attention, for I want my northern readers to know what true Americans they all were. Without this they cannot have their full glory. And their justification is that of their people. Such effective leaders are always representative. It is a misnomer to call them leaders. They were really followers of their constituents who were struggling for the subsistence of themselves and their dear ones. During this time Calhoun, Toombs, and Davis, had they not labored in every way to protect this great cause--the cause of their own country--as they did, would have been as recreant as the confederate soldier, skulking away from the line defending home and fireside. When our country is in peril the unseen lords of its destiny do not take any one of us, from the greatest to the humblest, into their confidence as to the event. Every man of us must support in politics and on the field the cause of our people. If that must go down it will make defeat glorious to go down with it, as contentedly and bravely as did Demosthenes, Cicero, and Davis.
Whoever diligently studies the facts will be convinced that southern nationalization, with a power superior to human resistance, carried the southern people into secession, and that their so-called leaders were carried with them. He will discern that the parts of