The Brothers' War - The Original Classic Edition. John Calvin
both sides were morally right, and he is impartially just and equally loving to both. I feel that the quotations from a late work of his which I now make are the chief merits of[Pg 29] this chapter. Considering the controversy between the sections, he says, with the truest insight, "The constitution of the United States was presenting itself more and more in the light of an agreement between two incompatible sets of economic institutions, assuming to each the right freely to exist within its own limits."[7]
In this next passage as to the same subject, rising above Mr. Adams to the high frankness which the facts demand, he says, "The truth is that an irrepressible social conflict was at hand, and that both sides were as honorable as were both sides during the American Revolution, or during the civil wars of England."[8]
How just to north and south each, and how fraternally compassionate towards the south is this: "Solemn enough to the uninvaded north, the war meant more than northern imagination has yet realized to those southern States into whose heart its horrors were slowly, surely carried. Such a time was too intense for much expression; it was a moment rather for heroic action; and in south and north alike it found armies of heroes. Of these there are few more stirring records than a simple ballad made by Dr. Ticknor, of Georgia, concerning a confederate soldier."[9] And then he quotes "Little Giffen" in full.
Professor Wendell reaches a still greater height when he decorates the Tyrtaeus of the Confederate States and the supereminent anti-slavery lyricist of the north with equal homage and admiration. He says:
"The civil war brought forth no lines more fervent [than the concluding thirty-six of Timrod's 'The Cotton Boll,' which are set out], and few whose fervor rises to such lyric height. In the days of conflict, north regarded south, and south north, as the incarnation of evil. Time, however, has begun its healing [Pg 30]work; at last our country begins to understand itself better than ever before; and as our new patriotism strengthens, we cannot prize too highly such verses as Whittier's, honestly phrasing noble northern sentiment, or as Timrod's, who with equal honesty phrased the noble sentiment of the south. A literature which in the same years could produce work so utterly antagonistic in superficial sentiment, and yet so harmonious in their common sincerity and loftiness of feeling, is a literature from which riches may come."[10]
These words are more golden than I can tell. They parallel the elevation of Webster, showing the same love for South Carolina and
Massachusetts, in the pertinent parts of the reply to Hayne, which since my boyhood I have cherished as a nonpareil. It is cheering to a faithful southerner to receive such sure proof that the day must soon come when all obloquy will be lifted from the fame of Calhoun, Toombs, and Davis. What a grand triumph of contrast, almost surpassing the best achievement of Shakspeare, it will be when some honest Griffith, having shown Webster, Lincoln, and Grant in all the worth which merited their unspeakably happy lot, each radiant with the victor's glory, places opposite the great civic heroes of the southern nation, their due renown at last fitly
blazoned. That renown will be that they devoted the very greatest human powers and virtues all their lives, with never remitted effort and spotless fidelity, to save a doomed country,--the imperishable renown of grand failure in a cause which adverse fate cannot keep from being ever dear to all humanity.
My last word as to what I have just quoted from the three northern authors is that all of us--and especially the fast widening public of readers--ought to be forever in earnest to applaud such sentiments and chide[Pg 31] every manifestation of excessive sectional bias or prejudice from either northerner or southerner. This has been my incessantly kept faith for years. As proof I refer to my article, "The Old and New South," nearly all of it written in the early part of 1875--thirty years ago--and which I published the next year. I give an exact copy of it in the Appendix. As you go through it remember these things of the author: The election of Lincoln
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made me believe, as it did thousands of other southerners, that secession was the only patriotic course. I therefore voted for secession delegates to the State convention. I served in the confederate army all the war, taking part in the First Manassas and many other battles; and when I had been surrendered and paroled at Appomattox I walked back to my home in Georgia. Ten years after this I had found full solace and comfort for the direful event to the south of the brothers' war; and I had learned that the brothers on each side had complete justification in conscience for their contrary parts as statesmen, public leaders, voters, and at the end as soldiers. I want my readers of each section to see that I have long practised what I am now preaching.
I beg attention to the article on another score. It shows that the opinions expressed in this book have not been formed in haste. Nearly all of the more important will be found therein, in embryo, at least; and the present book will show, I hope, that they have prosperously grown. There are passages in the article, such as those touching the relations of the races, the future of the negro, the maintenance by the decentralizing forces of the union of their balance with the counter ones, and also others, which I might now justly claim to have proved prophetic; and I do not believe that a serious misprediction can be found in the entire article. This is, I hope, such corroboration by after occurrences as [Pg 32]indicates that even my early studies of the transcendently important theme were not unfruitful.
Further, the article serves in some sort to mark a definite stage in evolution. To give but one illustration: Although my close attention to planting interests at the time and for the seven or eight preceding years had kept me closely watching the negro, I had not then discovered even the beginning of that division of the race into two classes which is now so plain to me.
Possibly some readers may shy away from my book, deeming that its subject is hackneyed and worn out. They will exclaim, What can this author say that has not been said in the vast library of books already written upon the civil war? This will be asked, I am sure, only by the unobservant and unreflecting. If one but turn away from the assumptions, dogmas, and philippics, with which north
and south cannonaded each other's morality with increasing fury from 1831 to 1861, to the rerum causae, the play of resistless social forces, and the other actualities and great things indicated above, their huge stores of varied novelty, interest, romance, and wisdom will greatly embarass him--as has been my painful experience--both in making the best selection and in his felt inability to give what he does at last select its fit presentation.
As illustration I will say that every thoroughly impartial northern reader who meditates what I narrate as to Toombs will, I believe, be astonished to learn that one so prodigally gifted with supreme virtue and supreme genius, and who was of unexampled success
in doing all the common and all the extraordinary duties of high place, has become worse than forgotten in almost his own day; and such a reader will suspect, as I do myself, that there is much more of value in his career that I have overlooked.
[Pg 33]Perhaps this chapter is too long already. But I pray my reader to allow me to say a little more. We are upon the threshold of
a new American era. Evidently because of our western coast we are to dominate the Pacific ocean commerce and to develop it into proportions so enormous as to be now almost inconceivable. That coast will soon outstrip the Atlantic in population and great cities. Our people, safe against wars on the continent, maintaining armies only of workers, taught better methods every year by practice
and science, will soon be far in advance of their present enviable prosperity and comfort. Cheering as is the promise of their material progress, that of their progress in virtue and good government is still more cheering. Everywhere in the north--which was not impoverished, deprived of familiar modes of production, and paralyzed with a race question by the event of the brothers' war--the State electorates are rebelling successfully against the party machine, cashiering the boss, and subverting the corporation oligarchy. That in the last election the voters most intelligently split their tickets assures the early expulsion of spoilsmen, grafters, and public-service franchise-grabbers from the control of our politics, legislation, and administration of government, and the real and permanent elevation of the people to being their own absolute governors. In several States--one of these a southern--the vote was for the most democratic and anti-plutocratic president since Lincoln, while at the same time the anti-plutocratic State candidates, either of the other party or independent, were elected. Our population will