Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

never were its waters clearer, more translucent, or more musical. This is indeed the peculiar beauty of a feminine style--choice and elegant words, but such as are familiar in well-bred conversation; words, not used scientifically, but according to their customary signification. It is from being guided wholly by usage, undisturbed by extraneous considerations, and from their characteristic fineness of discernment with regard to what is fit and appropriate, as well as from their being much less influenced by the vanity of fine writing, that sensible, educated women have a grace of style so rarely attainable by men. What are called the graces of composition are often its blemishes. There is no better test of beauties or defects of style than to judge them by the standard of letter writing. An expression, a phrase, a figure of speech, thought to be very splendid in itself, would often appear perfectly ridiculous if introduced in a letter. The rule of the cynic is a pretty good one, after all: _In writing, when you think you have done something particularly brilliant, strike it out._

We are pretty well persuaded that authors are but poor judges of their own productions. They pride themselves on what they did with most labor. It is not good praise of any work to say that it is 'elaborate.' An author's letters are not apt to be labored, 'to smell of the lamp;' and they are, therefore, in general, his best specimens. In letter writing there will be found a facility, a freedom from constraint, a simplicity, and a directness, which are the capital traits of a good style. Of Shakspeare it is said, in the preface to the first edition of his works: 'His mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.' Shakspeare did not, therefore,

'Write with fury, and correct with phlegm;'

but he wrote straightforwardly and naturally, as they do who assiduously practise letter writing.

THE YEAR.

Come, gentle Snowdrop, come; we welcome thee:
Shine, fiery Crocus, through that dewy tear!
That thou, arrayed in burnished gold, may'st be
A morning star to hail the dawning year.

Now Winter hath ta'en Summer by the hand,
And kissed her on her cheek so fair and clear;
While Spring strews bridal blossoms o'er the land
To grace the marriage of the youthful year.

The blackbird sings upon the budding spray,
I hear the clarion tones of chanticleer,
And robins chirp about from break of day,--
All pipe their carols to the opening year.

The butterfly mounts up on jewelled wing,
Risen to new life from out her prison drear:
All Nature smileth;--every living thing
Breaks forth in praises of the gladsome year.

Down in the sheltered valley, Mayflowers blow,--
Their small, sweet, odorous cups in beauty peer
Forth from their mother's breast in softened glow,
To deck the vestments of the princely year.

And splendid flowers in richly-colored dress
Will bloom when warm winds from the south shall veer:
And clustering roses in their gorgeousness
Shall form a coronet for the regal year.

Rejoice, O beauteous Earth--O shining Sea!
Rejoice, calm Summer sky, and all things dear:
Give thanks, and let your joyful singing be
An anthem for the glories of the year.

THE GREAT AMERICAN CRISIS.

_PART ONE._

The American crisis, actual and impending; the causes which have led to it through the years that have passed; the consequences which must flow from it; the new responsibilities which it devolves on us as a people in the practical sphere; the new theoretical problems which it forces upon our consideration--everything, in fine, which concerns it, constitutes it a subject of the most momentous importance. The greatest experiment ever yet instituted to bring the progress of humanity to a higher plane of development is being worked out on this continent and in this age; and the war now progressing between the Northern and the Southern States is, in a marked sense, the acme and critical ordeal to which that experiment is brought.

First in order, in any methodical consideration of the subject, is the question of the causes which have led to this open outburst of collision and antagonism between the two great sections of a common country, whose institutions have hitherto been--with one remarkable exception--so similar as to be almost identical. Look at the subject as we will, the fact reveals itself more and more that the one exception alluded to is the 'head and front of this offending,' the heart and core of this gigantic difficulty, the one and sole cause of the desperate attempt now being waged to disturb and break up the process of experiment, otherwise so peacefully and harmoniously progressing, in favor of the freedom of man. There is no possibility of grappling rightly with the difficulty itself, unless we understand to the bottom the nature of the disease.

When the question is considered of the causes of the present war, the superficial and incidental features of the subject--the mere symptoms of the development of the deep-seated affection in the central constitution of our national life--are firstly observed. Some men perceive that the South were disaffected by the election of Abraham Lincoln and the success of the Republican party, and see no farther than this. Some see that the Northern philanthropists had persisted in the agitation of the subject of slavery, and that this persistency had so provoked and agitated the minds of Southern man that their feelings had become heated and irritated, and that they were ready for any rash and unadvised step. Others see the causes of the war in the prevalence of ignorance among the masses of the Southern people, the exclusion of the ordinary sources of information from their minds, the facility with which they have been imposed on by false and malignant reports of the intentions of the Northern people, or a portion of the Northern people. Others find the same causes in the unfortunate prevalence at the South of certain political heresies, as Nullification, Secession, and the exaggerated theory of State Rights.

A member of President Lincoln's cabinet, speaking of its causes, near the commencement of the war, says:

'For the last ten years an angry controversy has existed upon this
question of Slavery. The minds of the people of the South have been
deceived by the artful representations of demagogues, who have
assured them that the people of the North were determined to bring
the power of this Government to bear upon them for the purpose of
crushing out this institution of slavery. I ask you, is there any
truth in this charge? _Has the Government of the United States, in
any single instance, by any one solitary act, interfered with the
institutions of the South? No, not in one._'

But let us go behind the symptoms--let us dive deeper than the superficial manifestations--let us ask why is it that the South were so specially disaffected by the election of a given individual, or the success of a given political party, to an extent and with an expression given to that disaffection wholly disproportionate to any such cause, and wholly unknown to the political usages of the land? Why is the South susceptible to this intense degree of offence at the ordinary contingency of defeat in a political encounter? Why, again, does the persistent discussion or agitation of _any_ subject tend so specially to inflame the Southern mind beyond all the ordinary limits of moderation--to the denial of the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, and finally of the right of national existence itself to the North--except in conformity with preconceived opinions and theories of its own? Why were they of the South standing ready, as to their mental posture, for any or every rash and unadvised step? Why, again, are the Southern people uneducated and ignorant, as the predominant fact respecting a majority of their population? Why is the state of popular information in that whole region of a nominally free country, such as to make it an easy thing to impose upon their credulity and instruct them into a full belief in the most absurd and monstrous fabrications, or falsifications of the truth? Why were the ordinary sources of information excluded from their minds, more than from ours, or from the population of any other country? Why this fatal facility on the part of the Southern public for being misled by the designing purposes of ambitious demagogues; imbued with unjust prejudices; deluded into a murderous assault upon their best friends, and into the infliction of the most serious political injury upon themselves? Why, as a people, are they prompt to rush from the pursuits of peace into all the horrors and contingencies of war?--from the enjoyment of political freedom, at least nominal and apparent, into the arms of a military despotism, the natural and necessary ultimatum of the course which they have chosen to adopt?

The one and sole answer to all these questions is, Slavery. Some one has said, in speaking of the present crisis, that the sentiment of loyalty has never been prevalent at the South. This is a grand mistake. No people on the surface of the planet have more sincerely felt or more invariably and unflinchingly demonstrated loyalty than they. But it is not loyalty to the American Government, nor indeed to any political institutions whatsoever. It is loyalty to slavery and to cotton. No other ideas exist, with any marked prominence, at the South. The Northern people have never understood the South, and their greatest danger in the present collision results from that ignorance. The difference between the two peoples is indeed so wide that it is not equalled by that which exists between any two nations of Europe--if we except, perhaps, the Western nations and the Turks. The single institution of slavery has, for the last sixty or seventy years, taken absolute possession of the Southern mind, and moulded it in all ways to its own will. Everything is tolerated which does not interfere with it; nothing whatsoever is tolerated which does. No system of despotism was ever established on earth so thorough, so efficient, so all-seeing, so watchful, so permeating, so unscrupulous, and so determined.

The inherent, vital principle of slavery is irresponsible, despotic rule. The child is born into the exercise of that right; his whole mental constitution is imbued with its exercise. Hence for twenty or thirty years--not by virtue of law, but against law--the mails have been searched throughout the South for incendiary matter, with a strictness of censorship unknown to any Government of Europe. Northern men and Europeans immigrating to the South have uniformly been quietly dragooned and terrorized into the acceptance of theories and usages wholly unknown to any free country;--quietly, only because the occasion for doing the same thing violently and barbarously had not yet arrived.

The two civilizations, North and South, are wholly unlike. Without the slavery of four millions of men, to be kept in subjection by a conspiracy to that effect, on the part of the whole free population--the lack of fidelity to which conspiracy is the only treason known in those regions--the existence of a people like the inhabitants of the Southern States would be a riddle incapable of solution. Slavery itself, is _a remnant of barbarism overlapping the period of civilization_; but, unlike the slaveries of the barbaric ages, American slavery has been stimulated into all the enterprising and audacious energy of this advanced and progressive age. It is an engine of ancient barbarism worked by the steam of modern intelligence. The character of the people which has been created under this rare and anomalous state of things is alike rare and anomalous. No other people ever so commingled in themselves the elements of barbarous and even savage life with traits of the highest civilization. No other community were ever so instinct with the life of the worst ages of the past, and so endowed with the physical and intellectual potencies of the present. The national character of the South is that of the gentlemanly blackleg, bully, and desperado. Courteous when polished, but always overbearing; pretentious of a conventional sense of honor--which consists solely in a readiness to fight in the duel, the brawl, or the regular campaign, and to take offence on every occasion; with no trace of that modesty or delicacy of sentiment which constitutes the soul of true honor; ambitious, unscrupulous, bold; dashing and expert; with absolutely no restrictions from conscience, routine, or the ordinary suggestions of prudence; false and, like all braggarts, cowardly when beaten; confident of their own strength until brought to the severest tests; capable of endurance and shifts of all kinds; awaiting none of the usual conditions of success--the Southern man and the Southern people are neither comfortable neighbors in a state of peace, nor enemies to be slightly considered or despised in war.

The anomalous character of Southern society, it cannot be too often repeated, is not understood and cannot be understood by the people of the North, or of Europe, otherwise than through the sharp experience of hostile and actual contact; nor otherwise than in the light of the inherent tendency and necessary educational influences of the one institution of slavery. Of the whole South, in degree, and of the Southwestern States preëminently, it may be said as a whole description in a single form of expression: _They know no other virtue than brute physical courage, and no other crime than abolitionism or negro-stealing._

All this is said, not for the purpose of blackening the South, not from partisan rancor or local prejudice, or exaggerated patriotic zeal, but because it is true. It is not true, however, of the whole population of the South, nor true, perhaps, in the absolute sense of any portion. It is impossible to characterize any people without a portion of individual injustice, or to state the drift of an individual character even, without a like injustice to better traits, adverse to the general drift, and which, to constitute a complete inventory of national or personal attributes, should be enumerated. There is at the South a large counterpoise, therefore, of adverse statement, which might be, and should be made if the object of the present writing were a complete analysis of the subject. It is, however, not so, but a statement of the preponderance of public character and opinion in those States. As a people they have their countervailing side of advantage--a great deal of amiability and refinement in certain neighborhoods, so long as their inherent right of domination is not disputed. Men and women are found, all over the South, who as individuals are better than the institution by which their characters are affected, and whose native goodness could not be wholly spoiled by its adverse operation. Slavery, too, offers certain advantages for some special kinds of culture. We of the North, on the other hand, have our own vices of a kind not to be disguised nor denied; so that the present statement should not be mistaken for an attempt to characterize in full either population. It is simply perceived that the grand distinctive drift of Southern society is directly away from the democratic moorings of our favorite republican institutions; is rapid in its current and irresistible in its momentum; and that already the divergency attained between the political and popular character of the people at the North and the South is immense; that these constantly widening tendencies--one in behalf of more and more practical enlargement of the liberty of the individual; the other backward and downward toward the despotic political dogmas and practices of the ignorant and benighted past--have proceeded altogether beyond anything which has been seen and recognized by the people of the North; and that, consequently, the whole North has been acting under a misapprehension.

The spirit of the South is and has been belligerent, rancorous, and unscrupulous. The idea of settling any question by the discussion of principles, by mutual concessions, by the understanding, admission, and defence of the rights of each, is not in all their thoughts. They are inherently and essentially invaders and conquerors, in disposition, and so far as it might chance to prove for them feasible, would ever be so in fact. War with them is therefore no matter of child's play, no matter of courtesy or chivalry toward enemies, except from a pompous and theatrical show of a knightly character, which they do not possess;--it is simply a question of pillaging and enslaving, without let or hindrance from moral or humanitary considerations, to any extent to which they may find, by the experiment now inaugurated, their physical power to extend. The North, let it be repeated, entered into this war under a misapprehension of the whole state of the case. It is at the present hour, to a fearful extent, under the same misapprehension. There is still a belief prevailing that the South only needs to be coaxed or treated kindly or magnanimously to be convinced that she has mistaken the North; that she has not the grievances to complain of which she supposes she has, and that she can yet obtain just and equitable treatment from us. There is a tacit assumption in the minds of men that she _must_ be content to receive the usage at our hands which we are conscious that we are ready to bestow, and which has in it no touch of aggressive and unjust intention. It is not realized that the spirit of the South, in respect to the North, in respect to Mexico, in respect to the islands of the sea, and--should their power prove proportionate to their unscrupulous piratical aspirations--in respect to all the nations of the earth, is that of the burglar and the highwayman. It is not realized that the institution of slavery--itself essential robbery of the rights of man; covering the area of half a continent, and the number of four millions of subjects; planted in the midst of an intellectually enlightened people, whose moral sense it has utterly sapped--is essentially a great educational system, as all-pervading and influential over the minds of the whole population as the common schools of New England; and that this grand educational force tends toward and culminates in this same tendency toward robbery and the suppression of human rights or the individual and national rights of all other people--expressed _in a collective and belligerent way_. It is not, as said before, that all men at the South are of this filibustering cast; but the bold, enterprising, and leading class of the population are so, and the remainder are passive in their hands. Virtually and practically, therefore, the South are a nation of people having far more relationship in thought and purpose with the old Romans during the period of the republic and the empire, or with the more modern Goths and Vandals and Huns, than they have with the England or New England of to-day.

It is such a people, planted on our borders and aroused for the first time to an exhibition on a large scale of those abiding and augmenting national attributes and propensities which have thus been indicated, with whom we are now brought into hostile array. They are at present trying their hand at the collective and organic activities of a national cutthroatism which, in an individual and sporadic way, has for many years past constituted the national life of that people. Who at the North, at the commencement of the war, impressively understood these facts? Who even now sees and knows, as the fact is, that the military success of Jefferson Davis; that his triumphant march on Philadelphia, New York, and Boston--as they of the South threaten, and intend if they have the power, and have already twice unsuccessfully attempted--would terminate not, in a separation of these States by a permanent disruption of the old Union; nor in new compromises of any kind whatsoever; but in the absolute conquest of the whole North--not conquest even in any sense now understood among civilized people; but conquest with more than all the horrors which fourteen centuries ago were visited on Southern Europe by the overwhelming avalanche of Northern barbarian invasion?--that in that event, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of locomotion without question, freedom in any sense which makes life valuable to the man once educated into the conception of freedom, is lost?--that the whole progress of modern civilization and development, as it has been working itself out in the Northern American States, would not only be diverted from its course, but positively reversed and made to contribute all its accumulations of power to the building up, not of the temple of Freedom for the blessing of the nations, but of an infernal pantheon of Despotism and human oppression?

The North was forced, reluctantly and unwillingly, into this war: with her as yet it has hardly become a matter of earnest. She has endeavored to carry it on considerately and tenderly, for the well-being of the South as well as of the North, much in the spirit of a quiet Quaker gentleman unexpectedly set upon by a drunken rowdy, 'spoiling for a fight,' and whom in his benevolence and surprise, he is anxious indeed to restrain, but without inflicting on him serious injury. In an especial degree was this tenderness felt on the part of the Government and people of the North toward that peculiar institution of the South which is distinctively known to be, in some way, fundamentally related to this unprovoked and unreasonable attack. While the South was attributing to the whole North a rabid abolitionism; while the North itself was half suspecting that it had committed some wrong in the excess of its devotion to human rights; the simple fact on the contrary was, that the whole North had been and was still 'psychologized' into a positive respect for slavery, and for slaves as property, which we feel for no other species of property whatsoever. The existence of this sentiment of veneration for what our Abolition apostles have for some years been denominating the 'sum of all villanies,' is a curious fact in the spiritual history of our people, which had very generally escaped critical observation.

At the South, the individual planter, owning and possessing ten slaves, of an aggregate value, it may be, of ten thousand dollars, ranks higher, socially, is regarded indeed, in some subtile way, as a richer man, than the merchant or banker who may be worth his hundred thousand or half million of dollars, provided he has no slaves. To come to be the owner of negroes, and of more and more negroes, is the social ambition, the aristocratic purpose and pretension of the whole Southern people. It is by virtue of this mystical _prestige_ of the institution itself; which couples the charms of wealth with the exercise of authority, or a certain show of official supremacy on the part of the master; which begins by subjugating the imagination of the poorer classes, the whites throughout the South, whose direct interests are wholly opposed to those of the slaveholding class, and ends by subjecting them, morally and spiritually, and binding them in the bonds of the most abject allegiance to the oligarchy of slaveholders. It is in this way that the South is made a unit out of elements seemingly the most incongruous and radically opposed. For a series of years past, the South has sent forth its annual caravan of wealthy planters to visit the watering places, and inhabit the great hotels of the North. Coming in intimate contact with the superior classes of our own population; floating up in the atmosphere of serene self-complacency; radiating, shedding down upon those with whom they chanced to associate, the ineffable consciousness of their own unquestionable superiority; they have communicated without effort on their part, and without suspicion on the part of those who were inoculated by their presence, the exact mould and pressure of their own slaveholding opinion. To this extent, and in this subtile and ethereal way, the North had imposed upon it, unconsciously, a certain respect, amounting to veneration, for what may be called the sanctity of slavery, as it rests in and constitutes the aromal emanation from every Southern mind. Hence not only did we begin this war with the feeling of tenderness toward the Southern man and the Southern woman as brother and sister in the common heritage of patriotism, but, superadded to this, with a _special_ sentiment of tenderness toward that _special_ institution for which it is known that they, our brethren, entertain such _special_ regard.

Now all this is rapidly changing; the outrages inflicted on citizens of the North residing at the South at the opening of the war--hardly paralleled in the most barbarous ages in any other land;--their reckless and bloodthirsty methods of war; their bullying arrogance and presumption; the true exposition, in fine, of the Southern character as it is, in the place of a high-toned chivalry which they have claimed for themselves, and which the people of the North have been tacitly inclined to accord--are all awakening the Government and the people to some growing sense of the real state of the case. Still, however, we are so far dominated by these influences of the past, that we are not fighting the South upon anything like a fair approximation to equal terms. They have no other thought than to inflict on us of the North the greatest amount of evil; the _animus_ of deadly war. We, on the other hand, fight an unwilling fight, with a constant _arrière pensée_ to the best interests of the people whom we oppose--not even as _we_ might construe those interests, but, by a curious tenderness and refinement of delicacy, for those interests as _they_, from their point of view, conceive them to be. We forbear from striking the South in their most vital and defenceless point, while they forbear _in nothing_, and have no purpose of forbearance.

Who doubts for a moment that a thousand mounted men, acting with the freedom which characterized the movements of the detachment of Garibaldi in the Italian war, acting with the authorization of the Government, actuated by the spirit of a John Brown or a Nat Turner, sent, or rather let go, into the mountains of Virginia, North Carolina, or Georgia, with the authority to assemble and arm the slaves, retreating whenever assailed to the fastnesses of the mountains, would cause more terror in those States; would do more, in a word, toward the actual conquest in three months' time of those rebel commonwealths, than fifty or a hundred times their number organized in the regular forms of modern warfare, operating against the whites only, and half-committed to the coöperative protection of the institution of slavery, would accomplish in a year? Who doubts for a moment that, if the South could find a like vulnerable point in the openings of our armor, she would make, with no hesitation, the most fearful and tremendous use of her advantage? The whole North is aware of its possession, in its own hands, of this immense engine of destructive power over its enemy. The whole civilized world stands by, beholding us possessed of it, and expecting, as a simple matter of course, that we shall not fail to employ it--standing by indeed, perplexed and confused at the seeming lack of any significance in the war itself, unless we make use of the power at our command in this fortuitous struggle, not only to inflict the greatest injury upon our enemy, but to extinguish forever the cause of the whole strife. Still we forbear to make the most efficient use of our advantage. We for a long time embarrassed and partially crippled ourselves in all our movements by an almost unconscious sense of responsibility for the protection of this very institution of slavery from the disastrous consequences which were liable to fall upon it as the results of the war.

True, we are slowly and gradually recovering from this perversion of opinion. The Emancipation Proclamation was probably issued as soon, or nearly as soon, as the Northern sentiment was prepared to give it even a moral support. Another term had to expire to accustom the same public mind to appropriate the spirit of that document as matter of earnest; to come to regard it as anything more than a mere _brutum fulmen_, a Pope's bull, as President Lincoln once called it himself, against the comet. Up to this hour, its effect on the war has been far more as a moral influence preparing for a great change of opinion and of conduct, than as a charter of efficient operations. General Thomas's action at the South, just previous to the capture of Vicksburg, began experimentally to inaugurate, on something like an adequate scale, the new programme of practical work in the conduct of the war. Even a month earlier his movement would hardly have been tolerated by the same army, which, just then beginning to appreciate the tremendous difficulty of the enterprise of conquering the South, were ready to accept anything new which promised to augment their own strength and to weaken that of the enemy. Still another term of waiting and suffering is requisite to change the habit of mind which has so long despised and maltreated the negro, before he will be put, in all respects, upon the footing of his own merit as a patriot and a soldier; and before all of his uses as the severest goad in the sides of the hostile South will be fairly appreciated.

Thus in all ways we are only now in the midst of a revolution of opinion, which, when it is accomplished, will be seen to be the greatest triumph of the war. Though we have spoken of this change as slowly and gradually occurring, yet, viewed with reference to the long periods of a nation's life, it is an immense revolution almost instantly effected. We are perhaps already one half prepared adequately to use our tremendous advantage. New disasters may be providentially requisite to quicken our education in the right direction; more punishment for our complicity in the crimes of the South; new incentives to a more perfect love of justice as a people; but every indication points to the early achievement of these substantial victories over ourselves, while, at the same time, we conquer the powerful array of Southern intrepidity and desperation, in behalf of their bad cause, upon the external battle field.

To resume the question of causes. Why is there, and why has there always been at the South this unfortunate prevalence of certain political heresies, as Nullification, Secession, and the exaggerated theory of State Rights?

The answer is still, slavery. The cause of causes, lying back of the whole wide gulf of difference in Northern and Southern politics is still, slavery. From the date of our Constitution, opinion has divided into two great currents, North and South, in behalf of paramount allegiance to the General Government at the North, and paramount allegiance to the several State Governments at the South. The resolutions of '98 and '99 began the public expression of a political heresy, which has gone on augmenting at the South from that day to this. At the North, the Government of the United States was never feared as likely to become injurious in any sense to the inhabitants of the States. Each State fell quietly and harmoniously into its true subordinate orbit, acknowledging gladly and without question the supremacy of the new Government, representative of the whole of the people, in simple accord with the spirit and intention of the Constitution and the Government which the people had formed. At the South, on the contrary, the United States Government was, from the first, looked upon with a suspicion plainly expressed in the speech, for example, of Patrick Henry, in the Virginia convention, which consented reluctantly that the State should come into the Union, lest the National Government might, in some unforeseen contingency, interfere with the interests of the institution of slavery. That fear, the determination to have it otherwise, to make the General Government, on the contrary, the engine and supporter of slavery, the propagandist of slavery, in fine; has been always, since, the animating spirit of Southern political doctrine. A doctrine so inaugurated and developed has endeavored to engraft itself by partisan alliance upon the Democratic party of the North, but always hitherto with an imperfect success. State Rights, as affirmed at the North, has never been a dogma of any considerable power, because it has rested on no substratum of suspicion against the General Government, nor of conspiracy to employ its enginery for special or local designs. At the South it has been vital and significant from the first, and it has grown more mischievous to the last. President Lincoln, in his first message, discussed, ably enough, the right of secession as a mere constitutional or legal right. Others have done the same before and since. The opinion of the lawyer is all very well, but it has no special potency to restrain the nocturnal activities of the burglar. All such discussions are, for the present behalf, utterly puerile. Secession, revolution, the bloody destruction and extinction of the whole nation, were for years before the war foregone determinations in the Southern mind, to be resorted to at any instant at which such extreme measures might become necessary; not merely to prevent any interference with the holy institution; but equally to secure that absolute predominance of the slaveholding interest over the whole political concerns of the country which should protect it from interference, and give to it all the expansion and potency which it might see fit to claim. So long as that absolute domination could be maintained within the administration of the Government, slavery and slaveholders were content to remain nominally republican and democratic--actually despots and unlimited rulers. But a contingency threatened them in the future. The numerical growth of population at the North, the moral convictions of the North--both of these united, or some other unforeseen circumstance, might withdraw the operations of the General Government from their exclusive control. To provide for that possible contingency, the doctrine of paramount allegiance to the individual States, and secondary allegiance merely to the General Government--a perpetual indoctrination of incipient treason--was invented, and has been sedulously taught at the South from the very inception of the Government. Hardly a child in attendance upon his lessons in an 'old-field' schoolhouse throughout that region but has been imbued with this primary devotion to the interests of his State; certainly, not a young lawyer commencing to acquire his profession, and riding the circuit from county court-house to court-house, but has had the doctrine drummed into his ears, of allegiance to his State; and when the meaning and importance of that teaching was inquired for, he was impressively and confidentially informed that the occasion might arise of collision between the South and the General Government on the subject of slavery; and that then it would be of the last importance that every Southern man should be true to his section. Thus the way has been prepared through three generations of instruction, for the precise event which is now upon us, flaunting its pretensions as a new and accidental occurrence.

Meantime, the North has suspected nothing of all this. Her own devotion and loyalty to the General Government have been constantly on the increase, and she has taken it for granted that the same sentiments prevailed throughout the South. Hence the utter surprise felt at the enormous dimensions which the revolt so suddenly took on, and at the unaccountable defection of such numbers of Southern men from the army and the navy at the first call upon sectional loyalty. The question is not one of legal or constitutional rights in accordance with the literal understanding of any parchment or document whatsoever. The most triumphant arguments of President Lincoln or of anybody else have had in the past, and have now, no actual relevancy to the question at the South, and might as well be totally spared. It is purely and simply that the South are in dead earnest to have their own way, unchecked by any considerations of justice or right, or any other considerations of any kind whatsoever--less than the positive demonstration of their physical inability to accomplish their most cherished designs. Even in a technical way, the question is not most intelligibly stated as one of the right of secession; it is the bald question of Paramount Allegiance; it is so understood at the South. The whole action of the South is based upon a thorough indoctrination into a political dogma never so much as fairly conceived of at the North as existing anywhere, until events now developing themselves have revealed it, and which is not now even well understood among us. Back of this indoctrination again, and the sole cause of it, is the existence of the institution of slavery; its own instinct from the first that it had no other ground of defence or hope of perpetuation but physical force; its fears of invasion and its obstinate determination to invade.

The supposition has, until quite recently, extensively prevailed in the Northern mind that slavery is or was regarded at the South as a necessary evil, borne because it was inherited from the past and because its removal had become now next to impossible. A certain school of Northern philanthropists, headed, we believe, by Elihu Burritt, had gone so far, previous to the war, as to form a society and appeal to the Northern people for aid to enable their Southern brethren, through such aid, and finally, perhaps, through the interposition of the General Government, to rid themselves of this monster evil. This handful of kindly individuals must soon have discovered, had they come into actual contact with the prevailing sentiment of the South, that their whole movement was based upon a misapprehension of that sentiment. Thirty-five years ago, and before the Northern abolition movement had taken root in the land, it was a pleasant fiction for the Southern mind to speak deprecatingly of the blame which they otherwise might seem to incur in the mind of mankind for adhering to their barbarous institution; to plead their own conviction of its entire wrongfulness, and to commiserate themselves for their utter inability to free themselves from its weight. A certain considerable freedom of discussion in relation to its abstract merits was allowed, with the tacit condition imposed, however, just as really though not as consciously as now, that slavery itself must not be disturbed. Talk which had in it any touch of genuine feeling in favor of active exertion to rid the country of the institution as an evil, was then as effectually tabooed as it is to-day, with some minor exceptions on the borders of the slaveholding region, in Baltimore, North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, etc., and with the further exception when Virginia was terrified for a few weeks or months by the results of a desperate insurrection. On the strength of these few exceptions, it has been claimed at the South, and still more persistently by Southern sympathizers at the North, that the whole drift and tendency of things at the South prior to the commencement of the abolition agitation at the North were toward gradual emancipation, and that they would have ultimated at an early day in that result. This, too, is a pleasant fiction with the least possible percentage of truth at the bottom of it.

The institution of slavery, under the stimulus given to it by the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney, and the consequent development of the cotton-growing industry--aided, curiously enough, in a certain sense, by the prohibition of the African slave trade, giving rise to the slave-rearing business in Virginia and Maryland--has all along been exhibiting a steady, sturdy, and rapid growth. By the alliance, accidentally as it were, resulting from the prohibition of the slave trade, between the Southern and the Northern slaveholding States, a robustness and consistency were given to the whole slaveholding interest which possibly it might never have had under a different policy. If the foreign importation of slaves had continued, that species of population would gradually have overrun the cotton-raising border of States--would have overrun them to an extent threatening the safety of the institution there by its own plethora--while from the southern line of North Carolina and Tennessee northward, where this extra-profitable industry could not readily be extended, the temptation to the importation of slaves would have been slight, no market existing for the home increase. The hold of the institution would have been constantly weakened there in the affections of the white population; and, in those States, there is a seeming probability that white labor and free labor would have taken the place of the present system, as it did in the States farther north. This would have deprived the Southern belt of cotton-raising and negro-holding States of that sympathy which, under existing circumstances, they have steadily had from their more northern sisters, and favored an early extinction of the system. However this might have been, as things are and have been actually, it is certain that at no period has the growth of the slaveholding institution exhibited any weakness or defect of vitality. Like an infant giant, it has steadily waxed stronger and stronger, and more and more arrogant and aggressive.

When the anti-slavery agitation commenced at the North, the parties who engaged in it had no consciousness of the immense magnitude and potent vitality of the institution against which they proposed to carry on a moral warfare. They supposed that, as a matter of course, they would find a universal sympathy throughout the North with doctrines in behalf of freedom, where freedom was the basis of all our institutions, and where, apparently, there was no alliance of interest, no possible reason for a sympathy with slavery or the denial of freedom to man. They were met unexpectedly by a powerful current of semi-slaveholding opinion pervading the whole area of the Free States, and ready to deny to them free speech or the rightfulness of any effort to arouse the people to a consideration of the subject. When, after some years of contest, this current of prejudgment was partially reversed, and their new thought began to find audience by the Northern ear; when, strengthened by numbers and the better comprehension of the subject by themselves; the increased determination and enthusiasm which arose from the _esprit du corps_; and the assurance--satisfactory to themselves at least--that they were engaged in a good cause; they began to grapple more directly with intensified and genuine pro-slavery sentiment at the South itself, they were astonished to find that, instead of battling with a weak thing, they had engaged in moral strife with one of the most mighty institutions of the earth.

Pro-slavery sentiment at the South, inherently arrogant and aggressive, as already said, was, at the same time and from the same causes, aroused to the consciousness of its own strength. Called on to answer for the unseemly fact of its existence in the midst of these modern centuries, when the world boasts of human freedom and progression, it began by blushing for its hideous aspect and uttering feeble and deprecative apologies. Not that it was at bottom ashamed of its existence, for slavery, like despotism of all sorts, is characteristically self-confident and proud; but because it had been allowed to grow up under protest in the midst of free institutions, and among a people conscious of the incongruity of the relationship existing between them and it; and had so contracted the habit of apology, and the hypocritical profession of regret for its own inherent wrongfulness. Provoked, however, to try its strength against the feeble assaults of the new friends of freedom, finding all its demands readily yielded to, and itself victorious in every conflict, it soon threw off its false professions of modesty, pronounced itself free from every taint of wrong-doing, claimed to be the very corner stone and basis of free institutions themselves, the condition _sine qua non_ of all successful experiment in republican and democratic organizations, and became boldly and openly the assailant and propagandist, instead of occupying any longer the position of defence. Then followed the various attempts to overthrow and extinguish free speech in the capital of the nation by the use of the bludgeon, to extend slavery by illegal and bloodthirsty means over the soil of Kansas, to strengthen the enactments of the fugitive slave law by new and more offensive provisions, and to cause the authority of the Slave Power to be openly and confessedly recognized throughout the whole land, as it had been for years secretly and warily predominant. The opposition to these measures of aggression ceased to be wholly confined to the mere handful of technical abolitionists, and to spread and to take possession of the minds of the whole people, exciting surprise and alarm, and arousing them to some slight efforts at resistance. With this rising tendency to resist arose in like measure the tendency of the slaveholding power to invade. The alternative was quietly but resolutely chosen in the minds of the leading politicians of the South to 'rule or ruin.' Preparation was made for retaining the absolute control of the General Government at Washington, and for extending the influence of the peculiar institution over the whole North and all adjacent countries, so long as that policy should prove practicable; and, if by any contingency defeated in it, to break up the Union as it existed, and reconstruct it upon terms which should place the slaveholding aristocracy in that front rank of authority without question, to which, as a settled conviction, ever present and dominant in their minds, they alone, of all men, are preëminently entitled.

Accordingly they imposed their weight more and more heavily upon the successive administrations from Van Buren down to Buchanan, and were encouraged to find that, in proportion as they pressed harder in their demands, proportionate concessions seldom failed to be made. The reaction at the North was nevertheless steadily progressing. Wisely perceiving that the first part of their _programme_ of action had nearly served its day; that preparation must be made for entering on the second and more desperate part of their conspiracy against free government; they forced on the crisis at the Democratic Convention in Charleston, by demanding terms which, with the fire in the rear now regularly organized and steadily operative at the North, that party could not accede to, without consenting to its own death. A disruption ensued of the unnatural alliance between the Southern oligarchy and the Northern Democracy, and the Southern leaders from that hour availed themselves of their sole remaining lease of power under the administration of Mr. Buchanan to strengthen their position by all means, honorable and dishonorable, for the coming conflict, which by them had been long planned or at least looked forward to, as the probable contingency. Having virtually the entire control of the General Government, they used their power for sending South the arms of the common country, for disposing the army and navy in such ways as to leave them in the least degree effective for opposing their designs; and with all the quietness and deliberation of a dying millionaire making his will, they prepared to begin the conflict which the lazy and confiding North had not even begun to suspect as among the possibilities of the future; and to begin it absolutely upon their own terms.

Enough has now been said, perhaps, in relation to the causes of the present war. The present stage of its development is such as might have been fairly anticipated from such a commencement. The South has had the advantage of earnestness and concentration of purpose; of a warlike and aggressive spirit; of prior preparation, and of a full knowledge from the first of the desperate nature of the enterprise upon which they were about to enter, with a readiness to meet all its contingencies, and, since the great uprising, with no anticipation of easy work. The North was hurried into a war for which it had no preparation, to which it had never looked as a serious probability, and for which it had been stripped in a great measure, through the pilfering policy of the South, of the ordinary means at its command. A peaceable and highly civilized people, among whom actual war upon its own soil had been unknown for nearly fifty years, and among whom the spirit of war, always so rife at the South, was opposed and neutralized by a thousand industrial and peaceful propensities, was suddenly called into the field. Uninstructed at first in the real nature of the conflict, regarding it as an unreasonable disaffection, and therefore necessarily limited in extent, not aroused even yet to a full consciousness of the momentous consequences involved in the struggle and its gigantic proportions, they have come to the work, in a great measure, unprepared. Their condition at its commencement was even less favorable than that of the British nation at the commencement of the Russian war. Both of these great industrial peoples, with whom war had fallen among the traditions of the past, had to begin new struggles by learning anew the theory and practice of war. The Northern people rose, after the assault on Fort Sumter demonstrated to them that the South was in earnest, with the unanimity and power as of a single man, but bewildered and uncertain which way to turn, or how to grapple with the strange and unaccountable monster of rebellion which had suddenly precipitated himself among them. The whole habits of the nation had to undergo a violent and rapid change. A new educational experience had to be hurried through its successive courses of instruction. The gristle on the bone of the new military organization had to have time to harden. Sharp experiences had to be undergone, and will still have to be endured, as part of the price of tuition in the novel career to which we have been so unexpectedly called. Still, we have great power in reserve; no feeling of discouragement, no thought of abandoning the purpose of maintaining our integrity as a people, no sense of weakness possesses our minds. Great and triumphant successes are attending our arms. State after State, swept at first wholly or in part into the vortex of revolt, is again included within our military lines and brought back to a partial allegiance. New questions are rising into importance. We pass from the consideration of causes to that of results. It is a different and a difficult work to forecast the future. It is a perilous experiment to enact the prophet or seer, but in another paper we shall venture at least upon some suggestions which may have their uses in modulating that national destiny which none of us have the power actually to create or even to foretell.

WAS HE SUCCESSFUL?

'Do but grasp into the thick of human life! Every one _lives_ it--to not many is it _known_; and seize it where you will, it is interesting.'--GOETHE.

'SUCCESSFUL.--Terminating in accomplishing what is wished or intended.'--WEBSTER'S _Dictionary_.