Chapter 10
Garrison and the Civil War(1)
And behold,
the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains and brake in
pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after
the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the
earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still
small voice. -- I Kings xix:II, 12.
Garrison
is not known as a non-resistant because the world was not ready for
non-resistance, but it was ready for Abolition, and consequently upon his labors
for Abolition his fame at present rests. But to the young agitator of the
thirties one cause must have seemed as hopeless as the other -- or rather they
must both have seemed hopeless to those who lacked his faith. But he went on his
way, full of hope, and sowed his seed faithfully, leaving the harvest to take
care of itself. And he had the rare good fortune to reap one harvest, at any
rate, during his lifetime. He might, like so many other good men, have passed
his life in urging the highest ethics upon a generation too blind to see the
truth; but fortunately he found a particular cause, completely in harmony with
his highest conceptions, and yet ripe for action. Without abating a tittle of
his beliefs, he threw himself heart and soul into the struggle for emancipation.
In
considering that struggle we are brought face to face at once with the anomaly
that the cause fathered by a non-resistant was at last achieved by the greatest
war of history. Does not this dispose of all the claims of the doctrine of
abstention from violence? Was not non-resistance impotent until men who believed
in bloodshed, gun-powder and cold iron came to its assistance? Is not physical
force the true remedy for such evils as slavery after all? I think not. Garrison
had just one thing to accomplish and that was to make slavery intolerable, and
this he succeeded in doing. When it had once become intolerable, it was doomed;
but the method of its abolition was a matter of choice in which he was
overruled. He has been blamed from the standpoint of non-resistance because he
did not continue to protest against the war, and did not dissociate himself more
distinctly from its methods. It has been urged against him that when a young
friend who had obtained a commission in the army came to bid him farewell in
uniform, Garrison slapped him on the back and wished him Godspeed without a word
of disapproval. If there was any inconsistency in this behavior it was certainly
very natural -- very human -- and he must be indeed a very rigid moralist who
would refuse to excuse it. We all remember the story of the lady who, under most
provoking circumstances, thanked a neighbor for swearing for her, and if
Garrison even went so far as to rejoice over the victories of an army committed
to emancipation, it was not a very heinous crime. But his general course during
these difficult days seems to me absolutely consistent and praiseworthy. His
defense, which we have already considered in another chapter, is impregnable. He
was living among people who did not accept his standards of right and wrong. If
they chose to fight over an issue which he thought should be settled peaceably,
he could not but hope that the side of Abolition would triumph.
Was
war the best method of abolishing slavery? Was it a moral method? Was it the
most efficient? As to its morality, the North is practically unanimous; but,
then, so too is the South, and on the other side! This fact ought perhaps to
disturb our confidence. Thousands of men and women who disapprove of most wars
would make an exception of this, the holy war par excellence waged for
the liberation of an enslaved race. But has not the South an equal right to
judge of holiness? It is and was much more religious and orthodox (as those
words are ordinarily used) than the North. The leaders of the Northern hosts,
Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan and the rest, were not "religious"
men, and their connection with churches of any kind was usually of the most
formal description; while Jefferson Davis, Lee and Stonewall Jackson were
pillars of the church. And unprejudiced foreign observers often took the side of
the South, too, of whom Mr. Gladstone was a notable example. Was his sympathy
with the South a mistake? That depends, I think, on the character of the motives
which determined his choice. If it was a kindly feeling for slavery that
influenced him, of course it was a mistake. If it was a lurking fondness for the
lazy, useless life of the Southern aristocracy -- for the life of a class like
his own, whose boast it was that it lived on the labor of others -- then, too,
it was a mistake. But it is possible to take another view of the issue. In the
late fifties and early sixties, the North and South hated each other bitterly. I
was brought up in the midst of that hatred and partook of it; and I remember
suggesting, as a small boy, when Jefferson Davis was captured, that he be taken
through the streets of our cities on exhibition in an iron cage. Our favorite
song devoted him to death by hanging on a sour-apple tree. As for the
Southerners, they could find no words vile enough to describe their fellow
citizens of the North, "Northern scum" being one of the commonest and
most polite.
Here,
then, is the ethical proposition: We have two neighbors living in partnership
and hating each other with a deadly hatred, and one of them desires to separate
peaceably from the other. There was no practical difficulty in the way of making
a division, for the cleavage ran along geographical lines, and any
Master-in-Chancery would have been obliged to report that an actual partition
was perfectly feasible. Given this state of affairs, was it morally justifiable
for the stronger partner to hold the other to his side by force? This is no
Constitutional question, for it rises far above the plane of seals and
parchment. Indeed, nothing obscures moral investigations so much as the dragging
in by the heels of artificial and unnatural considerations. The simple issue
was: Is it right to hold haters together by force? If Mr. Gladstone decided this
question in the negative, I, for one, do not see how he could reasonably have
done otherwise.
What
was the psychological condition of the Northern mind, that the preference should
be given to it? It was filled with hatred, as we have seen; and, where it did
not hate, it was still bent upon having its own way. If we except an
inconsiderable number of Abolitionists, the question of slavery did not affect
the attitude of the North. It was only the South that was preoccupied with
slavery. President Lincoln said, as we have seen, that the war was undertaken
for the sole purpose of preserving the Union, and that he would preserve it,
either free or slave, or part free and part slave. He called out the troops to
maintain the Union, and not to abolish slavery. The slaves were finally freed,
as a war measure, to assist the armies in the field. The war was not designed to
help emancipation, but emancipation to help the war. And what was this
"Union" for which so many lives were sacrificed and in honor of which
so much poetry was written? In the last analysis it was the forcible binding
together of mutual haters, and its idealization was a curious example of
fetish-worship. Apart from sentiment, the practical element in the Union spirit
was the desire to preserve the size of the country; it was devotion to the idea
of bigness, and the belief that bigness is a matter of latitude and longitude --
the same spirit which prevailed in the Mexican and Philippine wars -- in other
words, the spirit of imperialism. It is impossible of course to extract any
moral essence from a mere matter of geographical extension, and it is hardly
necessary to point out that the highest civilizations of the past, those of
Athens and Jerusalem and Florence, were restricted to narrow areas.
If
the morality of the Northern policy in the Civil War was questionable, its
worldly wisdom was even more so. What would have been likely to happen if the
South had been allowed to secede peacefully and with the good wishes of her late
partner? That the Confederacy would have suffered from its new commercial
isolation cannot be doubted; and that the States of the Confederation would have
quarreled is almost equally certain, for hard times make hard tempers. It is
easy to predict, then, that a nation built upon the principle of free secession
would not have remained long intact. It is very clear, too, that slavery could
not have lasted long along the Northern border; for even before the war, with
the fugitive-slave law in full operation, a continual stream of escaping slaves
found its way across the intervening States to Canada. If nothing but an
ordinary boundary line had separated the slave States from free soil, a general
exodus of slaves would have begun, and ere long the border States would of
necessity have ceased to be slave States. With slavery extinct, the reason for
their separation from the North would have ceased, and their commercial
interests would have demanded reunion with the United States, while the kindly
action of the North in permitting them to secede without interference would have
left no hostile feelings in their minds to prevent such a reunion. With the
border States once annexed, a new boundary would have been created along their
Southern frontier, and here again history would repeat itself, until the nation
was again one. I do not think that such an outcome of Secession is fanciful, and
its realization would have been hastened by the growing impatience of the
civilized world with the continuance of chattel-slavery.
Against
this natural evolution of the race-difficulty what have we actually to set?
Slavery was, indeed, abolished; but it is altogether impossible to sum up the
evils which we have entailed upon ourselves by the manner of its abolition.
First of all, we have the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, and all the
grief and suffering consequent upon that loss. It is a common remark that the
wars of Napoleon permanently injured the physique of the French people by
killing off the strongest men. Is it not likely that we have suffered to some
extent in the same way? Then, how much money did the war cost? And how much more
wisely it might have been expended! Furthermore, consider our disgraceful annual
pension bill, which, larger than the cost of any European standing army, is, I
believe, actually increasing, and which seems to have transformed the brave
hosts of the North into an army of mendicants! And into that mendicancy who
shall say how much fraud has entered? Indeed, the moral effects of the war were
its worst effects. Is there a tavern at any cross-roads, North or South, without
its venerable toper whose habits were corrupted by the war? And where one has
survived, how many have died of intemperance of all kinds, and of loathsome
diseases which the war generated, fostered and spread down to this very day? All
the flags with which we decorate their graves on Memorial Day cannot conceal the
truth. I have seen it stated that discharged soldiers founded our army of
tramps, a name which has come into use in my time. Do not think that these are
the imaginations of a fanatic who sees in history only that which he looks for.
In the Century Magazine for November, 1903, is an article on "The Present
Epidemic of Crime," by the Rev. Dr. James M. Buckley, one of the best-known
clergymen in the country. At the very head of the causes of this ''epidemic'' he
places the great war. "Among the influences which have powerfully affected
the primary causes of crime, and are sources of this present epidemic, is the
effect of the Civil War.... The evil done by that war to public and private
morality was almost irremediable. Its effects were seen upon Congress, upon
politics, upon reconstruction, upon business, upon society, and upon the habits
of the people."
One
of the worst results of the Civil War was the resuscitation of the spirit of war
and imperialism. Is it a wonder that children brought up in an atmosphere of
hate and bloodshed should have had the spirit of hate and bloodshed infused into
their hearts? The seed sown then duly bore its crop, and the battle-cry,
"Remember the Maine!" (a vessel which all the world but America
believes to have been destroyed by accident) was the direct offspring of
"The Union Forever!" The Cuban War, waged for the independence of Cuba
(which could have been obtained, according to our Secretary of State and our
Minister to Spain, without a shot), and the Philippine War, waged for the
purpose of depriving a brave people of their freedom, are the legitimate twin
offspring of the Civil War, which in their turn may have their accursed progeny
a generation hence.
The
speculation caused by the interruption of commerce and the derangement of the
currency during our war laid the foundations of the new plutocracy. Money was
needed to pay the enormous expenses of destruction, and the tariff began to
grow, and behind it monopoly ensconced itself. With the new tramp came the new
multi-millionaire, and caste, luxury, pauperism and labor troubles in their
train. It would be possible to write a long and plausible book, tracing the
origin of almost all the pressing evils of the day to the Civil War. Was the
forcing of the issue of the abolition of slavery a few years before its time
worth while at such a cost? Garrison was right. The war was a mistake.
This
brings us to the sad fact that the war did not settle the race question, but
merely aggravated it. Slavery was wrong and should have come to an end, but we
ended it in the wrong way. The real trouble with the South at present is that
the question of slavery was settled over the heads of the inhabitants by a
hostile and hated power. No people could at heart accept such a settlement with
good grace, and it is not to be expected of human nature. We stabbed the South
to the quick, and during all the years of reconstruction turned the dagger round
in the festering wound. The spirit of war and imperialism has never yet properly
settled any question, except the question as to which side is the stronger; and
now, after forty years, we are beginning to learn that the Negro has yet to be
emancipated. If the South had been permitted to secede, slavery would have died
a natural death, the Southerners would have felt that they had consented to its
demise, and they would have accepted the new order with that attitude of
acquiescence which is necessary to the success of any social experiment. We have
still at this late day to learn the ancient lesson of Buddha: "Hatred does
not cease by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love; this is an old
rule."
The
wisest thing that was said by any Northerner at the outbreak of the war was the
saying usually ascribed to Horace Greeley: "Let the erring sisters
go." Mr. Whitelaw Reid has loyally endeavored to defend his former chief
from this ascription, and he declares that Mr. Greeley never used the words. If
Mr. Reid is speaking solely in the interests of historical accuracy, well and
good; but if he is stretching a point to save his friend, he is doing him a
doubtful service, for the final historian of the Civil War will have to record
that these were the words, and the only words, of wisdom. And this was
substantially the advice which Garrison gave.
In
an article in the North American Review I took the position that Mr. Gladstone
was right in sympathizing with the South, and I was much gratified afterwards to
receive a letter from an English ex-official who was close to Mr. Gladstone and
familiar with his opinions, in which letter he assured me that my explanation of
the British statesman's position was correct. His communication ran in part as
follows:
But
what was his real reason for sympathizing with the South? I am quite sure that
it was not sympathy with the Southern "aristocracy" -- which
undoubtedly, however , had a great effect in bringing over the mass of
upper-class opinion to that side. I do not believe it was his father's
slave-owning connection (although that influenced some of his early speeches
during the time he was still a Tory), for he had long since shaken himself free
from those ideas. I firmly believe it was, as he viewed it, his love of liberty,
his hatred and distrust of any policy of keeping any body of men in a political
connection against their will. This he regarded as bad for the community which
included an unwilling element in its midst, because it was an element of
weakness and not of strength; just as a regiment wherein one-fifth of the men
hate their officers or want to desert will not fight as well as a regiment
"at union with itself." He further regarded it as bad for the element
unwillingly included, because, being deprived of liberty, they were apt to
direct all their energies to a struggle to be free, instead of along the natural
lines of free and peaceful development and progress. This was at the root of his
later Eastern policy, of his sympathy with Italy, and of his Irish policy, and
also of his policy of union with the Colonies by the silken ties of sentiment
and the elastic bonds of freedom, rather than by any forced and formal
connection or by any cast-iron scheme of supposed material interests.
Such
were Mr. Gladstone's views, and such also were Garrison's. I do not believe that
the final judgment of posterity will be favorable to the course of the North in
the Civil War, any more than it will be favorable to the policy of coercion in
Ireland. It requires delicate instruments to cure national diseases, and we took
the sledge-hammer as ours. It may be high treason to say so, but I think that
the statesmanship of Gladstone -- and of Garrison -- was sounder than that of
Lincoln. There is a class of critics which denies the importance of Garrison's
services to the country on the ground that all idealists and reformers are mere
empty voices, and that none but economic causes affect the condition of men. The
world, according to these philosophers, crawls upon its belly, and its brain and
heart follow submissively wherever the belly leads. This is known as the
"economic interpretation of history," and is particularly affected by
Marxian socialists, who believe that state socialism is destined to be
established by irresistible economic laws, and that their own idealism and
agitation are altogether fruitless; which does not prevent them, however, from
laboring and sacrificing themselves for the cause, like the typical idealist.
This belief and this behavior is strangely like the Christian doctrine of
predestination, the certain triumph of the church, and the fore-ordained
election of the saints, which has never interfered with the missionary activity
of believers. The disciple of Marx comforts himself with the materialist
equivalent of the statement that all things work together for good, and his
dogmatism is as strict as that of any Presbyterian sect. It is the old issue of
fatalism and free will, the fatalist usually exerting himself to secure his ends
much more strenuously than his adversary.
The
most complete application of this theory of economic causes to the subject of
slavery has been made by an acute socialist thinker, Mr. A. M. Simons, in a
series of articles in the International Socialist Review of Chicago during the
year 1903. According to him the idealism of Garrison and the Abolitionists --
the growing belief in the immorality of slavery and the justice of the demand
for freedom, John Brown and his raid, Uncle Tom's Cabin, the battle songs of the
North -- all these things were phantasmagoria and the people were deceiving
themselves.
The real conflict was ... between the capital that hired free labor and the
capital that owned slave labor.(2)
And
Mr. Simons represents the Northern capitalists in the anticipation of a future
struggle between themselves and their employee, as deliberately determining that
the capitalists of the South should not enjoy the "privilege of an
undisturbed industry." It seems to me that anyone who can believe this can
believe anything that he wishes to. The fact is that slave labor did not compete
with the free labor of the North. The South had a practical monopoly of the
production of cotton, tobacco, rice and sugar, and slavery was chiefly confined
to that production. The relative cheapness or dearness of slave labor had
consequently no appreciable effect on Northern labor; and if it had, it is
absurd to suppose that Northern capital appreciated the fact or brought about
the war for any such reason. It is true that the North desired a protective
tariff for its manufactures, and that the South preferred free trade so that it
might have a world-wide market for its cotton. It is true that North and South
each desired to control the national government. But no war would have been
fought if the South had not seceded; the South would not have seceded unless she
had feared for the future of slavery; and slavery would not have been menaced
except for the agitation of the anti-slavery people of the North with Garrison
at their head.
As a
matter of fact, human idealism enters into all the works of man; and the
philosophy which asserts that poetry and religion spring from economic
conditions and nothing else, is erroneous or at least one-sided. That mind and
body are so intermingled that they react upon each other is undoubtedly true,
and our extreme idealists need to be reminded now and then that the bread and
butter factor must not be forgotten; but to assert that mind is made of bread
and butter is going much too far, and it ignores the commonest experiences of
human consciousness. Man's wish -- man's will -- is a force to be dealt with.
Even ordinary hunger involves wish and will in the choice of food. Is our
present civilization governed partially by the yield of wheat? But wheat itself
is a human creation. The first man who tasted a grain of wild wheat and liked it
and proceeded to sow other similar grains was moved as much by fancy as by
economic necessity. And there is hunger and hunger. There is a hunger and thirst
for knowledge, and a hunger and thirst after righteousness, and many other
hungers and thirsts which must all be reckoned with in the study of evolution.
And man can see the workings of this side of evolution in his own mind. I have
become a vegetarian, for instance, and I am unable to detect any economic reason
for my change of diet. I know many others of whom the same is true. In time the
increase in the number of such vegetarians will produce an appreciable effect
upon the economic condition of mankind, and here clearly will be a change
occasioned in large part by pure idealism. The same is true of socialism, and I
know many leading socialists who, so far from having been impelled to socialism
by economic motives, would be economic losers by its victory. And so with the
temperance movement, the peace movement, the movement for the prevention of
cruelty to animals, and many others. I am conscious and every man is conscious,
of doing things every day against mere economic interests, and I do not refer
exclusively to philanthropy by any means. The millionaire who spends his money
on a trip to Europe instead of saving it overrules his economic interests on
account of his higher desire for novel experiences, and he does the same thing
when he pays for a superfluous ornament on his house. To overlook men's desires
is to overlook life itself, and in the record of the living actions of men the
thought precedes the thing. You cannot have a dinner without thinking it out
beforehand, nor build a house without plans. You might wait till doomsday for
"economic conditions" to roast a potato for you. The will of man must
intervene before the miracle is performed, and sometimes he wills to rise above
his economic conditions and refuses to bend before them. In short, the
"economic interpretation of history" is equivalent to the brick
interpretation of a house (leaving the architect and the owner who ordered it
built out of the question) -- that is, no interpretation at all. Economic
conditions are more often the limitation than the source of evolution. The
exertion of our powers is more or less bounded by our materials, and events
which are not economically possible are not likely to happen; but things are not
yet in the saddle and the socialist movement, with its devoted and
self-forgetful leaders, gives ample proof of it. It is curious to note that our
extreme materialists call themselves "scientific socialists," and our
extreme idealists, who deny the existence of matter, take the name of
"Christian scientists." True "science" lies between these
extremes, and perhaps it is wise to fight shy of those who advertise their
"science" too conspicuously.
In
the history of slavery the element of human will and initiative is particularly
prominent. A sentimental bishop was the first to suggest the importation of
Africans to America in order to relieve the Indians from the labor which their
spirit could not brook. It was a philanthropic business at the start. Indians
would not work, Negroes would. Here again the human factor asserted itself. The
cavalier immigrants of the South did not like to work, the Puritans of the North
did; hence one of the reasons that slavery flourished only below Mason and
Dixon's line. Mr. Simons refers to this fact as "one of those strange
happenings" called "coincidences"! "The interesting point
lies," he goes on to say, "in the fact that in Europe it was just the
cavalier who represented the old feudal organization of society with its servile
system of labor, while the Puritan is the representative of the rapidly rising
bourgeoisie which was to rest upon the status of wage-slavery."
"Strange happening," "coincidence," "interesting
point"! This is certainly most naive. There was no reason why slaves should
not be employed in the North in raising wheat as well as in the South in raising
cotton, except that the Northerners did not want them, and heredity as well as
climate goes to account for the difference. Mr. Simons himself quotes from the
work of an ante-bellum author a reference to German settlers who, "true to
their national instincts, will not employ the labor of a slave." And in
fine, as if to show how little he is convinced by his own arguments, Mr. Simons
says of this same volume (Helper's "Impending Crisis"), "This
book had a most remarkable circulation in the years immediately preceding the
war, and probably if the truth as to the real factors which made public opinion
could be determined, it had far more to do with bringing on the Civil War than
did 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'" -- which involves an admission as to the latter
book as well as to the former. Books and arguments and ideals had their leading
part to play in the abolition of slavery, and the very adversaries of the belief
cannot get away from it. "Public opinion" is and always has been a
determining element in history, and it is swayed by novels and agitators and
poets. Garrison still has his place in history.
Another
class of critic minimizes the work of the Abolitionists upon the ground that
they did more harm than good, and that slavery would have been abolished much
more easily without them. To refute this argument we must appeal to the entire
history of the times, which has been so briefly summarized in these pages. We
cannot read it impartially without being conscious throughout of the constant
presence, behind statesmen and politician, behind orator and editor, of the goad
of the Abolitionist. In the troubled waters of controversy his was ever the
stirring power. He was not a fly on the wheel, but steam in the engine. And we
can call the best of all witnesses in confirmation of this fact. President
Lincoln, a few days before his assassination, when congratulated by Mr.
Chamberlain, afterwards governor of South Carolina, upon having freed the
slaves, answered, "I have been only an instrument. The logic and moral
power of Garrison and the anti-slavery people of the country, and the army, have
done all."
1. A
portion of this chapter appeared originally in the North American Review, and is
reprinted here by consent.
2.
Quoted by Mr. Simons from a former work by Benjamin E. Green.
