The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862

The people of the Southern States were wholly unwilling to accept the condition to which the legitimate workings of the Constitution had fairly brought them. Being a minority in numbers and in representative weight, they rose up in rebellion against this unalterable fact. They foresaw it, and, by every possible device, resisted it before it came. When it arrived, they resisted still more madly, even to the extent of self-destruction. The minority was arrayed not merely against the majority, but also against the necessary results of our institutions and against the decrees of nature: that is to say, against the law of man, and against the law of God. The majority was expected to give way, and to permit the engine of national progress to be reversed, our eighty years of glorious history to be undone, and humanity itself to be turned back upon the dreary path of its earliest and saddest struggles. This refused, the alternative was the destruction of the Government.

It was wholly impossible for the majority to make any satisfactory concessions to a minority infatuated with such ideas. Compromise was impracticable, so long as the rebellious States made the perpetuity of slavery and the predominance of its power an indispensable condition of any arrangement. Their demands were forever inadmissible so long as they remained in the Union; and to permit them to effect their purposes as an independent confederacy, was equally out of the question. There is no longer any division of sentiment on this point, whatever doubts may have been expressed in the beginning. Separation of the States would be disastrous and fatal to all the fragmentary governments which would take the place of this majestic Union. The nation instinctively feels that its unity is its salvation—that disunion will be destructive of all its long-cherished and glorious hopes. Its permanent peace, its prosperity and progress, its greatness, its honor, and its influence among civilized nations—all depend on its unity. These, which are the glory of our country to every patriotic heart, were the stumbling blocks to the conspirators. Slavery was ambitious and discontented with its appointed lot; it was determined; it rushed headlong to its fatal purpose. The nation stood in its path, and would not, could not get out of the way. This is the central fact of the whole controversy. National unity is on the one side—the disintegration and anarchy which slavery demands, are on the other. These are the contending forces; they are engaged in mortal combat, and one or the other must be utterly overthrown and destroyed. Slavery must succumb and consent to disappear, or the Union of our fathers must go down in the dust, never again to rise.

Can the enemies of the United States, at home or abroad, suppose that these vital questions can ever he yielded? That the nation can voluntarily abdicate its authority, confess the failure of its work for three quarters of a century; permit all the purposes of its creation to be utterly thwarted, and tamely and basely surrender all those hopes of a glorious destiny, which we have ever been taught to cherish as the goal of our unexampled freedom? The Southern people have been the sport of many delusions and infatuations; but the belief of these incredible and impossible suppositions, is the crowning folly of them all. These restless and daring men occupied the fairest region of the globe, with a virtual monopoly of the cotton culture. The unexampled increase of the cotton trade and manufacture, if it had not filled their coffers with unbounded wealth, had at least given them lavish returns for the labor of their slaves and enabled them to live in unlimited profusion. That under such a system they should have little provident care, but should indulge unbounded confidence in the future, was natural enough, for they conceived their prosperity, which cost them so little labor or anxiety, to be in its nature permanent. When, therefore, they saw gradually approaching the certain downfall of their power, they could not understand that this was the result of natural causes, but attributed it to the malignant enmity of the Government. A social organization, so agreeable, so full of pleasures and advantages, conferring not only ease and luxury, but also station and authority, must necessarily be right in itself, and worthy of every effort and every sacrifice to perpetuate it. What was the Government of the United States, that it should presume to erect itself as an obstacle to the progress of this rich and powerful organization? Was not the whole fabric of human industry dependent on it, and would not foreign nations be compelled by the very helplessness of their starving people to sustain and defend it? Why should there be anything sacred in the institutions of the country, when they evidently tended, by their spirit and operation, to overthrow the power of slavery? Washington was weak, with all his goodness; Jefferson was a demagogue; Madison had not forecast enough to see the necessary results of his political combinations. We have grown wiser; then let us sweep away the obstacles which were placed in our path by the weakness and folly of our deluded forefathers. Let us prostrate the clumsy fabric which they constructed, since the Yankees have taken possession of it, and are working it for the benefit of Irish and German immigrants and their descendants, and not for that of African traders and negro masters. By some terrible fatality, it was the misfortune of the Southern leaders to believe these delusions. They have gone so far as to act upon them, and have seduced their people into fatal coöperation; and these are now reaping the bloody fruits of an error so profound and awful.

The rebellious States not only thought it practicable to overthrow the National Government; they, doubtless, also held that result necessary to their safety and success. This followed as a logical conclusion from their established dogma that the slavery of the laboring class is the only firm foundation of social order. They convinced themselves that white men could not perform the labor necessary on cotton and sugar plantations. The negro alone was capable of standing the fierce rays of the Southern sun, and of successfully resisting the deadly malaria which prevails in that region. The Southern people firmly believed this doctrine, although their very eyes, in all parts of their territory, except perhaps in the rice fields of South Carolina and Georgia, thousands of white men were and are daily occupied in this very work. So remarkable a delusion, contradicted by their own daily experience, is by no means uncommon under similar circumstances. When the passions of men are aroused and their interests, real or imaginary, involved, they seldom comprehend the true significance, nor do they stop to estimate deliberately the actual conditions, of what is going on around them. Much less do they understand the character and tendency of great social movements, in which they themselves are actively engaged. The strongest intellects, in such circumstances, do not often escape the prevailing prejudices and delusions. A sort of common moral atmosphere pervades the whole society; opinions become homogeneous; and even the worst abuses, sanctioned by time and by universal custom, lose all their enormity, and command the support and approval even of good men. Palpable errors of fact, and, indeed, every available sophistry in argument, have been adopted by the Southern men to sustain the system of slavery.

The deluded victims of these false ideas could not conceive a different organization of labor as possible for them. It was perhaps even natural for them to consider the opposite system in the Northern States, as hostile to their interests and dangerous to their peculiar property in labor. Nor were they in fact mistaken: not that the Northern social system need have interfered violently to overthrow their institutions; but there was an instinctive feeling that the two could not exist together and flourish in the same community. It was obscurely felt that one must give way before the other, whether peacefully or violently, and it was impossible to doubt which of the two was destined to succumb, under the gradual but inevitable operation of our established political forms and principles. Under the dominion of excited and unreasoning prejudices, the Southern mind could see no distinction between the necessary and irresistible operation of principles and the intentional hostility of their hated rivals. Thus, with a fixed conviction of the inevitable end of their system under the Constitution, it was vainly expected to avoid that unwelcome fate, by destroying the Government of the United States, which had been deliberately created by its founders with a view to the ultimate extinction of slavery.

But, alas! this expedient has proved to be a fatal error—none more fatal has ever misled and ruined a prosperous and gallant people. Instead of overthrowing the Government—a consummation never to be admitted or even thought of, with any toleration, for a single moment—they will only bring the cherished object of their bloody sacrifices to a sudden and disastrous end. Slavery never could have had—never ought to have had any better security than was afforded by the Constitution of this country, administered fairly, as it always has been, if not with evident partiality, toward this exacting interest. Take away from it the support of the Constitution, and, under any circumstances, it would most assuredly fall. But the Government assaulted, in the interest of slavery, for the increase and perpetuity of slavery—that presents an emergency which admits of no hesitation, and in which those who have been most tolerant toward the system, and most ready to yield its unreasonable exactions to save the Government, will be the first to strike it down for the same end. The nation must survive; its enemies must succumb or perish.

Can any one deny that the Federal Government was compelled to take up the gage of battle which the rebels had so vauntingly thrown down? Not merely the interests of civil authority and order, but the preponderance of freedom, and the claims of humanity on this continent, required the most determined resistance to be made, and forbade the possibility of quietly surrendering the destinies of the nation into the hands of the traitors who sought to destroy it, What a spectacle of imbecility and miserable failure in the hour of great peril would have been presented to the indignant world, if, in this great crisis, the national authorities had been so far beneath the occasion as to have declined the proffered contest and basely betrayed their trust, at the first demand of the seceding States! The everlasting scorn of mankind would have overwhelmed and blasted the dastard and degenerate race, who would thus have sacrificed the highest and most sacred interests of humanity. Rather than this, welcome the civil war, with all its sacrifices! Welcome privations, labors, taxes, wounds, death, and all the nameless horrors that swarm along the red path of civil strife! Thousands of precious lives and billions of treasure have already been expended, and yet no patriotic heart thinks of turning back from the battle field, until the Union established by our fathers shall be restored to its integrity.

Compelled to admit the conclusions already stated, let us not do injustice even to the men who are prominent in this iniquitous rebellion. The most difficult of all moral problems is to determine how far individual agency can control social or political events, and what degree of responsibility attaches to those who have been apparently influential in producing disastrous results. An impartial study of history will serve to establish the truth that prominent men who, in any age, may seem to have produced great changes by their individual will, were merely the instruments of society by which irresistible tendencies were carried out to their necessary ends. The very conceptions of such men are the offspring of their times, and in order that they should have power to accomplish their designs, the great social forces of the community must be at their disposal, ready and inclined to perform the work. A great rock or a mighty glacier may be so balanced at the mountain top, that a small force—the sound of a trumpet, a mere breath of air—may dislodge it, and cause it to descend, carrying destruction into the valley. But the force of gravitation is necessary to bring it down and give it the impetus of ruin. So the might of a great people may be poised on some lofty pinnacle of human destiny; but unless there he involved in the existing sentiments and convictions, the situation and surroundings of that people, the elements of force and action, for good or evil, no individual agency and no combination of men can impart the power which they lack. All that was required among the Southern people, for the initiation of this gigantic rebellion, was some universal animating idea, capable of binding them together in unanimous accord, imparting the necessary force and velocity in the direction of treason, when started and impelled by the efforts of their leading men. Slavery was just such a principle; it was the gravitating power which hurled them down the precipice, and gave the tremendous impetus of ruin which they have exerted in their awful descent. But, in truth, this mischievous power has been accumulating ever since the Government was founded. It grew out of the antecedents of existing society; and the present generation is not wholly responsible for it. The misfortunes of our fathers, their omissions and errors as well as ours, have left this fatal legacy to descend into our hands. We may not have dealt with it wisely, but assuredly the framers of the Constitution did not intend slavery to be perpetual, nor did they provide for it the power to overthrow the Government.

ON GUARD

 
In the black terror-night,
On yon mist-shrouded hill,
Slowly, with footstep light,
Stealthy, and grim, and still,
Like ghost in winding sheet
Risen at midnight bell,
Over his lonely beat
Marches the sentinel!
 
 
In storm-defying cloak—
Hand on his trusty gun—
Heart, like a heart of oak—
Eye, never-setting sun;
Speaks but the challenge-shout,
All foes without the line,
Heeds but, to solve the doubt,
Watchword and countersign.
 
 
Camp-ward, the watchfires gleam
Beacon-like in the gloom;
Round them his comrades dream
Pictures of youth and home.
While in his heart the bright
Hope-fires shine everywhere,
In love's enchanting light
Memory lies dreaming there.
 
 
Faint, through the silence come
From the foes' grim array,
Growl of impatient dram
Eager for morrow's fray;
Echo of song and shout,
Curse and carousal glee,
As in a fiendish rout
Demons at revelry.
 
 
Close, in the gloomy shade—
Danger lurks ever nigh—
Grasping his dagger-blade
Crouches th' assassin spy;
Shrinks at the guardman's tread,
Quails 'fore his gleaming eyes,
Creeps back with baffled hate,
Cursing his cowardice.
 
 
Naught can beguile his bold
Unsleeping vigilance;
E'en in the fireflame, old
Visions unheeded dance.
Fearless of lurking spy,
Scornful of wassail-swell,
With an undaunted eye
Marches the sentinel.
 
 
Low, to his trusty gun
Eagerly whispers he,
'Wait, with the morning sun
March we to victory.
Fools, into Satan's clutch
Leaping ere dawn of day:
He who would fight must watch,
He who would win must pray.'
 
 
Pray! for the night hath wings;
Watch! for the foe is near;
March! till the morning brings
Fame-wreath or soldier's bier.
So shall the poet write,
When all hath ended well,
'Thus through the nation's night
Marched Freedom's sentinel.'
 

RAILWAY PHOTOGRAPHS

On a fair, sunny morning in July, 1862, I started from—no matter where; and taking my seat in a comfortable rail car, turned my face toward the borders of Vermont.

As the road, for the greater part of the way was an up-grade, and as there is on that particular route a way station about every two miles, at each of which the cars unduly stop, our progress was rather slow, and I had ample time to observe alike the wild and rugged scenery through which we were passing, and the countenances and actions of my fellow passengers.

For a time the picturesque character of country engaged my attention; but getting tired, at last, of the endless succession of green mountains, clothed to their summits with dark pine and hemlock; of rocky, tortuous streams, their channels run almost dry by the excessive drought; of stony fields, dotted with sheep or sprinkled with diminutive hay cocks, or coaxed by patient cultivation into bearing a few hills of stunted Indian corn, I began to find the interior of the car a much more interesting field of observation. And it is wonderful how many different aspects of human nature one can see in the course of a day's journey in a railroad car.

The first person who attracted my notice, was a young man sitting opposite to me. His appearance was prepossessing, not so much from beauty of form or feature, as from the pleasant expression of his fair, open face, adorned with side whiskers of a reddish hue, of the mutton-chop genus and pendent species. He looked like an Englishman or Anglicized Scotchman; but from some words he let drop, I am inclined to believe he was a Western man. Be that as it may, he was evidently a tourist, travelling for pleasure through a country that was new to him, and desirous of gaining all the information he could concerning it.

On the hooks above him, hung a heavy blanket shawl, an umbrella, and a little basket. In his hand he held one of Appleton's Railway Guides,' to which he made constant reference, reading from it the names of the places through which we passed, in tones so loud and distinct, that most of his fellow passengers participated in the information. On the seat beside him lay a large book in red binding, which proved to be another guide book, and to which he referred when the smaller one failed him. Immediately behind him sat a saturnine-looking gentleman (also provided with a railway guide), with whom he frequently conversed, addressing him as 'John,' and who seemed to be his travelling companion.

It was impossible not to feel interested in the movements of the tourist. To gentlemanly manners and an air of refinement, there was added a certain boyish simplicity that was quite refreshing to contemplate. He seemed to fraternize with everybody, conversing freely, first with one passenger, then with another; and apparently imparting to all a portion of the genial good humor with which his nature was flooded.

I was amused with a colloquy that took place, in regard to a field of ripening grain, near which the train had stopped.

'Is that a field of wheat?' asked 'John' of his friend.

'Well, really,' said the tourist, ingenuously, 'I don't know the difference between wheat and rye.' Then bending toward the person who sat in front of him, he said, in an earnest manner, 'Pray, sir, can you tell me whether that field is wheat or rye?'

The other glanced at the field rather dubiously, I thought; but answered promptly:

'That's wheat, sir.'

It was rye, nevertheless.

I observed that the tourist had, by affability, completely won the heart of the conductor. Whenever that official was at liberty—which, by the way, was only for a few minutes at a time, in of the numerous stopping places—he would sit down until the scream of the whistle summoned him again to his duty, when he would hurry through his task, again to his favorite seat.

The gentleman was much struck with the large quantities of wild raspberries, that clothed the fences on either side of the track. 'There were no raspberries,' he said, 'where he came from. At the very next station I saw the conductor go out (although it was now raining), break off a branch, loaded with ripe fruit, from a raspberry bush, and returning to the car, smilingly present it to his friend. The gentleman thanked him warmly; but instead of selfishly devouring the fruit himself, generously shared it with all within reach of his arm, with a diffusive benevolence that put me in mind of the free-hearted Irishman, who, as he gave his friend the half of his potato, said: 'You're welcome to it, if 'twere twice as little.'

At another place the tourist himself got out, and returned with a handful of wayside flowers. Selecting from them a fine, blooming clover head, and a little weed of the bulrush family, he placed them between the leaves of his guide book, saying to his neighbor, as he did so:

'I like to preserve such little mementoes of the places I visit. Once, when travelling at the South, I gathered a cotton bud; and would you believe it, in the course of three months it expanded to a perfect flower, and actually ripened its seeds?'

'Why, then,' said the other, laughingly, 'we need be at no loss for cotton, if it can be cultivated as easily as that.'

In striking contrast to this passenger, was another, who sat a few seats in front of him. His appearance was not prepossessing, on the contrary, 'quite the reverse.' He was a coarse, heavy-looking, thick-set, dirty, Irish soldier, redolent of whiskey and tobacco. His looks inspired me with profound disgust and dislike, which were not at all lessened when I saw him take from the hands of a comrade a black bottle, and applying it to his lips, solace himself with a 'dhrop of the cratur.'

But I found, ere long, that there was a heart beneath that dirty uniform, a soft kernel inside of the rude, unpromising husk. His family were on the car; and as he sat in a lounging attitude, conversing with his comrade (they had both been discharged, I heard them say, from the '6th New York'), a little girl came staggering along the passage way, holding herself up by the seats on either side. As she neared him, she sprang to him, and placed herself between his knees; and the coarse, weather-beaten face beamed down upon her with such a smile—so full of warm, tender, earnest affection, that I felt rebuked for my previous poor opinion of that man.

Nor was this all. At C–, the little girl, accompanied by her mother and several brothers and sisters, got out; while the soldier himself, having seen them all safely deposited on the station platform, and treated them to a hearty smack all round, returned to the car, and resumed his seat. As the train began to move, he started up, thrust his head out of the window, and greeted the group on the platform with another of those bright, loving smiles, that made my heart warm to the rough, sun-burnt soldier, in spite of tobacco, and whiskey, and dirt.

About noon we reached the pretty village of Rutland, Vt.; and there the stentorian voice of the conductor rang out:

'Passengers for Boston, change cars!'

I hastened to obey the mandate; and the last I saw of the genial-hearted tourist (who was going to Montreal), he was shaking hands with his friend the conductor, whose 'beat' extended no further; and bidding him a warm and hearty 'good-by.'

In the car in which I now found myself, no talkative tourist or companionable conductor enlivened the way; a much more 'still-life' order of things prevailed. But here, too, I soon found objects of interest.

Near me sat a young officer in undress uniform, with a cicatrized bullet wound in his cheek. He had doubtless been home on 'sick leave,' and, though now quite restored to health, was apparently in no hurry to go back. Far from it. Very different thoughts, I fancy, occupied his mind than cutting rebel throats, or acquiring distinction in the 'imminent deadly breach.' There was a lady by his side, with whom, judging by appearances, his relations were of an extremely tender character. They were either newly married, or about soon to 'undergo the operation.' I incline to the latter belief; for in reply to a remark from the lady that they would be late in arriving at their destination, I overheard the gentleman smilingly say:

'Well, at all events, nothing can be done until we get there.'

And here, in passing, I would respectfully suggest to all couples in the peculiarly interesting position of my young fellow travellers, that a railroad car is not the most suitable place in the world, in which to lavish endearments on each other. However delightful the 'exercise' may be to them, truth compels me to say that it is, to cool, uninterested, dispassionate lookers-on, decidedly nauseating.

At the time of which I am writing, the War order, recalling all stragglers, had not been promulgated; and no one, in travelling, could fail to be struck with the predominance of the military element among the population. It was unpleasant to observe, at every railroad station, at every wayside grocery store, groups of idle, lounging soldiers, smoking and gossiping, and having, apparently, no earthly object except to kill time; and to know that these men, wearing their country's uniform, and drawing their pay from her exhausted exchequer, were lingering at home on various pretexts, and basely and deliberately shirking their duty, while rebellion still reared its horrid front, and the Government required every arm that could be raised in its defence. That energetic document put a stop to all this; but the question here arises, Can the men be in earnest? Can that patriotism be genuine which needs to be driven to the battle field?

Ah! here is one brave fellow, who, though still lame from a recent wound, is hastening back to the scenes where duty calls him. He comes into the cars with his sword in one hand, and his overcoat, neatly strapped, in the other. He looks grave and serious—doubtless he is thinking of home, and of the dear ones he has just left. Doubtless, from that cause springs a singular restlessness, that impels him to get out at every stopping place, and pace backward and forward with unequal steps, till the train starts again. As he passes and repasses me, I try to read his countenance. There is no flinching there—no shrinking from duty in that brave soul. In the expressive language of Scripture, he has 'put his life in his hand,' and is ready to offer it at the shrine of his country. As I mark his firm lip, his thoughtful eye, his look of steadfast determination, there come into my mind those grand soul-stirring lines of Percival:

 
'Oh! it is great for our country to die; when ranks are contending,
Bright is the wreath of our fame; glory awaits us for aye:
Glory, that never is dim, shining on with a light never ending,
Glory, that never shall fade, never, O never, away.'
 

At the first station beyond Rutland, a woman with a baby—there is always a woman with a baby in the cars—got out. In addition to the baby, she had a carpet bag, a band box, a basket, and several paper parcels. How she managed to carry them all, I know not; but as she was stumbling along, thus overloaded, a lady, just entering the car with some others, with a sudden, generous impulse, took the baby in her arms, and, at the risk of losing her own passage, carried it to the door of the waiting-room. Then, without stopping to receive the thanks of the grateful mother, she rejoined her friends, smiling at her own exploit, and all unconscious of the admiration her beautiful action had excited in some of her fellow travellers. At the picturesque village of Bellow's Falls, on the Connecticut river, we entered the 'Old Granite State,' but too far south to see the 'native mountains' in their wildest grandeur and magnificence. One specimen, however, greets us as we leave the village—a huge, perpendicular mass of granite, rising sheer up from the railroad to the height of a thousand feet or more; while the river, a wild receptacle of tumbled rocks and broken falls, stretches along the other side of the track, far beneath us. The labor expended in the construction of this mountain road (the Cheshire Railroad) must have been enormous, and affords a striking proof of the indomitable energy and enterprise of the New England character. The high places have literally been brought low, and the valleys exalted. Not once, but many times, the train rushes through between two perpendicular walls of solid granite, so high that not a glimpse of the sky can be seen from the car windows; while beyond, some hollow chasm or rugged gulley has been bridged over, or filled up with the superabundant masses of stone excavated from the deep cuts.

It gives one a feeling of dizzy exaltation to be whirled, at the rate of thirty or forty miles an hour—for as there is for a good part of the way a descending grade, the velocity is tremendous—along the verge of a mountain, and to see other mountains, with valleys, rivers, villages, and church steeples, spread out beneath you, as if on a map. But gradually the face of the country changes; the mountains become less lofty, the granite formations disappear; here stretches a wide, dismal pond of stagnant water, yellow with water lilies (Nuphar), and there a field that has been burnt over, leaving the scorched and branchless trees standing like a host of hideous spectres, until at last the fertile and highly cultivated fields of Massachusetts smile upon us with a pleasant, cheerful aspect.

But, pleasing as it is to contemplate well-cultivated farms and thriving homesteads, it must be confessed that to the eye of the traveller wild mountain scenery has a far stronger attraction; and insensibly, as the train speeds on through the now level country, veiled in a thin, drizzling, mist-like rain, I find my gaze and my thoughts coming back from the outside world, and resting once more on my co-inmates of the car.

Not far from me sits a beautiful young girl, fair haired and blue eyed, and of a peculiarly interesting and lady-like appearance. She has a look of bright intelligence; and on her lap lies a book, the title of which I can read from here: 'English Literature.' But she is deaf and dumb, as is plainly betokened by the rapid, chirological conversation going on between her and a young man, evidently her brother, who sits beside her. Behind them is seated an elderly lady, who seems to have charge of her, and with whom she occasionally converses in writing.