The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864

For this material superiority of the free-labor States inevitably inured to the advantage of liberty. In vain did every new Free State, year after year, vote with the Slave Power; in vain did every great railroad and manufacturing corporation of the North obey the political behests of the lords of the plantations; in vain was the mercantile aristocracy of all the great cities the fast friend of the slave aristocracy; and vainly did almost the entire immigrant population fall politically into its control. All this was as nothing against the irresistible natural tendency of free labor. The Irishman who voted against the negro was breaking his chain with every blow of his pick. The Wall-street banker, the great railroad king, the cotton manufacturer, who railed against abolitionism like mad, were condemning the slave aristocracy every day they lived. There is a divine law by which the work of freemen shall root out the work of slaves; and no law enacted by the will of Northern doughfaces could repeal this statute of nature. These Northern friends of the aristocracy supposed themselves to be helping their ambitious allies by their political support. But the slaveholders knew how fallacious was this aid. They saw that the North was gaining a huge superiority to the South; that the people were slowly consolidating; that when the free-labour interest did finally concentrate, it would carry every Northern interest with it, and, when the pinch came, no Northern party or statesman could or would help them do their will. They carefully sifted all offers of aid from such quarters, and having used every Northern interest and institution and party till it was squeezed dry of all its black blood, they turned their backs haughtily on the white sections of the Union, plundered friend and foe alike, and flew into civil war, out of spite and rage at the census of 1860; in other words, declared war against the providence of God as manifested in the progress of free society. They have fought well; at first, perhaps, better than we; but when General Lee 'flanks' the industrial decrees of the Almighty, and Stuart 'cuts the communications' between free labor and imperial power, they will destroy this republic—and not till then.

But was this great material gain of the people to be accompanied by a corresponding spiritual advancement? Was man to become the chief object of reverence in this wonderfully expanding industrial empire? If not, all this progress was deceptive, and nobody could predict how soon our very superiority should be turned to the advantage of that aristocracy which had perverted so many things in the republic.

It could not be denied that the Free States were making wonderful strides, during these forty years, in mental cultivation and power. The free industry of the North was an education to the people, and nowhere has so much popular intelligence been carried into the business of life as here. This period also witnessed the organization of the free school everywhere outside of New England, its home; the daily press, the public lecture, the creation of an American literature, all Northern; the growth of all institutions of learning and means of intellectual and artistic cultivation unparalleled in any other age or land. No well-informed person could also deny the astonishing progress in furnishing the means of religious instruction, the multiplication of churches, great ecclesiastical organizations, and philanthropic leagues. Notwithstanding the apparent absorption of the North in its material prosperity, no people ever was so busy in furnishing itself with the means of spiritual improvement; and though a population of several millions of ignorant and superstitious foreigners was thrown in upon it during these eventful years, it came out at the end the most intelligent people, the best provided with the apparatus of religion, that was ever known.

But there was one element yet wanting to assure the right usage of all this wealth of material, intellectual, and ecclesiastical power. This was what the slaveholding aristocracy saw at once to be the fatal omen for their cause, and nicknamed 'Abolitionism.' Abolitionism, as recognized by the Slave Power, is nothing more nor less than the religious reverence for man and his natural rights. This moral respect for the nature and rights of all men has always encountered the peculiar scorn of aristocracies, and no men have been so bitterly persecuted in history as those who represented the religious opposition to despotism. The Hebrew aristocracy in old Palestine called this sentiment 'atheism' in Jesus Christ, and crucified Him. The pagan aristocracy called it a 'devilish superstition' in the early Christians, and slaughtered them like cattle. The priestly and civil absolutism of the sixteenth century called it 'fanaticism' in the Dutch and German reformers, and fought it eighty years with fire and rack and sword. The church and crown nicknamed it 'Puritanism,' and persecuted it till it turned and cut off the head of Charles the First, and secured religious liberty. The slave aristocracy stigmatized it 'Abolitionism,' and let loose upon it every infernal agency in its power.

One great man, yet alive, but not yet recognized as he will be, was the representative of this religious reverence for the rights of man. Lloyd Garrison has been, for the last twenty-five years, the best-hated man in these Northern States, not because he failed to see just how a Union of Free and Slave States could endure; not because of any visionary theory of political action or the structure of society he cherished; but, strangely enough, because he stood-up for man and his divine right to freedom. This was what the aristocracy hated in him, and this is what, with inexpressible rage, it saw gaining in the North. It truly said that our education, our arts, our literature, our press, our churches, our benevolent organizations, our families, all that was best in Northern society, even our politics, were being consolidated by this 'fanaticism,' Puritanism,' 'Abolitionism'—otherwise, by reverence for man and his right to freedom.

It grew, however, almost as fast as the material power of the North—this moral conviction of the divine right of man to liberty; grew so fast, that in 1860, South Carolina glanced over the November election returns, saw the name of Abraham Lincoln at the head, shrieked, 'The North is abolitionized!' and rushed out of the Union, with ten other Slave States at her heels, while four more were held back by the strong arm of the national power. The North is not yet 'abolitionized,' but every volley fired at liberty by the Slave Power these last three years, has killed a lover of slavery, and made an Abolitionist; as the juggler fires his pistol at your old black hat, and, when the smoke clears up, a white dove flutters in its place. If the Slave Power shoots at us long enough, we shall all become Abolitionists, and all learn to love our fellow man and protect him in the enjoyment of every right given him by God!

Thus had the Free States, the people's part of the Union, gone up steadily to overshadowing material, intellectual, moral power. But up to 1850 this mighty growth had got no fit expression in State or national politics. All the great parties had mildly tried to remonstrate with the slave aristocracy, but quickly recoiled as from the mouth of a furnace. A few attempts had been made to organize a party for freedom, but nothing could gain foothold at Washington. A few noble men had lifted their voices against the rampant tyranny of the slaveholders: chief among these was John Quincy Adams, the John the Baptist crying in the desert of American partisan politics the coming of the kingdom of Heaven! But when the people had come up to a consciousness of their consolidated power, and the reverence for human right was changing and polarizing every Northern institution—in the fierce struggle that ushered in and succeeded the admission of California, between 1848 and 1856—this Northern superiority culminated in a great political movement against slavery. This movement assumed a double form-positive, in the assertion that the Slave Power should be arrested; negative, in the assertion that the people should have their own way with it. The Republican party said: The slave aristocracy shall go no farther. The 'Popular Sovereignty' party, or Douglas Democracy, said: The people shall do what they choose about this matter. Now the people were already the superior power in the republic, and were rapidly growing to hate the Slave Power; so the slaveholders, saw that the Northern Democracy, with their war cry of popular sovereignty, might in time be just as dangerous to them as their more open enemies. They repudiated both forms of Northern politics, and tied the executive, under James Buchanan, and the Supreme Court, under Judge Taney, to their dogma: The right of the aristocracy is supreme. Slavery, not liberty, is the law of the republic.

The great leaders of these Northern parties were Stephen H. Douglas and William H. Seward. Mr. Douglas was the best practical politician, popular debater, and magnetizer of the masses, the North has yet produced. He was the representative of the blind power of the North, and stood up all his life, in his better hours, for the right of the people to make the republic what they would. But the representative statesman of the era is the Secretary of State. The whole career of Mr. Seward is so interwoven with the history of the political consolidation of the people against the Slave Power, that the two must be studied together to be understood. Nowhere so clearly and eloquently as in the pages of this great philosophical statesman can be read the rapid growth of that political movement that in twelve years captured every Free State, placed a President in the chair, and then, with a splendid generosity, invited the whole loyal people to unite in a party of the Union, knowing that henceforth the Union meant the people and liberty against the aristocracy and slavery. And only in the light of this view can the course of this man and his great seeming opponent, but real associate, be fitly displayed. Douglas had taught the people of the North that their will should be the law of the republic. Seward had told them that will should be in accordance with the 'higher law' of justice and freedom. Like men fighting in the dark, they supposed themselves each other's enemies, while they were only commanders of the front and rear of the army of the people. Both appeared on the national arena in the struggle of 1850, and soon strode to the first place. The Slave Power repudiated Seward and his 'higher law' of justice and liberty at once. They tolerated Douglas and his 'popular sovereignty ' ten years longer, when they found it even a more dangerous heresy, and threw him overboard.

In the election of 1860 there were but two parties—the two wings of the people's army, under the patriots Lincoln and Douglas; the two wings of the slave host, under the traitors Breckinridge and Bell. Of course the people triumphed. Had Douglas been elected instead of Lincoln, the Slave Power would not have stayed in the Union one hour longer. It was not Lincoln, but the political supremacy of the people they resisted. The Free States had at last consolidated, never to recede, and that was enough. Henceforth no party could live in the North that espoused the cause of this rebel aristocracy. Whoever was Governor or President, Democrat, Republican, Union, what not, the people's party was henceforth supreme, and the aristocracy, with all its works of darkness, was second best.

The political victory of 1860 was virtually complete. For the first time in eighty years had the people concentrated against the Slave Power. The executive was gained, placing the army, navy, appointments, and patronage in the hands of the President, the people's representative by birth and choice. The North had a majority of eight in the Senate and sixty-five in the House of Representatives, insuring a control of the foreign policy and the financial affairs of the republic; while the Supreme Court, the last bulwark of despotism, could be reconstructed in the interest of the Constitution. It is true the people did not appreciate the magnitude of the victory, or realize what it implied. They would probably have made no special use of it at once, and the aristocracy might have outwitted them again, as they had for three quarters of a century past. But the slaveholders knew that now was just the time to strike. If they waited till the people understood themselves better, and learned how to administer the Government for liberty, it would be too late. They still had possession of the executive, with all the departments, the Supreme Court, army, and navy, for four precious months. This was improved in inflicting as much damage on the Government as possible, and organizing a confederacy of revolted States. The people did not believe they would fight, and offered them various compromises, everything except the thing they desired—unlimited power to control the republic. The aristocracy knew that no compromises would do them good which proposed anything less than a reconstruction of the Union which would insure their perpetual supremacy. They even doubted if this could be effectually accomplished in a peaceful way. The people must first be subdued by arms, their Union destroyed, and brought to the verge of anarchy by this mighty power, backed by the whole despotism of Europe; then might they be compelled to accept such terms as it chose to dictate. It waited no longer than was necessary to complete its preparations, and opened ed its guns in Charleston harbor. When the smoke of that cannonade drifted away, the people beheld with consternation the Slave Powers arrayed in arms, from Baltimore and St. Louis to New Orleans and the Rio Grande, advancing to seize their capital and overthrow the republic.

Having conquered the aristocracy by its industry, education, religion, and politics—driven it from every position on the great field of American society in an era of peace—the people slowly awoke to the conviction that they must now conquer it on the field of arms. They were slow to come to that conviction. Their ablest leaders were not war-statesmen, and did not comprehend at once the full meaning of the war. They called it a 'conspiracy,' a 'rebellion,' an 'insurrection,' a 'summer madness,' anything but what it was—the American stave aristocracy in arms to subdue the people of the United States with every other aristocracy on earth wishing it success. But the people did not refuse the challenge. In April, 1861, they rushed to the capital, saved their Government from immediate capture or dispersion, and then began to prepare, after their way, for—they hardly knew what—to suppress a riot or wage a civil war.

In every such conflict as this the aristocracy has a great advantage, especially if it can choose its own time to begin the war. Never was an oligarchy more favored in its preparations than ours. Since 1820 it had contemplated and prepared for this very hour. It had almost unlimited control over fifteen States of the Union. Society was constructed in all these States on a military basis, the laboring class being held in place by the power of the sword. An aristocracy is always preceded by military ambition; for all subordinate orders of its people have acquired the habit of respect for rank and implicit obedience to superiors, so essential to success in war. When the war broke out, the Slave Power was ready. Its arms and ammunition and forts were stolen; its military organizations had been perfected in secret societies; its generals were selected—its president perhaps the best general of all; its military surveys were made, every Southern State mapped, and every strategical point marked; its subordinate officers, in which the real efficiency of an army consists, had been educated in military schools kept by such teachers as Hill and Stonewall Jackson. It had a full crop of cotton as a basis for finance. Its government was practically such a despotism as does not exist in the world. At the sound of the first gun in Charleston, the aristocracy sprang to arms; in a fortnight every strategical point in fifteen States was practically in its possession, and Washington tottered to its fall.

The people, as the people always are, were unprepared for war. Their entire energies had been concentrated for forty years in organizing the gigantic victory of peace which they had just achieved. When they woke up to the idea that there was yet another battle to be fought before the aristocracy would subside, they began to learn the art of war. And never did the people begin a great war so unprepared. The people of Europe have always had military traditions and cultivation to fall back upon in their civil wars. The North had no military traditions later than the Revolution, for no war since that day had really called forth their hearty efforts. Three generations of peace had destroyed even respect for war as an employment fit for civilized men. There were not ten thousand trained soldiers in all the nineteen States in April, 1861. There were not good arms to furnish fifty thousand troops in the possession of the National or loyal State Governments. Most of the ablest military men of the North had left the army, and were engaged in peaceful occupations. Halleck was in the law; McClellan, Burnside, Banks, on the railroad; Mitchel and Sigel teaching schoolboys; Hooker, Kearny, McCall, Dix, retired gentlemen; Fremont digging gold; Rosecrans manufacturing oil, and Grant in a tanyard; and so on to the end of the chapter; while Scott, the patriot hero, who was but once defeated in fifty years' service, was passing over into the helplessness of old age. Of course such a people did not realize the value of military education, and fell into the natural delusion that a multitude of men carrying guns and wearing blue coats is an army; and any 'smart man' can make a colonel in three months. There was not even a corporal in the Cabinet, and Mr, Lincoln's military exploits were confined to one campaign, in the war of 1812, and one challenge to fight a duel. There were not ten Northern men in Congress who could take a company into action. In short, we had the art of war to learn; even did not know it was necessary to learn to fight as to do anything else; especially to fight against an aristocracy that had been studying war for forty years.

For more than three years have the people of the United States waged this gigantic war thus precipitated upon them by their aristocracy to arrest the irresistible growth of modern society in the republic. Every year has been a period of great success, though our peaceful population, unacquainted with war, and often ignorant of the vast issues of this conflict, have often inclined to despondency. Of course the aristocracy fought best, at first, as every aristocracy in the world has done. With half our number of better disciplined troops, better commanded and manœuvred, and the great advantage of interior lines, supported by railroad communications, and possessing in Virginia, perhaps, the most defensible region in the Union, they held our Army of the Potomac at bay for two years; have thrice overrun Maryland and the Pennsylvania border, and yet hold their fortified capital; while every step of our victorious progress in the Southwest has been bitterly contested. Yet this war of martial forces has been strangely like the long, varied war of material, moral, and political forces of which it is the logical sequel.

The Union navy won the earliest laurels in the war. The navy has been the right arm of the people in all ages. The Athenian navy repelled the invasion of Greece by the Persian empire. Antony, Pompey, Cæsar, the people's leaders in Rome, built up their youthful power upon the sea. The Dutch and English navies saved religious and civil liberty in the sixteenth century; and all the constitutional Governments that now exist in Europe came out of the hold of a British man-of-war. The United States, in 1812, extemporized a navy that gained us the freedom of the seas. And now the navy has led the way in the war for the freedom of the continent. The aristocracy felt, intuitively, the danger of this arm of defence, and discouraged, scattered, and almost annihilated our naval power before they entered upon the war. When we learn that our active navy, in April, 1861, consisted of one frigate, too large to sail over the bar of Charleston harbor, and one two-gun supply ship; and that in the three successive years it has shot up into a force of five hundred vessels; that our new ironclads and guns have revolutionized the art of naval warfare; that we have established the most effective blockade ever known along two thousand miles of dangerous coast; have captured Port Royal and New Orleans, aided in the opening of the Mississippi and all its dependencies which we now patrol, penetrated to the cotton fields of Alabama, occupied the inland waters of North Carolina and Virginia, seized every important rebel port and navy yard save four, and destroyed every war ship of the enemy that has ventured in range of our cannon, we are pronouncing a eulogy of which any people may be proud. One year more will swell this maritime power to a force amply sufficient to protect the coast of the whole republic from all assault of traitors at home or their friends abroad.

But the army of the Union has not been content to remain permanently behind the navy. Even in the first year of the conflict, when it was only a crowd of seventy-five thousand undisciplined militia, contending against a solid body of well-disciplined and commanded forces, it wrested two States from the foe, and baffled his intentions for the capture of all our great border cities. But since the opening of the campaign of 1802, the real beginning of war by the North, we have conquered from the aristocracy and now hold fast in Slave States an area of two hundred thousand square miles, inhabited by four millions of people—a district larger than France. Three years ago, every Slave State was virtually in the grasp of the rebels, and the Union was really put upon the defensive to protect freedom in the Free States and the national capital. Now, by a masterly series of campaigns in the West and Southwest, ranging from the Alleghanies to the Gulf, in which we have never lost a decisive battle, we have saved all the Territories of the United States, cut the 'Confederacy' in two equal parts, holding the western division at our mercy, opened the Mississippi and all its tributaries, and crowded the rebellion into the five States nearest the Atlantic coast. In the east we have fought a score of battles with the most formidable army ever marshalled on this continent, composed of the flower of the rebel soldiery led by their best generalship, and, spite of frequent repulses, have forced it from the Potomac and below the Rappahannock to the James, away from the smell of salt water, holding firmly every seaport from Washington to Wilmington, North Carolina, and a belt of land and water commanding the approach to the interior of every Atlantic State. The military force of the rebellion is rapidly being crowded into one army, not exceeding two hundred and fifty thousand men, against which the mighty power of the Union can be marshalled in overwhelming array. I know well enough that the decisive moment will really come when we confront that desperate and veteran host, on which the fate of aristocratic government upon this continent depends. But we shall then have a great army of veterans, marshalled under commanders fit to lead them in the name of liberty and the people.

It is not strange it has taken us three years to find who can fight among us. The Germans fought fifty years against religious despotism before they found Gustavus Adolphus to lead them to victory. The English fought ten years before Cromwell took command of his Ironsides. The French blundered ten years before the 'little corporal' led the army of the republic over the Alps to dethrone half the monarchs of Europe. The people had but one great general in the Revolutionary War. Until 1860 the aristocracy had furnished the only great American commander. But great generals have now appeared among the people; and if we fight stoutly and treat men fairly, our commander will appear when his army of veterans is ready.

The aristocracy at first moved armies faster than the people, for the same reason that the Tartars, the Cossacks, the Arabs, the Indians, and all semi-barbarians move more rapidly in war than a civilized people. A semi-barbarous oligarchy fights because it loves war; a civilized people fights to establish civilization and peace. The Southern army carries little along, lives on the food and wears the dress of the semi-savage, and overruns vast spaces, leaving a smoking desolation and a ruined society. The Northern army moves slowly, because it carries American civilization in its knapsack and baggage wagons, organizes republican society as it goes, and prepares to hold for liberty all it has gained. The people's army has paved the way for liberty and a democratic order of society over two hundred thousand square miles, among four millions of people, in three years. New Orleans, Nashville, Memphis, Beaufort, Alexandria, every slave city in our possession, is being made over into a free city.

The army goes slow because it is only the people's pioneer to level the mountains and fill up the valleys, and construct the highway of liberty from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. The Secretary of State has well said: 'The war means the dissolution of slave society.' It was entered into with the distinct understanding that it was the last expedient to save the negro oligarchy from ruin, and every day it goes on its thundering course it more emphatically pronounces its doom. The war for the Union is the people's final contest for liberty, a contest in which they will be victorious, as in the strife of industry, morals, and politics. The people, like John Brown's soul, are 'marching on' to dissolve the slave oligarchy and establish democracy. The people now possess three fourths the territory, population, and wealth of the republic. There are yet some six million black and white people in the South to rescue from their masters, who now use them against us. They are being prepared for Union with us by this war. The poor white man will be made better, more intelligent, more ambitious even, by service in the rebel army, and on the return of peace will become the small farmer of a free soil. The black men will be raised, in due time made freemen, and start as a free peasantry on a new career. A hundred thousand slaveholders, with their families, not more than one million of people in all, will hate the Union permanently. They will be defeated, we hope and believe, and disorganized as a social and political power, and the people rule in every State they have cursed by their ambition for the last fifty years.

We do not prophesy just when or how the people will triumph. The victory, we believe, will come; but whether all at once, or through temporary revulsions of purpose and alternate truce and war, whether finished by arms or yet cast again into the arena of polities, whether by occupying all this three millions of square miles of territory or gaining on despotism year by year, nobody knows. The Slave Power has not yet played its trump card. It has a hundred devilish resources yet to foil us. It may yet try to use the negroes it still holds against us by emancipation. It may yet drag us into a war with Europe, and Saratoga and Lake Erie and Plattsburg, and Long Island and Trenton and Bunker Hill, and Detroit and New Orleans may yet be fought over again. But we have seen how, for the last forty years, the people of the United States have strode on toward supremacy, led by a Power they did not always recognize, and sometimes scorned, but led to victory spite of themselves.

There has indeed been a Divine Intelligence guiding the destiny of our republic by the 'higher law' of the progress of free society toward a Christian democracy. We do not think the Peace Party will be able to abolish that 'higher law,' as certain of our politicians expect. We believe God Almighty is shaping a free and exalted civilized nation out of this republic, by a law of progress which we did not make and cannot repeal. We may postpone that nation by our folly and sins, but it must be made. Through labor and education, and religion and arts, and politics and war, 'it marches' on to supremacy—the people's nation. And when it is established it will be the controlling nation of this continent, one of the firmest powers on the earth, the terror of every aristocracy, and the joy and hope of every people on the round globe.