Book: Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861




Events have been gradually convincing them that the peril was actual and
near. They begin to see how unwise, if nothing worse, has been the weak
policy of the Executive in allowing men to play at Revolution till they
learn to think the coarse reality as easy and pretty as the vaudeville
they have been acting. They are fast coming to the conclusion that the
list of grievances put forward by the secessionists is a sham and
a pretence, the veil of a long-matured plot against republican
institutions. And it is time the traitors of the South should know that
the Free States are becoming every day more united in sentiment and more
earnest in resolve, and that, so soon as they are thoroughly satisfied
that secession is something more than empty bluster, a public spirit
will be aroused that will be content with no half-measures, and which no
Executive, however unwilling, can resist.

The country is weary of being cheated with plays upon words. The United
States are a nation, and not a mass-meeting; theirs is a government,
and not a caucus,--a government that was meant to be capable, and is
capable, of something more than the helpless _please don't_ of a village
constable; they have executive and administrative officers that are not
mere puppet-figures to go through the motions of an objectless activity,
but arms and hands that become supple to do the will of the people so
soon as that will becomes conscious and defines its purpose. It is time
that we turned up our definitions in some more trustworthy dictionary
than that of avowed disunionists and their more dangerous because more
timid and cunning accomplices. Rebellion smells no sweeter because it
is called Secession, nor does Order lose its divine precedence in human
affairs because a knave may nickname it Coercion. Secession means chaos,
and Coercion the exercise of legitimate authority. You cannot dignify
the one nor degrade the other by any verbal charlatanism. The best
testimony to the virtue of coercion is the fact that no wrongdoer ever
thought well of it. The thief in jail, the mob-leader in the hands of
the police, and the murderer on the drop will be unanimous in favor of
this new heresy of the unconstitutionality of Constitutions, with its
Newgate Calendar of confessors, martyrs, and saints. Falstaff's famous
regiment would have volunteered to a man for its propagation or its
defence. Henceforth let every unsuccessful litigant have the right to
pronounce the verdict of a jury sectional, and to quash all proceedings
and retain the property in controversy by seceding from the court-room.
Let the planting of hemp be made penal, because it squints toward
coercion. Why, the first great Secessionist would doubtless have
preferred to divide Heaven peaceably, would have been willing to send
Commissioners, must have thought Michael's proceedings injudicious, and
could probably even now demonstrate the illegality of hell-fire to any
five-year-old imp of average education and intelligence. What a fine
world we should have, if we could only come quietly together in
convention, and declare by unanimous resolution, or even by a
two-thirds' vote, that edge-tools should hereafter cut everybody's
fingers but his that played with them,--that, when two men ride on one
horse, the hindmost shall always sit in front,--and that, when a man
tries to thrust his partner out of bed and gets kicked out himself, he
shall be deemed to have established his title to an equitable division,
and the bed shall be thenceforth his as of right, without detriment to
the other's privilege in the floor!

If secession be a right, then the moment of its exercise is wholly
optional with those possessing it. Suppose, on the eve of a war with
England, Michigan should vote herself out of the Union and declare
herself annexed to Canada, what kind of a reception would her
Commissioners be likely to meet in Washington, and what scruples should
we feel about coercion? Or, to take a case precisely parallel to that of
South Carolina,--suppose that Utah, after getting herself admitted to
the Union, should resume her sovereignty, as it is pleasantly called,
and block our path to the Pacific, under the pretence that she did not
consider her institutions safe while the other States entertained such
unscriptural prejudices against her special weakness in the patriarchal
line. Is the only result of our admitting a Territory on Monday to be
the giving it a right to steal itself and go out again on Tuesday? Or
do only the original thirteen States possess this precious privilege of
suicide? We shall need something like a Fugitive Slave Law for runaway
republics, and must get a provision inserted in our treaties with
foreign powers, that they shall help us catch any delinquent who may
take refuge with them, as South Carolina has been trying to do with
England and France. It does not matter to the argument, except so far as
the good taste of the proceeding is concerned, at what particular time
a State may make her territory foreign, thus opening one gate of our
national defences and offering a bridge to invasion. The danger of the
thing is in her making her territory foreign under any circumstances;
and it is a danger which the Government must prevent, if only
for self-preservation. Within the limits of the Constitution two
sovereignties cannot coexist; and yet what practical odds does it
make, if a State becomes sovereign by simply declaring herself so?
The legitimate consequence of secession is, not that a State becomes
sovereign, but that, so far as the General Government is concerned, she
has outlawed herself, nullified her own existence as a State, and become
an aggregate of riotous men who resist the execution of the laws.

We are told that coercion will be civil war; and so is a mob civil war,
till it is put down. In the present case, the only coercion called for
is the protection of the public property and the collection of the
federal revenues. If it be necessary to send troops to do this, they
will not be sectional, as it is the fashion nowadays to call people who
insist on their own rights and the maintenance of the laws, but federal
troops, representing the will and power of the whole Confederacy. A
danger is always great so long as we are afraid of it; and mischief like
that now gathering head in South Carolina may soon become a danger, if
not swiftly dealt with. Mr. Buchanan seems altogether too wholesale a
disciple of the _laissez-faire_ doctrine, and has allowed activity in
mischief the same immunity from interference which is true policy only
in regard to enterprise wisely and profitably directed. He has been
naturally reluctant to employ force, but has overlooked the difference
between indecision and moderation, forgetting the lesson of all
experience, that firmness in the beginning saves the need of force in
the end, and that forcible measures applied too late may be made to seem
violent ones, and thus excite a mistaken sympathy with the sufferers by
their own misdoing. The feeling of the country has been unmistakably
expressed in regard to Major Anderson, and that not merely because he
showed prudence and courage, but because he was the first man holding
a position of trust who did his duty to the nation. Public sentiment
unmistakably demands, that, in the case of Anarchy vs. America, the
cause of the defendant shall not be suffered to go by default. The
proceedings in South Carolina, parodying the sublime initiative of
our own Revolution with a Declaration of Independence that hangs the
franchise of human nature on the kink of a hair, and substitutes for
the visionary right of all men to the pursuit of happiness the more
practical privilege of some men to pursue their own negro,--these
proceedings would be merely ludicrous, were it not for the danger that
the men engaged in them may so far commit themselves as to find the
inconsistency of a return to prudence too galling, and to prefer the
safety of their pride to that of their country.

It cannot be too distinctly stated or too often repeated, that the
discontent of South Carolina is not one to be allayed by any concessions
which the Free States can make with dignity or even safety. It is
something more radical and of longer standing than distrust of the
motives or probable policy of the Republican Party. It is neither more
nor less than a disbelief in the very principles on which our government
is founded. So long as they practically retained the government of the
country, and could use its power and patronage to their own advantage,
the plotters were willing to wait; but the moment they lost that
control, by the breaking up of the Democratic Party, and saw that their
chance of ever regaining it was hopeless, they declared openly the
principles on which they have all along been secretly acting. Denying
the constitutionality of special protection to any other species of
property or branch of industry, and in 1832 threatening to break up
the Union unless their theory of the Constitution in this respect were
admitted, they went into the late Presidential contest with a claim for
extraordinary protection to a certain kind of property already the
only one endowed with special privileges and immunities. Defeated
overwhelmingly before the people, they now question the right of the
majority to govern, except on their terms, and threaten violence in the
hope of extorting from the fears of the Free; States what they failed
to obtain from their conscience and settled convictions of duty. Their
quarrel is not with the Republican Party, but with the theory of
Democracy.

The South Carolina politicians have hitherto shown themselves adroit
managers, shrewd in detecting and profiting by the weaknesses of men;
but their experience has not been of a kind to give them practical
wisdom in that vastly more important part of government which depends
for success on common sense and business-habits. The members of the
South Carolina Convention have probably less knowledge of political
economy than any single average Northern merchant whose success depends
on an intimate knowledge of the laws of trade and the world-wide
contingencies of profit and loss. Such a man would tell them, as the
result of invariable experience, that the prosperity of no community was
so precarious as that of one whose very existence was dependent on
a single agricultural product. What divinity hedges cotton, that
competition may not touch it,--that some disease, like that of the
potato and the vine, may not bring it to beggary in a single year, and
cure the overweening conceit of prosperity with the sharp medicine of
Ireland and Madeira? But these South Carolina economists are better at
vaporing than at calculation. They will find to their cost that the
figure's of statistics have little mercy for the figures of speech,
which are so powerful in raising enthusiasm and so helpless in raising
money. The eating of one's own words, as they must do, sooner or later,
is neither agreeable nor nutritious; but it is better to do it before
there is nothing else left to eat. The secessionists are strong in
declamation, but they are weak in the multiplication-table and the
ledger. They have no notion of any sort of logical connection between
treason and taxes. It is all very fine signing Declarations of
Independence, and one may thus become a kind of panic-price hero for a
week or two, even rising to the effigial martyrdom of the illustrated
press; but these gentlemen seem to have forgotten, that, if their
precious document should lead to anything serious, they have been
signing promises to pay for the State of South Carolina to an enormous
amount. It is probably far short of the truth to say that the taxes of
an autonomous palmetto republic would be three times what they are now.
To speak of nothing else, there must be a military force kept constantly
on foot; and the ministers of King Cotton will find that the charge made
by a standing army on the finances of the new empire is likely to be
far more serious and damaging than can be compensated by the glory of a
great many such "spirited charges" as that by which Colonel Pettigrew
and his gallant rifles took Fort Pinckney, with its garrison of one
engineer officer and its armament of no guns. Soldiers are the most
costly of all toys or tools. The outgo for the army of the Pope, never
amounting to ten thousand effective men, in the cheapest country in the
world, has been half a million of dollars a month. Under the present
system, it needs no argument to show that the Non-slaveholding States,
with a free population considerably more than double that of the
Slave-holding States, and with much more generally distributed wealth
and opportunities of spending, pay far more than the proportion
predicable on mere preponderance in numbers of the expenses of a
government supported mainly by a tariff on importations. And it is not
the burden of this difference merely that the new Cotton Republic must
assume. They will need as large, probably a larger, army and navy than
that of the present Union; as numerous a diplomatic establishment; a
postal system whose large yearly deficit they must bear themselves; and
they must assume the main charges of the Indian Bureau. If they adopt
free trade, they will alienate the Border Slave-States, and even
Louisiana; if a system of customs, they have cut themselves off from
the chief consumers of foreign goods. One of the calculations of the
Southern conspirators is to render the Free States tributary to their
new republic, by adopting free trade and smuggling their imported goods
across the border. But this is all moonshine; for, even if smuggling
could not be prevented as easily as it now is from the British
Provinces, how long would it be before the North would adapt its tariff
to the new order of things? And thus thrown back upon direct taxation,
how many years would it take to open the eyes of the poorer classes
of Secessia to the hardship of their position and its causes? Their
ignorance has been trifled with by men who cover treasonable designs
with a pretence of local patriotism. Neither they nor their misleaders
have any true conception of the people of the Free States, of those
"white slaves" who in Massachusetts alone have a deposit in the Savings
Banks whose yearly interest would pay seven times over the four hundred
thousand dollars which South Carolina cannot raise.

But even if we leave other practical difficulties out of sight, what
chance of stability is there for a confederacy whose very foundation
is the principle that any member of it may withdraw at the first
discontent? If they could contrive to establish a free-trade treaty with
their chief customer, England, would she consent to gratify Louisiana
with an exception in favor of sugar? Some of the leaders of the
secession movement have already become aware of this difficulty, and
accordingly propose the abolition of all State lines,--the first step
toward a military despotism; for, if our present system have one
advantage greater than another, it is the neutralization of numberless
individual ambitions by adequate opportunities of provincial
distinction. Even now the merits of the Napoleonic system are put
forward by some of the theorists of Alabama and Mississippi, who
doubtless have as good a stomach to be emperors as ever Bottom had to a
bottle of hay, when his head was temporarily transformed to the likeness
of theirs,--and who, were they subjects of the government that looks so
nice across the Atlantic, would, ere this, have been on their way
to Cayenne, a spot where such red-peppery temperaments would find
themselves at home.

The absurdities with which the telegraphic column of the newspapers has
been daily crowded, since the vagaries of South Carolina finally settled
down into unmistakable insanity, would give us but a poor opinion of the
general intelligence of the country, did we not know that they were due
to the necessities of "Our Own Correspondent." At one time, it is Fort
Sumter that is to be bombarded with floating batteries mounted on rafts
behind a rampart of cotton-bales; at another, it is Mr. Barrett, Mayor
of Washington, announcing his intention that the President-elect shall
be inaugurated, or Mr. Buchanan declaring that he shall cheerfully
assent to it. Indeed! and who gave them any choice in the matter?
Yesterday, it was General Scott who would not abandon the flag which he
had illustrated with the devotion of a lifetime; to-day, it is General
Harney or Commodore Kearney who has concluded to be true to the country
whose livery he has worn and whose bread he has eaten for half a
century; to-morrow, it will be Ensign Stebbins who has been magnanimous
enough not to throw up his commission. What are we to make of the
extraordinary confusion of ideas which such things indicate? In what
other country would it be considered creditable to an officer that he
merely did not turn traitor at the first opportunity? There can be no
doubt of the honor both of the army and navy, and of their loyalty to
their country. They will do their duty, if we do ours in saving them a
country to which they can be loyal.

We have been so long habituated to a kind of local independence in the
management of our affairs, and the Central Government has fortunately
had so little occasion for making itself felt at home and in the
domestic concerns of the States, that the idea of its relation to us as
a power, except for protection from without, has gradually become vague
and alien to our ordinary habits of thought. We have so long heard the
principle admitted, and seen it acted on with advantage to the general
weal, that the people are sovereign in their own affairs, that we
must recover our presence of mind before we see the fallacy of the
assumption, that the people, or a bare majority of them, in a single
State, can exercise their right of sovereignty as against the will of
the nation legitimately expressed. When such a contingency arises, it is
for a moment difficult to get rid of our habitual associations, and to
feel that we are not a mere partnership, dissolvable whether by mutual
consent or on the demand of one or more of its members, but a nation,
which can never abdicate its right, and can never surrender it while
virtue enough is left in the people to make it worth retaining. It
would seem to be the will of God that from time to time the manhood of
nations, like that of individuals, should be tried by great dangers or
by great opportunities. If the manhood be there, it makes the great
opportunity out of the great danger; if it be not there, then the great
danger out of the great opportunity. The occasion is offered us now of
trying whether a conscious nationality and a timely concentration of the
popular will for its maintenance be possible in a democracy, or whether
it is only despotisms that are capable of the sudden and selfish energy
of protecting themselves from destruction.

The Republican Party has thus far borne itself with firmness and
moderation, and the great body of the Democratic Party in the Free
States is gradually being forced into an alliance with it. Let us not be
misled by any sophisms about conciliation and compromise. Discontented
citizens may be conciliated and compromised with, but never open rebels
with arms in their hands. If there be any concessions which justice may
demand on the one hand and honor make on the other, let us try if we can
adjust them with the Border Slave-States; but a government has already
signed its own death-warrant, when it consents to make terms with
law-breakers. First reestablish the supremacy of order, and then it will
be time to discuss terms; but do not call it a compromise, when you
give up your purse with a pistol at your head. This is no time for
sentimentalisms about the empty chair at the national hearth; all the
chairs would be empty soon enough, if one of the children is to amuse
itself with setting the house on fire, whenever it can find a match.
Since the election of Mr. Lincoln, not one of the arguments has lost its
force, not a cipher of the statistics has been proved mistaken, on
which the judgment of the people was made up. Nobody proposes, or
has proposed, to interfere with any existing rights of property;
the majority have not assumed to decide upon any question of the
righteousness or policy of certain social arrangements existing in
any part of the Confederacy; they have not undertaken to constitute
themselves the conscience of their neighbors; they have simply
endeavored to do their duty to their own posterity, and to protect them
from a system which, as ample experience has shown, and that of
our present difficulty were enough to show, fosters a sense of
irresponsibleness to all obligation in the governing class, and in the
governed an ignorance and a prejudice which may be misled at any moment
to the peril of the whole country.

But the present question is one altogether transcending all limits of
party and all theories of party-policy. It is a question of national
existence; it is a question whether Americans shall govern America, or
whether a disappointed clique shall nullify all government now, and
render a stable government difficult hereafter; it is a question, not
whether we shall have civil war under certain contingencies, but whether
we shall prevent it under any. It is idle, and worse than idle, to
talk about Central Republics that can never be formed. We want neither
Central Republics nor Northern Republics, but our own Republic and that
of our fathers, destined one day to gather the whole continent under a
flag that shall be the most august in the world. Having once known what
it was to be members of a grand and peaceful constellation, we shall not
believe, without further proof, that the laws of our gravitation are to
be abolished, and we flung forth into chaos, a hurlyburly of jostling
and splintering stars, whenever Robert Toombs or Robert Rhett, or any
other Bob of the secession kite, may give a flirt of self-importance.
The first and greatest benefit of government is that it keeps the
peace, that it insures every man his right, and not only that, but the
permanence of it. In order to this, its first requisite is stability;
and this once firmly settled, the greater the extent of conterminous
territory that can be subjected to one system and one language and
inspired by one patriotism, the better. That there should be some
diversity of interests is perhaps an advantage, since the necessity of
legislating equitably for all gives legislation its needful safeguards
of caution and largeness of view. A single empire embracing the whole
world, and controlling, without extinguishing, local organizations and
nationalities, has been not only the dream of conquerors, but the ideal
of speculative philanthropists. Our own dominion is of such extent and
power, that it may, so far as this continent is concerned, be looked
upon as something like an approach to the realization of such an ideal.
But for slavery, it might have succeeded in realizing it; and in
spite of slavery, it may. One language, one law, one citizenship over
thousands of miles, and a government on the whole so good that we seem
to have forgotten what government means,--these are things not to be
spoken of with levity, privileges not to be surrendered without a
struggle. And yet while Germany and Italy, taught by the bloody and
bitter and servile experience of centuries, are striving toward unity as
the blessing above all others desirable, we are to allow a Union,
that for almost eighty years has been the source and the safeguard of
incalculable advantages, to be shattered by the caprice of a rabble that
has outrun the intention of its leaders, while we are making up our
minds what coercion means! Ask the first constable, and he will tell
you that it is the force necessary for executing the laws. To avoid
the danger of what men who have seized upon forts, arsenals, and other
property of the United States, and continue to hold them by military
force, may choose to call civil war, we are allowing a state of things
to gather head which will make real civil war the occupation of the
whole country for years to come, and establish it as a permanent
institution. There is no such antipathy between the North and the South
as men ambitious of a consideration in the new republic, which their
talents and character have failed to secure them in the old, would fain
call into existence by asserting that it exists. The misunderstanding
and dislike between them is not so great as they were within living
memory between England and Scotland, as they are now between England and
Ireland. There is no difference of race, language, or religion. Yet,
after a dissatisfaction of near a century, and two rebellions, there is
no part of the British dominion more loyal than Scotland, no British
subjects who would be more loath to part with the substantial advantages
of their imperial connection than the Scotch; and even in Ireland, after
a longer and more deadly feud, there is no sane man who would consent
to see his country irrevocably cut off from power and consideration
to obtain an independence which would be nothing but Donnybrook Fair
multiplied by every city, town, and village in the island. The same
considerations of policy and advantage which render the union of
Scotland and Ireland with England a necessity apply with even more force
to the several States of our Union. To let one, or two, or half a dozen
of them break away in a freak of anger or unjust suspicion, or, still
worse, from mistaken notions of sectional advantage, would be to fail in
our duty to ourselves and our country, would be a fatal blindness to
the lessons which immemorial history has been tracing on the earth's
surface, either with the beneficent furrow of the plough, or, when that
was unheeded, the fruitless gash of the cannon-ball.

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