# The Civil War in America (Smith)/The Civil War in America

THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA.
The civil war in America is over; the armies have gone home; the passions have subsided; and though the ashes still glow, though the time when an impartial history can be written has not arrived, we may try to understand the real import of the conflict—the real significance of the victory—and to read, as far as mortal eyes may read, the counsels of Providence in this the great event of our age.
This great struggle, like most of the great struggles in history, was complex in its character. In some measure its character changed as it went on. On the Southern side most were fighting for Slavery, but some for State Right. On the Northern side some were fighting against Slavery, but many were fighting for the Union. At the North the Anti-Slavery sentiment grew more predominant towards the close, both because the moral feeling of the people had been stirred and elevated by the struggle, and because they saw more clearly that Slavery was the root of the political evil, and a root from which, unless it was plucked up, the same evil would always grow. At first the majority would have compromised with Slavery for the sake of the Union, the source, as they deemed it, of their greatest blessings, the object of their fondest and most hallowed associations. If there is a nation which would readily ​consent to disruption for a moral object, let it cast the first stone at them for their weakness. But at the last Presidential election, the question being distinctly put to the people whether they would compromise with Slavery for the Union, the people answered by a great majority that they would not. Then the victory was given into their hands. Let the nation which can boast of virtue pure and unalloyed, which has needed no pressure of circumstances to force it into the right way, no suffering to purge its vision that it might clearly discern good from evil, no chastisement to teach it the will of Heaven—let this nation, I say again, cast the first stone. To the American people the Union was not empire only, but immunity from hostile neighbourhood and standing armies; it was the pledge not of power only, but of liberty and peace.
That Slavery was the cause of the war, who can sincerely doubt? Secession broke out and had its focus in the centre of Slavery, spread wherever Slavery prevailed, was most intense where Slavery prevailed most. It did not extend to the free districts of the South, Western Virginia and Eastern Tennessee, the inhabitants of which were dragged into the Confederacy by force. It exactly followed the wavering line of slavery in the mixed States, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. The secession ordinances proclaimed as the ground, and the sole ground, of the revolt the rights of Slavery, threatened by Northern abolition. The Southern prophets all prophesied of a vast slave empire as the reward of success. Visions of such an empire, stretching from the grave of Washington to the hills of Montezuma, filled the minds of Secessionists, as visions of a perfect Christian society and of a reign of Christ on earth filled the minds of the Wycliffites and the Puritans, as ​visions of a Brotherhood of Man filled the minds of enthusiasts on the eve of the French Revolution. On the other hand, the Anti-Slavery sentiment was called forth at the North as strongly as the Pro-Slavery sentiment at the South. And the immediate result of the victory has been the downfall of Slavery, not in the United States only, but everywhere and for ever.
The theory that the war arose from a divergence of commercial interest, that it was a struggle between free trade producers on one side and protectionist manufacturers on the other, though skilfully devised for the market of English opinion, was defective in two respects. It did not fit the facts, and the cause it assigned was inadequate to produce the effect. It did not fit the facts; for the Western States were producers as well as the Southern, and the Western States, notwithstanding the predictions of their imminent secession, were as true as the New England States to the Union, and as staunch for the war. The cause which it assigned was inadequate to produce the effect, for when did a mere divergence of commercial interest rend political bonds so powerful, or lead to such a civil war? It is too true that the manufacturers and ironmasters of the North are still in the gall of Protection, that they still resist those economical laws of Providence in the observance of which other nations are blessed, and that for them now, as formerly for our protectionists, writers are found to veil barbarous cupidity in the language of patriotism and science. The same tendency is seen in our colonies, and ignorance is its chief root. Perhaps this quarrel between manufacturer and producer may have contributed to the disruption as a secondary cause, but it was as a secondary ​cause only. No mention was made of it in the manifestos of the seceding states.
The struggle was one between Freedom and Slavery. But it was something deeper than this. It was a struggle between Christianity and all that is most hostile to Christianity. Christianity had founded a great community in the New World. Slavery came up against that community, as Mahometanism, with its polygamy, its fatalism, its exterminating ferocity, came up against European Christendom ten centuries ago; and, like Mahometanism, it has been overthrown. The Powers of Good and Evil, in forms perhaps more sharply defined than they had worn in any previous encounter, have fought for that New World, and the Power of Good has conquered.
I went to the United States believing, I returned firmly convinced, that not democracy in America, but free Christianity in America, was the real key to the study of the people and their institutions. Democracy is a political arrangement, dealing, like all political arrangements, with the shallower interests of man. It would be reversing the order of causation to deduce from it the deeper parts of the character of the people.
I mean by Christianity nothing sectarian or narrow. I mean by it the spirit of Christian society—the spirit which has hitherto alone shown itself capable of animating and sustaining a real community; for the spurious communities of heathen antiquity were oligarchial communities of masters tyrannising over a people of slaves. I mean the spirit which is present in many a champion of humanity, who, since Christianity has been degraded by superstition and allied with social injustice, would scarcely call himself by the Christian name, but who is nevertheless ​doing his part to convert the kingdoms of the world into the kingdom of Christ; while others are labouring with all their power, political and ecclesiastical, to retard that conversion, though they may arrogate the name of Christian to themselves alone. I mean the spirit of faith in God and man, of charity between man and man, of hope for the future of humanity. I mean the spirit of progress of which Christian hope is the life, and which, look where you will, is confined to the nations of Christendom. I mean the spirit of Christianity, not the mere form, dogmatic, ceremonial, or ecclesiastical. Such Christianity may be a nullity in sectarian theology. It is the great reality of history.
In Europe Christianity is paralysed by the divisions of the national Churches, each with a state creed imposed by political power and maintained by the state clergy, who are legally bound over against conviction, so that till State and Church shall have been separated the divisions of Christendom are hopeless. The Church in the Old World is unable to do or attempt what it was intended to do for man. But two centuries ago, England, then in her noblest mood—for never, in spite of her trade, her victories, and her empire, has she been so noble as she was in the days of Hampden, Falkland, Milton, and Cromwell—sent forth a religious colony, which founded the great community of the New World. It was well chosen for its high purpose that germ of English religion, law, and freedom. It was well chosen, and so was the place where it was planted—a vast expanse divided by no strong natural boundaries, and commercially united in all directions by the courses of great rivers, so that national divisions, with the political enmities and religious schisms which they entail, ​could scarcely find a place; while it was severed from the Old World by an ocean which steam has now narrowed, but which was broad enough at first to emancipate the New World from old influences, and give human progress a fresh spring.
By the same exodus, which brought Christianity out of the State Churches, society escaped from feudalism into a system founded on equality and justice. This social transition Europe for two centuries of abortive revolution has been striving in vain to effect. The feudal aristocracy has in some countries been overthrown; but from the inability of untrained communities, with dangerous masses of destitution and with no moral stay stronger than that of a state religion, to carry on self-government, the nations have escaped from aristocracy only to become the prey of despotism, supported by great standing armies, which now arrests the progress of humanity here, and from which there is at present no visible escape, though we may be sure that God, who has not made the world for standing armies and their masters, will in time find a way.
The Western States of America are a colony of New England. The original company of pilgrims is the seed from which the whole tree has grown. No creative monad, imagined by science, could be more pregnant with a new order of things than that little band of exiles; no moment in history is more solemn or more big with consequences than that in which the colony on its arrival in the New World made a set of laws for itself—laws for self-government—rational, unfeudal laws.
The little Puritan settlement is lost in a great nation, and the narrow Puritan religion has expanded, or is fast expanding, into something more comprehensive, though ​still you trace the original type in all the lineaments of the now mighty frame. But the Northern States remain what their Puritan founders desired that they should ever be, a plantation religious. In America two things must strike every traveller, the equality of the habitations and the number of places of worship. Not only in New England is each city, each little town crowned with a cluster of steeples, it is the same in the Far West; and while Christianity is proclaimed to be dying here, its churches are rising, built by free will, in apparently unhesitating faith, wherever the pioneer axe makes room in the woods of Michigan, wherever the plough turns the soil in the prairies of Illinois, on the distant hills of Iowa, beneath the lonely headlands of the Upper Mississippi. Men go to write the life of Christ beside the sepulchre were he was laid; if they would go where Christianity is spreading over the untrodden West, they might know the meaning of the words, “He is risen indeed.” There is every outward sign of regard for religion among this people. The churches are well filled, and Sunday is well kept. Much of this perhaps may be deference to opinion; but opinion itself is free. The government must study the national character, and it always speaks as to a religious nation.
In America, too, there is a cry of the decay of faith; and there, too, less might be said of the decay of faith, if, in the first place, faith were not confounded with a belief in tradition; and if, in the second place, there were more of charity, and more of hope. There is, however, a religious crisis there as well as here, though it is less severe there than here; because in America there is no State Church to bar with a solid obstruction the current of ​religious thought, and chafe it into destructive fury. The doubts and perplexities which we are at this time called upon to meet manfully in reliance on the God of truth, Americans also are called upon to meet in the same spirit. In both countries some, unable to endure suspense, unable to watch the one hour, have lost their faith in Providence, and committed religious suicide, by casting themselves into the superstitions of the past. But there are two things going on at present in American Christendom widely different from the decay of faith, which may easily be taken for it. The first is the decline of clerical authority; the second is the breaking up of sectarian dogma, and the consequent approach of a reconciliation of the churches.
The decline of clerical authority in itself indicates no decrease of religious feeling among the people. It may indicate the reverse. Intellectually and spiritually, the pastor of a Puritan congregation stood far above his flock, who looked up to him as their half-inspired and almost infallible guide. Now the flock are more nearly on a level both intellectually and spiritually with their pastor, and can regard him as an infallible guide no more. The circumstances of Christian Churches, like those of other communities change, and their organisation must adapt itself to their circumstances. This holds good of all except the Roman Catholic clergy, whose authority purports to be founded on the supernatural powers of a divine order, not on the natural influence of character or mind. But the Roman Catholic clergy lose their flocks when the Irish have become educated, that is in the second or third generation.
The Churches of America, in the main, are offsets of the Churches of Europe. The New World has not yet had leisure to produce a theology of its own. There are ​the different Protestant sects, the Presbyterians, the Baptists, the Methodists, which three communions embrace the bulk of the people; Presbyterianism being the religion of the section corresponding to our upper middle class, while the other two are the religions of the masses. There is Unitarianism, the religion of the cultivated, rather negative, it is said, in many cases, and tending to scepticism: not seldom, perhaps, a decent name which scepticism itself assumes among a religious people. There is Roman Catholicism, the religion of the Irish emigrants, and for them, in their uneducated state, indispensable; somewhat more rational, less given to miracles, relics, and mariolatry, and, if the court of Rome would let it be, less intriguing than in Europe, but everywhere, it is to be feared, inherently anti-social and the inveterate enemy of united education. There is Anglicanism, the genteel religion of the rich and fashionable world, a character which it has kept since the colonial days, with an element of Romanism in it as here, and a clergy who, like ours, would fain be a priesthood, but with a democratic and lay ascendancy in its government which keeps these tendencies within bounds, while, in deference to the sentiment of a rational and charitable community, it ceases to utter the denunciatory dogmatism of the Athanasian Creed. Universalism, of which English divines speak with terror as a vast and portentous heresy, is simply Protestantism, less the more cruel doctrines of Calvinism, against which it is a reaction. The hardness and the tyranny of extreme Calvinism send not a few converts in America to Episcopacy itself. There are sects of a more enthusiastic and grotesque kind, such as life in the wilderness produces when religious passion is under no intellectual control. There is Cameronianism, ​in its ancient sternness, resolutely and to its singular honour excluding the slave-owner from its pale. The Church of the Mormons is chiefly fed from the Old World. Mormonism is in fact the English or Welsh peasant’s craving for a more equal lot, combined with his Old Testament fallacies and his wild apocalyptic faith. Materialism, it is said, is found among the German emigrants, and among them alone.
All the Churches must be and visibly are affected by the element of political democracy which surrounds them, and this not only in their forms of government but even in their modes of thought. It is hard to believe in an arbitrary God when all the institutions of man around you preach justice. It is hard to believe in an unmerciful God, when all the institutions of man around you preach mercy.
If, however, America has produced no new theology she has produced Religious Liberty; and from Religious Liberty in time better things still will spring. The circumstances under which these waifs of all the Churches of Christendom were cast upon the American coast were such as to preclude the existence of a dominant sect and to forbid mutual persecution. For a moment the Calvinists of New England displayed the intolerance which they had learnt in the old world; but that moment was soon past. The tendency of the British dominion to establish Anglicanism at the South ended with the dominion itself. Even Roman Catholicism, in its turn a fugitive from persecution, proclaimed toleration in its new abode. Not only the political and social equality, but the political and social union of the Churches is almost complete, saving in the case of Roman Catholicism; and even a Roman Catholic priest is ​obliged to conform in some measure to the principles of a society intolerant of intolerance alone, and to take part in works of Christian benevolence with the clergy of other creeds. Under the influence of political and social union, ecclesiastical divisions are gradually giving way. Christian character is brought into the foreground, sectarian dogma is thrown into the background. The Churches are gradually falling, but through their ruins appear again the lineaments of the Universal Church. Intolerant orthodoxy still holds its ground in the heart of many Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Calvinists; but it is on the defensive, and its ramparts are tumbling down. In each sect there appears a liberal party, suspected by the narrowly orthodox, and tending to fusion with other churches. The same, when the time comes, will be the process of reconciliation in the Old World: Christians will not be be brought over by controversy; but, when perfect religious liberty reigns, they will be re-united by fellowship. In America at present lies the best hope of the reconciliation of Christendom. And where the best hope of its reconciliation lies, there lies the best hope of the propagation of its faith. India has not been converted from Rome or Canterbury; perhaps she may be converted from San Francisco.
When dogma is gone a rational theology will rise. It was well that America could not have a theology when theology would have ministered to sectarian dogmatism. It was well that she could not have a church art and a ritual, while church art and ritual would have ministered to superstition.
It is in the West, perhaps, that the religious mind is most free, that sectarian dogma has least power, that Christianity has most gone out of the churches which had ​been its temples, and threatened to become its graves, into the general life of the community at large. Yet the West, I believe, is not irreligious. One Western man, at all events, raised from a low estate to the dizziest elevation, and there set to contend with appalling perils, was kept calm and wise by his strong sense of the constant presence and the over-ruling providence of God. If I am not misinformed, there is a great craving among the Western people for theological truth of a certain kind. Talk to them of the questions that come before our Ecclesiastical Courts and they will probably pay you little attention: but if you have anything to say in singleness of purpose about the great and vital truths of religion, there, if I mistake not, are the ears that will hear and the hearts that will understand you.
Christianity, as the religion of light, has always—always at least where her own light has not been turned to darkness—preached and practised the duty of education. The Reformers, appealing from tradition to individual reason and conscience, and to the Written Word, were great revivers of this duty. Of popular education, in fact, they may be said to have been the founders; for the educational charity of the middle ages was, for the most part, practically confined to poor children destined for the clerical order. The common school in America is the offspring of the Puritan church. To adapt it to a society of various creeds it has been in a certain sense secularised, but it still retains a religious character, as do the motives which support it, and is a bond not only of social and political but of Christian union in the nation. There are, I doubt not, great local inequalities and grave general defects in American education. In the higher education ​unquestionably there are grave defects, arising partly from the excess of the democratic spirit, which will not suffer academical authority to be exercised to the needful extent, and lavishes literary and scientific degrees through unqualified institutions, which afford no security for the proper tests. But America is the land in which the duty of educating the people has been most distinctly recognised, and most universally performed; in which, let me add, that duty has been performed most for its own sake, and least with the object of training children up in allegiance to any political or ecclesiastical system. And the nation receives its reward in high political intelligence pervading the whole people, and in industry which is the source of doubled wealth, because it is not only active but skilful, and not only skilful but inventive. The Patent Museum, at Washington, bears striking testimony to the inventiveness of American industry. The mansion of the President, at Washington, has now twice borne striking testimony to the political intelligence by which the whole people is pervaded, and which can, of a farmer or mechanic, make a ruler, the peer of those who were born to rule.
The first Christian society had all things in common. So for a time had the Puritan settlement in New England. This was in each case a primitive state destined soon to give way to the exigencies of existing civilisation. But perhaps before the final consummation of Christian history that primitive state may again be virtually realised, not by violence or sudden revolution, but through the gradual operation of Christian influences, which, whenever they decisively prevail, without taking away the landmarks of property, transmute proprietorship into duty. Possibly the communistic aspirations which break forth whenever the ​soul of Christian society is deeply moved may not, after all, be pure chimeras, but only chimerical anticipations of a result as yet indefinitely distant. Be this as it may, Christianity, if it does not absolutely exact, does certainly love as fair a distribution as may be of this world’s goods among those who are equal members of the Christian brotherhood. She abhors at least the hideous extremes of wealth and destitution. She abhors the sight of sumptuous palaces tenanted by Christians, with other Christians starving at their gates. The soul in truth is not so independent of the body that Christian aspirations and Christian excellence can easily exist where the whole being of great masses of the people is absorbed in the grim struggle with hunger. A very large proportion of crime is the offspring of want, and can be practically removed only by giving bread to the people. And how great an obstacle to Christianity are the feelings produced in the hearts of multitudes by the daily pressure of an unjust lot! How many evil tempers against which Christian ministers preach are inevitably aggravated by institutions which the preachers think it their political duty to support! In the United States the distribution of worldly goods is probably more equal, and the means of a decent livelihood are more assured to all than in any other country. Poverty, saving among the newly arrived emigrants, is rare; want of bread almost unknown, except as the consequence of vice. There are no workhouses full of penal paupers, nor multitudes of labourers outside the workhouses living with penal pauperism always in view. The inmates of the public almshouses, even in the great cities, are few in number, and, for the most part, as I was told, not Americans by birth; nor has American society been scared by the terrible cancer of ​indigence into treating destitution as half a crime. The houses seem those of one vast middle class. Nowhere do you see palaces; and, generally speaking, the eye of the European visitor looks around in vain for the hovels of the poor. The quarters of the Irish and German emigrants in the great seaboard cities (especially those of the Irish, who linger in their helplessness where they land) were the only haunts of misery and squalor that met my eye. I saw nothing so bad as the low quarters of Liverpool or of London in the cities; nothing approaching to the cabins of the English, much less to those of the Irish peasantry in the country. This is partly due to the bounty of nature in a rich and virgin land, which helps to solve so many difficulties in America, as, in justice to European legislators, we must always bear in mind. But it is also partly the effect of just laws. In the transit to the new world primogeniture and entail were left behind.
In England, the place of the old English yeoman knows him no more. In his stead the great proprietor reigns. But in the prairies of Illinois is a tract of deep rich soil, stretching for hundreds of miles each way in one vast plain, with only slight swells of undulation and without a stone for the plough to strike against—an ocean of cornland, monotonous to the eye, yet redeemed from dreariness by its glorious fruitfulness, which seems to bid all that hunger in the earth come there and be fed. Through the midst of it runs the railway, bringing down for the first time all the implements and resources of scientific agriculture into the virgin wilderness, and, like the Nile in its course through Egypt, turning everything round it into fertility and wealth. From the handling of those harvests stately cities have risen where forty years ago the Indian ​wigwams stood. There the English yeoman has found his home again. There he once more tills his own land, often broad lands, and once more lives frank and free among his peers. The dry American air has made his once burly frame more spare and sinewy: enterprise and education have developed his forehead, and lent keenness to his eye. But he still retains his solid English virtues, his kindliness, his good sense, his reverence for the law, and to judge by the Sunday aspect of his villages, his fear of God. He is still formidable to his foes under Grant and Sherman, as he was when he drew the bow with Edward and the Black Prince. Still, too, he loves his country, restless and ever moving westward though he be. Boys did the work of men in Illinois while her brave husbandmen were gone by thousands and tens of thousands to the war: and by the side of her villages is many a grave tenanted by the slain, brought from distant battle fields to protest against the calumny that hirelings only fought for the government of the people. It is a good thing to go to Greece and Italy and to look with grateful reverence on the monuments of the illustrious past: and it is a good thing also to go to Illinois and see the blessing of heaven resting on the future. No doubt this prosperity depends on the abundance of unoccupied and fertile land; and even that exhaustless store must some day be exhausted: but by that time perhaps great problems will have been solved.
A popular novelist, from whose unauthentic page Englishmen I suspect draw many of their notions of America, has represented the Americans as not honouring labour. If they do not, they are not good Christians; for Christianity bids all its professors work if they would eat, forbidding any man to live in mere uselessness by the ​labour of his fellow. But here, as in many other cases, as in the stories of duelling and stabbing, what was true only of the Slave States has been carelessly said of the Free. In the Free States probably labour is more honoured, idleness more despised, than in any other country in the world. Very rare are the instances, if my observation was correct, of men, however wealthy, who are merely living in luxury on their riches and adding nothing to the common store. As in Italy of old, so in America now, the merchant, however large the fortune he may have secured, seems almost always to retain his connection with commerce; and like the Bardi, the Pitti, and the founders of the house of Medici, to act as a chief of industry and trade. However high men have risen, they are proud to own that it was by labour, even manual labour, that they rose. To have split rails with his own hands was in the eyes of Northern men a proud addition to Mr. Lincoln’s escutcheon, and a recommendation to the highest office in the State. That the American community is immensely wealthy, its bitterest enemies cannot deny; and if labour were not honoured, whence could the wealth come?
In Europe divisions of class are sharp, as we feel to our cost whenever any political or social question is approached. And they run all down the scale. The farmer is an aristocrat, too often a very haughty aristocrat to the labourer; the great tradesman to the small. And each class is ever dreading the claims and struggling against the pretensions of those beneath it. In America class divisions, though by no means extinct, are comparatively faint, and the jealousies and dangers which they entail are mitigated in proportion. All are politically equal, all are comparatively on a level in education and even in ​property; any man may rise rapidly, and numbers are daily rising from the lowest round of the ladder to the chief places in commerce and the highest honours of the State. Equality, therefore, is the rule of life. It is the rule, as inequality is with us, throughout society. The farm labourer lives as an equal at his employer’s table, and I have seen very well-dressed children, the children I was told of wealthy parents, in school with the shoeless children of the emigrant. Perhaps in outward things the rule is sometimes carried to a superstitious excess, which is apt to provoke an inward reaction, as the outward deference exacted by rank does here. But on the whole I am persuaded that it is a happy rule. The fusion of classes fills society with a feeling of security, not so familiar here. It opens a wider and more varied range of social enjoyment, and better opportunities for the formation of social character to every right-minded man. I cannot conceive any countervailing benefits which an exclusive class, set on an eminence by itself, can either receive or confer. I know there are rich men in America who feel that wealth is not enough honoured, and who, while they conform to equality in public, recoil from it in secret, and are glad to come over to European society for comfort. It may be that wealth suffers a little there from the reaction of feeling after its domination here. But, on the whole, I confess it seemed to me that supposing a rich man to be a man of sense and capable of deriving enjoyment from the public welfare, equality added at least as much to his happiness as to that of the poor.
The relations between employer and employed again, so far as I could gather, though not free from difficulty or discord, are upon the whole sounder and more kindly than ​in this country. Strikes were rare till the derangement of prices caused by the Legal Tender Act put the world of industry out of joint. They were generally the newcomers from Europe, I was told, who resorted to violent modes of raising wages; the native American workman, in whom the real tendency of the community appears, usually taking, in case of difference, a more rational and amicable course. There seems to be an approach on the whole to an adjustment of mutual rights between the two classes less by the the angry clash of adverse interests and more by intelligence and the common sense of justice. And, if it be so, assuredly this is in itself a sufficient cause for wishing well to the great community of labour which is tracing out for us the better way.
The Irish form a low and dangerous class. But this dark stream of barbarism has its shameful source, not in America, but in misgoverned Ireland. America receives as much of it as she can in her common schools, finds it work and good wages, civilises it, and, not without trouble and peril to herself, converts the Irish pauper into an orderly and thriving citizen. It is an office for which, if we were disposed to be grateful to her, we shall owe her some gratitude. The last news I heard in this country, before embarking for America, was that of the Belfast riots. The dominant church of the minority and the oppressed church of the people were tearing each other to pieces in the name of religion. The effects of this, and of the alien land system which we persist in maintaining in Ireland, on the Irish character are seen again upon the other side of the Atlantic, but they are not to be charged upon American institutions.
One observes, indeed, in America, a sort of aristocracy ​of races. The native American, with the English and Scandinavian immigrants, being at the head of the industrial scale; the Irish and the Southern Germans at the bottom: but it is a beneficent aristocracy, under which the lower races are being constantly trained by a necessary tutelage to the level of the higher.
The native American, generally speaking, is unwilling, from independence of feeling, as well as on account of the high remuneration of industry, to become a domestic servant; and that part is usually filled by the Irish. The consequence is a difficulty in getting good servants, which to most people from Europe seems a fatal defect in the structure of American society. The evil, however, if it be one, extends to our own colonies. This scarcity of servants leads to more self-help, more contrivances for supplying the place of servants’ hands in houses, the total absence of large establishments, a great reduction of the number of persons out of the whole population whose labour is expended in waiting on the rich. Whether it may not lead to some more radical changes in the whole system of domestic servitude, and whether these changes will be beneficial to society or otherwise, remains yet to be seen.
The rate of wages which has been noticed as in part the cause of the scarcity of domestic servants, gives rise generally to a multitude of inventions for replacing manual labour by machinery. And this again tends to raise the condition of the labouring man. From being himself a machine, or, in the expressive phrase, a hand, he becomes the skilled manager of a machine. As these American inventions find their way to Europe, the same effect will, in some measure, be produced here. Skilled labour will be required by agriculture in place of unskilled, and the condition of our labourers will be raised.
​It is a special mark of a Christian as distinguished from a heathen community, to care for all its members, not only for those who can maintain themselves and contribute to the general welfare, but for the sick, the infirm, and even for the criminal. America is the land of benevolent institutions, to which not only much money but a more precious tribute of voluntary labour is paid. It is the land too of mild criminal legislation and of prison reform. In its charities and in its model prisons, as well as in the opulence and comfort of its prim Quaker streets, Philadelphia stands a noble monument of the Society of Friends. Whether the system employed for the regeneration of the criminal has been in all things wise is a different question. There is no doubt such a thing as pseudo-philanthropy; though it would be well if those who have denunciations of pseudo-philanthropists always in their mouths, would tell us, and show us by their own example, what genuine philanthropy is, that we may not be in danger of relapsing altogether into savagery and barbarism. But at all events, the system is an attempt to redeem the most abject, and at the same time often the most sorely tempted and the most unfortunate portion of humanity; it is a genuine victory of the Christian spirit over those cruel fears which lead society to be lavish of punishment. Democratic justice, as well as philanthropy, contributed to the change. Our criminal law, in the last century, was the law of a privileged class, which hanged the rabble wholesale for petty larceny, while it indulged itself freely in duelling and all the vices of a gentleman. It is true that the benevolence and humanity, unquestionably characteristic of American nature, are partly virtues of prosperity—qualities not of character but of circumstance. The same people who are ​so charitable to those in need, and so unwilling to inflict cruel punishments on the guilty, are often criminally reckless of human life in the pursuit of gain. But it is thus that human virtue finds its feet, propped by circumstance, before it learns to stand by moral force alone.
Americans are supposed to be slaves to money. It is true that many Americans are slaves to money, and are hurried by the eagerness with which they pursue it through lives of unrest into early graves. It could scarcely be otherwise when human covetousness was excited by the opening wealth of a new world. It is not wonderful that the looks of the throng should be keener, and their steps more hurried in the mart of New York than in the mart of London. Nor is it wonderful that such immense opportunities for speculation should lead to commercial gambling, and this again to a looseness of commercial morality in certain circles—to what extent I must leave it to commercial men to say, though it cannot be to so great an extent as is often asserted, otherwise credit, and with credit trade, would cease. The evil, I believe, is at least as rife in our colonies as in the United States. But as among the merchants of Florence, in old times, so in America, the wealth which is eagerly and laboriously made is generously spent, and often on public objects. A successful trader in an aristocratic country buys a great estate, and founds a noble family: a successful trader in America founds a public institution. The great Italian republic never poured out her wealth more freely in her gallant struggles for the independence of Italy against the tyrants of Milan, than did the merchants of the North in struggling against the slave-owner for American freedom. That commerce must be mean is a feudal superstition; ​less meanness commonly goes with the wealth that has been earned by labour than with that which is inherited and not earned. There is, if I mistake not, many a spirit among the great merchants of America as magnificent as that of any Cosmo or Lorenzo, though the magnificence of the American may not yet be guided by the same taste as that of the Florentine. Nor is wealth the thing, generally speaking, most worshipped by American society. Intellectual distinction is generally most worshipped. No owner of millions would have had the reception given to Mr. Dickens. The worship of intellect may itself be foolish and even wrong, it may be ill-directed, and assume ridiculous and repulsive forms. But it is a different thing from the worship of wealth.
Where wealth is luxury will be. Where wealth is suddenly made by men of little education or refinement luxury will be coarse. No doubt among the wealthy upstarts of New York and other great cities, sensualism, unregulated by taste, does assume its coarsest, most repulsive, and, therefore, perhaps least dangerous form. No doubt the world of mock-fashion in America does justly excite the scorn and disgust of the real world of fashion in Europe. I have seen myself figures which would have moved laughter in an English pantomime. But among the people of the better sort, however wealthy, I found, together with the greatest hospitality, genuine simplicity of life. The very scarcity of servants keeps ostentation, at all events, within bounds; and public opinion is opposed to a display of wealth, partly, it may be, from democratic jealousy, but partly, as I think, from feelings of a better and a more Christian kind.
Again, Americans are said to be wanting in courtesy. ​That there are many discourteous people in America we may be sure; and as aristocracy is apt to beget the rudeness of insolence, so democracy is apt to beget the rudeness of self-assertion. But though a student may not be a very shrewd observer of manners, or entitled to much attention on that subject, I must say, that wherever I went in America, whether I was among friends or strangers, I found myself among a kind and essentially courteous people. Never, when seeking information, or any of those good offices which a man in a strange country is sure to need, did I fail to meet with politeness and attention. No doubt to secure courtesy in America you must cordially accept equality; but in what community is it not necessary cordially to accept the leading principle of society if you wish to be courteously treated? Manners in a certain sense are free. You are not required to put on a dress coat when you dine with a friend. But as a general rule, it did not seem to me that there was among Americans a want of mutual respect, or an unwillingness to pay reasonable deference to real social claims of any kind. In truth, equality is the necessary condition of courtesy in the proper sense of the word. Where there is a difference of social rank there may be condescension on one side and homage on the other; but courtesy can only exist between equals. The respect for women in America is notoriously carried to a height which some observers have even pronounced to be absurd, and injurious to the grace of the female character itself; though if this be so, like other exaggerations of untrained sentiment, it will find its level in course of time. I have been told that among the rural democracy of New England you may see the rudiments of finer manners than aristocracy ever produced. He who told me this was an ​enthusiastic lover of his country. Yet I am not prepared to say that his statement was untrue till I have seen more of the American people. And if my credulity is thought absurd, I must appeal from those travellers who have lived in American hotels and steamboats to those, much fewer I suspect in number, who have lived in American homes.
It is often asserted that family relations are bad in the United States, that there is a want of filial affection and a want of attachment to home. That this is not always the case my own eyes are witnesses. No English home can be better or more beloved than some in which I have passed happy days in that country. That it is often the case in America, as well as in Europe, I can easily believe. I can easily believe, too, that in this case again, the excess of the democratic spirit is partly the cause of the evil, by enfeebling domestic authority and disparaging that modesty in youth which is the only portal to dignity of character in later years. But the independent manners of children arise, in some measure at least, from their being really independent of their parents, by beginning to earn their own bread so young. In our own colonies the same thing is seen, and the same complaints are made. And, if affection does not centre so much in the old hearth of the family, it is because in a new country, where the people are still half-emigrant, old hearths are not so common. Even here, our pictures of Christmas gatherings are drawn more from the mansions of the upper class than from the cottages of poorer families who have once dispersed in quest of bread. Besides, our sentiment on these points is a little too absolute. Some change must inevitably take place in these, among other relations, as the world moves on. The domestic tie must to some extent ​be superseded by the social. You cannot preserve in a modern community the domestic exclusiveness of the patriarch’s tent.
The morality of a nation, in the restricted sense of the term, is a point on which it is extremely difficult to speak with accuracy in the case of any nation. The difficulty is enhanced in the case of America, by the confusion of emigrant morality with that of the natives; the blending of which two elements renders it also peculiarly hard to read aright the statistics of crime. In a great commercial city such as New York there is sure to be plenty of vice, though the outward decency of that city, as you pass through its streets by night, strongly contrasts with the indecency of London. In no country, however, I believe, is the marriage-tie, on the whole, more reverenced or more strictly kept. Early marriage, which the circumstances of the people permit, and which appears to be almost universal, must in itself be a great safeguard against the evils of which moralists and social reformers are complaining here. Infanticide, that hideous ulcer of our society, to the existence of which we have been terribly awakened, but which we scarcely dare to probe, could hardly be very prevalent in a land where children are almost an unmixed blessing. There being no primogeniture, there are no younger sons brought up in habits of luxury, and without the means of marriage. All human virtue is comparative, and it appears that the sanitary records of the American army denote comparative virtue. Of this I feel sure, that vice which shows a bold front in the high places of society here, would shrink abashed from public opinion in the United States.
In a country where all the people have, from the rate ​of wages, an almost unlimited command of drink and stimulants, habits of coarse indulgence are sure to be too common. This is naturally the case in an especial manner among the emigrants, unaccustomed to the command of such luxuries, and untrained to self-control. Popular effort, however, to reform popular vice is more common than it is with us. The Maine liquor-law may not have been wise or very effective, but it denotes a desire on the part of the masses to exert self-control; and I am inclined to think that we shall see this desire further displayed.
I have not said, in touching on each of these main features of American society, this is a Christian feature; but the remark would suggest itself spontaneously if what I have said on each point is true.
I speak of the political institutions last, not because they are the least important subject, but because this is the natural order. Political institutions are the expression of national character, though they re-act powerfully on the character, of which they are the expression. No community but one of diffused property and intelligence, socially united and sound in its morality, could support perfectly free institutions on so large a scale. Not the special form of the government, but the comparative absence of necessity for government, is the thing to be noted and admired, politically speaking, in the United States. The proper sphere of government is compulsion. The necessity for it in any given community is in inverse proportion to the social virtue and the intelligence of the people. The policeman, the executioner, the tax-gatherer, these are its proper ministers, and the representatives of what we call its majesty. It is destined to decrease as Christianity increases, and as force is superseded by social affection, and spontaneous ​combination for the public good. The more a community can afford to dispense with government the more Christian it must be, and no great country has yet been able to dispense with government so much as America.
No man of any depth of character will worship democracy any more than he will worship monarchy or aristocracy. All alike are embodiments of force: monarchy is the rule of one over all; aristocracy, of the few over the many; democracy, of the many over the few. An unjust democracy is perhaps the most deeply wicked of all governments, because so many must be implicated in the injustice. It is a fearful moral evil, compared with which a tyranny may be almost regarded as a physical visitation. And, at the best, democracy, like the other forms of governnment, has special vices of its own: it is beset by faction, by corruption, by popular passion, by demagogism, by envious ostracism of merit, by oppression of classes which are not numerically strong. American democracy has not been free from these things, or from the odious self-worship of the sovereign people. We have already glanced at the bad influence, flowing from the same source, which is visible in social and domestic life. I can well understand that men of dignified and refined character may shrink from politics, and wish, as the philosopher says, “to stand under the wall while the cloud of dust whirls by;” though I cannot deem it the greatest of evils that the highest intellect of the country should not be devoted to work which, under ordinary circumstances, is very far from being the highest. The evil has been aggravated by the revolutionary bias given to the national character through the rupture with the English monarchy, by the influx of French Jacobinism in connection with the same event, ​and by the error, as I presume to think it, committed by the founders of the constitution, in imitating the great centralised goverments of military Europe, and creating an elective presidency which, with the patronage it commands, must be the prize and the stimulant of intrigue, faction, and personal ambition. It would be difficult to stand at Washington, amidst the abortive streets of that factitious capital, and not to feel that they are typical of a great political misconception. What Providence intends in the New World apparently is not a mere reproduction of the European nations on a colossal scale, but a great development of humanity, for which Federation, with its infinite power of expansion, its multiplied centres of independent life, its freedom of local action, seems to be the destined mould. It appeared to me that so far as American institutions were local, they were good: good, at least, in full proportion to the virtue, or, to speak plainly, to the Christianity of the people in the state or district, and no institutions can be more. The town meetings, where the people manage their own affairs, and which form the solid basis of American politics, are probably the soundest institutions in the world. Nearly as much may be said of the State legislatures in the better States. It is in the central government that such evil as there is has hitherto had its main seat. There are the prizes for which the great parties, with all their tyrannical and unpatriotic organisations, are formed. There are the “spoils” which, according to the evil saying of Jackson, “belong to the victor” in the unhallowed strife. There the great infirmity of all representative systems makes itself fully felt. The people would generally chose the best candidate, if he were placed before them. In the choice of the candidates lies the difficulty. ​The readiest to come forward are not the best men, but those who most desire the prize; and the selection is practically made by a party machinery which is apt to preclude all freedom of choice, and to force upon the electors the most violent partisan. Washington, itself a mere political and official city, removed from all the tempering influences of general society, seems the inevitable scene of cabal and corruption. I do not shut my eyes to these things. But it must be remembered that the action of the central government is in ordinary times very limited, and that the evils connected with it by no means sink deep into American life.
Again, I do not shut my eyes to the evils of universal suffrage, when extended not only to the educated and prosperous American, owning property or receiving high wages, and fully competent to exercise all the powers of a citizen, but to the ignorant and penniless emigrant, Irish or German. This is a mischief which has arisen from the desire in each state to create a large number of voters, that it may be largely represented in the central government. Possibly the increased firmness of tone which has been produced in American politics by this struggle, and the evidence which the Irish have given of their political character, may lead to some salutary measure for the preservation of the franchise from abuse, and for preventing these wanderers, while still in their uncivilised state, from destroying with their own hands the blessings which, when civilised, they are destined to enjoy. Meantime it is a fallacy, derived from the too exclusive study of New York correspondents of our newspapers, to suppose that the Irish mob of the great cities governs America. It might almost as well be said that the Irish ​mob of London and Liverpool governs England. The Irish, though they carry the city, cannot carry the state of New York. The power of the country, as well as the largest portion of its worth, in the last resort resides in the yeomen, who, when a real emergency calls, can always be trusted to come forward in overwhelming force, and with a truly patriotic spirit, to guard the great interests of the country.
Hitherto, however, there has been another disturbing element, more serious than Irish violence itself, and one for which the free institutions of America are as little responsible as they are for Irish character. We must suspend our judgment of the American government till we have seen it fairly at work under better auspices than those of the Democratic party. The two presidents of the Republican party whom we have seen augur well for the political future.
English notions of the political character of the Americans are naturally formed mainly from the American journals, or rather they are formed from the worst passages of the worst of those journals, carefully extracted for the English market. The spirit of political journalism in America is necessarily in the main that of the central institutions, and it often enough gives one occasion to raise the question as to the benefits of an anonymous press. It does this not least when it is immolating the character of other nations to the self-esteem of the American people. The writing is, generally speaking, inferior to ours; the calling of a journalist not being so distinct or so well paid there as it is here. I will venture, however, to say that there is nothing in American journalism so profligate or so coarse that a match may not easily be found ​for it in the most aristocratic journals of this country. The United States having, fortunately for them, no real metropolis, there is no metropolitan press ruling the opinion of the whole country, and itself liable to the secret influences of the central government and of the circles of the capital. Nor is the press in America so poweful either for good or evil as it is here. The government being itself the authentic organ of the popular will does not stand so much in awe of self-constituted tribunes of the people.
Without a master, without a governing class, this great community is a law to itself. That it is, indeed, a law to itself, that American freedom is not anarchy, anyone who has seen the country must know. If the persons and the property of men were not secure, how could industry thrive? Whence could the wealth arise? In no monarchy or aristocracy, I venture to say, is the reverence for law among the people so deep. If you asked Americans for what they were fighting, nine out of ten would tell you that they were fighting to vindicate the law. And surely a great community which is a law to itself is a glorious thing: not only in itself, but still more in what it denotes. It marks a great step in the progress of humanity. It marks a great advance in the influence of Christianity. It confirms the Christian’s faith in man.
There had been nothing like it before in history. Greece and Rome, though incomparably superior in their moral and intellectual productions to the monarchies of the East, though presenting in the intensity of their patriotism the narrow prototype of an ampler fellowship to come, were, as was said before, really republics of masters, the mass of the people being slaves. The free cities of Italy, of Germany, of Flanders, produced in virtue of their freedom ​fruits of civilisation, as well as of industry, far nobler and more abundant than those which were produced by great feudal kingdoms. But their liberties were mere burgher liberties, deeply tainted with the tyranny of guild over guild, of city over city, of the inhabitants of the cities over the peasantry beneath their sway; based upon no broad principles of equity or respect for human rights, and doomed by their vices to an extinction which we mourn for the sake of art, but which we cannot call unjust. Nor had these municipalities ever entirely cast off the idea of allegiance to a suzerain, or pronounced in unfaltering accents the name of freedom. The republicanism of Switzerland was rather a geographical accident than an effort of humanity to rise to a nobler state; and this also was deeply tainted with aristocracy and with the domination of canton over canton. The republic of Holland was the noble but transient offspring of a rebellion against a foreign master, whose tyranny provoked resistance and whose overthrow left the provinces for a time without a sovereign. The nation of the Old World which has approached most nearly to a commonwealth, though under monarchial and aristocratical forms, is that of which, in the hour when the love of the public good was strongest in the hearts of its citizens and their political character at its grandest elevation, the American Republic was born.
In its external relations, also, the American commonwealth was a new birth of time. It kept no standing army, and, as far as the Free States were concerned, cherished no thought of conquest, though the military spirit had been excited, and a somewhat thrasonical element introduced into the national education and character by the first Revolutionary war. It was the Democratic ​party, under Southern leaders, that made the war of 1810; which was resisted by the best spirits of the North. It was the South that dragged the Union into the attack upon Mexico. Every aggression—every scheme of aggression—was Southern. From Southern politicians installed at Washington proceeded all the insolent menaces and all the maxims of violence which have been so carelessly visited on the heads of their opponents and successors.
Grow the American Federation must. Its people know that it must grow: and diplomacy will do well at once to acquiesce in the natural and inevitable course of things. But the growth will be that of peaceful expansion and attraction; not of forcible annexation, of which I believe no considerable party at the North dreams or has ever dreamed. The British North American colonies will in time, and probably at no very distant time, unite themselves politically to the group of states, of which they are already by race, position, commercial ties, and the characteristics of their institutions a part. No one can stand by the side of the St. Lawrence and doubt that in the end they will do this; but they will be left to do it of their own free will.
Even as regards the Indians, it will be found, I believe, that it is on the South, not on the North, that the blame of the most flagrant aggressions rests. By the New Englanders greater and more sincere efforts were made on the whole to reclaim and Christianise these tribes than have been made by colonists in the case of any other savage race. But here disturbing influences from an extraneous source came in. Towards the close of the seventeenth century England and France went to war, armed the savage tribes on both sides in their American dependencies, and ​put an end to the work of civilisation which down to that date religion and philanthropy had not unhopefully carried on. Before that time there had been only two wars between the New Englanders and the Indians in half a century. A spirit more akin to that of Eliot and Penn is now again in the ascendant, and a fresh hope dawns for the Indian tribes.
No doubt American society, like European society, has its peculiar evils. It has some which even a foreign observer sees, and many more, we may be sure, which a foreign observer does not see, but which Americans themselves know and feel, and which give birth to political and social complaints there as mournful in tone as any that are heard here. It is not by sudden and vigorous bounds, but by slow and tottering steps that humanity advances. Probably in many things the balance, here inclined too much one way, is there inclined too much the other way, and needs time and training to adjust it to the point of perfect equity. Such of the national virtues as are virtues of circumstance, have yet to be proved in a severer school; while of the faults and absurdities some at least are those of youth, and as the nation advances in years will pass away. After all America is not a new world, but the embryo of a new world. Many things deemed peculiar to it are common to all colonies, and will be modified as the colony becomes a nation. Of the energy of the people, hitherto almost absorbed in the work of reclaiming a continent, a larger share will be spared for learning, art, and science. With higher cultivation finer tastes will be introduced, vulgarity will be purged away, extravagance will be chastened, more independent intellects will arise, and the servility of thought, of which ​there are just complaints at present, will cease to prevail. The restless movement westward will come to a stand. More settled habits and associations will be formed. A sounder and more effective philosophy will lay its tranquillising hand on the feverish pulse of political and commercial life. If justice prevails here, Ireland will become a home to her own people, and Irish emigration will cease to flow in so dangerous a current. The volume of emigration generally will perhaps be diminished, if governments in Europe grow wiser; and the American people, as a whole, will wear less the aspect of new comers still hastening on to fresh abodes. The habits of man will be better adapted to the climate of that continent, and a limit will be set to the nervous excitability produced by it, the influence of which is at present great, and more important, perhaps, in its effects than is generally supposed. At the same time new elements and influences will come into play, as the vast federation of the North American continent, the colossal lineaments of which are at present but faintly discernible, begins to assume its perfect form. The centre of power and importance will be transferred, as it is now fast shifting, to the mighty West. The federal institutions framed for the thirteen old colonies can hardly fail to undergo some change. The infant nation has hitherto been in many things like a child in an untouched orchard of nature, filling its arms with golden fruit, and letting them drop again as it hurried on to the next bough. The boughs, though laden, will be stript in time, the boundary of the orchard will be reached, the manhood of the nation will come, and bring with it new cares and perhaps difficulties as yet unforeseen. But the past can never return: Feudalism, ​Primogeniture, State Churches, are left behind for ever. Here was at all events a grand experiment; here was, for the first time, a great community, founded on the free allegiance of all its members to the common good; here was a great hope of Humanity, its newest and probably its fairest hope, though hope is not fulfilment, and though they to whom it is committed are human.
But effort is the law of the world. No hope reaches its fulfilment—no character, whether of man or nation, is formed without a struggle. For the American commonwealth, in its turn, a great trial was prepared.
If New England was, in the language of its founders, emphatically a plantation, not of trade but of religion; Virginia was as emphatically a plantation, not of religion but of trade. It was a plantation of gold-seekers, recruited by convicts. Afterwards there were added a few Cavaliers: but those who wish for Cavaliers should seek them rather in the poor white population of Barbadoes, whither they were exported in great numbers by Cromwell. The aristocracy of the South sprang from a different source. In Virginia and her sister States, partly from the climate, partly and principally from the character of their colonists. Slavery fixed its abode. By a fatal compromise with evil, sure, if God is strong and just, to bring down in the end a full measure of retribution, it was received into the constitution of the new Republic—received by men who had the highest doctrines of liberty and equality on their lips, and had just vindicated their own rights as freemen with the sword. But then it wore the harmless aspect of an aged and sickly man, whose life could not be brought at once to a violent close, but who would soon die in the course of nature. In those days the production of cotton by slave ​labour was unprofitable. The cotton gin was invented; the production of cotton by slave labour became a source of immense profit; opinion at the South, if it had ever been sincerely in favour of abolition, (which in spite of the loud professions of Southern Republicans is somewhat doubtful), underwent a complete change. That which had before been an evil, doomed to speedy extirpation, became inevitable, good, divine. A whole group of theological and philosophical theories sprang up to prove that what covetousness desired, God had decreed; and to show what intellectual feats hypocrisy can achieve when it is stimulated by the love of gold. And soon casting off the disguise of age and mortal sickness, under which he had crept into the commonwealth, the Demon towered up in colossal strength, and laid his terrible hand on the moral life of the American people.
As Northern society was in its structure and principles essentially Christian, Southern society was as essentially anti-Christian, and at the same time and for the same reasons essentially barbarous, though it might profess, and even unctuously profess, a belief in the Christian creed; though it might keep a Christian clergy to preach Slavery; though perhaps, if Secession had won the day, it would have had an Established Church for the same purpose. In its slave code it denied the fundamental principles of Christianity. It was in a literal sense based upon iniquity. Hideous as was its cruelty, at least as hideous and as subversive of Christian morality was its lust. It denied to its victim the conditions alike of moral and of intellectual manhood. It denied him what the worst of heathen slave states had not denied him, the hope of emancipation. For the purposes of its rapacity and pride, it was systematically ​effacing the image of the Creator from several millions of human beings, and this not without religious pretences, not without prayer. Almost as degrading to the poor whites as to the negro—morally, perhaps, even more degrading—it immolated the whole community to the vicious ends of a few wealthy men. Against the distinct command of Christianity, it branded labour with dishonour; and within its pale the meanest white preferred a life of penury, wandering, sponging on the great planters, to honest industry—the lot and badge of the negro slave. Instinctively hating the light which Christianity loves, as well as dreading the growth of intelligence in the slave or in the dependent white, it excluded popular education and every source of popular enlightenment; and when Secession had fairly let loose its tongue, it spoke of them openly with devilish hatred. By brutalising labour, it often blasted the fertility of the very soil which it occupied, and the forest is seen growing in Virginia over the traces of ancient cultivation. Pretending to set intellect free from manual toil and to dedicate it to higher ends, it produced no intellectual fruits whatever, except a statecraft, the sole object of which was to maintain and propagate Slavery. It could not produce intellectual fruit, because the noble aspirations which lead to the discovery of truth, the tenderness which creates intellectual beauty, could not dwell with brutality and injustice. The traveller in its realms found no books, no musical instruments, no means of culture. It generated a barbarism, the deeper because it was not original but relapsed, which met the civilisation of the Free States on the boundary line between them, like a dark element meeting a brighter, and was plainly depicted on the very faces of the Southern ​soldiery. It was full of violence and bloodshed, of stabbing, duelling, and lynch law, the offspring of the passions fostered by domestic tyranny. So jealously was the den of Slavery closed and its mysteries concealed, that till the Northern armies penetrated into the South, the horrors of the system were not fully known. Not the mutual confidence which reigns at the North, and produces there an almost reckless freedom of social intercourse, but suspicion, bred of conscious wrong, brooded over the realm of Slavery. The face of every stranger was scrutinised, his words and demeanour watched. Nor was silence enough: to a public conscience so burdened, silence was a reproach; you must speak in favour of slavery, or feel its knife. No doubt there was lavish hospitality, such as brought golden words from those who shared it, in the houses of Southern planters, as there always is where prodigality is fed by the sweat of another man’s brow. No doubt the graces of Southern ladies often won them admirers and partisans; so did those of the Roman ladies who were in the habit of crucifying slaves. The proudest of aristocracies, this society was called. Let those who gave it that name cease to accuse others of traducing aristocratic institutions.
As a power, Slavery was, and would always have been, fiercely aggressive. It ravened for land to supply the place of that which its ruinous culture had exhausted, and it could not bear the reproachful and contagious neighbourhood of free institutions. While it ruled the foreign policy of the States, that policy was always menacing and piratical. The North could not have lived at peace with it; England could not have lived at peace with it, unless she had sunk, as some of her sons would have had her sink, to to the level of its degradation.
​There had been no iniquity like it before. The Slave States of antiquity sinned, and their sin was their death; but they did not sin in the light, and therefore their corruption was less deep. The idea of a common humanity transcending all divisions of tribe and race had in those times scarcely dawned upon the mind of man, and the pang of conscience was hardly felt in reducing men of another tribe or race to Slavery. There was even a kind of justice in Slavery as it then existed. In an age of universal war the slave, while he sustained the community by his labour, was exempted from the dangers and hardships of military service, which it was the lot of every freeman to undergo. And, moreover, Roman Slavery became in its later days a great channel both of education and of emancipation.
The political character of the Southern Oligarch however was closely akin to that of the slave-owning republicans of antiquity, little as he resembled them in their culture and their classic grace. It was full of the same rebellious pride, the same fierce spirit of self-assertion, combined with the same haughty contempt for the rights of others. The land of slavery was the land of tyrannicide. Sic semper tyrannis was the motto of Virginia; and every one was a tyrant who restrained the tyranny of the slave-owner. The patriotism of the North, so far as it approaches its ideal, is that of a Christian community; the patriotism of the South was that of a heathen republic.
And the great political quality of the slave-owning republic was to be its stability. It was to remain for ever unchanged, while all things were in a state of change around it. Hope of piratical aggrandisement at the expense of its neighbours it had. Other hope it had none, ​either for the master or for the slave. The faith of that Christian community was faith in force, its charity Slavery, its hope despair.
The conflict between Slavery, thus erected into a powerful interest, and Freedom was irrepressible; the phrase has become hackneyed, because it is so true. The struggle began in the political field, and was there waged through a series of party encounters, of which this civil war was in fact only the culmination. In the political field Slavery found an organisation ready made for it, and a weapon prepared to its hands in the Democratic party. Washington and his friends had fought as Englishmen for the great charter. But there was another party, of which Jefferson was the leader, an offset not of English patriotism but of French Jacobinism, and like its parent stock in irreligion, in canting philanthropy, in lust of violence and blood. This party made the war of 1810, and carried into power General Jackson, the American counterpart of the Dantons and Santerres. The party of Washington and Hamilton were for a strong federal government. In opposition to them the Democrats held the doctrine of state-right—a doctrine in itself respectable, and, as I believe, sound; but held in an evil spirit, and perverted to evil ends. From this semblance of attachment to local and popular rights, it arrogated to itself the name Democratic. Under the organisation of this party the slave oligarchy extended itself. There it had as its allies and tools the lowest democratic element of the North, the Irish of New York and the other great cities, so that the worst spirit of oligarchy and the worst spirit of democracy were blended into a combination of evil as fell as ever menaced the the political life of a nation. The days of this party were ​days of violence at home as well as abroad. They produced abroad the Ostend manifesto, at home that worst of democratic excesses—the destruction of judicial independence by the institution of elective judges. Besides the slave-owners and the Irish, the party embraced a number of rich men at the North who sympathised socially with the slave-owner, and a body of hereditary partisans, with place-hunters not a few. The slave-owners were the leaders of the whole; they fought for a principle, and could afford to throw the pelf of office to their meaner allies. Never has a name been so abused as that of democratic when applied to this confederation. Yet that name stood the leaders in good stead. It drew to them, among other reinforcements, a number of exiles from European tyrannies for whom anything democratic had a charm. The ends of the party were well defined. Its discipline was perfect. It was led, like the Confederate armies in the beginning of the war, by men accustomed to command. It obtained complete possession of power, and established a political reign of terror. Many things conspired in its favour. The rapid growth of wealth was engendering a disregard of principle; for after all it is really hard, as the history of many a base surrender and betrayal has proved, for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. The interests of Slavery were supposed to be inextricably entwined with those of national wealth; the country was full of its commercial partners and its creditors. Its enemies became the enemies of the rich. From other causes faith was decaying, and the power of moral resistance which faith alone can sustain in extremity was growing weak. Good society was all on the same side. The Churches of the wealthier class, thinking no doubt that so long as ​they held fast to orthodoxy they might let morality go, or rather because they had no real faith in them, but only a traditional creed, bowed, under the hypocritical pretence of political neutrality, to the dominant iniquity of the hour. Conspicuous among them in compliance was that Church—the Church, as we have said, of wealth and fashion—the presence of which in America appears to our High-Churchmen the only redeeming feature in that God-forsaken world. Soon, even in New England, abolitionists were hunted down as noxious fanatics; the rich, and, as they call themselves, the respectable citizens, heading the mob which assailed them. The moral life of the community was fast ebbing away under the deadly pressure. The national legislature was gagged, and the press was in danger of being gagged on the question most vital to the well-being of the state. Men do not yet know what a crisis in the world’s history this was. The supreme moment seemed to have come, when Daniel Webster, a puny soul in a giant body of intellect, passed to the side of Slavery in hope of obtaining the Southern nomination to the presidency, which, however, the mocking fiend denied him, when he had sold his principles and his fame. Humanity will for ever honour the names of Theodore Parker and those who with him struggled in this the darkest hour of American history, at the cost of social excommunication, at the risk of personal violence, to stem the mingled tide of Slavery, materialism, and political atheism which was overwhelming the moral world, and beneath which, as Parker says in his funeral oration on Webster, everything had sunk, even the steeples of the highest churches, except the ark of God. Their indignation against dominant wrong may have provoked these men to the use of violent language. Their ​indignation against orthodox hypocrisy demurely pandering to the wickedness of wealth and power, may have provoked them to the use of language offensive to piety. Our criticism is easy, their struggle was hard.
It was not the opponents of Slavery, however, that roused the North at last, but the slave-owners themselves. Evil always contains in it the germ of its own destruction. The tyrannical violence of the slave-owner carried him beyond what subserviency could endure—his tendency to aggression beyond what apathy could overlook; while his uneasy conscience led him to exact securities for his institution, which were effectual only in multiplying and exasperating his enemies. The fugitive slave-law was a final appeal to whatever of morality and honour might linger in the heart of the nation. A captured slave, dragged back to the lash through the streets of a Northern city, was a sight to make the stones cry out against the sufferance of a debased people. Slavery, as it were, scourged on the reaction which finally bore Mr. Lincoln into power; and even Mr. Lincoln himself was in effect elected by the slave-owners, who might, with their democratic allies in the North have carried a moderate friend of Slavery, but chose to split the party, and let an avowed enemy become President, that they might have a pretext for civil war. An avowed enemy to Slavery Mr. Lincoln was, and steadfastly, though by constitutional means, did he seek its overthrow; yet he and his party, at the time of his election, hoped only for its territorial limitation. It was Slavery itself that would be satisfied with nothing short of its own destruction. The Kansas question had wound up both parties almost to the war-pitch. The assault on Mr. Sumner had already given the signal of violence. The slave-owners sprang to arms.
​We will not argue over again the question of constitutional law. What I have always said on that subject is, that if there was a constitutional right of secession, of which I can see no trace whatever in the language of the Constitution, this was not an exercise of that right; this was a conspiracy as dark and treacherous, as deeply tainted with abused confidence and betrayal of trust, as any conspiracy in history. The man who poisons his friend in the cup of hospitality is not more perfidious than were the public servants who used the power confided to them over the public arsenals clandestinely to disarm the country, and expose it defenceless to the meditated blow. But it may be urged, there is a natural right of rebellion, independent of written constitutions, which no republican or Liberal can gainsay. That there is a right of rebellion against hopeless tyranny, for the purpose of recovering freedom, I admit; I do not admit that there was a right of rebellion against a free government, under which no grievance was hopeless, for the purpose of making a great mass of its people slaves for ever. The negro-labourers of the South had no part in secession; it was made to rob them of their last hope of emancipation, and they were entitled to the protection of the State: so were the white people of Western Virginia and Eastern Tennessee, who, when they resisted secession, were coerced by the slave-owners as rebels. Moreover, it is, I am convinced, a mistake to think that secession was a mere separation. It would have proved, and the chief authors of the plot intended that it should prove, indefinite aggression. Not only would the Slave Empire have spread westwards and southwards over territories destined to be the seat of great free communities, and of the future of which the American commonwealth was the ​trustee. As I am persuaded, the Confederacy was not intended to remain for ever bounded on the North by a frontier so close to its capital. The old alliance with the anti-republican rich and with the democratic mob of the North, those commercial interests and connections the strength of which had been so fatally proved, the standing army which the Slave Confederacy would certainly have kept up and with which it would always have been ready to interpose in favour of its political allies, would probably have brought over to it the Border States, Kentucy, Maryland, Missouri, already tainted with Slavery; might possibly have brought over to it even Pennsylvania and New York, in both of which the Democratic and Pro-Slavery party was very strong: and the visions of restoring the right relation between labour and capital, (visions not confined to the case of the black labourer) might have been fulfilled in the city of William Penn, as well as over the grave of Washington and in the halls of the Incas. Christianity was not the aggressor in the conflict; it was struggling for life. It did not even technically deal the first blow. The Northern people, with their government, were standing at gaze, not knowing how to act, unwilling to attempt coercion, ready, I am afraid, a good many of them, to avert disruption by concessions to Slavery, when Slavery, still impelled to suicide by the vices of its own character, fired on the national flag at Fort Sumter, and the North sprang to arms. The importance of that incident in rousing the Northern people to a spontaneous movement, which the government could not, if it would, have failed to obey, has not been understood here, nor has its effect upon the question as to the lawfulness of the war been duly weighed. When one of two parties begins a ​war, it is surely lawful for the other to prosecute it to a victorious issue, even though that issue may be not the transfer of a province from one king to another, but the transfer of a world from Slavery to Freedom. The employment of arms for the propagation of principles or institutions is not to be justified. But this was a war to save principles and institutions from armed aggression; it was not only a righteous but a defensive war.
It is needless to give a history of the great conflict, and less to recall events and vicissitudes fresh in every memory, and at which our hearts have scarcely ceased to throb. The struggle was long, and its length made the extirpation of Slavery sure. Emancipation owes its completeness, under Providence, to the tenacity of President Davis and the skill of General Lee. The course of events remarkably resembled, in some respects, that of our civil war in the time of Charles I. The Federals, like the Parliamentarians, were superior in numbers and in wealth; but they were unwarlike in their habits, and wholly untrained to command and obedience; while the Confederates, like the Cavaliers, were accustomed to carry arms and to exercise command over their dependents, who again, from their habits of life, were soldiers almost ready made. The Federals began, like the Parliamentarians, with overweening confidence and humiliating failure. After Bull’s Run, after the failure of M’Clellan, the defeat of Pope, the defeat of Burnside, shouts of exultation and derision arose from the enemies of the Republic. The world laid down its money with confidence on the Confederate side and the hearts of all who hated freedom, civil or religious, were filled with an unwonted joy! The model Republic had fallen! To tyranny, to class privilege, to darkness, ​after all belonged the future of mankind! But if the slave-owners had the strength of an oligarchy, the Federals had the far greater strength of a community, and in that strength they conquered. For the sake of their community they learned obedience in war, a more effective obedience than that which the conscript yields under the lash. They turned their vast industry to a new purpose, and produced on a marvellous scale, with marvellous rapidity, and with marvellous excellence, all the materials of war. They drew military aptitude from all the grades of an educated and intelligent community, and raised it to command. With the power of voluntary association, which the members of a real community alone possess, they aided their government in its new and colossal task. They sustained it through all reverses, and in spite of all its errors, with the loyalty which can be paid only by a real community to the government of its choice. They animated it, and all who under it fought or laboured for the common cause, with the spirit of a united people. Gradually the resources of the slave oligarchy began to fail. The conscription laws, to which almost from the outset it had been forced to resort, though supported by the sternest military discipline, were ineffectual to keep its white serfs in the line. It was compelled to tear the veil from its own hypocrisy, and to ask the negro, to whom it had denied the rights and the very name of man, to shed his blood as a fellow-citizen for a common country; though with a proviso that if he conquered in the common cause the property of his master in him should remain unchanged. The operations of the Federals, now directed by officers of the highest merit, were better combined, and pressed at all points on the enemy, who before, by moving swiftly from point to ​point in the inner circle, had beaten or baffled the Federal commanders one by one. While Sheridan dealt blow after blow in the Shenandoah Valley, while Grant held Lee immovable before Richmond, while Farragut and Porter thundered on the sea coast, another Federal army, under Sherman, pierced through the circle of the military defences into the heart of the Confederacy, and encountered no popular resistance. This was the end. And never did the moral and intellectual forces more signally prove their ascendency over the physical forces in war. It is too late to deny this now. It is too late now to affect wonder that the Confederacy could hold out so long, after telling us for four years, and persuading men to risk their money on the faith of the prediction, that the task which the Federals had undertaken was hopeless, and that the victory of the Confederates was sure.
The greatest deliverances of Humanity have been wrought by higher agencies than war. But by war no such deliverance of Humanity was ever wrought as this. Not the fields on which Greek intellect and art were saved from the Persian; not the fields on which Roman law and polity were saved from the Carthaginian and the Gaul; not those plains of Tours on which Charles Martel rolled back Islam from the heart of Christendom; not the waters over which the shattered Armada fled; not Leipsic and Lutzen, Marston and Naseby, where, at the hands of Gustavus and Cromwell, the great reaction of the seventeenth century found its doom, will be so consecrated by the gratitude of after ages as Vicksburg and Gettysburg, Atlanta, and those lines before Richmond which saw the final blow.
And how, on the whole, did the North bear itself in this war? how did its love of law, its patriotism, its ​humanity endure this, notoriously the severest test which can be applied to the character of a nation? The answer to this question is as important as the actual issue of the war.
There was to be an anarchy. So said that wisdom which is wise by precedents, and which, in choosing its precedents, is guided by its passions. Never, through the whole of the conflict—fiercely as the passions of parties were inflamed at the North—was public order seriously disturbed, except by the savage Irish at New York; and on that occasion it was quickly seen that there was force enough upon the side of order, and that the belief in the omnipotence of the New York mob, however time-honoured, was not true. I witnessed myself the last Presidential election. No occasion could be imagined more trying to the self control of the people. I said at the time, and I repeat now, that the day passed off like an English Sabbath. There was not, I believe, in all the States, as much disturbance as, at the previous general election in England, there had been in the rotten borough of Calne. At New York only was there any apprehension even of a breach of the peace: and there again it was the Irish only that gave occasion for the fear. Some troops were brought into the harbour; but I believe they were not landed: certainly they were not called upon to act. The minority, even in the places where it was at once weakest and most odious, was allowed to express its sentiments on the the platform and through the press, to hold its party meetings, to celebrate its torchlight processions, to hang its banners across the public way unmolested and unrebuked. I saw friendly greetings pass between men of opposite parties, as they went to the ​poll on the issue of which hang, as they believed, national life and death. I saw, by proof still more conclusive, that private courtesy survived—with difficulty perhaps, but still it survived—the bitterest political estrangement. Tyranny of opinion! Too much of it no doubt there is in America, and wherever else human nature has not yet thoroughly learnt the highest and hardest of moral lessons—perfect respect for conscientious difference of conviction. But the tyranny of opinion in America in the midst of a dangerous civil war appeared to me, I confess, very like the freedom of opinion which other countries enjoy in time of security and peace.
After the anarchy, there was, as a matter of course, to be a military despotism. It seemed, indeed, from the language used, that the two were existing at the same time. Sages began to whisper in awful tones that the rule of a military despot was the issue to which all the respectable people in the United States were looking forward with melancholy complacency as their only refuge from the horrors of freedom. The first successful general would, without fail, overturn the constitution; and his army would, without hesitation, make itself the instrument of his treason. And it must be confessed that this prediction had all the precedents in its favour. Yet not a shadow of military despotism ever fell upon the scene; not a thought of treasonable usurpation ever, so far as we can see, entered any commander’s mind. When, upon a single occasion, a victorious general stepped beyond a general’s province, and assumed a power of negotiation which belonged only to the civil government, his soldiers, though he was their idol, showed at once that they had been citizens before they were soldiers. These men, as has been pertinently ​remarked, were readers; and when soldiers are readers, it it is difficult to use them as Prætorians or Zouaves. The fears, natural as they were, of the predominance of a military spirit, and of the ascendancy of the military over the civil power, have so far proved totally unfounded; the ascendancy of the civil power over the military has, on the contrary, been maintained in a manner very memorable and very full of comfort. No sooner was the war at an end than the armaments were reduced; and the soldiers, who were to be the tyrants of the country, returned not only willingly but eagerly to their peaceful occupations; though there were many officers, still young or in the prime of life, who had half run a brilliant career, and in whom the desire of completing that career must have been strong. If a larger standing army than usual is still kept on foot, it is partly because the fires of rebellion are hardly yet extinct, partly on account of the threatening presence of French ambition. General Grant himself is foremost in all measures for reducing the standing army, and he it is who, by his noble avoidance of military pomp and of everything that could inflame the military spirit, and by the magnanimity with which in his own person he has kept the soldier in subordination to the citizen, has done most to prevent military passions from gaining possession of the nation, and to avert the danger, if ever there was any, of sabre sway. He is greater in this than in his victories. The Duke of Wellington was deemed a high example of duty because, loaded with wealth and honours as the reward of his services, he did not attempt to overturn the constitution of his country, as Napoleon characteristically took it for granted that he would. Let this standard of conduct be applied to the American commanders, and ​the characters of some of them will stand high. But in truth they must have had bad hearts to conspire against the liberties of their country: so rich is the reward of gratitude and affection bestowed by the American people on all who have served or tried to serve them well.
The President, during the struggle, necessarily exercised great power. He became by the tacit consent of the nation almost the Dictator of the imperilled Republic. At all times indeed the power of a President is greater than is commonly supposed; and if the constitutions of England and America are compared with regard not to their forms but to their substance, that of America will be found to approach more nearly to a popular and elective monarchy, that of England to an aristocratic republic. With invasion on the frontier and treason swarming within it, a few arrests of doubtful legality and doubtful expediency were made; but they were made without any unconstitutional design, and with a merely preventive object, to restrain the persons arrested from courses which might have led to the penalty of treason. Arbitrary things were done in some places by military subordinates unaccustomed to the exercise of power. But on the whole it may truly be said that in no country engaged in civil war, or even in imminent danger of invasion, have law and liberty been so little disturbed as they were, during this civil war, in the loyal states. At the South, meantime, Unionists, or men suspected of being Unionists, were being hunted down like wild beasts. After the murder of Mr. Lincoln, a disposition was shown by the Government to employ secret tribunals for the trial of his murderers; but the nation, excited as it was against the authors of a great crime, declared at once for publicity as the safeguard of justice; and ​from the time when the conflict ceased, law has resumed its uninterrupted course. To preserve the Constitution unimpaired was, throughout, the aim, almost the passion, of the man who was under the greatest temptations to impair it: and he succeeded, for not a particle of it has perished. That the proclamation of liberty to the negroes in the insurgent states was not an act of lawless tyranny but a fair measure of war, became clear to all when the insurgents began to use the slaves as soldiers.
If the Government showed respect for law, did not the people show respect for authority? Those who declaim on the fickleness of Democracy may be safely challenged to produce from history an instance of a government so followed and supported through such trials and reverses. Never for a moment, even when the failure of the war seemed most complete, and when the elections of the great state of New York were going against the Government, did the constitutional ruler fail to command the constitutional obedience of the citizen. A popular Government, of course, felt it necessary to entitle itself to allegiance by showing a reasonable respect for public opinion and a paramount regard for the public interest. When an officer had decisively failed in supreme command (never, I apprehend, before he had decisively failed), he was removed, and he immediately became in the eyes of aristocratic critics a victim of democratic ingratitude. But the victims of ingratitude continued, with perhaps one notable exception, to serve their country zealously in inferior posts. It is one of the noblest features of the struggle; it speaks volumes for the beneficence of institutions, attachment to which can thus prevail over selfishness even in a case where selfishness so easily assumes the mask of dignity and self-respect.
​The cohesion of the States again was, we were told, to give way under this strain. It was impossible that such a Government could be revered far from its centre, or that the Union could have advantages enough to hold together its distant members under any severe pressure. Every day the West was about to part from the East, as well as the South from the North; and instead of one disruption, if the war went on, there were to be a dozen. Yet not only did the West remain firm and true; but remote California rivalled her sisters in loyalty and zeal for what to her also was the common cause.
The soldiers of the North were described as hirelings—Irish and Germans selling their blood for Yankee gold. In those vast hosts there were many foreigners, though foreigners who for the most part intended, unlike our German Legion in the Crimean war, to make the country which they served their home. There were also many soldiers of Irish and German extraction, as in the British armies there are many Angles, Jutes, and Saxons, not to mention Normans and other men of alien ancestry not a few. But that the mass were American husbandmen, woodsmen, and artisans, the world must begin to believe, now that it sees them return to the plough, the axe, the workshop, and the loom. The armies of the South were raised, after the first year at least, by the most sweeping conscriptions, in which utter disregard was shown for public faith; men who had voluntarily enlisted for a year being voted in for a longer term, and at last to the end of the war. Those of the North were raised in a great measure, as the armies of European monarchies are entirely raised, by the inducement of pay; and the usual evils of recruiting, crimping, and trepanning, did not fail to attend the process when the ​demand for recruits became great, especially in New York, where the people, though compelled to furnish their contingent, were at once peculiarly unwarlike, and mainly on the Southern side. The North, as an industrial community, fought as industrial communities (our own included) always fight, with the industry which supplies the sinews of war: and this became more apparent as the war went on, and the drain upon the labour market became more severe. But there must also have been many in the Northern armies to whom, the rate of wages and the earnings of industry being what they are in that country, the pay of a soldier could have been but a slight inducement. On the whole, probably no country has ever received a larger free-will offering of its children’s blood. There were some at least in those ranks whose self-devotion (I hardly like to use the profaned name of chivalry) could scarcely be doubted. It was no sordid motive that led Mr. Wadsworth, when past middle age, to leave wealth, ease, social honour, troops of friends, for the hardships of a soldier’s life, and death at the head of his division. It was no sordid motive which led Colonel Lowell, whose funeral I myself witnessed, to resign the pleasures of a fine and cultivated intellect and the brightest promises of opening life for the service in which he gloriously fell. It was no sordid motive and no common self-sacrifice that led Colonel Shaw to accept the command of the first negro regiment, and imperil not only his life, but his reputation, to redeem the despised race. When Colonel Shaw was killed in leading his regiment against Fort Wagner, the Southern chivalry, insulting the dead, buried him, as they said, among his niggers. A Federal general was about to remove the body to a more honourable place of burial: but Colonel Shaw’s family ​desired that it might rest in that most honourable grave where it already lay. That rich and refined Americans are disaffected to the institutions of their country is a very common belief, to which the language of some of them when in this country lends colour. But I have seen rich and highly refined Americans, accustomed to the best society of Europe, rejoice as they approached their home, though that home was at the time the scene of civil war; and in this struggle not a few of that class gave noble proof (proof never to be forgotten by their countrymen) that the rich, as well as the poor, may be heartily loyal to the government of the people.
As the Americans were said to be shedding only the blood of hirelings, so they were said to be spending only the money of posterity. I will not be guilty of extenuating either the evils of a national debt, or the criminality of laying the burdens of the present generation on posterity, if the State can possibly be saved by any other means. The Americans have, unhappily, borrowed a great sum. Other nations, not only when fighting for existence, but when fighting for mere ambition, had done the same before them: but, unlike other nations, they seem disposed to make an effort to pay what they have borrowed; and if they have burdened posterity, they have really secured it against war. They were doomed by their critics to be, or rather they were already, bankrupt. But now they have become a salutary example of a nation determining to reduce its debt; though the way in which they proceed to the reduction of the debt, by first reducing their armaments, is not so clearly perceived. Ignorant of finance, which had never been a pressing subject in a country without great establishments and heavy taxes, they committed at first ​some great financial errors; above all the error of passing the Legal Tender Act, the consequences of which they still feel in the derangement of prices, the disturbance of trade, and the prevalence of gambling speculation in gold. Nor was the willingness of the people to bear taxation at first fully appreciated by the government itself. But towards the close of the war the whole amount of the burden, which it must be remembered was really self-imposed, including all the imposts. Federal and State, must have been as heavy as was ever borne: and at the same time large sums, as well as very precious time and labour, were being freely contributed to patriotic objects connected with the war.
In this, as in other respects, the character of the nation improved as the war went on. So again, at the outset, the immense amount of sudden expenditure, and the vast number of contracts thrown at once upon the market, no doubt bred, as such things always will breed, a great deal of roguery and corruption. But in time, reasonable purity, as well as efficiency, was secured; so I was assured by informants unconnected with the administration, and who were not strong partisans of the war. That the Government itself was not actuated by the corrupt love of patronage, it has proved by its prompt reduction of the great establishments, on the magnitude of which its patronage depended.
There is a question more important still, especially to those who insist that the American community is based on Christianity. How did the humanity of the people bear the most terrible of all trials, the trial of civil war? To be able to answer this question fairly we must recall to our minds the records of other civil wars—those of the civil wars in France between the Burgundians and the ​Armagnacs, between the Huguenots and the Catholic League, between the Royalists and Republicans at the time of the Revolution, even between the party of Order and the Reds in 1848—those of the civil wars between Guelfs and Ghibelins, in the Italian cities—those of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany—even those, though far less dreadful, of our own civil war in the time of Charles I., or of our colonial war at the time of the American Revolution. If we would be just—if we would avoid the deserved imputation of hypocrisy and Pharisaism—we mast also recall to mind the severities with which we have thought it lawful to put down rebellion in Ireland and India. Tried by the historical standard, I am convinced that the Federals will be found, on the whole, to have shown, both in the war and after it, a humanity which may be almost said to form an epoch in the moral history of our race. Acts of ferocity and devastation were no doubt committed by armies in the enemy’s country; and evil be to him who, whether from want of feeling or from partisanship, speaks lightly of such things. The houses of Confederates were ruthlessly burnt by Federals on land, while the ships of Federals, even those engaged in the most peaceful commerce, even the barks of harmless fishermen, were being destroyed as ruthlessly by the Confederates at sea. But I feel confident that when the truth shall have been sifted from the falsehoods purveyed by the worthy agents of an unprincipled press for the gratification of malignity here, it will be found that rarely if ever was blood shed except on the field of battle; and that the stories of women given up to the lust of the soldiery at New Orleans and elsewhere, were unadulterated lies. The proclamation of General Butler, in particular, which filled ​with chivalrous indignation the bosom friends of Louis Bonaparte, St. Arnaud, and Pelissier—those who had hung the banner of Perjury and Massacre beside the banner of the Black Prince, was bad in form, but in substance it was merely a threat to women who insulted soldiers and officers in the street, who spat in an officer’s face, that they should be treated as street-walkers were treated under the local law. It proved effectual, and saved all the decent women and all the decent citizens of New Orleans from the consequences of a collision between the garrison and the inhabitants. No captured city of the Confederates suffered the fate of Magdeburg or Lyons, or even of Badajoz and St. Sebastian. I visited myself a large prison camp and a prisoner’s hospital. The inmates of the prison camp were evidently well fed, and, so far as I could see, were undergoing no hardship not inseparable from a captive’s lot. The inmates of the prison hospital were treated, if my eyes did not deceive me, with the utmost liberality and kindness. The agents of the Sanitary Commission, when they came upon a field of battle, made no distinction between the wounded friend and the wounded enemy. Public sentiment did not demand, and would not have suffered any effective retaliation for the atrocities of Andersonville. At the very time when the North was ringing with the report of those atrocities, I was able to write that though I had heard fierce expressions of indignation against the rebels and of determination to put them down, I had heard scarcely a single expression of bloodthirstiness, scarce a single expression of desire for vengeance. At the time, I believe what I said seemed ​incredible. It will hardly be thought incredible now. For this great rebellion, by which the Commonwealth was brought to the verge of destruction, not a single life has been taken. Wirtz, the only man who has been executed, suffered not for his part in the rebellion, but for thousands of murders. Mr. Davis is still awaiting his trial; but nobody imagines that he will be put to death. Confiscation was suspended over the heads of the Southern oligarchy for a time: but they have suffered no personal punishment, though they have lost slavery, the stake of the desperate game which they had played with the blood of so many thousands. Oligarchs too must pay, when they play at rebellion and lose the game. The Southerners are called upon to accept the system which has been pronounced by overwhelming authority to be alone compatible with Christianity, morality, and industrial prosperity: this is the penalty which they have to undergo for the most criminal and dangerous attempt ever made not only against a single Commonwealth, but against the Commowealth of Man. There are some who doubt the wisdom of this all embracing mercy. It is as profoundly wise as it is noble and full of high instruction to mankind. Its wisdom will not be the less manifest, even though the South should fail to be touched by it, and provoke measures of severity, which then would have the moral approbation of the whole world.
We were led to believe that while the South was all dignity and self-sacrifice, the North was revelling in a ghastly and almost fiendish whirl of gaiety and dissipation. It no doubt was so among a certain set at New York, in the vortex of contracts and gambling speculation. But elsewhere I can bear witness that it was not. Elsewhere ​I can bear witness that society wore an aspect not unbecoming a nation under a great affliction. If people could only believe it there were too many mourners in Northern homes for mirth and feasting to prevail.
There were some other redeeming points in this war. The excellence of the hospitals and the tender care for the wounded surpassed, as seems to be generally admitted, all previous efforts of humanity in that sad field, and the proportion of recoveries appears to have exceeded all experience. Here, again, we see besides the remarkable power of spontaneous organisation (for much of the work was done by voluntary effort), the regard paid by a democratic community to the meanest as well as the most important of its members. These soldiers were not mere food for the cannon. The women, too, appear to have done their part in this work of patriotism and humanity, and to have put away from themselves the reproach of having been flattered and pampered into frivolity and uselessness. It was something also that the inventive faculties of an industrial people should tell for so much in the production of new weapons and ships, of new military contrivances and constructions of all kinds; that intelligence should thus, even in war, have gained the mastery over brute force; and that means should have been prepared by which society may possibly one day annul the power of those drilled masses, which at present press so heavily on the liberties of the world.
In proportion as the struggle was for a moral object its effects upon the national character will be, and in some respects have been good. The nation has gained in dignity and self-respect. A just pride has cast out weak vanity, and abated the loud boastfulness which at first ​turned many hearts away from the Federal cause. The habit of swagger sensibly diminished as the stern struggle went on. Before, America had no history: her cravings for one were visible in the anxiety with which the most equivocal monuments of antiquity were preserved. Now she has a history which even the war powers of the Old World must respect and acknowledge as a title to the fellowship of great nations. True independence has been achieved, and the same slavish homage will no longer be paid, under the mask of ostentatious disdain, to the ideas and influences of the Old World. A manlier tone begins to pervade public and private life. Types of genuine worth have superseded empty demagogism in the allegiance of the national heart. The excess of the democratic spirit has been corrected by military discipline; and the moral courage of rulers, and their firmness in the exercise of lawful authority, have increased. Patriotism has been stimulated so much, that a nationality too intense and narrow, too like that which incessant wars have engendered in European communities, is the thing at present to be feared. Soon the fruits of quickened intellect, as well as those of regenerated character may begin to appear. Soon we may see in America something like that burst of mental life which has followed and rewarded great moral struggles in the case of other nations: which followed and rewarded the struggle of Athens against the Persians: the struggle of Elizabethan England against Philip II. Already, indeed, the political intellect of the people has been elevated and ennobled by the practical discussion of the grandest questions on which political intellect can be engaged; and of this high training there is more, perhaps there is only too much, yet to come.
​Before the war America hardly possessed any grand examples of public character saving that of Washington, which was somewhat remote and somewhat aristocratic. The public men of the democracy lacked the potent teaching of such examples, and this was one cause of the want of dignity in American statesmen. A democratic leader scarcely knew what his ideal was. Now, new examples have been added of the true democratic type. The nation has been greater in this struggle than the individual men: but judged by the average standard of other nations and times, America in the civil war can scarcely be said to have been barren of great men. Two or three might be named who are still living. One has finished his course. In his perfect simplicity of character, as well as in his perfect devotion to the public good, Mr. Lincoln presented the ideal of a true servant of the people. The almost absolute ruler of a mighty nation, the chief of the greatest armaments in the world, he never allowed himself, in language or demeanour, to be exalted above his fellows, or to claim for himself the respect which was due to his place alone. No state surrounded his person. We have too good reason to know that this tyrant kept no guard. His example and the type of character which he has set before public men, as much as the victory which his patient wisdom, his constancy, and integrity mainly achieved, will protect for ever the cause for which he toiled and died; so that, in his own words, government for the people and by the people shall never perish from the earth.
It would be wickedness, the greatest wickedness, to make a eulogy of war. War, besides the misery that it inflicts, stirs up from their depths all the evil passions of ​human nature. If this conflict could be painted to the life, in all its details, the picture would no doubt teem, even on the Federal side, with things shocking and vile: with violence, rapine, depravity, and corruption. But it may truly be said that taken as a whole, and compared with other civil wars, it has displayed the growing ascendancy of influences which will at last banish all civil war, and all war, from the earth.
The power put forth by the American Commonwealth has secured another object most valuable to humanity. The Monroe doctrine, properly understood, and as Canning, who was really its first propounder, understood it, means not the aggrandisement of the United States, but the independence of America. It means that the Powers of the Past may work their will in their own Europe for a season; but that they shall not be allowed to mar the hopes of man in the New World. The American Republic is not propagandist. Neither by violence nor by intrigue does it threaten any established government with subversion. Its citizens indeed are almost too regardless of the fate of the old nations, and too much inclined to treat freedom as a privilege of their own, not as the heritage of mankind. In this they are true to the example of their race which, in its revolutions, has always been content with asserting English rights. But they are warranted in defending, they are even bound to the extent of their power to defend, from the intrusion of propagandist despotism and aristocracy a hemisphere destined for other things. French Imperialism, which is as little capable of enduring the reproachful existence of freedom as Slavery was, took advantage of the distress of the American Republic to propagate itself, with its ecclesiastical and social ​appendages, in Mexico. It may have cause to rue, perhaps it already has cause to rue the hour.
To be just we must not forget to pay a tribute to the valour of the Southerners, sullied as it was at Fort Pillow, at Andersonville, and on other occasions, by the ferocity of barbarians. In some of them this valour was inspired by a love of independence and a sincere belief in State Rights which mingled with and partly redeemed the more criminal object for which they fought. It receives its reward, not only in the respect which proved valour ensures, but far more in liberation from the worst doom which can fall on man, that of being the active minister of evil. To oppress is worse than to be oppressed. If Slavery is degradation to the slave, it is far deeper degradation to the master; and emancipation is a far greater boon to the master than to the slave. To that cruel, corrupt, and barbarous society a hope of better things has come, though in the stern form of conquest. A sea of blood has been shed in this war, but on neither side has it been shed entirely in vain.
The curtain has fallen upon the great drama of war. It rises for a political drama equally great. The work of reconstruction presents problems which will tax to the utmost the practical sagacity of the American people; but in that sagacity I have almost unbounded faith. It is the quality not of isolated statesmen, with difficulty dragging the dull masses after them, but of a whole nation, capable of entering into political questions, and at once supporting and correcting the action of the government, which is in fact only the organ of the people. For ultimate reconciliation, when once the actual wound shall have been healed, and the blackened relics of the war shall have disappeared, ​the clemency of the conqueror has nobly paved the way; and from the moment when I saw the temper of the Northern people I doubted as little of the possibility of restoring the Union as I did of Federal victory. The debt is a grave danger, rather from the political difficulties incident to the distribution of the burden than from its actual amount compared with the resources of the nation; but prompt economy and a quick return to sound principles of finance have already restored the value of the national securities; the people will always support as far as they can the credit of a government with which they are identified; and, as in the case of Florence, so in the case of this great community of labour in America, the industry and frugality of a hive in which there are no drones will soon repair the waste of war. Protection indeed adds greatly to the gravity of the situation, political as well as financial, and threatens a new disruption of interests, as well as an increase of contrabandism dangerous to the character of the nation: but over this too, as I believe, the good sense of the mass of the people will prevail; and it has been justly observed that in the case of America, the difficulty is not aggravated by the existence of a great territorial aristocracy, identified in interest with the Protectionist party. Nor does it appear that there is much reason in this case to apprehend the reaction which commonly ensues after violent revolutions. Political extravagance, such as the attempt of the French Revolutionists suddenly to grasp political perfection, is sure to be followed by a fatal collapse. But this has been a wise and sober, though terrible struggle, for the preservation of the State; and therefore it does not seem likely to entail as its result the penalty that belongs to madness. ​Some reaction after such enthusiasm—some relaxation of the sinews after such a tension, must be expected; but America is in no danger of sinking, like France, into political apathy and despair.
The most tremendous problem of all, is not the restoration of the Union, nor the discharge of fiscal liabilities, nor anything of a purely political kind; it is the re-organisation of society at the South. To this operation the eyes of all men may well be turned: it is perhaps the hardest ever undertaken by statesmen. Jamaica tells us with terrible emphasis what are the perils of a community composed of the ex-slave owner and the ex-slave. How can these perils be avoided? What will cleanse away the taint which seems not to quit the blood of the man who has owned slaves—or of his children—or of his children’s children? How, with the ineradicable difference of colour, to which fatal memories will long cling, and with the physical antipathy the existence of which it is vain to deny, can we hope for social fusion? Without social fusion, how can we hope for political equality? And without political equality, what security can there be for justice? Kindness and wisdom would cure, in course of time, the slowly receding vices of the slave. Fair wages, paid at set of sun, so that even his shortened vision may see his reward as he works, would in time teach him industry: education, in the course of two or three generations, would raise his intelligence, and give him the power of self guidance. But the kindness and wisdom that might do this, in whom are they to be found? As to the theories about the incurable indolence and the incurable ferocity of the negro,—they will claim attention when a particle of historical evidence has been produced in their ​support. As the case at present stands, the possibility of curing the indolence and the ferocity of the whites at the South is a much graver question. The negroes made good soldiers when they were well commanded; and when they have been fairly tried they have made industrious workmen. The late war, by putting their masters in many places into their power, gave their ferocity full play; yet I believe there was scarcely a single well-attested instance of negro revenge. If the race had been really ferocious they would not have been slaves; to make the Red Indian a slave would be no easy task. This figment of indelible inferiority has been coined against oppressed nations as well as against oppressed races; ever since the days of the ancient slave-owner, who held the fathers of great European nations in bondage as indelibly his inferiors, it has been the well-known stock-in-trade of philosophic rapine. It is not in the hopeless defects of the negro that the difficulty lies; it is in the relations between the master and slave race when they are set to live together as fellow citizens. And this is a problem of which (though perhaps we may see the dawn of success in the changed position which, partly in consequence of the exigencies of the war itself, industry has assumed at the South, and in the probable influx of Northern employers at least into the Middle States) we can only watch the solution with intense sympathy and interest. Providence is inexhaustible; and in the New World many things are new. A way may yet be found to form out of the two races, and by a combination of their different faculties and powers, a society, different perhaps in its structure from Northern society, yet equally based on justice.
If this had been a mere struggle for empire, it would ​scarcely have lead to a corresponding conflict of parties in this country. Being a struggle for great principles and objects most vital to humanity, it did lead to such a conflict. And that conflict gave birth to the Society the existence of which terminates to-day. We will not dwell long on this part of our theme. Among the papers of Mr. Lincoln was found, I am told, one which showed that he intended, as a part of his policy of reconstruction, to destroy all the trophies and monuments of the civil war. The parts of men have for the most part been cast for them by antecedent circumstances; and all, except minds of remarkable independence, must play their allotted part. That the territorial aristocracy of this country and the clergy of the Established Church should vehemently sympathise, even with the Slave Power, against a community which though, as I have said, not propagandist, was still the chief embodiment and the hope of the principles most opposed to their own, was natural; and we ought rather to dwell with gratitude on the exceptions, than to blame those who obeyed the prevailing impulse, and followed the general rule. Although, could these friends of order and religion but have seen it, all order, all religion, all conservatism even, in the only rational and moral sense of the word, were on the side of those who were defending against violence the established constitution and the established principles of the United States. Conservatives must not think that they can sanction violence till the law is settled in their own favour, and thenceforth permit it no more. They will find that violence, once let in, subverts all law, and that the party which, in the long run, has most reason to dread the inroads of physical force is that which, in the long run, has not physical force upon its side. This is no ​superfluous or irrelevant remark, when that strange and fearful epilogue to the civil war in America, the Jamaica Massacre, is about, apparently, to become the subject of a party contest. Of course, though persons may be held blameless for having played their natural parts, inferences will be drawn from what has passed as to the character of institutions. Men cannot be forbidden to ask whether a nobility, which casts in its lot with slave-owners, is a nobility indeed, really transcending in nobleness the natures of ordinary men, so that the world still needs it, and ought to make great sacrifices to maintain it as a type of exalted humanity and a cynosure of honour, or whether the day is not approaching when society must let chivalry rest with the dust of the Crusaders, and take up with homely justice. Men cannot be forbidden to ask whether it is really well to let political power impose upon us spiritual guides, when the guides it imposes have, in this the most manifest conflict, as it seems to those who think as we do, between Good and Evil which has been waged in our days, almost unanimously taken the side of Evil; when they have gone up into their pulpits to preach a religion of purity and mercy, and come down from the pulpit to stand side by side with atheist sciolism in defence of Slavery and the Jamaica Massacre. Patient confidence in progress and in the future of Humanity, not impatient desire of sudden change, much less of revolution, is the sentiment which this great victory ought to inspire; but we have had an experience which will be remembered in the day when great political issues are tried, and when the nation wavers between its hopes of the future and its fear of breaking with the consecrated institutions of the past. The conduct of these classes, however, I repeat, was natural, ​and would not have deserved or excused a bitter word, if they could only have said frankly that they desired the downfall of institutions opposed to their own, instead of talking about their sympathy for the weak, and their respect for national independence, and their anxiety for the triumph of Free Trade. Equally natural, perhaps, with the conduct of the territorial aristocracy, was that of our commercial aristocracy, who again, with some exceptions, for which the whole order will some day be grateful, ranged themselves on the side of the South. The relations between employer and employed are not yet happily settled; and till, by a better understanding of mutual interests, and the removal of faults on both sides, they are happily settled, a certain division of sympathies is sure to be seen. Perhaps there are other things to be said about a large number of those who have grown suddenly rich, and have not been trained to feel an interest in anything but the security and enjoyment of wealth, which it is not necessary, and would not be agreeable to say, but which if said, would partly account for their conduct in the struggle which is just past. Below all these classes, however, there was a mass of loose and ignorant opinion, which, partly by the skilful manipulation of the slave-owners, who evidently knew the secret of dealing with the press, and the adroit suggestion of a false theory at the critical moment—partly by ignorant prejudices and fancies about American aggressiveness, was turned to the wrong side. The truth is, political principle among ourselves was during those years rather at a low ebb. We were passing through a phase very analagous to that which I have described as existing in America under the ascendancy of Slavery, before the great rally of morality at the North. The causes of the phenomenon in both cases were ​nearly the same. Here, as well as there, there was a great and rapid increase of wealth; and here, as well as there, there was a temporary decay of faith. We had gone in fact so far in the backward path that now, as in the time of Charles I., our reactionary politicians seem to think that they can set their feet on the Great Charter, and our reactionary ecclesiastics that, with a few bells and a little incense, and a word or two whispered into the ears of wealthy devotees, they can undo the Reformation. We have shared the moral decline of America, and we shall share her regeneration. Already a change is felt, and the breeze of morning begins faintly to blow over the long stagnant sea.
To stem this tide of sympathy with the slave-owner; to do justice to the large classes, especially the working classes, of this country, who were not represented by the reactionary press; to prevent the moral weight of England, perhaps even her sword—from being cast at a momentous crisis of human destiny into the scale of Slavery; to save the honour of our country from being sullied by a great apostasy; to confirm the Government in neutrality, and see that it was a real neutrality, not a neutrality of Alabamas; to keep alive, if possible, the good feeling between the two kindred nations, and avert the deadly rupture, deadly not only to England and America but to the highest interests of mankind, which the Southern party in Parliament and the Press were labouring to bring on,—this Association and its sister associations were formed. They were not formed till support had been organised in this country for the South, so that our action, like that of the party in America with which we sympathised, was strictly defensive. We did not make the civil war, nor did we instigate the Americans to make it. Most of those who are here can ​probably say with me that they looked upon its approach with horror. There are not a few perhaps in this room whom it threatened with ruin. But when it had commenced, we took part with what we believed to be the right, and strove to prevent England from taking part with what we believed to be the wrong. There is no blood on our heads: there might have been blood on the heads of our opponents if they had succeeded in involving England and America in war. Charges were brought against us of folly, blindness, fanaticism, which the event has answered, and with which we need concern ourselves no more. It has been shown that it is not unwise sometimes to back the moral forces even against the military probabilities; and on the other hand, that the shallow canning which can purvey for the prejudices of a club is apt to be at fault when the moral forces are on the scene. We may not be versed in the mysteries of diplomacy, but we were not bad diplomatists when we did our utmost to counteract the efforts of the powerful party here, which would have estranged from us for ever the heart of the American people. The main end we had in view was not commercial; but I do not think we counselled English commerce ill, or that English commerce now believes that we counselled it ill, in dissuading it from sending out Alabamas. We had no doubt a primary regard, as surely every Christian and every rational and large-minded patriot must have a primary regard, for the general interests of humanity, in which those of each individual nation are bound up. But I hope and believe that we at the same time did, and I am sure that we wished and endeavoured to do, that which was best for the interest and for the honour of our country.
If the object of the Association has been in any measure ​fulfilled, if it contributed in any measure towards averting the evils which it was formed to avert, every member of it will have cause to look back with thankfulness to his connection with it; and we have all reason to be grateful to our President and to others who at the critical moment organised us and directed our efforts, not without labour, not without sacrifices, not I fear without incurring some of the penalties which men incur by boldly separating from those around them on a question of principle; for all which I trust the recollection of the good they have done and the evil they have prevented will make them full amends. And especially is the gratitude of all in this place, and of society at large, due to those who have shown by the course they have taken in this question, that the interests of the great employer are not really opposed, and that his sympathies ought not to be opposed, to those of the working man. That hour of Federal despair was a testing hour. It searched the convictions of all classes and of all men, and severed the counterfeit liberalism from the true.
In concluding let us return for a moment to a part of the subject as to which we have always hoped that, in spite of sinister appearances, there could be no real division of sentiment among the English people. There can surely be few Englishmen, few fellow-countrymen of Pitt and Wilberforce, to whom the Abolition of Slavery, however accomplished, is not in itself welcome. Here we may meet again, and rejoice again to meet, many from whom we have been divided on other grounds. Since the advent of Christianity itself, few more blessed announcements have been made to man than this, that Slavery is dead, dead in its only great stronghold, and therefore virtually dead ​everywhere and for ever; though the institution may still linger in Cuba, and though the tendency and the temper may remain and threaten revolt against humanity in Jamaica and elsewhere. It is not only that the chains of the negro have been struck off, that the negro race is redeemed from boundless and endless misery, from boundless and endless degradation. In the person of the negro, the respect for humanity has been restored—the principles of Christian and civilised society have been vindicated—the rights and the hopes of labour have been rescued from the powers which had conspired against them. It is a victory in which every man, high or low, who lives by the sweat of his brow has a part—in which every man who lives by the sweat of his brow has reason to rejoice. Be these the last words of the Association which ends its course to-night, Slavery is dead everywhere and for ever.