USA > New York > Dutchess County > Address delivered Wednesday, 28th November, 1866 : in Feller's Hall, Madalin, township of Red Hook, Duchess Co., N.Y. > Part 9
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The whirlwind of war that for four years has been careering over the face of the land has at last died away and sunk to peaceful silenc- on the far-off savanna's of Texas. The streams that have divided great hosts of fighting men, and sometimes been dyed with the blood of the combatants, from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, have ceased to be the objects of strategy, and are again devoted to the peaceful activities of com- merce. The long rows of polished bayonets that bristled along a hundred hillsides are replaced by rows of maize. that grows all the richer for the hu- man blood that has fertilized the soil. America turns her amazing energies that have been so conspicuously displayed in war to the blessed labors of reconstruc- tion, the rearing again of the houses consumed by invaders, the organization of newer and fairer forms of life and power out of the charred timbers and dilapidated walls that mark the ruin of what is past.
There remains for us another great duty, that of studying this epoch of our history as we have studied no other in the tide of time, and deriving from it all the wisdom, all the instruction, all the valuable and salutary lessons for future guidance that can be learn- ed in the broad field where philosophy teaches by example. Nor is our duty accomplished till fitting tribute is paid to the memory of the great multitude of the patriotic dead. Their dust is not to sleep in forgotten resting-places. The well-ordered and de- corated burial place, the towering granite, the deep- cut marble, the enduring bronze, will doall that mute things can do to perpetuate the memory of all who have fallen in the great war of freedom.
From the obedient soldier who marched to certain . death in the cross fires of the fatal batteries at Fred- ericksburg and Chancellorsvile, to the glorified dust of the Great Martyr whose assassination crowned and
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completed the hercie work, closing the long sacrifices by the blood of the noblest victim, the deeds of the whole host of laborers and of martyrs need to be commemor- ated by the whole power of monumental and historic eloquence. Forma mentis aeterna. And he will con- tribute most to the history of these times who shall show how, in the decrees of Providence it was ordered that Slavery should perish by the sword which, in an hour of political madness, she drew upon the august image of Constitutional Liberty, as seen in the Union of the American states : how it was permitted this institution to grow apace and rear her bronzed front in the eyes of the world a defiant relic of dead bar- barisins, till her assurance became the seal of her de- struction, and the haughtiness of her step was seen to be the pride that goeth before destruction.
In justice to human nature, and to historie proba- bility, we should tra e, as we can, the causes which led to this political upheaval. Foreign nations and future ages will hardly see in the mere fact of the election to the Presidency of a candidate distasteful to the Southern people, a sufficient reason for the prompt. united, deliberate and defiant revolt that ensued. Nobody contended that the Constitution had been violated in any important particular. The South had ever enjoyed an ample share of the executive patron- age. Sons of her soil had fil ed the Presidential chair four-fifths of the time from the election of Washington to that of Lincoln. Free labor throughout the South was well rewarded. Their soil was fertile; their climate genial, their taxes moderate, their rights, their immunities, and even their whims and prejudices had been respected by every administrat on from 1787 to 1860 and yet, in the winter and spring of 1861, eleven States, in well-studied concert and with singular unanimity, and often by overwhelming ma- jorities, passed ordinances s parating them forever from all political connection with the government which had been the constant devotee of their inter- ests, their pride, and the bulwark of the'r glery.
Madness and folly seem to be sometimes inherent in a particular family and may be expected in most of their acts, and human nature may be so exasperated by generations of depotism and abuse that, when once the crust of the earth above the heaving mass is broken, a deluge of lava may burst ont and bury, in desolation and ashes, everything fair and lovely that grew above the volcanoes, as the world saw with amazement in the European earthquake seventy years ago.
But that an entire population should go crazy and commit acts that involved political suicide and the destruction of most of those blessings that make life
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desirable, is so far an anomaly in human nature that some more rational hypothesis than madness iss ught by any thoughtful student of this epoch. Besides, our modern Romes are not built in a day, any more than the crowned city of the seven hills was built in that space of time. Great results now, as they have ever been. are the culmination of forces that have been in operation for generations of men. Morally speaking, the metal of that historic first gun at Sumter was moulded in the da: s of Queen Elizabeth, and the powder was mixed before Washington was in his honored grave, and it was planted and sighted not by a gasconading Louisiana creole, but by the great- est master of metaphysics and political sophistry the world ever saw. but who had been quietly reposing in the soil of the Carolina, that so loved and honored Lim, for ten years previous to the 12th of April, 1861.
Immediately after the war of the Revolution there began to appear the germs of what we, of this genera- tion, see in full growth and loaded with its noxious fruits. The essential tendency of the slave power and the slave influence is to personal isolation and political disintegration. It was so in Jewish and Greek and Roman slavery, and our American slavery furnishes no exception to the rule. IIe who com- mands the services of others by the simple right of mnight, is in a way to emancipate himself from all ne- cessity to conciliate the good will of others or secure their social co-operation. In democratic communities, generally. every man is under the necessity of winning the kind feelings of his neighbors by reciprocal acts of kindness, and gaining by association the necessary strength to accomplish what he cannot do by his un- aided labor or skill. The Pennsylvania farmer who needs the strength of twenty men to raise the heavy timbers of his barn. invites his neighbors to come and lift with him, and holds himself in readiness to re- spond. at once. to a similar invitation from any of them. But th- Virginia planter needed no such gratuitous and reciprocal assistance. At the blast of his planta- tion Lorn. he could summon from the tobacco field twenty stout slaves, whose services were absolutely his by the law of the land. A group of settlers in Ohio when they are touched with the importance of furnishing good schools for their children, must meet, contribute their money or their labor to the erection of a school house and tlie payment of a teacher's salary. The Mississippi planter, when he wanted his children educated, could order his colored carpenter to build a suitable house, and employ some educated person as a family teacher, without once seeking or needing a word of advice or any act of co-operation from any
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of the neighboring aristocrats. The unit of Southern society was the petty but independent despot, and the first combination, and in fact the only. combina- tion natural in such civilzation. was in groups of petty despots, each supreme in his sphere, but independent of each other, under no necessity of mutual concession, mutual forbearance, or mutual aid. As a necessary con- sequence, associations of all kinds always langnished and drifted toward dissolution under. that exploded system. In that first representation of associated labor, the common road. this was painfully apparent. and the surprised traveler saw the first great incon- gruity in the narrow, n-glected, and circuitous wagon- road that was the only means of communication be- tween princely landed estates. Common schools never flourished south of the Potomac. Their colleges were the abodes of literary indolence or the haunts of youthful debauchery. Associations for the dissem- ination of useful knowledge were hardly known, and the voice of the lecturer was mute. The concert and the theatre were the only snecessful social institutions ; for these are mainly supported by the crowd of pleas- ure-seekers who are above the useful necessity of pleasant exertion.
When the Constitution of 1787, the great charter of our liberties, that has come out bright with new glory from the baptism of blood, was first propounded to the States south of the Potomac, how was it re- ceived ? South Carolina fought 'it with her whole vigor, and in the General Assembly of Virginia, that great and eloquent voice which, thirteen years before, had raised the heroic battle-shout of the war of Independence, was now, and for the last time on earth. raised in protest against Unionism.
" When I observe, " said PATRICK HENRY. " that the war-making power and the money-making power are. by this Constitution, monopolized by the Federal Government, I see no foothold left for State sovereign- ty to rest upon. and I tremble for the liberty of Vir- ginia." And JOHN RANDOLPH, who was then the young and ardent champion of the Constitution, and secured its ratification despite the powerful opposi- tion of PATRICK HENRY, became, under the disinte- grating effects of that society, so thoroughly a state- rights man that he ever placed Ins State above his nation, and esteemed it a greater honor to be a Vir- ginian than to be an American Was it strange, then, that the famous resolutions of Virginia and Kentucky of. 1799, the Magna Charta of Secession, were adopted and given to the world as the first deliberate, formal and well-pronounced utterances of the disintegrating spirit.
Thus cotemporaneous with our Constitutional birth
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as a nation, and advancing, pari passu, with American greatness, we find this conception of the nation as no more than a compact between independent, irrespon- sible and sovereign States : this advocacy of the right of a State to challenge, adjudicate upon, and deliber- ately disobey a Federal law which was deemed obnoxious to her local interests, was ever a Southern doctrine, emanating from the bosom of those disinte- grating social tendencies that are inherent in the relation of master and slave.
From the death of WASHINGTON till the presidency of JACKSON, an interval of nearly thirty years, the ruinous dogma slept on the shelf where the almost forgotten Virginia resolutions were gathering dust. Meantime the commercial and manufacturing interests of the Northern communities were constantly on the increase, and with the far-sighted sagacity of a traffic that had whitened every ocean with our sails, the commercial cities were asking Congress for a species of legislation that would at once stimulate these vast activities to fresh enterprises and place them on a secure foundation in national law. Against this leg- islation the South, that had but her one interest of agriculture to foster, and that was now fast becoming jealous of the rapid increase of Northern power, took a position of firm and almost rebellious opposition. The community where this antagonism was most active was t e Southern city that bad for a time hoped to rival New York as an emporium of trade, and Charlesten found a champion in national debate, the most subtle and powerful reasoner from given prem- ises, right or wrong, that the Senate of the United States ever saw. in the p rson of JOHK C. CALHOUN.
The doctrine then invoked, for commercial reasons only, was vigorously discussed and its fallacy thorough - ly exposed in those famous debates of 1831 in which selected champions of both constructions of the Con- stitution met in the Senate of the nation and the Southern combatant was thoroughly worsted and unhorsed. Four years later, in 1835, arose the first agitation on slavery, and then were coupled for the first t me those famous dogmas of which the scenes of the past four years have been but the bloody acting out. They appear in the elaborate and able report drawn up by Mr. CALHOUN on the right of Congress to prevent by law the circulation of abolition prints or books through the Southern States. He there lay's down these principles, which, from that time on, were the accepted principles of Southern politicians, which they steadily advocated and defended by all the power of words, and for which. twenty- six years after their enunciation, they drew the sword in delib- erate revolt:
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1. That American slavery needed no apology on moral grounds : that it is a relation right, just and admirable in itself, a source of great mutual benefit to both master and slave, and its abolition would be the greatest social disaster to both.
2. That when antagonism to this institution, on the part of those who felt themselves called upon to protest against and oppose it, reached a point where any material interest of slavery was endangered, the remedy of the South was to withdraw from: the Union ; and the defence of such withdrawal was found in the doctrine of State Rights, which leaves with the sena- rate States the right of saying whether the Federal Union was any longer conducive to their best interests.
These doctrines, issued with audacity, clearness and ability, by Mr. CALnous, were the maxims of Southern logic and the rallying points of slavery from 1835 till 1861, when they became her battle-cry.
But simultaneously with this revival of the secession dogma of 1799 and the change of base on the part of Southern Congressmen and the Southern press as to the propriety.of apologizing for their institution, another material circumstance needs to be borne in mind. During the first quarter of this century American slavery had advanced from being a source of doubtful pecuniary advantage to be regarded throughout the South as the easiest and surest road to wealth and all the aggrandizement that ever goes with ample fortune Just as western emigration was opening the mellow and loamy uplands and the inexhanstible alluvions of the southwest to agriculture, the invention of the cotton-gin at once raised cotton-growing from the productions of a modicum for household consumption to the planting and gathering of a great exporting staple.
Until the development of the cotton interest, agri- culture at the South was essentially forming ; but after the staple assumed a position of control the sys- tem was changed, farmning was abandoned and planting became the one business which monopolized all the capital, subsidized all the science, and bounded all the worldly ambition of the Southerner. The produc- tion of cotton demands but little skill and but little heavy or exhausting labor. But it requires a persist- ent and unremitting industry, from New Year's day until Christmas ; an industry which is monotonous and uninteresting and requiring constant exposure to the burning of a semi-tropical sun.
For these reasons it soon grew to be a conviction on the part of the planter that the conditions essen- tial for the production of cotton are compulsory labor on the supposition that free labor will never bend to the galling yoke of an industry so monotonous; that.
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such compulsory labor must be enforced upon a trop- ical race whose skin had been, by original creation or from centuries of equatorial life, fitted to resist the effects of great and continued heat.
In connection with these opinions and circumstances is to be mentioned the fact, that England had found in the great expansion of her manufacturing interest a safe investment for her surplus capital and safe occu- pation for her large surplus population, and was pre- pared to buy at handsome prices all the cotton, that enforced industry, on a virgin soil could produce. Thus will be seen the stilts upon which Southern pride was lifted up until this accidental, and. as it were, mechanical elevation was, by her, mistaken for colossal superiority.
The planter was inflate ! first by the possession of a large landed estate. From his veranda his eye could sweep over several hundred and often over sev- eral thousand acres to which his title was absolute and indefeasible ; and one-half or two-thirds of the area, thus gratifying his love'o' possession, was cover- ed with a crop either growing o- being gathered, the proceeds of which were cert .in to fill his pockets. with glittering crown pieces from the vaults of the Bank of England. Those fields were tilled and all the offices of his household were performed by ser- vants whom the law of his State made his property ; whose services he could always co upel ; whose n.isde- meanors he bad full power to punish, even to the extent of death, where the offence committed was against society as well as against plantation rules. He was under the necessity of performing no physical labor, and the care of h's planting-estate gave hun ample leisure for aimisement, conversation, the rites of hospitality and the pleasures of the chase. Then, whenever his attention was arrested by the steady inroads that public opinion were making upon that form of society, and the fact that slavery had already disappeared in all civilized countries, he looked to the doct ine of State Sovereignty. as propounded by the great South Carolinian, for his remedy, and flat- tered himself that whenever sl. very became unsafe and not fully protected and fortified by public law under the Constitution and in the Union, it could, at any time, be made absolutely secure and perpetual by going out from the Union and founding .an oligarchy of the skin and of property in man, wi h chattel- slavery as its corner-stone and Leviticus for its New Testament.
Thus it was, and by the doginas and circumstances . above described that the minds of planters were molded and prepared for the events of 1861. A gen- eration had been educated in the belief that it was
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not only right but a duty to conserve their character- istic institution and that. when, by any means, slavery was at all endangered in the Union. the Southerner had a full right by the first principles of American republicanism to retire from all political connection with the non-slaveholding States and place slavery on a basis which could never be threatened by the con- stantly swelling majorities of free la' or.
This sentiment. this conviction well instilled into the Southern mind and all that followed was easy. It only remained to convince the South that the election which took place in the Fall of 1860 was an act of hostility to slavery sufficient to justify the long- meditated revolt. It was not urged that the election of ABRAHAM LINCOLN was in any respect conducted in an unconstitutional manner, or that he was not fairly chosen by a decided electoral, though not a popular, majority. The principal upon which he went into the canvass and on which he was elected was only a polit- ical opinion, and eleven States declared that he should never be their President or President of the United States because of thar political opinion.
He held that in the nature of things the system of compulsory labor and the law giving property in man are unjust in themselves and can have no sanction in the general principle of jurisprudence, but rest wholly on the provisions of special and local law ; that in re- spect to the unsettled territories. the Constitution ought to be so construed as to consecrate them forever to free labor, and leave them open for the immigration of white laborers who should own the soil they tilled. rather than to immigrants who sought to make property of both soil and its tiller: that while the Constitution does not interfere with the local law that sustains slavery in certain States, it can declare whether territories shall or shall not be slaveholding, and that wherever a doubt exists, a construction should be given favorable to freedom and progress, rather than a concession to an unfortunate relic of despotism left in the constitu- tion . of a democratic republic. In the canvass of 1860, Mr. LINCOLN had. moreover, expressed his con- viction that a natural and insurmountable antagonism . ex sts between the two systems of free and slave labor ; and that the nation would not long exist half slave and half free, but would at some time, not far distant, become all one thing or all the other.
The opinions of the candidate for whom most of the Southern votes were cast were understood to be that congressional discussions of the inherent right of slavery were unnecessary, ill-tuned and. impolitic ; that, as the Constitution guarantees security to slavery in nearly one-half of the States it ought to be
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so construed as not to prevent the slaveholder from . migrating with his slaves to territories purchased by the treasure or won by the valor of citizens of all the States; that slavery ought to have an equal repre- sentation with free labor in the National Congress, and in order to secure such equality no check ought to be imposed on the formation of slave States.
The defeat of the candidate representing these ideas was understood by the South to be the exclusion of these principles from all future control in national councils. It was not said or believed that the suc- cessful candidate would, upon taking his oath of office, proceed at once to open a crusade upon slavery as existing in the States. All that was feared, and all that was urged as ground for protest even to rev- olution and blood against the recognition of Lincoln by the South was, that by the principles announced in his canvass, he was pledged to oppose and veto the admission of any more slaveholding States ; that he would favor the action of Congress abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, and that in case of a vacancy occurring on the bench of the Supreme Court, a man would be appointed who would think with CURTISSand with MCLEAN, rather than with CAMPBELL and with TANEY, on the vexed question of the status of the African by general American law. In other words, the South saw in the administration of LINCOLN the settlement of three important issues, each adverse to slavery and tending to its extinction: no more slave States ; no more slavery on soil belonging to the National Government ; and no more Dred Scott decisions.
One sentiment became almost universal in the slavebolding States as soon as the election of LINCOLN was assured : that the South owed it to herself and her principles to accept a magistrate, if he were ac- cepted at all, under protest. and to show by proofs unmistakable that each of those points adverse to the South would be carried, if at all, only in the teeth of a fierce and unyielding opposition. It was. moreover, urged by the orators in all the slave States that no man would be worthy of the respect or confidence of his fellow-citizens who would accept any appoint- inent, whatever, from the obnoxious magistrate, and that a LINCOLN collector of customs or a LINCOLN post- master would be liable to mob violence and death . itself. In South Carolina the teachings of their be- loved and admired statesman were recalled and his doctrines followed with unflinching logic to the des- perate extreme. With one accord the leading men of that State believed that the crisis predicted by their greatest citizen; when all the advantages of the Fed- eral Union wou'd be outweighed by the danger to
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slavery from the Federal Government had come ; that. in their opinion. the great ends songht by the Union. so far as the South was concerned. could no longer be secured ; that Unionism had been tried and had been found insufficient to protect Southern institutions, and was, therefore, dangerous and obnoxions to the South ; that American politics had become wholly sectional, and the weaker section was now at the mercy of a bold, triumphant and increasing majority.
It must be remembered, too. that aside from, yet springing out of this radical diff rence on the subject of the agitation of slavery, there had been growing for generations a personal antipathy between the citizens of the Northern and Southern States. There were differencss in the form of worship, differences in social ideas and habits, differences in personal man- ners that divided the Southern planter from the mer- chant or artisan at the North by an interval almost as wide as that which separates Americans from the English. In some States this antagonisin was as ancient as the English revolution of 1644. Massachu- setts even then, though but an infant colony, was in hearty sympathy with the Puritans and their valiant leader ; while Virginia, with her hereditary aristocra- cy, her large landed estates, and with the established Church of England for her religion, never lost her ad- miration for monarchy, nor ceased to sympathize with the sufferings of the dethroned and beheaded CHARLES. The social ideas in a country where lands are divided into tracts of a thousand acres each are necessarially different from the institut ons and manners of com- munities where the average size of the farms is sixty acres. With her single and all-monopolizing interest of agriculture, hardly conceiving of a fortune that did not consist to a great extent in landed estate spend- ing lavishly the ample re urns of a virgin soil, and conscious of the ability to remove at any time from an exhausted to a fresh plantation. it was hardly to be expected that Virginia planters should admire or . even respect the energy, the thrift, the rigid economy by which the Northern communities maintained themselves in comfort, notwithstanding the sterility of their soil and the severity of their climate. . The Southern planter was naturally jealous of those com- mercial and manufacturing interests by which fortunes were accumulated beside which his possessions shrunk to a mere competency, and cities were built which far outshine anything that he could boast upon his soil. White facts and figures convinced the planter that his section was numerically and in all the exter- nal signs of power the inferior of the free States, and while he admitted the intelligence and superior culture of the Yankee, he ever plumed himself on what he
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