1859] John Brown's raid 439 1859, one John Brown, at the head of a little band of less than twenty followers, seized the United States arsenal at Harper's Ferry in Virginia, meaning to strike there a sudden blow for the freedom of the slaves, and, having set a servile insurrection aflame, make good his retreat to the mountains. It was the mad folly of an almost crazed fanatic; the man was quickly taken and promptly hanged: his flame of war had flickered and died in the socket. But that was not all. Brown was from Kansas; he had come to Virginia, at midsummer in that anxious year 1859, with the stain still fresh upon him of some of the bloodiest of the lawless work done there in the name of freedom: a terrible outlaw, because an outlaw for conscience' sake; intense to the point of ungovernable passion; heeding nothing but his own will and sense of right; a revolutionist upon principle; lawless, incendiary, and yet seeking nothing for himself. He brought arms and means to Virginia with which he had been supplied out of New England, not for use in the South, but for use in Kansas. But Southern men were not in a temper to discriminate. If Northern men would pay for the shedding of blood in Kansas, why not for the shedding of blood in Virginia also? Slavery was the object of the attack, and the slaveholders saw little difference, great as the difference was, between Abolitionists and Free-Soilers. And this terrible warning at Harper's Ferry was of a sort to put even cool men out of temper for just and sober thinking. A slave insurrection meant what it maddened Southern men to think of: massacre, arson, an unspeakable fate for women and children. If this was what "anti-slavery" meant, it must be met and fought to the death, Union or no Union. It was in such a season of disturbed and headstrong judgment that the presidential campaign of 1860 came on. The Democrats were the first to attempt a nomination; but their convention proved a house divided against itself and went hopelessly to pieces; and the outcome was two "Democratic" nominations. One section of the party nominated Douglas for the presidency; the other, which was the Southern section, named John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky as its candidate. A new party sprang into existence, the "Constitutional Union " party, made up of those who had been Know-Nothings until the Know-Nothing party died of inanition, and of those who had left the other parties but had found it impossible to digest the Know-Nothing creed of all who feared alike the Democratic and the Republican extremes of policy and doctrine, and still hoped the quarrel might be composed. These nominated John Bell of Tennessee, and declared in a platform of great simplicity and dignity that they recognised "no political principle other than the Constitution of the country, the union of the States, and the enforcement of the laws." The Republicans alone were united and confident. They warmly disavowed all sympathy with attempts of any kind to disturb slavery where it was established by law; but they declared as flatly as ever against the extension of slavery to the Territories; 440 Election of President Lincoln [1860 and they nominated, not Mr Seward, the chief figure of their party, — for many felt a distrust of him as a sort of philosophical radical, — but Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, the shrewd, persuasive, courageous, capable man who had loomed so big in the memorable debates with Douglas three years before. Their convention had sat at Chicago, in Mr Lincoln's own State. The cheers of the galleries and the astute combinations and diplomacy of his friends in their work among the delegates had played as great a part as his own gifts and popularity in obtaining for him the nomination. But when once he had been named the whole country began to see how wise the choice had been. Eastern men for a little while looked askance upon this raw Western lawyer and new statesman: but not after they had heard him. And when the votes were counted it was found that he had been elected President of the United States. One hundred and eighty of the electoral votes went to him; only one hundred and three to his three opponents combined. It was a singular result, when analysed. The electoral votes of Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky had gone to John Bell, the nominee of the "Constitutional Union" party; the rest of the Southern votes had gone to Breckinridge; Douglas had received only the votes of Missouri and three of the nine votes of New Jersey. And yet, although these amounted to but one hundred and three votes altogether in the electoral college, the total popular vote at the back of them was 2,823,741, as against a popular vote for Lincoln of only 1,866,452, — a popular majority of almost a million votes against the Republicans, -so large was the aggregate minority in the States whose electoral votes the Republicans had won. It was a narrow victory, no popular triumph; and Lincoln, like the other leaders of his party, was disposed to use it with the utmost good temper and moderation. But Southern men took no comfort from the figures and did not listen to protestations of just purpose. They looked only at the result, saw only that the government was to be in the hands of the Republicans, regarded the defeat as final and irreparable. Their pride was stung to the quick by the unqualified moral censures put upon them by those who were now to be in power. "The whole course of the South had been described as one of systematic iniquity." Mrs Stowe's striking and pathetic picture of what slavery sometimes led to, in her Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), had been accepted in the North and by the Englishspeaking world at large as a picture of what it usually led to. Southern society had been represented as built upon a wilful sin; the Southern people had been held up to the world as those who deliberately despised the most righteous commands of religion. They knew that they did not deserve such reprobation. They knew that their lives were honourable, their relations with their slaves humane, their responsibility for the existence of slavery amongst them remote "; and that now those who had most bitterly and unjustly accused them were to become their 1860] The Southern States secede 441 rulers. It seemed to them, too, that the North itself had of late practised nullification in its fight against them. More than a score of the States had passed "personal liberty" laws which were confessedly intended to bar and render impracticable the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. The South Carolina legislature, which itself chose the presidential electors of the State, had remained in session to learn the result of the election. When it knew that Lincoln was to be President, it summoned a Constitutional Convention, which severed the State's connexion with the Union; and before Lincoln was inaugurated six other Southern States had followed South Carolina out of the Union. The inevitable disintegration of the Union, by reason of the operation of the institution of slavery, had worked its perfect work. The South, which did not change, had become a region apart; and it now put the Union aside in accordance with the theory with respect to its authority which it conceived to have obtained at its constitution. There was here nothing of the contradiction which seemed to lie at the heart of nullification; the South was not resisting the Union and yet purposing to remain within it. It had taken the final step of withdrawal: the partnership was dissolved. If that were revolution it was at least revolution within the original theory of the law as the South had learned it. The issue was-slavery? Yes, upon the surface. Perhaps it need never have come to this, had Douglas kept his hand from the law. The movement against slavery had been weak, occasional, non-partisan until the Missouri Compromise was repealed, ten years before. It was that which had brought the Republican party into existence and set the sections by the ears. But now that the breach had come, it did not seem to men in the South merely a contest about slavery: it seemed, rather, so far as the South was concerned, a final question and answer as to the fundamental matter of self-government. There were many men in the South who, while they had no love for slavery, had a great love, a deep inherited veneration even, for the Union, but with whom the passion for the ancient principles, the ancient sentiment, of self-government was greater even than these, and covered every subject of domestic policy. It was this they deemed threatened now. Slavery itself was not so dark a thing as it was painted. It held the South at a standstill economically, and was her greatest burden, whether she felt it to be so or not. Bad men, too, could shamefully abuse the boundless powers of a master. But humane sentiment held most men steadily and effectually off from the graver abuses. The domestic slaves, at any rate, and almost all who were much under the master's eye, were happy and well cared for; and the poor creatures who crowded the great plantations where the air was malarial and where the master was seldom present to restrain the overseer, were little worse off than free labourers would have been in a like case, or any labourers who could live there. 442 Preparation for war [1860 Those who condemned slavery as it existed in the South condemned it unjustly because they did so without discrimination; and those who attacked it with adverse laws seemed to invade the privileges of selfgoverning States under the Constitution. Thus it was that Lincoln's election meant secession, and that the stage was set for the tragedy of civil war. For the whole country it was to be the bitterest of all ordeals, an agony of struggle and a decision by blood; but for one party it was to be a war of hope. Should the South win, she must also lose must lose her place in the great Union which she had loved and fostered, and must in gaining independence destroy a nation. Should the North win, she would confirm a great hope and expectation, establish the Union, unify it in institutions, free it from interior contradictions of life and principle, set it in the way of consistent growth and unembarrassed greatness. The South fought for a principle, as the North did: it was this that was to give the war dignity, and supply the tragedy with a double motive. But the principle for which the South fought meant standstill in the midst of change; it was conservative, not creative; it was against drift and destiny; it protected an impossible institution and a belated order of society; it withstood a creative and imperial idea, the idea of a united people and a single law of freedom. Overwhelming material superiority, it turned out, was with the North; but she had also another and greater advantage: she was to fight for the Union and for the abiding peace, concord, and strength of a great nation. CHAPTER XIV THE CIVIL WAR: I (1) PRESIDENT LINCOLN THE election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, on November 6, 1860, was the culmination and final decision of the long political struggle between the North and the South over the question of slavery. Descended from several generations of pioneers, Abraham Lincoln was born in the backwoods of Kentucky on February 12, 1809. His childhood and youth were passed amid the poverty and rude experiences of the frontier. The fever of westward emigration caused his father to move from Kentucky to Indiana in 1816, and from Indiana to Illinois in 1830, when, having reached the age of twenty-one, the son, following usual custom, left the home-cabin to begin life on his own account. In rude elementary schools he obtained during his boyhood an aggregate of about one year's tuition from five different teachers. The reading, writing, and ciphering thus learned he supplemented with diligent study of the few books that fell within his reach, so that at his majority, when he had grown to the stature of six feet four inches, with unusual physical strength and skill in frontier athletics, he also wrote a clear hand, and could express his thoughts in plain but concise and forcible language. Two flat-boat voyages on the great rivers to New Orleans, one from Indiana and the other from Illinois, gave him a glimpse of his country beyond his immediate neighbourhood. In the representative institutions of the New World, politics afforded the most frequent and easy avenue to distinction; and the acquirements and aptitudes of the tall stripling, who had begun life as a day-labourer, gave him a popularity which secured him four successive biennial elections to the State legislature. In these new surroundings he also underwent the varied experiences of clerk, village postmaster, captain of volunteers, deputy surveyor, and law student. The political and social conditions of the West were in their most active formative period. Between the date of Lincoln's majority and his election as President, |