THE BROTHERS’ WAR BY JOHN C. REED OF GEORGIA AUTHOR OF “AMERICAN LAW STUDIES,” “CONDUCT OF LAWSUITS” “THE OLD AND NEW SOUTH” BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1905 Copyright, 1905 , By Little, Brown, and Company . All rights reserved Published October, 1905 THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A....

I would explain the real causes and greater consequences of the bloody brothers’ war. I pray that all of us be delivered, as far as may be, from bias and prejudice. The return of old affection between the sections showed gracious beginning in the centennial year. In the war with Spain southerners rallied to the stars and stripes as enthusiastically as northerners. Reconcilement has accelerated its pace every hour since. But it is not yet complete. The south has these things to learn: 1. A provid

INTRODUCTORY The inhabitants of the English colonies in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are all of the same race, language, religion, and institutions of government. Such homogeneousness, as has long been recognized, works powerfully for the political coalescence of separate communities. With the adjacent ones of the colonies just mentioned there has always been trend to such coalescence, as is impressively illustrated by the recent establishment of the Australian Federation. The thirteen col

A BEGINNING MADE WITH SLAVERY As a distinguished southerner, familiar with the subject, says, slavery in the United States was “a stupendous anachronism.” [11] It is almost incredible to the average northerner of to-day that the enlightened people of the south sank backwards in social development a thousand years or more, and hugged to their bosoms for several generations such a monstrous evil and peril. The co-operation of two facts fully explains the wonder just noted. Now let us try to unders

UNAPPEASABLE ANTAGONISM OF FREE LABOR AND SLAVE LABOR, AND THEIR MORTAL COMBAT OVER THE PUBLIC LANDS Now a brief explanation of the antagonism between free and slave labor. The expense of his slaves to the farmer is the same whether they are resting or at work. Sundays, days and even seasons of unfavorable weather, in long do-nothing intervals succeeding the making and also the gathering of the crop, they cost him just as much as when he can work them from sun to sun. But this is not all of his

GENESIS, COURSE, AND GOAL OF SOUTHERN NATIONALIZATION Nationalization is the process by which a nation makes itself. The process may be active for a long while without completion, as we see in the case of Ireland; it may form a nation, but to be overturned and wiped out, as the southern confederacy was; or it may find its consummation in such a powerful one as the United States. The most conspicuous effect of the process we now have in hand is to make one of many communities. But sometimes a par

AMERICAN NATIONALIZATION, AND HOW IT MADE THE BOND OF UNION STRONGER AND STRONGER Greece was going down in her contest with Macedon when she gave the world to come the Achæan league, the first historical example of full-grown federation. As Freeman says of such a federal government: “Its perfect form is a late growth of a very high state of political culture.” [27] This historian thus summarizes its essentials: “Two requisites seem necessary to constitute federal government in this its most perf

ROOT-AND-BRANCH ABOLITIONISTS AND FIRE-EATERS For a long while opposition to slavery was moderate and not unreasoning. The first actual quarrel over it between the sections was when Missouri applied for admission to the union in 1818. That was settled by the famous compromise of 1820. The most of the anti-slavery men of that day stood only against the extension of slavery. While many a one of them believed his conviction was dictated, independently and entirely, by his conscience, it was in fact

CALHOUN After John Caldwell Calhoun, who was born March 18, 1782, the birth-year of Webster, had become large enough to go to the field, the most of his time until he was eighteen was spent in work on the plantation. His father had never had but six months’ schooling. There were no schools in that region except a few “old field” ones, where the three R’s only were taught. To one of these John went for a few months. The boy learned to read, and manifestly he had acquired some habit of reading. In

WEBSTER Calhoun was the pre-eminent champion of the southern cause in the union, while Toombs was that of southern nationalization seeking independence. Webster was the pre-eminent champion of American nationalization seeking continental union. Toombs and Webster are therefore in antithesis; and it will be well for me to begin the chapter by anticipating some of the characteristics of the former, who will be treated at large later on, and briefly contrasting the two. By nature Toombs was so pron

“UNCLE TOM’S CABIN” The misrepresentations in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” of the character of the negro and his usual treatment in southern slavery have been taken as true by the best-informed and most unprejudiced everywhere outside of the south. The quotations which I make above from Prof. Barrett Wendell’s bahnbrechend work on American literature [81] show a rare and exemplary freedom from sectional bias. But he is a most convincing witness to the statement with which I begin this chapter, as I shall

SLAVERY AT LAST IMPELLED INTO A DEFENSIVE AGGRESSIVE Until the crisis of 1850, slavery had never changed from purely defensive tactics. This year made it seem that the north had fully resolved that slavery should never be allowed another inch of new territory; and also was very near, and was rapidly coming nearer to, the point of practically preventing the enforcement of the fugitive slave law. We have explained how slave property could not live unless it found new virgin soil in the Territories

TOOMBS Calhoun solidified the south in resolve to leave the union if the abolition party got control of the federal government. Just before his death there commenced such serious contemplation of an aggressive defence of slavery that we may call it an actual aggressive. Although by reason of his unquestioned primacy he could have assumed the conduct of this aggressive, he did not. Toombs was its real, though not always apparent, leader, from its actual commencement until it resulted in secession

HELP TO THE UNION CAUSE BY POWERS IN THE UNSEEN If you are not balked by adherence, either to the rapidly waning overpositiveness of materialism, or to the ferocious orthodoxy which denies that there has been any providential interference in human affairs since that told of in the bible; and if you are exempt from the fear of being regarded as superstitious which keeps a great number of even the most cultivated people forever in a fever of incredulity as to every example of what they call the su

JEFFERSON DAVIS For some time after the brothers’ war it was very generally believed that Davis had been one of the Mississippi repudiators; that through all his ante-bellum public career he had been an unconditional secessionist—what we in the south mean by a fire-eater; that cherishing an accursed ambition for the presidency of the southern confederacy he organized a secret conspiracy which consummated secession; that as the chief executive of the Confederate States he aided and abetted the pe

THE CURSE OF SLAVERY TO THE WHITE, AND ITS BLESSING TO THE NEGRO The master got the curse and the negro the blessing of slavery. We set out by mentioning how certain ants have been injured by becoming masters. Before this they were doubtless the equals of any non-slaveholding tribe in self-maintenance. Now they “are waited upon and fed by their slaves, and when the slaves are taken away the masters perish miserably.” [139] It did not become so bad as this with human slaveholders; but the consequ

THE BROTHERS ON EACH SIDE WERE TRUE PATRIOTS AND MORALLY RIGHT—BOTH THOSE WHO FOUGHT FOR THE UNION, AND THOSE WHO FOUGHT FOR THE CONFEDERACY The proposition of the heading has really been demonstrated in the foregoing chapters. I feel that the demonstration should have impressive enforcement. It will surely be for the great good of our country if the brothers of each section be truly convinced that those of the other were morally right in the slavery struggle from beginning to end. Let us begin

THE RACE QUESTION—GENERAL AND INTRODUCTORY 1. Dense fogs from various sources have settled over this subject. The root-and-branch abolitionists have made many believe that emancipation of the slaves was the great object of the north in the brothers’ war. The authors and defenders of the three amendments—especially of the fifteenth—have made many others believe that the inferiority of the southern negro is the effect of American slavery; that the cause having been removed by emancipation he becam

THE RACE QUESTION—THE SITUATION IN DETAIL The distinction between the two classes of southern negroes, glanced at in the last chapter, is to be always kept in mind—at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end, of our discussion. Its importance commands that we say something of it here. Consider how enormously the two differ in numbers. Five per cent of these negroes, that is, some four hundred thousand, in the upper; ninety-five per cent, that is, seven million and four hundred thousand, in t

The Old and New South , a Centennial article for the International Review, afterwards corrected and published separately. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co. 1876. The approach of the Centennial Celebration is not hailed in the south with the demonstrative joy of the north. It would be out of taste to expect that the former should appear to triumph greatly over the life of the nation preserved at the cost of her recent overthrow. Her late antagonist can rejoice in a vast and happy population, g