The industrial republic: a study of the America of ten years hence

The thing which most impresses the student of the Civil War struggle, is how generally and completely the people who lived through it failed to understand it themselves. We of the present day know that the War was a clash between two incompatible types of civilisation; between an agricultural and conservative aristocracy, and a commercial and progressive democracy. We can see that each society developed in its people a separate point of view, separate customs and laws, ideals and policies, literatures and religions. We can see that their differing interests as to tariffs, police regulations, domestic improvements and foreign affairs, made political strife between them inevitable; and that finally the expansion which was necessary to the life of each brought them into a conflict which could only end with the submission of one or the other. Yet, plain as this seems to us now, the people of that time did not grasp it; through the whole long process they were dragged, as it were, by the hair of their heads, and each event as it came was a separate phenomenon, a fresh source of astonishment, alarm, and indignation. Even after the war had broken out, the vast majority of them would not be enlightened as in regard to it—a few of them have not been enlightened yet. I talked recently with an old Confederate naval officer, who said to me: “Oh, yes; it was the politicians who made the war.” I recall the astonished look which crossed the old gentleman’s face when I ventured the opinion that the politicians of this country had never yet made anything except their own livings.

It seemed not merely that they could not understand the thing; they would not. The truth did not please them, and the best and wisest of them appeared to have the idea that they had only not to see it, and it would cease to be the truth; after the manner of the learned men of Galileo’s time, who declined to look through his telescope, or to watch him drop weights from the Tower of Pisa. They made it a matter of offence that anyone should understand; the ability to predict political events was held to imply some collusion with them. When Lincoln, just before the crash, ventured to doubt the stability of “a house divided against itself,” his enemies fell upon him precisely as if he had declared, not that such a house would fall, but that he intended to knock it down. And this was the established view of all the conservatism of the country, only two or three years before there burst upon it one of the most fearful cataclysms of history.

Let us endeavour to place ourselves in the position of the average man of 1860, and see now the whole matter appeared to him.

Way back in the early thirties, eight or ten more or less insane fanatics—“apostate priests and unsexed women,” as one writer described them—had got together and begun an agitation for a wholly impossible and visionary (to say nothing of revolutionary and unconstitutional) programme—“the immediate and unconditional emancipation of the slaves.” They formed a society and started a paper called the Liberator. When governors of Southern states protested concerning it, the Hon. Harrison Gray Otis, Mayor of Boston, wrote as follows: “It appeared upon inquiry that no member of the city government, nor any person of my acquaintance, had ever heard of the publication. Sometime afterward it was reported to me by the city officers that they had ferreted out the paper and its editor; that his office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a very few ignorant persons of all colours. This information, with the consent of the Aldermen, I communicated to the above named governors, with an utterance of my belief that the new fanaticism had not made, nor was likely to make, proselytes among the respectable classes of the people.”

Nevertheless, the danger of this propaganda was recognised, and before long the Abolitionists were being stoned and shot, their presses smashed, and their meetings broken up; a “broadcloth mob” put a rope round the neck of the editor of the Liberator and dragged him through the streets of the city. And still, in spite of this, the agitation went on. All the “cranks” of the country gradually rallied about the movement. Their leader was a woman’s suffragist, an infidel, a prohibitionist, and a vegetarian; he denounced the Constitution as “an agreement with Death, and a covenant with Hell.” There was one man among them who addressed meetings with clanking chains about his wrists, and a three-pronged iron slave-collar about his neck; and who declared to the people of a town that they “had better establish among them a hundred rum-shops, fifty gambling-houses and ten brothels, than one church.” They allowed Negroes to speak on the platform with them, and they opened schools for Negro girls, or tried to, until these were broken up. One of them refused to pay taxes to a slave-holding government, and went to jail for it.

Assuredly, no common-sense person would have thought that here was anything save a madness that might be allowed to run its course. Yet the Abolitionists kept at it. In the election of 1840, a wing of them split off, and nominated a candidate for the Presidency, who received seven thousand votes out of a total of two or three millions. Four years later, when the Democratic Party was on the verge of forcing the country into a war with Mexico, they raised a hue and cry that this was a “slave-driver’s enterprise,” with the result that their vote went up to sixty-two thousand. And by keeping up the ceaseless agitation all through the war, and taking advantage of a factional quarrel in New York state to nominate a politician who came into their camp for the sake of revenge, they cast, in 1848, a vote of two hundred and ninety-one thousand.

And also they had by this time succeeded in colouring a great mass of the popular thought with their views. They had gotten the country unsettled; they had made people feel that something was wrong, and all sorts of anti-slavery measures were beginning to be championed. Some wanted to exclude slavery from the new Territories; some wanted to exclude it from the National Capital; some wanted to restrict the domestic slave-trade. All of these people, of course, denied indignantly that they were Abolitionists, denied that they had any sympathy with Abolitionism, or that their measures had anything to do with it. But the South, whom the matter concerned, understood perfectly well the folly of such a claim—understood that the institution of Slavery was one which could not be made war upon, or limited, and that the first hostile move which was made against it would necessarily mean its downfall. Hence, to the South, all these people were “Abolitionists.”

Over the California question, there came at last a crisis, and all the Conservative forces of the nation were scarcely equal to the settling of it. Edward Everett and Rufus Choate and Calhoun and Clay and Webster, and a dozen others that one might name, exerted all their influence, and went about warning their countrymen of the danger, and denouncing what Webster called “the din and roll and rub-a-dub of Abolition presses and Abolition lectures.” Under these circumstances the “Compromise” was adopted, and the vote of the Abolitionist Party fell off to one hundred and fifty-six thousand.

But then came the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which brought Lincoln into politics. The Abolition clamour surged up as never before—here was one proof the more, they said, that Slavery was menacing American institutions. The whole country seemed suddenly to be full of their supporters; and the Kansas Raid only added more fuel to the flame. The Republican Party was formed, the Black Republican Party, as the slave-holders called it; and at the Presidential election of 1856, they cast more than one million three hundred thousand votes, about one-third of the total vote of the country.

After that came, in due course, the attempt of the Supreme Court to put an end to the Abolitionist agitation, declaring that Congress could not restrict slavery in the Territories, which meant that the Republican Party had no right to exist. To “cheerfully acquiesce” in the decision of the Supreme Court, was the duty of “all good citizens,” according to President Buchanan; yet the only result of the action of the Supreme Court was to cause the agitation to burst out afresh. In Illinois, Abraham Lincoln ran for senator in flat defiance of the Supreme Court’s decision, and the Republican Party all over the country went on in its revolutionary course, precisely as if no Supreme Court had ever existed. A year or two later an agitator made matters still worse by his attempt to set free the slaves by force. “It is my firm and deliberate conviction,” said Senator Douglas, “that the Harper’s Ferry crime was the natural, logical and inevitable result of the doctrines and teachings of the Republican Party.” And he was perfectly right.

It was disgraceful, and yet it would not stop. The North had by this time become so full of Abolitionism, that even the Democrats were not to be trusted. When the split came, in Charleston, Yancey of Alabama explained this. “When I was a boy in the Northern States,” he said, “Abolitionists were pelted with rotten eggs. But now this band of Abolitionists has spread and grown into three bands—the Black Republicans, the Free-soilers, and the Squatter-sovereignty men—all representing the common sentiment that Slavery is wrong.” And when Abraham Lincoln was elected President by a minority of the people, upon a platform which declared that the Constitution was to be disregarded, the party of conservatism and tradition resorted to force to maintain its rights.

And what happened then? Why, simply this: a group of fanatical visionaries who had for thirty years been jeered at for demanding of the country something that was revolutionary and inconceivable—the destruction of an institution which had stood for centuries, and was built into the very framework of the nation—suddenly began to see the mighty structure totter, to see cracks open in it, to see its pillars crumble, its roof fall in; and at last, before they had fairly time to realise what was happening, the whole heaven-defying colossus lay a heap of dust and ruins at their feet!

I have said that I believe that our country is now only a few years away from a similar great transformation. In order to maintain that thesis, it will be necessary to show, first, a great underlying economic cause, working irresistibly to force the issue; and second, a consequent movement of protest, slowly making headway and ultimately permeating the whole thought of the country.

What was the cause of the Civil War? To put it into a phrase, it was the need under which Slavery laboured of securing new territory. The reader may find a contemporary exposition of the situation in Olmstead’s “Cotton Kingdom.” Slave labour was a very wasteful means of cultivation—only the top of the soil was used, and ten or fifteen crops exhausted it. Virginia was once a great exporting state, but in the forties and fifties it had become simply a slave-breeding ground for the younger generation, which had moved to the Far South. And then, when the Far South began to prove insufficient, there was another move, into Texas; and finally an attempt at still a third, into Kansas—which brought on the clash with the free states.