Franklin County: "The Lesson of Our Civil War," by A. K. McClure, June 16, 1886
Summary: In this lecture before the literary societies of Washington and Lee University, A. K. McClure, McClure describes the origins of the Civil War as the conflict in vision between Jefferson and Washington, while slavery played a role only as an obvious expression of the deeper conflict.
Gentlemen of the Literary Societies of Washington and Lee University:
Do not shudder at the theme I have chosen. I do not come to criticise the past, or to speak to those of the past. There are deep wounds not yet wholly healed; there are fierce passions which, though enfeebled, have not perished; there are bereavements whose shadows linger in countless homes; and there are sorrows which are tempered by time, but not effaced. I come to speak to a new generation, to which we, who witnessed our great civil conflict, must soon give place. I do so because I address young men, most of whom were not born when Appomattox became historic, and young men who, by reason of their better opportunities and attainments, are to be teachers and leaders when the memorable names of the war shall be known only in the exceptionally grand, and thrilling history whose annals they have made illustrious.
There is no history or tradition of man that does not tell of civil war. Even the chosen people of God, led by His own appointed lawgiver-fed, guided, and rescued by miracle-were made wanderers in the wilder-ness by secession and fraternal dispute; and, when in possession of the promised land, the tribes of Judah and Israel plunged into bloody conflict. Thus, through all the strange mutations of ancient and modern national structures, every civilization has carved out its destiny with the battle-axe and sword, and chiefly by internecine war. It was the natural employment of the barbarian. As a better civilization dawned, wars often multiplied until they blotted out the grandest monuments they had erected; and the history of every great nation of to-day has for its foundation the arbitrament of sanguinary battle. Our own republic was deeply crimsoned with the blood of its founders, and it was through the deadly struggle of mother and son of proud Britain that the noblest government of earth was created.
But the civil wars of other countries and civilizations bear no analogy to the two great internecine conflicts which the American people have made memorable. The wars of the ancients were wars of ambition, of conquest, of robbery. All that is immortal in Roman or Grecian or Carthaginian history, where we read of popular rule-all the wonderful temples, triumphal arches, and other monuments of antiquity, and even the later achievements commemorated by the imposing columns of modern art, as a rule, proclaim how history has repeated itself in all ages, by wars of ambition. Every great nationality of the past was rocked in the tempest of civil conflict; every civilization of the present has bloody pages of fraternal strife, and there is no more thrilling record of sanguinary internal struggle than that of England, the accepted fountain of the best civilization the world has known. The right of might is the sole title to every monarch's sceptre in the Old World, and that tells the whole story.
But history is among your collegiate studies; and, with the strange conflicts and mutations of living, languishing, and perished nationalities, you are familiar. Let us deal with what is least taught in colleges, and what is most needed to be learned by students-our country and ourselves.
You are told, by many inconsiderate political writers and orators, that our late civil war was the creation of extremists in both sections: of Northern abolitionists and Southern fire-eaters; that they inflamed the people beyond the bounds of reason; that they precipitated North and South into causeless war. It is not so. They aided and hastened the conflict, just as the driftwood of the resistless current adds to its momentum. They were only the white-caps of the often angry surface-waves which betokened the restless unfathomable deep. They were seen and heard by all, while the profound unrest that flung them up to play fantastic parts was unnoted and unappreciated.
It is a reproach to American intelligence and heroism to assume that mere sectional agitators could lead the most peace-loving, the most cultivated, and the most prosperous people of the earth into the bloodiest war of modern history. No: there were rational causes arising from sincerest conviction, which became too great for adjustment by statesmanship, and war came because of irreconcilable dispute on problems which defied solution by the methods of peace. It is easy to present many plausible theories by which the conflict between the North and the South could have been averted; but those who thus theorize do not understand the best attributes of American citizenship. There were statesmen and soldiers who welcomed war, but they were rare exceptions. There was not a great soldier, of either North or South, who did not draw his sword with painful reluctance: there was not a great statesman, in either section, who did not profoundly deplore the resort to arms. I saw tears jewel the eyes of Winfield Scott, the morning after the surrender of Fort Sumter, as he stood in the President's room and looked across the Potomac to his mother commonwealth. "I fear Virginia-I fear Virginia," was the sad and tremulous exclamation of the hero of two wars, and the great Captain of the Age. I then, for the first time, understood how deep and implacable were the opposing convictions of allegiance, when State and Nation gave opposing commands.
Let me say to the young men before me, who must learn of the great civil struggle of their fathers from the pages of history, that, to be just to their country and their countrymen, they must intelligently and dispassionately search beneath the partisan and sectional rubbish of the day, for the rational causes and the logical results of the most heroic conflict of either ancient or modern times.
Will it startle you to be told that the germ of discord, that ripened into civil war after two generations had nourished it, was planted by the two most illustrious men of our history? They were George Washington and Thomas Jefferson: men who made the grandest records of unsullied patriotism, of loftiest heroism, of wisest statesmanship. They differed widely, radically, as to the true theory of popular government Washington believed in a strong centralized government, Jefferson believed in the supreme power of the people; and the conflicts between the elder Adams and Jefferson surpassed even the intense partisan asperities of the present time.
Had either Washington or Jefferson defined the basis and powers of our government, there never could have been an issue between State and Nation, with color of law; but they created the issue, in all the integrity of their matchless devotion to the republic, and neither was able to solve the problem. Could they have foreseen the fierce sectional struggle over Missouri in 1820, that brought the country to the very verge of dissolution, or the "nullification" disturbance of 1831, or the Kansas-Nebraska tempest, that raged from 1854 to 1860, or the fearful climax that was reached in 1861, they would have left no such issue to convulse the people to whom they had given free government. They not only could not forecast the future magnitude of the question, but they could not control the discordant and almost chaotic elements of the country in the formation of a permanent government. The Confederation of 1781, the firstborn governmental structure of the Union, was fruitful chiefly in demoralization and the lack of government. Although impoverished by war, and without currency or credit, extravagance and a growing disrespect for authority prevailed throughout the land. A government that would govern became a supreme necessity; and it is wonderful that, with the honest antagonisms of the ablest and best men of the day, and the power of the demagogues-who were potential then as now-so beneficent a structure of constitutional government was finally attained in 1789.
Had the Constitution been any less a succession of compromises, it would have been rejected; and it was by the supreme necessity of compromise, even to the extent of ambiguous definition of what later proved to be most vital questions, that an acceptable fundamental law was framed. Opposing partisans, failing to obtain the plain command of the Constitution in harmony with their views, at once claimed by construction what they had failed to obtain in indisputable terms. From the day of the adoption of the Constitution and the organization of the government, the sovereignty of the State as against the Nation, and the sovereignty of the Nation as against the State, were both taught with equal ability and earnestness, and the high warrant of the fundamental law was claimed with equal positiveness by the disputing statesmen.
Vital as the issue was regarded by the leading founders of the republic, it grew into paramount importance as the interests of sections became more and more involved. Slavery was accepted as warranted by the common law of the country, as there were slaves in all of the thirteen colonies excepting Massachusetts, at the adoption of the Constitution, and Puritan Massachusetts profited largely by the slave-traffic.
Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Henry did not approve of slavery; but they accepted the compromises of the Constitution, believing that it would gradually perish without convulsion to property-interests. Jefferson's great lesson to the republic on the subject was given in the Ordinance of 1787, that excluded slaves from the whole Northwestern Territory; but there were not only great property-interests, but strong convictions, in some of the Southern States, to sustain slavery: and it is not surprising that the framework of a new government, aiming to harmonize widely-conflicting views, trusted to the future the adjustment of antagonisms which it was hoped would perish, in the fullness of time, without disturbing the peace of the nation.
We can now see wherein Washington and Jefferson erred; but who of their day, or of ours, could have been as wise as they, in surmounting the countless obstacles to the creation of a constitutional republic?
You are often told that slavery was the issue that plunged the North and the South into fraternal conflict. Slavery was not the source of the war. Its interests happened to be most intimately interwoven with the fundamental dispute that estranged the two sections; but the slavery-issue never could have assumed disturbing proportions, had the founders of the republic clearly decided the supreme question of the scope of our nationality. It was the broader and deeper issue of the constitutional power of State and Nation that defied peaceable adjustment. For three-quarters of a century, the question had been asked: Are we a Nation or a Confederation at will? and it had been answered with equal ability, integrity, and patriotism, and in nearly equal numbers, affirming each.
The growth and power of slavery, that were not anticipated by those who framed our structure of government, were the creation of the steady and positive enlargement of the theory of State sovereignty and the long-passive assent of those who disputed and feared it. Jefferson boldly taught the sovereignty of the State; Calhoun enlarged upon Jefferson; and the leaders of 1861 enlarged upon Calhoun, until the refusal to recognize the individual rights of States, as paramount to the National authority in every State of the Union, precipitated civil war. Slavery had much to do with broadening and intensifying the issue, but there was not a disputed demand of slavery that was not anchored in the unsettled sovereignty of the State.
Jefferson, the great leader for popular government, for the dethronement of centralization, and for the sovereignty of the State, had consecrated the great Northwest to freedom; and he was logical in all his theories, when we consider the great battle he had to fight. He dreaded centralization, and wisely dreaded it. He saw the dregs of monarchy in the demand for a strong government, and he had no weapon with which to oppose it successfully but the sovereignty of the State. He did not battle for slavery, for he was not its friend: he did not battle for slavery-extension, for he did not dream of that. He rescued popular government from what he regarded as its most dangerous foes, and the States now glittering as jewels in the crown of the republic, created in the then unknown land ceded to the Union under Jefferson's matchless statesmanship, tell how exceptionally grand were his achievements.
And what more beautiful or attractive theory could be presented to a free people, than the sovereignty of the State? It was the bulwark of safety against the despotism of centralized power, and it quickened every instinct and impulse of a free people. Who could forecast the fearful peril with which it was fraught? It required no special perspicacity to appreciate the danger of disruption, if Hamilton had triumphed over Jefferson and made centralization a positive feature of the new republic; but the sovereignty of the State appealed to freedom: it appealed to the pride of community: it appealed to the self-appreciation of individual manhood: and it appealed to the love and sanctity of home; but it rejected every attribute of nationality.
Centralized governmental authority had visible peril: it invited despotic elements to effort; it appealed to the human infirmity that grasps power; and its logical tendency is to the stealthy abridgement of popular rights. But the sovereignty of the State, in a government of free people, was beautiful and fragrant as the rose with its hidden thorns. Of the two great highways open to the feeble and hesitating government, both gave promise of future safety, both were beset with danger; and concession and compromise handed down to succeeding generations the grave problems the fathers could not solve. You naturally ask: "Was there no middle-ground on which the new nation could have been founded?" No: there was no middle-ground then; there is none now; there can be none in the future.
The prerogatives of nationality must be clear and unmistakable, or the nation must be the plaything of every popular caprice or passion. There is but one source of safety in our nationality founded in the liberty of law: that is, the reserved sovereignty of the people over the power of their government. They make and unmake constitutions and government, and in their unquestioned sovereignty-asserted, as it ever can be, in all the channels of authority-is the sole safety of the republic, against the despotic abuse of national prerogatives.
In the very cornerstone of the new republic, shattered by antagonistic construction from the day the government was organized, and in the growing and adverse interests which attached to disputed policies, we have the true source of our civil conflict. For nearly the period of a generation, the opposing theories of the power of State and Nation were discussed as abstract propositions, rather than as vital principles applicable to practical statesmanship. Slavery was sheltered under the sovereignty of the State, and there were none of consequence to assail its constitutional right; but, in 1820, the admission of Missouri precipitated a direct issue between disputing constructionists. Vast property-interests were enlisted with the South; and, in the South-as in the North, and as in all peoples-interest colors and intensifies conviction. Jefferson, Madison, and Marshall were yet living; but the South had passed from the policy of gradual emancipation, that was expected by the founders of the government, to the policy of slavery-extension. It had then become a great property-power and a great political power: and, with the sovereignty of the State taught by the ablest and best statesmen of the South, and by many of the ablest and best of the North-with both the sovereignty of the State and the divine authority for slavery taught in every home, in every school, in every pulpit, of the Southern States, and with sincerest political and religious conviction and individual and general property-interest to crystallize Southern sentiment, you can understand how the Missouri contest brought the loosely-anchored nation to the very verge of destruction.
And how was it saved? Then, as in the framing of the Constitution, the vital point of dispute was evaded: concession and compromise again transmitted to posterity the problem that the statesmen of 1820 could not solve. It created a pacificator in Henry Clay; but it left our government with doubtful and disputed prerogatives, to vex the coming generation. Missouri was admitted, with slavery: all the territory north of it was solemnly dedicated to freedom: and the disputants retired from the drawn battle, to fortify their camps for future struggle. That conflict made slavery-aggression the logical offspring of the sovereignty of the State. The lines were clearly defined: the obviously opposing interests of the free industry of the North and the menial industry of the South were arrayed in hostility that, however smothered for a third of a century, was implacable.
The threat of nullification in South Carolina, in l831, was another and a bolder assertion of the sovereignty of the State; and it, like the Missouri dispute, was settled by a compromise tariff, without touching the vital point in controversy. Again did our statesmen transmit to posterity the problem they could not solve.
In 1850, the disputing hosts were marshaled to convulse the nation over the admission of California and the organization of the other Mexican Territories. After tempestuous strife, compromise measures were enacted admitting California with a free Constitution, organizing the Territories without interdicting slavery, and revising the law for the rendition of slaves. Political revolution followed, in North and South. Toombs and McDonald locked horns on the compromise in a battle for the gubernatorial chair of Georgia; and Jefferson Davis and Henry S. Foote resigned their seats in the Senate, to contest the Governorship of Mississippi on the same issue; while the banner of Free Soil was unfurled with formidable numbers in its following in the North. Georgia and Mississippi elected Toombs and Foote; but Massachusetts and Ohio, in the confusion of parties, called Charles Sumner and Salmon P. Chase, then un-known in the circles of partisan politics, to a new destiny as great national leaders, and Henry Wilson was sent to fill the seat of Daniel Webster in the Senate. Then, as in 1820, and again in 1831, our statesmen transmitted to their successors the problem they could not solve.
Growth of population, growth of industry-free and slave-growth of commercial interest in the opposing theories of constitutional power, the friction of perpetual watching, and the wounds of repeated conflicts intensified alike conviction and effort on both sides; and the repeal of the Missouri compromise in the Kansas-Nebraska bill of 1854 was logical, because that restriction was a frowning menace to the whole theory of the sovereignty of the State, as then taught in its advanced features.
The sovereignty of the State made slaves property; the Territories were the common property of all; and equal rights for Northern and Southern property of every kind were demanded and obtained. Then came the logical demand, from the new standpoint of the sovereignty of the State, for the right of transit in free States; and finally came the Dredd Scott decision, that crowned the South with victory. It had sectionalized freedom and nationalized slavery. It was then that Abraham Lincoln, in the most carefully considered and prepared political address of his life, delivered before the Springfield convention that nominated him for United States Senator, against Douglas, in 1858, voiced the considerate sentiment of all sections, when he said: "I believe this government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved: I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect that it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South." This was before Mr. Seward's bitterly-criticised proclamation of the irrepressible conflict, and it was the sober truth.
The general political disruption that followed created a new party, with a single creed; and a change of half the number of votes in a single ward of Philadelphia would have given the new party the victory in its first battle, and made Fremont President instead of Buchanan. In l860, Mr. Lincoln was chosen President: it was the first lawfully-expressed mandate of the sovereign power of the Nation, that the sovereignty of the State was not supreme; and then, for the first time since Washington, and Hamilton, and Jefferson, and Madison met the issue and passed it by, three-quarters of a century before, the grave problem had to be solved.
In vain did sincere men plead for compromise: the sturdy conviction and intensified purpose of the most intelligent and earnest people of the world made it impossible. We point to unwise acts on both sides, and thoughtlessly charge them with precipitating war; but, over and above all the follies of sectional disturbance, were the wisest and bravest men of both sections, who saw and accepted the inevitable, while ceaselessly but hopelessly striving to avert it. The sovereignty of the State then summoned its last prerogative: to sever the Union, and end the pretense of nationality. Peaceable dismemberment or civil war: such was the only choice presented, and civil war was inevitable. Do you inquire why it was inevitable? Let me answer in a single sentence: I am sure that peaceable disunion would have brought anarchy to the North; I believe that, sooner or later, and soon at the latest, it would have brought anarchy to the whole continent.
There are two memorable political deliverances to which the student of to-day can turn, in beginning the study of the causes which led to what must ever seem a most unnatural conflict. Jefferson boldly gave the keynote for the construction of the Constitution in favor of the sovereignty of the State, in the Kentucky resolutions of 1798. He framed them, and Madison framed like resolutions passed by the Virginia Legislature the same year. In the first of Jefferson's resolutions, he declares that the States "are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government," that "they constituted a general government for special purposes, delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government, . . . that this government, created by this compact, was not made the exclusive or final judge of the powers delegated to itself, . . . but that, as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.'' One year later, the Kentucky Legislature simply amplified Jefferson's resolutions of 1798, by another resolution declaring "that the several States which formed the instrument, being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable right to judge of the infraction; that a nullification, by those sovereignties, of all unauthorized acts done under color of that instrument, is the rightful remedy."
Such was the theory of our nationality proclaimed by Jefferson, whose policy ruled the republic for sixty years. The States were not only declared sovereign, but independent, and they were to be the sole judges of any wrong, and of the remedy, in a conflict between State and Nation. All that followed, touching the dispute, was entirely logical under Jefferson's construction of our feeble fundamental law. From the Missouri conflict of 1820 to the South Carolina eruption of 1831, thence to the California struggle of 1850, thence to the Kansas-Nebraska controversy of 1854-60, thence to the Dredd Scott decision, and thence to supreme national mastery or war, it was steady and consistent progress.
The other memorable deliverance came from the Chicago Lincoln convention of 1860, when a body of able and intensely earnest men came to reverse and direct our national destiny, as Jefferson came to reverse and direct it in 1800. It declared "that the new dogma that the Constitution, of its own force, carries slavery into any or all of the Territories of the United States is a dangerous political heresy, at variance with the explicit provisions of that instrument itself, with contemporaneous exposition, and with legislative and judicial precedent: is revolutionary in its tendency, and subversive of the peace and harmony of the country."
These two deliverances, coming from equally honest and earnest conviction, are the landmarks of the sixty years of political history which made the issue of the powers of State and Nation so momentous and fraught with such vast property and political interests, that there was no middle-ground, no basis of compromise, no solution but peaceable dismemberment or fraternal war. Had it been possible to evade the issue then, as it was evaded in the formation of the Constitution, or in the Missouri, the South Carolina, the California, and the Kansas-Nebraska controversies, disruption could and would have been delayed, but not averted; but the issue had finally confronted the country in an attitude that demanded prompt and final solution, and the question whether State or Nation was sovereign mocked every arbitrament but the sword.
Thus came our civil war. It is erroneously accepted by the multitude as a war caused by slavery, and waged solely for the maintenance or destruction of slavery. Slavery became so important a factor in precipitating the appeal to arms, and the effect of the conflict upon slavery was so distinctly visible to all, that even pretended historians have assumed that slavery was the one great issue that summoned a million reapers to the har-vest of death. The young men before me, who must be among the teachers of the future, should better understand the struggle that established a new epoch in the history of the republic. Let us briefly look at the fountain, and trace its streams as they coursed through the Lincoln administration. The fourth resolution of the declaration of principles on which Lincoln was elected declared: "That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of powers on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depends." There were men in that convention who did not honestly believe in that hiatic declaration, but they were inconsiderable in number and power; and no man in Virginia more sincerely believed in it, in the broadest interpretation, than did Abraham Lincoln. He had never, by word or deed, questioned the right of States to establish, maintain, or abolish slavery; and, in his first inaugural address, he pointedly declared, by quoting from a previous public address: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in the States where it exists. I believe that I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."
There were leading men in the North who either welcomed civil war or accepted it with complacency, because they expected from it the bloody overthrow of slavery; but I speak what Lincoln's public and private utterances, and what his public and private acts, uni-formly declared, when I say that there was not a day, from the date of his inauguration till the first of January, 1863, when the final proclamation of emancipation was issued, that the war could not have been ended by the restoration of the National Union and its authority, without destroying slavery in a single State. The very circumstances under which the secession of Southern Senators and Representatives occurred proved that it was not slavery they were defending by revolutionary action. The President, the Senate, and the Supreme Court were each a bulwark of safety to the South against any infraction of the sovereignty of the State in the regulation of its own domestic institutions, and the political power of the Senate was given to the Lincoln administration only by the resignation of Southern Senators. Slavery in the States was safe beyond question; but the higher issue of the absolute sovereignty and independence of the State, as then interpreted, was assailed with resolute, aggressive purpose, and it had no hope but in revolution.
When war came, and great battles had been fought, the pressure on Lincoln for an avowed emancipation policy daily grew in strength and intensity, and Lincoln severed strong personal and political ties by patient and exhaustive effort to end the war by the restoration of the Union without forcing the final decision of the slavery issue. He knew that slavery was not the cause of the war; he knew that, with slavery gradually and peaceably abolished and the sovereignty of the State still paramount to the sovereignty of the Nation, new South Carolina nullification of revenue-laws, or new Connecticut conven-tions to interpose in favor of foreign enemies, or new Pennsylvania whiskey-rebellions would peril our national existence. He concisely stated his position, in his letter to Horace Greeley, on the 22d of August, 1862, when he said: "If there be those who would not save the Union unless at the same time they could destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object is to save the Union, and not either to save or to destroy slavery."
At last, it became a supreme necessity to obey public sentiment in the North, and to disarm the threatening sentiment of foreign nations which hated free government North or South, by an avowed emancipation-policy; but, when it was avowed, it was done with every opportunity for the absolute safety of slavery in the States. The preliminary proclamation of emancipation was issued on the 22d of September, 1862, and it fixed the following 1st of January, more than three months in the future, for the final proclamation, with the assurance that it should not apply to any "not then in rebellion"; and it proffered compensation for slaves to all who, at the expiration of the more than three months of time given, were found under the authority of the Union, and accepted immediate or gradual emancipation. And, when the final proclamation was issued-on the lst of January, 1863-it excepted parts of Virginia and Louisiana, and all of the States of Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee, from its mandate.
That step once taken by the Government, after nearly two years of war for the maintenance of the Union, could be receded from only when the sword com-manded it; but there was not a day, from the date of the final proclamation of emancipation until the 3d of February, 1565, when Stephens, Hunter, and Campbell, the Confederate commissioners, met Lincoln at Fortress Monroe, that Lincoln would not have gladly accepted peace under a restored Union, with compensated emancipation. I well remember hearing him discuss it, late in the autumn of 1864, when the question of military success on great battlefields was no longer problematical; and, could the people of the South have heard him as I did, and trusted him as all trusted who knew him, I believe that there would have been early peace with compensated emancipation, and reconstruction without the desolating tread of the thief and adventurer. I saw his plan, written out by his own hand, based on the payment of four hundred millions to the owners of slaves. I shall never forget the sorrow with which he contemplated the probability of future battles and sacrifice of life, and the earnestness with which he sought peace when mere ambition would have pressed for the laurels of the conqueror. He said: "Four hundred millions! It seems a large sum to add to our already heavy debt; but one hundred days of war will cost as much. If we are to be reunited, the loss North and South is equally the loss of the Nation; and, when the sacrifice of life and the added sorrow to the homes of both sections are considered, there is no argument against compensated emancipation. It would not only give us peace, but it would temper the sad sectional estrangement, and enable the South to resume her industries and contribute her share to the payment of our national debt." I give the exact substance of his remarks, and nearly his exact words.
When he met the Confederate commissioners, on the 3d of February, 1865, he was precluded from proposals for peace by the limitation upon their action from the Confederate President, making the recognition of the Confederacy a condition precedent to negotiation. Compensated emancipation was possible even then, for it had one unfaltering potential friend in Abraham Lincoln. How wise he was when he suggested it, in the fall of 1864, is proved by the expenditure of nearly twice four hundred millions in war, with its countless cost of life and sorrow added, before peace was finally attained.
Thus did Lincoln, the oracle of the North during the war, seek to protect slavery in the States until an emancipation-policy became a military, political, and diplomatic necessity; and, from the date of the emancipation-policy until the 3d of February, 1865, he was the open, earnest supporter of compensated emancipation. He waged war not against slavery, but for the supreme sovereignty of the republic.
I have thus presented the supreme issue that led to our civil war; but you will still ask why peaceable adjustment was not possible with a people so grand in statesmanship, and bound together by the most patriotic ties. In answer, let me ask you to glance at the distinctive character of our people, from the Congress of 1776 to the Congress of 1886, and from the battlefield of Bunker Hill to that of Yorktown, and from Bull Run to Appomattox, and you will see that every effort and achievement was of heroic type. The fathers who fled from their vexed homes beyond the sea, for freedom of conviction, gave equally sturdy conviction to their children, and Puritan and Cavalier were alike resolute in their purpose. The same people were in North and South: inheritors of the same heroic manhood: sharers of the same traditions, of the same freedom, of the same religion: worshipers of the same God, at the same altars: warriors under the same flag, from Valley Forge and Lundy's Lane to New Orleans and the halls of the Montezumas: and yet how strangely and sadly they misunderstood each other! Neither credited the other with the profound sincerity that pervaded the great body of the people of both sections; and, stranger still, with the most heroic record of any nationality, neither believed the other heroic to the extent of sacrifice, in the sectional issue that divided them. Both were forgetful that, for nearly two generations, the education, the worship, the prayers, of the two sections, had been in direct antagonism on the issues of national sovereignty and slavery. They were forgetful of the heroic religious conviction that had dismembered great churches on the issues which finally precipitated war. The North believed the South to be bombastic without courage, and the South believed the North to be shriveled into money-getting and cowardice. I remember, as if it were but yesterday, a Legislative caucus of the dominant party in my own State, held when Sumter was fired upon, in which I declared that, if war came, the South would be heroic as the North in battle; and the response was a flood of hisses from a majority of my associates. How sadly that prophecy was fulfilled, the countless graves of our battlefields fearfully attest. Each entered the war, believing, that the other would speedily weary of it, and end the strife; but both learned too late what the unbroken history of a century should have taught.
A Confederate government, established with all the attributes of an independent nationality but the recognition of the government from which it seceded, and promptly acknowledged as a belligerent power by England and France-where was the middle-ground for compromise? The battle thus begun could end, short of the mastery of the sword, only by the absolute surrender of the parent government or of the Confederacy; and where, in all the history of American effort, was there a precedent for such a solution of the dispute? No: there was, then, no peace possible but by war; and on the hills of Gettysburg the decisive struggle came. For three days the issue of battle trembled in the balance, and, when decided against the repulsed but undaunted legions of Lee, the contest of Caesar and Pompey on the plains of Pharsalia was not more decisive of the destiny of Rome than was Gettysburg of the destiny of the Confederacy.
A less sincere and heroic people than Americans would have there ended the conflict; but the Southerners, like the Spartan warriors of old, still fought and fell: repeating, in the name of the South, the inscription on the graves of the heroes of Leonidas: "Oh, stranger, go tell the Lacedemonians that we lie here in obedience to their laws." Even with Gettysburg lost, and Vicksburg on the same natal day of the republic, sending the Father of Waters again "unvexed to the sea," other great and bloody battles were fought; but Gettysburg and Vicksburg unalterably determined the destiny that made Appomattox historic.
Thus came, thus ended, civil war; and the matchless grandeur of American citizenship was as sublime in peace as in the flame of battle. Who saw the emblems of victor or vanquished, at Appomattox? A swordless chieftain met the chieftain whose warriors had fought against overwhelming numbers until it was no longer heroic to die in fragmentary and hopeless struggle. They met for peace. The defeated insurgent was welcomed to the bountiful supplies of the flag that was his enemy an hour before, speeded to his home, and he bore with him the hearty fellowship of his late deadly foes and the guaranteed protection of the Nation. By the order of President Lincoln, issued through General Weitzel, in Richmond when Lincoln was present, the State authorities of Virginia were given safe conduct to resume their functions at Richmond, and restore the commonwealth to the Union; and, in obedience to the some instructions from President Lincoln, personally given to General Sherman at City Point, in presence of General Grant, the first Sherman-Johnston military treaty, furling every Confederate flag, retiring every Confederate soldier from the field throughout the entire South, and restoring civil authority in every State, was framed and executed.
But, dark as had been the days of war, a darker day dawned upon the South, just as Sherman and Johnston met to give the country universal peace. Abraham Lincoln was murdered, and, in the bewildering frenzy, the Sherman-Johnston peace was swept away, and passion and resentment were given the mastery. But peace came to the warriors of the blue and the gray; while disturbers who are sometimes invincible in peace, and usually invisible in war, for a full decade desolated the South and denied tranquillity to all. The soldiers of both sections, who had made American heroism the most lustrous of history, obeyed the command for peace; and, from warrior to citizen-from the hoarse music of shotted guns to all the various channels of commerce, industry, and trade-a million and a half of heroes settled down to dignify a common citizenship. In no land but ours, would such peace have been possible; and ours is the only country in the world where the soldiers of civil war have been the bulwark of safety for law and order in every community. When Johnston and Buckner stood with Sherman and Sheridan at the grave of Grant, as pall-bearers, they reflected the grander heroism of peace that only the soldiery of America could portray.
It would be sad, indeed, if the lesson of our civil war ended with the story of sacrifice, sorrow, and desolation, even with the silver lining of the heroism of our people in battle and in peace; but the lesson does not thus end. The present is full of promise: the future of our great people is the brightest of all the peoples of the earth; and, but for the hitherto matchless progress of my own generation, I would wish to lag even superfluous on the stage of action, to witness and be an unnoted part of the grander advancement that must weave the chaplets for the great actors of your generation. How we have progressed, you may understand when I tell you that I was an interested student of our country's growth when its population was only one fourth of our present sixty millions; that I can recall the birth of eleven of our thirtyeight States; that I well remember when there was not a steamship on the seas: when there was not a railway-locomotive operated in the world: when the lightning messenger was undreamed of: when to have predicted the ocean-cable would have been regarded as the phantom of a hopeless lunatic: when the Golden Gate of the Pacific was an idle waste, under semi-barbaric rule: when the great Northwest, with its now-brilliant stars in the galaxy of States, was known only as the home of the savage: when the coming Empire State in the Southwest was tossed in revolution by adventurers: and when schools and newspapers were luxuries enjoyed only by the affluent. Look around you, and tell me what must be the achievement of your age, with your vastly greater sources of enlightened progress! With such lessons yet fresh in the memories of the fast-fading actors, what must be the story of the young student now before me, who shall come back to this fountain of learning to portray the advancement of the next generation?
Will he deplore our civil war? I think not. He will deplore its bereavements, as the angel of every better nature sorrows for the sorrowing; but will he not point to the war as dating the new era of matchless advancement in all the greater attributes of national power and grandeur? Of what will he speak? Those of us who have felt the wounds of the conflict will then rest in the dreamless home of the dead, and the living will be inspired by the new duties and the new opportunities before them. The scars left by the harsh invader in Lexington, and the charred walls and broken columns of once lovely homes left by the harsh invader in Chambersburg, will be as twice-told tales to the earnest men who must then see about them a nation greater in population than the entire Russian Empire of to-day: greater than England and France combined: greater than any civilized nation of the earth. He will speak of the new past as we speak of the conflicts of 1776 and 1812, with England, and of 1847, with Mexico; and he will point to the monuments of the living present as the lesson of the occasion. He will tell of the new departure that made a homogeneous people, in industry, in trade, in education, in thrift, and in progress, from Northern lakes to Southern gulf, and from the Eastern to the Western sea; and he will point, with all the pride of home and section, to the tide of immigration and wealth from the North and from Europe, diverted from the highways toward the setting sun to the more inviting fields, forests, and mines of the South. He will be armed to challenge the North in the race for productive riches; he will portray the wealth of character and fortune that has been created by the desolation of war; and he will date the most beneficent growth of the American people from the conflict whose wounds are yet sensitive, even when viewing their own great work. When war began, a locomotive could not be artistically tired south of Mason and Dixon's line: to-day, nearly fifteen thousand miles of Southern railway could be changed in gauge almost between two settings of the sun, and ten thousand miles of it were constructed since the war.
The land for the homes of our future growth is not in the West, nor in the East, nor in the North: it is in the South, where there are more unimproved and improvable acres than the present total improved land in all the States of the Union, excepting Illinois. There is now no barrier to industry in any section of the Union, and the two hundred and fifty million acres of land open to the husbandman, embracing the valuable forests of the nation, with fruitful soil, mines of boundless wealth, genial climate, and abundant water-power, will surely enrich the story of national progress to be told here to the next generation. Then, as now, there will be monuments of the past as fingerboards on the highway of industrial and national greatness. As we turn back to Washington and Jefferson, and to Jackson and Clay, as exemplars of American character and achievement, so will the people who come after us turn to the two foremost exemplars of opposing greatness in our civil war. One name will leap up from the love of every Northern heart-one name will be lisped in tenderest affection by every son and daughter of the South; they are indissolubly linked with the greatness that is above envy and hate. They met in mighty conflict for the mightiest issues, and yet gave the world no utterance or token of resentment; they taught to friend and foe, above the fiercest passion of civil strife, the lesson of duty and of sacrifice for duty. The dust of one rests in these college-halls, in the tomb of Robert E. Lee; the dust of the other rests in his own loved and loving Prairie State, in the tomb of Abraham Lincoln. They taught, by word and deed, in the greatest actions of our greatest conflict: "With malice toward none, with charity for all." That ends the office of eulogy.
But the lesson of our civil war is not fully presented by the consideration, of its primary causes, its heroic history, and the sublime progress it has achieved for free institutions and the best civilization of the world. The attributes of our nationality are now so clearly defined that none dispute them, and inconsiderate men point to assured perpetuity because of the inherent strength of our government. You, who will fight the battles for our free institutions during the next generation, must not be deceived by the presumed safety of popular government. The pendulum that is swung in violence will be violent in its return, and sweep beyond its justly-defined limits. For a generation before the war, the equilibrium was disturbed by the violent swing to the supreme sovereignty of the State, and the return to a supreme nationality was given additional impetus by the violent throes of revolution.
All nations are led to grandeur or to decay by the resistless mutations which come from both war and peace, and ours cannot be an exception to the rule. The lesson of our civil war is incomplete without noting and guarding against the chief peril that comes with newly-defined national sovereignty. It is the safe team that runs away because the reins are loosened, and safety is assumed without vigilance; and the decline and fall of many great nationalities were solely by unseen and unappreciated dangers which insensibly sapped the vitals of just administration.
There was danger in the sovereignty of the State that dismantled the sovereignty of the Nation, and there is danger in the sovereignty of the Nation that has dismantled the sovereignty of the State. There is weakness in the very strength of our nationality, and it is clearly taught by the logical results of the war. The peril to free government to-day is centralization; and its deformed image has been often visible, since the war, as the legitimate offspring of debauched political authority. It has called to earnest protest and fearless battle many of the ablest and best men of the North who were in sincere accord with the establishment of national supremacy. It disrupted the great party of power in 1872; and it was the undaunted friends of Lincoln who halted at the threshold of despotic political power; and revolutionized the national administration. They saw centralization in government, in finance, in business, in every channel where its power could reach with profit; and the industry of the North is convulsive to-day chiefly in protest against the common peril to industrial thrift and national safety that has been born of centralization.
Remember that, in both North and South, during the war, there was one supreme law-"salus populi suprema lex"; and those who administered government were of necessity the judges of the "safety of the people." There were forms of popular government alike in the parent nationality and in the Confederacy; but both military and political necessity were often above the law: and what party can thus rule, and not learn to grasp and maintain despotic power? It would be more than human if a season of such authority, fraught with all the disturbing elements of civil conflict and resulting in the triumph of enlarged national prerogatives, did not leave, widespread and deeply planted, the love of the law of command. Ours is a government of law, and its safety is in the liberal and faithful administration of its laws for the benefit of its people; and, while its supreme national attributes are established, the sovereignty of the State is as sacred to-day, and as essential to the enjoyment of free government, as it was when Jefferson triumphed as its standard-bearer in 1800. The State is not sovereign against the unity of the republic; but it is sovereign in all else to assure the happiness and prosperity of its citizens, except wherein all are alike restrained by the fundamental law.
And there is one supreme sovereignty over all-over State and Nation: the absolute sovereignty of the American people. They reversed Federal centralization in 1800, under Jefferson, because it was construed to justify despotic oppression under color of law; and, with reversed political power, was reversed the judgment of the highest Court. They reversed the sovereignty of the State in 1860, when it boldly asserted itself above national unity; and, with it, again reversed the solemn judgment of the first judicial tribunal of the republic.
With them and for them you will be called to battle against the dregs of the despotism of war, that will ever be plausibly excused or justified, as centralization comes with gifts to open the citadel of freedom. Against it, let your hatred be implacable: let your effort be tireless: let your patriotism be unabated. It is the great peril to free government. It will not come with banners, declaring its purpose; but it will come with deceitful promise: it will affect to reject the crown, as Caesar did; but remember that Rome was never free, after the Rubicon had been crossed. Trust the people; educate the people; teach them that eternal vigilance is ever the price of liberty; warn them against every approach to despotic authority in a government whose supreme sovereignty is only in the people, and whose Nation, State, County, and Home are "distinct as the billows, yet one as the sea."
Young men of Washington and Lee, I have performed my task, and have striven to speak with greater candor than is common on occasions such as this. I have remembered that you will be leaders and teachers, in the vigor of your lives, when the sovereign power of this fair land will rest in one hundred millions of people; and surely such great duties and such grand opportunities demand the counsels of truth and soberness. If I have led you to new thoughts and new appreciation of duty and country, however you may criticise my premises or conclusions, I shall feel that something has been done, in an humble way, to preserve and advance the grandest government and the noblest people of the earth.
Bibliographic Information: Source copy consulted: The Lesson Of Our Civil War, By A. K. McClure, Philadelphia: McLAUGHLIN BROS. C0., BOOK AND JOB PRINTERS. 1886
