The Civil War

Front matter

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Book J %4

Contents

CHAP. FAOB

I The Law of the Land . . ^ . • • . . 11

II Secession 25

Preface

It is the attempt of this book to show that the Civil War was more than a succession of battles; that it was a struggle between two civilizations, each the logical result of its environment, and each endeavoring to work out the best American interest as it saw it. That of the two civilizations, one was reactionary, and opposed to both the humanitarian sentiments of the nineteenth century and the economic profit of the race, is quite as true as the fact that honesty and intelligence were about evenly divided in the contest. The motive for secession, slavery, was indefensible in the long run, but men brought up with that institution believed in it, and were led by it to believe that the Constitution had not created a nation, — a position in which they were contradicted by the facts of industry and the law of the land. On both counts, slavery and secession, American history must adjudge the South to have been mistaken.

It is reasonably clear to-day, that the South would of hei'self have discarded slavery in another generation ; that the New Nationalism would have

X PREFACE

come about without the Civil War. Yet the war dominated in the American mind for forty years, and is worthy of study if only on this account.

The reader of this book is ui-ged to study the campaigns with the map before him. The larger strategy of the Civil War was simple and direct, but, without a map, it will remain incomprehensible.

The writer of the book is indebted to innumerable fore-runners, who have re-fought the battles on paper, and disputed controverted points. The limits of a preface do not permit all the acknowledgments that he would like to make. But the greatest of his debts is one which he, in common with every other student of the Civil War, owes to the profound, judicial, and enlightened pages of James Ford Rhodes,

Madison, Wisconsin,

August, 1911,

THE CIYIL WAR

Chapter I

After more than fourscore years of storm and calm, of war and politics, of trying hardships and yet more trying prosperity, the United States remained both independent and united in 1860. In commerce as in government it had managed, one way and another, to hold together and to grow. Through accretion and happy accident, rather than foresight or construction, it had attained a size and wealth surprising to its critics and overwhelming to its citizens. Only a few of these knew whence it had come or whither it was tending, yet in the souls of nearly all there burned a love of country and pride of performance that made the American a marked man wherever he appeared in the society of the world.

The American Civil War was fought on both sides by men who had lived through a period of national adolescence. Their intellectual heritage was one. In the conduct of their affairs they showed the weaknesses as well as the strength of their experience. They were essentially American whether they were right or wrong.

Only the calm judgment of posterity can determine which side was wrong. Few of the men who voted for or against Abraham Lincoln in 1860 knew enough real history to be influenced by it. What they thought was history they had taken from the lips of their statesmen, as they had read the speeches of Webster or Calhoun. The sources of their knowledge were themselves colored by the facts of the prolonged controversy that had given life to American politics for thirty years. Yet, after all, one side was right and one was wrong. Though advocates of either were frequently mistaken in their application of historic facts, though partisans of both were always more honest than informed, one side of the quarrel harmonized generally with the trend of human experience and the laws of economic and political evolution; the other was reactionary and as such condemned by time.

Any explanation of the causes of the Civil War must take into account the forces which had made the American and the southern environments. Fundamental among those of the latter was the cultivation of the cotton plant, and the type of labor which it permitted. From the earliest days of American colonization there had been divergent tendencies to separate the plantations of the southern seaboard from the farms of the Atlantic coast north of Delaware Bay. Climate, in the South, checked the physical activities of white men, whereas in the North it stimulated and invigorated them. The northern soil responded only to persistent and vigorous attack; the farm lands along the southern rivers invited the easy cultivation of a few staple crops. Everywhere the question of labor supply was great. In a new country the invitation to work must always be more generous than the response of workers. But in North and South this invitation called for different answers.

The northern laborer before 1830 was most likely to be a farmer, or to be connected in some way with agricultural enterprise. The range of crops to which his labor could be applied was so wide that no single product dominated. All the year round he worked, in the fields or indoors at domestic manufactures. Turning from job to job, doing a dozen different tasks between sunrise and sunset, he succeeded best who had those traits which the term Yankee has come to signify — quick alertness, readiness of initiative, intelligence and competence. Working by himself, and generally for himself, at tasks that called for close individual application, the northern laborer was the highest of his kind. The opportunity which the New World offered for advancement quickened his intellect and inspired his exertions. Unless he was a Yankee he could not prosper.

The southern climate and soil permitted the use of a different kind of labor from that which was essential to the North. Single crops, which could be cultivated by routine, could be grown over wide areas. It was not that individual application and industry could not succeed in the South, but that conditions allowed this industry to exploit a variety of labor that could not justify its existence in the North. Had half -civilized negro laborers been usable in the North, slavery would have flourished there, for labor was in high demand, and the average ethics of the seventeenth century saw nothing anomalous in a human chattel. But in the southern climate the low-class negro laborer adapted himself readily. Improvident and incompetent he was, but under white direction, in a new and fertile land, he could be used to the profit of his owner. The plantation system, which is only the application of gang labor and routine tasks to agriculture, had already become a southern type before the American Revolution. The negro was held as a slave largely because no other way was known to control barbarian laborers. The slave-owner was not yet troubled by logical deductions from the rights of man.

At the beginning of the American government under the Constitution, in 1789, there was a difference existing between the labor systems of the northern and southern states; but there were many other differences among the sectionahstic and locaHstic states that were beheved to be more serious. "It is too probable that no plan we propose will be adopted," the most eminent American had admitted in 1787 when he confronted the task of finding a working basis for friendly relations among thirteen independent states. During the War of Independence, common interests had produced such similarity of result among the states that many have believed that they were then really united. During the years of the Confederacy divergent selfish interests reduced to complete incompetence the congress of ambassadors created by the Articles of Confederation. And when in 1789 the new Constitution was allowed to go into effect the doubters and scoffers were innumerable. The states, though resembling each other in language, government, and practices, were in fact independent and jealous. They had been units as British provinces; and between 1776 and 1789 they had developed so few economic interests that crossed state lines, that the convention, entrusting all these general interests to the new government, had summed them up in a single clause respecting commerce.

The economic development of the United

16 THE GIVIL WAR

States after 1789, is a part of that great industrial revolution that has re-made nearly every government of modern Europe. In America population multiplied and spread. Crossing the Alleghanies the pioneers of the West erected new states which, one by one, were admitted to the Union until in 1860 the original thirteen had been enlarged to thirty-three. The western commonwealths perpetuated the ideas and economic institutions of their eastern predecessors. Following climatic lines, the territories of the Northwest found their prosperity in free labor, and had been so manifestly predetermined in this that Congress had been able in 1787 to respond to a new humanitarian sentiment and forbid slavery, forever, in the Old Northwest. The Southwest throve on the cotton crop, made ever more important by the invention of the gin, the sewing machine, and the application of steam, and continued the exploitation of negro labor on the plantation in the culture of that staple.

The minute localism of interests which had characterized the American states in 1789 was in part destroyed by 1830. One group of states, possessing climatic similarity and geographic propinquity, had acquired a common quality that gave to it weight in the counsels of the nation out of proportion to its population or wealth. The northern states remained individualistic and often antagonistic, but south of Pennsylvania and the Ohio River, every state possessing the plantation system and slave labor felt its closeness to its neighbors in the common jealousy of anything which might injure the value of its slave property. The South had become a section that in many ways forgot state lines. Its representatives in Congress voted as a unit. The philanthropic notions of the nineteenth century aroused its fears and antagonisms. Vitally interested in the property which its economic situation had allowed it to accrue, it could see no good in social movements that threatened the permanence of its vested rights.

Economic unity, based upon slave labor, had come to the South before 1830. Such unity, over a large portion of the United States, had not been anticipated by the f ramers of the Constitution whose experience had been with the centrifugal forces of local rivalry. Once recognized, however, it gave to the states involved such an advantage in federal affairs that they were able to control the government. After twenty years of this control, they had come to believe themselves entitled, as of right, to direct those national policies which an accident of economics had thrown into their hands.

In the twenty years after 1830, while the South was exulting in its dominance over Congress, the northern states underwent a unifying process, and became the North.

Here, as in the South, it was the trend of business that produced unity. There, a common method of production gave rise to a community of interests that was intensified when the rest of the world repudiated slavery. Interchange of wares destroyed the localism of the North.

I The Allegheny Mountains were both an obstacle and an encouragement to the economic development of the North. So long as they were crossed only by narrow and devious wagon paths, they prevented any large exchange of commodities. They were but a slight obstruction to the South, which passed them and found on their western slopes rivers flowing easily into the Gulf of Mexico and providing abundant routes to a market for their products. But they were a real barrier between the Northeast and the Northwest. The latter region found that it was limited to the markets reached by the tedious courses of the St. Lawrence or the Mississippi. It coveted the trade of the populous eastern states, and this desire caused it to press for roads across the mountains. Turnpikes, useful but inadequate, were built, used, and discarded for canals; while these in turn were superseded by the railroad just as soon as steam was brought under control.

During the two decades in which the South was convincing itself that cotton was king, and was rushing its crop to a receptive world by the water routes that nature had provided, the North and Northwest were strugghng with grades and tunnels, cuts and embankments. Before 1840 railroads scarcely diverted the streams of American trade. In the next ten years the trunk lines climbed the Alleghenies. During the fifties, 10,000 miles of railway were opened in the Old Northwest alone, and every farmer north of the Ohio could ship direct to tidewater on the Atlantic. It was not a habit or a system of labor that produced the economic unity of the North in contrast to that of the plantation South. It was a physical amalgamation that suddenly appeared between 1850 and 1860, and it was based upon 20,000 miles of railway track which defied the sectionalism of geography.

From 1830 to 1850 the united South controlled the policies of the United States. Few even of its leaders foresaw the economic trend of the North. The quick changes of the fifties, operating everywhere in the United States, but most strikingly in the free states, where capital was mobile and was not tied up in an owned labor supply, came as a shock to the South, which had long been a united section and which did not abandon hope of permanent control until after 1860.

The conditions of 1789, in which each state lived by and for itself, had forever passed away by 1860. Even in the South independence by states was out of the quesm THE CIVIL WAR

tion. The railway net, and the growing industriaHsm of society demanded government of a type not foreseen when, in 1789, the states forswore their sovereignty and entered the Union. The development of the national government was inevitable. Had the Constitution been as the southern leaders persuaded themselves it was, there must have been revolution or wholesale amendment to adapt it to modern life as shaped by machinery and steam transportation. Happily, however, it was adequate to the needs of the nineteenth century, and the odium of revolutionary attempt falls upon the section that tried to construe it so as to turn back the hands of time.

The Constitution had been adopted as an experiment. Many believed that it was too rigorous for liberty to survive under it. Others lamented the absence of a more strongly centralized machine. It was a compromise, reached by a convention that sat in secret, and ratified as the last hope of avoiding anarchy and dissolution. That commercial growth should in less than a century weld the thirteen rival states, and twenty more, into an industrial unit was not anticipated by even the wilder enthusiasts of federalism. Many of the framers would probably have admitted that, if the experiment should fail to work, the states could resume their former independence. Yet they had inserted in the document phrases whose ratification destroyed the possibility of rupture of the new Union by anything short of revolution. "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof," the sixth article runs, "shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding." To the courts created by the Constitution was assigned judicial power extending "to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority." Without catching the attention of most of its contemporaries a new nation had come into being with all the power necessary to maintain itself. Within the limits of its delegated authority, concerning whose extent its own supreme court was to be the final judge, the nation was supreme. In the years following 1789 one state after another became discontented with its treatment under the Constitution, and in bad temper denied its obligation to submit to federal exaction. But every time a local grievance produced its protest the weight of the disinterested states stifled it. As business came gradually to the courts of the United States, these accepted freely the doctrine that the Constitution had become the law of the land. When Calhoun, realizing the essential sectionalism which slavery gave to the South, announced again the doctrine of secession as a remedy within the Constitution, Webster found, in all the disinterested states, lawyers and laymen to follow him when he made his ringing plea for "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable! "

After 1830, southern leaders continued in general adherence to the Calhoun theory of the right of the state to refuse to obey what it believed to be unconstitutional laws. The cotton fields spread out of the old South into the Southwest, and the glamour of the great plantation owners' wealth concealed the undesirable position of the low class whites and the absence of that social uniformity which was the triumph of the North. From the knowledge that slave labor was personally profitable to the favored class it was easy to develop a plausible argument that it was profitable to the society that employed it, although in the whole South only about one person in ten owned any slaves, and fewer than 12,000 owned as many as 50, in 1860. It was forgotten that listless, incompetent labor is dear even when employed without a wage. Until the railway appeared, with its large demand for free capital for investment, the South could not see the fact that it was bound to a system that forbade change in method or adaptation to the conditions of modern life. The men who proi-

THE LAW OF THE LAND 2S

ited by the institution had made themselves into an aristocracy that controlled the politics as well as the business of their section, and whatever threatened their interests was treason to the social order. In the national government they met each step against slavery with threats of dissolution of the Union, but in no case before 1860 were they compelled to carry out their threat, since their compact unity controlled Congress. The North had passed the South in both population and wealth; being free itself, it had come to dislike slavery; and not sharing in the profits of slavery it had been able to develop a public opinion antagonistic to it. But until the trunk line railways were done in the early fifties, it had no political unity that could give its opinions weight. The generation of Webster passed away, leaving behind in the North a new generation that had declaimed his reply to Hayne in their school days, and had grown up to see an indestructible Union, in law, become one in economic fact. Until 1854 every time the South faced Congress with the alternatives of concession to slavery or secession, it carried its point against the disorganization of the northern states. Before the end of the fifties, the changing North became a nation that must one day refuse to be scared by the bogey of disunion, and stand its ground on the hard facts of economics and law. From the beginning, the Constitution had been m THE CIVIL WAR

the supreme law of the land. Under it, a majority was entitled to rule. Before 1860 a united nation, bound unbreakably by the irons of 30,000 miles of railway and nearly independent of sectionalism that was based on geographic accident, lived under the Constitution and was prepared to test its strength.

Chapter II

The rise and growth of the Republican party is the measure of the reahzation on the part of the North that it had a unity as well as a political purpose. For many years Lundy, Garrison, Channing, and Parker had preached against the slavery which the North had outgrown. Exasperating to the South, and ineffective in the North, the new gospel was the work of individuals and produced no reaction that could check the annexation of Texas, the conquest of Mexico, the opening of the territories to slavery, or the repeal of the Missouri compromise. Both great parties. Whig and Democrat, feared the loss of the southern vote. Their leaders repeatedly professed themselves to believe that the rising question was settled. Regardless of party lines, southern politicians voted with unerring vision when sectional interests were involved. But in the year in which the first Chicago railway reached the Mississippi there was born a party of opposition to the continued exactions of the South.

The opening of the railways was followed by hopeful speculation throughout the North. Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and St. Louis struggled among themselves for the control of the markets of the East. New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston sent their agents out to secure the markets of the West. New activities and general prosperity are recorded in the commercial journals of the fifties. Close upon these, intellectual and political enthusiasms followed. Every mile of track increased the weekly range of the New York Tribune. Unity in trade relations became the foundation of an approach to uniformity in conviction and action. The deep emotions aroused among individuals when Douglas, in 1854, directed the organization of Kansas and Nebraska, and opened the territories to slavery, came at a time when newspapers were circulating with a new ease, and men in the North were becoming conscious of their political weight.

The Kansas-Nebraska law, passed in May, 1854, repealed the Missouri compromise and organized two territories, whose status as to slavery or freedom should be regulated in the future by their occupants. Before it was signed, resistance to its fundamental premise had appeared throughout the North. On July 13, the anniversary of the great Northwest ordinance of 1787, numerous mass meetings denounced the repudiation of a sacred compromise. In the autumn elections, a new party showed itself able to break down, here and there, a party line. In every month after July, 1854, the new party, named Republican, became stronger and more clearly defined throughout the North as a sectional party, favoring opposition to the sectional policy of the South that had won every important division for nearly thirty years.

In 1856 the Republican party entered upon its first national campaign. It was too weak to hope for success; leaders of assured reputation were yet unready to imperil their future by accepting its nominations. Made of men of diverse antecedents, with no common bond save the desire to restrict the extension of slavery, it was forced to feel its way among the old issues. It contented itself with a candidate no more important than John C. Fremont, whose title to fame was his service as an explorer, and whose meagre abilities were ever to be over-exploited by his better half, a daughter of Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. Yet the new party carried eleven northern states and polled a third of the popular vote. Fremont was defeated by James Buchanan, an elderly northern Democrat, backed by the united South; but the old Whig party was almost extinguished and the Republicans now took their place as one of the two great party organizations. Thus far they had been a party of idealists; hereafter the practical politician gained more than a foothold among them.

In the next four years the sectional character of the controversy became more clear. Forgetful that it had been the first to establish a permanent sectionalism in politics, the South denounced the sectional character of the "Black Republicans." Bad temper, which had always been associated with the slavery struggle, became worse. Ignorance of the motives and character of the Republicans, on the part of the South, was exceeded only by the northern ignorance of the capacity of the negro and the temper of the slave-holder. The greatest test of popular government must always come when the constitutional majority is separated from the minority by a geographic line. When parties are intermingled over the same area the majority always knows the minority too well to be unduly harsh. But sectional parties are separated by a gulf of ignorance which no charity can bridge, and either side is willing and anxious to believe the worst of its opponent. Thoroughly American on both sides, devoted to the Union as they knew it and the ideals that flourished in their sections, the North and South came to face an issue in which one must triumph and the other surrender. Henry Clay had outlived the period of compromises and now a consolidating North could no longer yield.

The platform of the Republicans was clear in 1856. Its leaders were yet to be developed from the three classes of men who acted with the party. Mature Democrats and mature Whigs abandoned their old relations, in their opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska measures. To these were added young men, who had read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as youths, and who came to their first vote in 1856 or 1860. Most prominent of the leaders who took up the new fight was William H. Seward, former governor of New York, enthusiastic, vigorous, and plausible, whose best known phrase gave name to the "irrepressible conflict." Next to Seward was Governor Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, once a Democrat, of solid legal knowledge and first-rate administrative ability, who fell short of greatness only through his touch of personal ambition. After these came the lesser lights, inspired by principle or hope of profit. Some were spoilsmen who abandoned sinking ships, others were abolitionists whose radical ideas found too little play within the new organization. One of them was a western politician, no longer young and without great prominence, whose right to leadership was slowly established during the administration of James Buchanan.

Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, had endeared himself to his associates, but had made no impression upon the United States in 1856. He was a country lawyer, brought up on a raw frontier, deprived of formal schooling.

and making only a moderate success at his profession, when he left his office to campaign for the Republican party. He might never have passed beyond the activities of a local politician had not chance thrown him against a more successful citizen of his state, who had established himself as the leader of the Democrats. Stephen A. Douglas lifted Lincoln into the national vision. Fighting the Kansas-Nebraska principle, Lincoln was ever on the trail of Douglas, the author of the bill. In 1858 they were both engaged in a contest over a legislature which was to choose a senator to fill Douglas's seat. After the custom of the time they toured the state, speaking in joint debates which failed to defeat Douglas for re-election, but which clarified the issues, and made the aims of both great parties clear and unmistakable. In these debates Lincoln, as a speaker and popularizer, impressed the news correspondents who had come west to report the speeches of Douglas. The Republican party found his arguments their best campaign material. With good temper, simplicity, and logic he stated the theories of majority rule, and expressed his belief that slavery would cease to exist. For the federal government he claimed only a single right: to exclude slavery from any of the territories of the United States. Over these, he maintained that Congress had ample power. The Dred Scott decision, which denied this power, he criticized as bad law, while he pledged his party to unswerving opposition to any variety of slavery extension.

Among the Republicans, Lincoln was a moderate. Though believing slavery wrong, he denied any power in Congress to limit or abolish it within the states. The abolitionists thought him impervious to the ethical question. He was regarded as too radical by the practical politicians of his party because he frankly attacked the law of the Dred . Scott case and explicitly stated his desire to abolish slavery in the territories. If any one had cared to note it, he might have seen that, in his personal judgments, Lincoln was not censorious, that he had no disposition to denounce the slave-holder but was content to fight the issue.

Up to the meeting of the Republican convention, in June, 1860, few foresaw that Lincoln would secure the nomination, and those few were generally engaged in managing his campaign. The newspaper lists of possible candidates rarely included his name, but the disabilities of the reputed candidates were quite as important for him as his own qualities. Though an old Whig, he had been too obscure to arouse the antagonisms that headed off the other candidates for the nomination. It was a disappointing shock to eastern Republicans when they learned that at Chicago their party had been induced to accept a candidate without experience, with little national reputation, and with standing chiefly as a man of words. But dissatisfied as many Republicans were, their unity was stronger than that of any other party in the impending campaign.

The rise of the Republicans was contemporary with the breakdown of the Whigs and the schism of the Democrats, the last being partly the result of Lincoln's generalship. It was he who pointed out to the South that when Douglas spoke of popular sovereignty he meant what he said, — that popular sovereignty might mean rejection of slavery as well as its extension. To the South, which had accepted Douglas's doctrine as a means of extending slavery, this interpretation was disconcerting. The extremists repudiated both the doctrine and its author; the moderates clung to him. When the party met in national convention at Charleston, in April, 1860, Douglas controlled the organization, but could not prevent a radical minority from bolting the convention. Panic-stricken, the convention adjourned to Baltimore, only to find the schism wider. Split for the first time, with John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky heading the bolters and Douglas as the nominee of the regulars, the Democrats offered victory to the better united Republican party. This victory was made more certain when a fourth ticket, of conservative Constitutional Unionists, brought John Bell of Tennessee into the field.