The Civil War in America

The Civil War in America

THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA.

The civil war in America is over; the armies have gone home; the passions have subsided; and though the ashes still glow, though the time when an impartial history can be written has not arrived, we may try to understand the real import of the conflict—the real significance of the victory—and to read, as far as mortal eyes may read, the counsels of Providence in this the great event of our age.

This great struggle, like most of the great struggles in history, was complex in its character. In some measure its character changed as it went on. On the Southern side most were fighting for Slavery, but some for State Right. On the Northern side some were fighting against Slavery, but many were fighting for the Union. At the North the Anti-Slavery sentiment grew more predominant towards the close, both because the moral feeling of the people had been stirred and elevated by the struggle, and because they saw more clearly that Slavery was the root of the political evil, and a root from which, unless it was plucked up, the same evil would always grow. At first the majority would have compromised with Slavery for the sake of the Union, the source, as they deemed it, of their greatest blessings, the object of their fondest and most hallowed associations. If there is a nation which would readily consent to disruption for a moral object, let it cast the first stone at them for their weakness. But at the last Presidential election, the question being distinctly put to the people whether they would compromise with Slavery for the Union, the people answered by a great majority that they would not. Then the victory was given into their hands. Let the nation which can boast of virtue pure and unalloyed, which has needed no pressure of circumstances to force it into the right way, no suffering to purge its vision that it might clearly discern good from evil, no chastisement to teach it the will of Heaven—let this nation, I say again, cast the first stone. To the American people the Union was not empire only, but immunity from hostile neighbourhood and standing armies; it was the pledge not of power only, but of liberty and peace.

That Slavery was the cause of the war, who can sincerely doubt? Secession broke out and had its focus in the centre of Slavery, spread wherever Slavery prevailed, was most intense where Slavery prevailed most. It did not extend to the free districts of the South, Western Virginia and Eastern Tennessee, the inhabitants of which were dragged into the Confederacy by force. It exactly followed the wavering line of slavery in the mixed States, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. The secession ordinances proclaimed as the ground, and the sole ground, of the revolt the rights of Slavery, threatened by Northern abolition. The Southern prophets all prophesied of a vast slave empire as the reward of success. Visions of such an empire, stretching from the grave of Washington to the hills of Montezuma, filled the minds of Secessionists, as visions of a perfect Christian society and of a reign of Christ on earth filled the minds of the Wycliffites and the Puritans, as visions of a Brotherhood of Man filled the minds of enthusiasts on the eve of the French Revolution. On the other hand, the Anti-Slavery sentiment was called forth at the North as strongly as the Pro-Slavery sentiment at the South. And the immediate result of the victory has been the downfall of Slavery, not in the United States only, but everywhere and for ever.

The theory that the war arose from a divergence of commercial interest, that it was a struggle between free trade producers on one side and protectionist manufacturers on the other, though skilfully devised for the market of English opinion, was defective in two respects. It did not fit the facts, and the cause it assigned was inadequate to produce the effect. It did not fit the facts; for the Western States were producers as well as the Southern, and the Western States, notwithstanding the predictions of their imminent secession, were as true as the New England States to the Union, and as staunch for the war. The cause which it assigned was inadequate to produce the effect, for when did a mere divergence of commercial interest rend political bonds so powerful, or lead to such a civil war? It is too true that the manufacturers and ironmasters of the North are still in the gall of Protection, that they still resist those economical laws of Providence in the observance of which other nations are blessed, and that for them now, as formerly for our protectionists, writers are found to veil barbarous cupidity in the language of patriotism and science. The same tendency is seen in our colonies, and ignorance is its chief root. Perhaps this quarrel between manufacturer and producer may have contributed to the disruption as a secondary cause, but it was as a secondary cause only. No mention was made of it in the manifestos of the seceding states.

The struggle was one between Freedom and Slavery. But it was something deeper than this. It was a struggle between Christianity and all that is most hostile to Christianity. Christianity had founded a great community in the New World. Slavery came up against that community, as Mahometanism, with its polygamy, its fatalism, its exterminating ferocity, came up against European Christendom ten centuries ago; and, like Mahometanism, it has been overthrown. The Powers of Good and Evil, in forms perhaps more sharply defined than they had worn in any previous encounter, have fought for that New World, and the Power of Good has conquered.

I went to the United States believing, I returned firmly convinced, that not democracy in America, but free Christianity in America, was the real key to the study of the people and their institutions. Democracy is a political arrangement, dealing, like all political arrangements, with the shallower interests of man. It would be reversing the order of causation to deduce from it the deeper parts of the character of the people.

I mean by Christianity nothing sectarian or narrow. I mean by it the spirit of Christian society—the spirit which has hitherto alone shown itself capable of animating and sustaining a real community; for the spurious communities of heathen antiquity were oligarchial communities of masters tyrannising over a people of slaves. I mean the spirit which is present in many a champion of humanity, who, since Christianity has been degraded by superstition and allied with social injustice, would scarcely call himself by the Christian name, but who is nevertheless doing his part to convert the kingdoms of the world into the kingdom of Christ; while others are labouring with all their power, political and ecclesiastical, to retard that conversion, though they may arrogate the name of Christian to themselves alone. I mean the spirit of faith in God and man, of charity between man and man, of hope for the future of humanity. I mean the spirit of progress of which Christian hope is the life, and which, look where you will, is confined to the nations of Christendom. I mean the spirit of Christianity, not the mere form, dogmatic, ceremonial, or ecclesiastical. Such Christianity may be a nullity in sectarian theology. It is the great reality of history.

In Europe Christianity is paralysed by the divisions of the national Churches, each with a state creed imposed by political power and maintained by the state clergy, who are legally bound over against conviction, so that till State and Church shall have been separated the divisions of Christendom are hopeless. The Church in the Old World is unable to do or attempt what it was intended to do for man. But two centuries ago, England, then in her noblest mood—for never, in spite of her trade, her victories, and her empire, has she been so noble as she was in the days of Hampden, Falkland, Milton, and Cromwell—sent forth a religious colony, which founded the great community of the New World. It was well chosen for its high purpose that germ of English religion, law, and freedom. It was well chosen, and so was the place where it was planted—a vast expanse divided by no strong natural boundaries, and commercially united in all directions by the courses of great rivers, so that national divisions, with the political enmities and religious schisms which they entail, could scarcely find a place; while it was severed from the Old World by an ocean which steam has now narrowed, but which was broad enough at first to emancipate the New World from old influences, and give human progress a fresh spring.

By the same exodus, which brought Christianity out of the State Churches, society escaped from feudalism into a system founded on equality and justice. This social transition Europe for two centuries of abortive revolution has been striving in vain to effect. The feudal aristocracy has in some countries been overthrown; but from the inability of untrained communities, with dangerous masses of destitution and with no moral stay stronger than that of a state religion, to carry on self-government, the nations have escaped from aristocracy only to become the prey of despotism, supported by great standing armies, which now arrests the progress of humanity here, and from which there is at present no visible escape, though we may be sure that God, who has not made the world for standing armies and their masters, will in time find a way.

The Western States of America are a colony of New England. The original company of pilgrims is the seed from which the whole tree has grown. No creative monad, imagined by science, could be more pregnant with a new order of things than that little band of exiles; no moment in history is more solemn or more big with consequences than that in which the colony on its arrival in the New World made a set of laws for itself—laws for self-government—rational, unfeudal laws.

The little Puritan settlement is lost in a great nation, and the narrow Puritan religion has expanded, or is fast expanding, into something more comprehensive, though still you trace the original type in all the lineaments of the now mighty frame. But the Northern States remain what their Puritan founders desired that they should ever be, a plantation religious. In America two things must strike every traveller, the equality of the habitations and the number of places of worship. Not only in New England is each city, each little town crowned with a cluster of steeples, it is the same in the Far West; and while Christianity is proclaimed to be dying here, its churches are rising, built by free will, in apparently unhesitating faith, wherever the pioneer axe makes room in the woods of Michigan, wherever the plough turns the soil in the prairies of Illinois, on the distant hills of Iowa, beneath the lonely headlands of the Upper Mississippi. Men go to write the life of Christ beside the sepulchre were he was laid; if they would go where Christianity is spreading over the untrodden West, they might know the meaning of the words, “He is risen indeed.” There is every outward sign of regard for religion among this people. The churches are well filled, and Sunday is well kept. Much of this perhaps may be deference to opinion; but opinion itself is free. The government must study the national character, and it always speaks as to a religious nation.

In America, too, there is a cry of the decay of faith; and there, too, less might be said of the decay of faith, if, in the first place, faith were not confounded with a belief in tradition; and if, in the second place, there were more of charity, and more of hope. There is, however, a religious crisis there as well as here, though it is less severe there than here; because in America there is no State Church to bar with a solid obstruction the current of religious thought, and chafe it into destructive fury. The doubts and perplexities which we are at this time called upon to meet manfully in reliance on the God of truth, Americans also are called upon to meet in the same spirit. In both countries some, unable to endure suspense, unable to watch the one hour, have lost their faith in Providence, and committed religious suicide, by casting themselves into the superstitions of the past. But there are two things going on at present in American Christendom widely different from the decay of faith, which may easily be taken for it. The first is the decline of clerical authority; the second is the breaking up of sectarian dogma, and the consequent approach of a reconciliation of the churches.

The decline of clerical authority in itself indicates no decrease of religious feeling among the people. It may indicate the reverse. Intellectually and spiritually, the pastor of a Puritan congregation stood far above his flock, who looked up to him as their half-inspired and almost infallible guide. Now the flock are more nearly on a level both intellectually and spiritually with their pastor, and can regard him as an infallible guide no more. The circumstances of Christian Churches, like those of other communities change, and their organisation must adapt itself to their circumstances. This holds good of all except the Roman Catholic clergy, whose authority purports to be founded on the supernatural powers of a divine order, not on the natural influence of character or mind. But the Roman Catholic clergy lose their flocks when the Irish have become educated, that is in the second or third generation.

The Churches of America, in the main, are offsets of the Churches of Europe. The New World has not yet had leisure to produce a theology of its own. There are the different Protestant sects, the Presbyterians, the Baptists, the Methodists, which three communions embrace the bulk of the people; Presbyterianism being the religion of the section corresponding to our upper middle class, while the other two are the religions of the masses. There is Unitarianism, the religion of the cultivated, rather negative, it is said, in many cases, and tending to scepticism: not seldom, perhaps, a decent name which scepticism itself assumes among a religious people. There is Roman Catholicism, the religion of the Irish emigrants, and for them, in their uneducated state, indispensable; somewhat more rational, less given to miracles, relics, and mariolatry, and, if the court of Rome would let it be, less intriguing than in Europe, but everywhere, it is to be feared, inherently anti-social and the inveterate enemy of united education. There is Anglicanism, the genteel religion of the rich and fashionable world, a character which it has kept since the colonial days, with an element of Romanism in it as here, and a clergy who, like ours, would fain be a priesthood, but with a democratic and lay ascendancy in its government which keeps these tendencies within bounds, while, in deference to the sentiment of a rational and charitable community, it ceases to utter the denunciatory dogmatism of the Athanasian Creed. Universalism, of which English divines speak with terror as a vast and portentous heresy, is simply Protestantism, less the more cruel doctrines of Calvinism, against which it is a reaction. The hardness and the tyranny of extreme Calvinism send not a few converts in America to Episcopacy itself. There are sects of a more enthusiastic and grotesque kind, such as life in the wilderness produces when religious passion is under no intellectual control. There is Cameronianism, in its ancient sternness, resolutely and to its singular honour excluding the slave-owner from its pale. The Church of the Mormons is chiefly fed from the Old World. Mormonism is in fact the English or Welsh peasant’s craving for a more equal lot, combined with his Old Testament fallacies and his wild apocalyptic faith. Materialism, it is said, is found among the German emigrants, and among them alone.

All the Churches must be and visibly are affected by the element of political democracy which surrounds them, and this not only in their forms of government but even in their modes of thought. It is hard to believe in an arbitrary God when all the institutions of man around you preach justice. It is hard to believe in an unmerciful God, when all the institutions of man around you preach mercy.

If, however, America has produced no new theology she has produced Religious Liberty; and from Religious Liberty in time better things still will spring. The circumstances under which these waifs of all the Churches of Christendom were cast upon the American coast were such as to preclude the existence of a dominant sect and to forbid mutual persecution. For a moment the Calvinists of New England displayed the intolerance which they had learnt in the old world; but that moment was soon past. The tendency of the British dominion to establish Anglicanism at the South ended with the dominion itself. Even Roman Catholicism, in its turn a fugitive from persecution, proclaimed toleration in its new abode. Not only the political and social equality, but the political and social union of the Churches is almost complete, saving in the case of Roman Catholicism; and even a Roman Catholic priest is obliged to conform in some measure to the principles of a society intolerant of intolerance alone, and to take part in works of Christian benevolence with the clergy of other creeds. Under the influence of political and social union, ecclesiastical divisions are gradually giving way. Christian character is brought into the foreground, sectarian dogma is thrown into the background. The Churches are gradually falling, but through their ruins appear again the lineaments of the Universal Church. Intolerant orthodoxy still holds its ground in the heart of many Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Calvinists; but it is on the defensive, and its ramparts are tumbling down. In each sect there appears a liberal party, suspected by the narrowly orthodox, and tending to fusion with other churches. The same, when the time comes, will be the process of reconciliation in the Old World: Christians will not be be brought over by controversy; but, when perfect religious liberty reigns, they will be re-united by fellowship. In America at present lies the best hope of the reconciliation of Christendom. And where the best hope of its reconciliation lies, there lies the best hope of the propagation of its faith. India has not been converted from Rome or Canterbury; perhaps she may be converted from San Francisco.

When dogma is gone a rational theology will rise. It was well that America could not have a theology when theology would have ministered to sectarian dogmatism. It was well that she could not have a church art and a ritual, while church art and ritual would have ministered to superstition.

It is in the West, perhaps, that the religious mind is most free, that sectarian dogma has least power, that Christianity has most gone out of the churches which had been its temples, and threatened to become its graves, into the general life of the community at large. Yet the West, I believe, is not irreligious. One Western man, at all events, raised from a low estate to the dizziest elevation, and there set to contend with appalling perils, was kept calm and wise by his strong sense of the constant presence and the over-ruling providence of God. If I am not misinformed, there is a great craving among the Western people for theological truth of a certain kind. Talk to them of the questions that come before our Ecclesiastical Courts and they will probably pay you little attention: but if you have anything to say in singleness of purpose about the great and vital truths of religion, there, if I mistake not, are the ears that will hear and the hearts that will understand you.

Christianity, as the religion of light, has always—always at least where her own light has not been turned to darkness—preached and practised the duty of education. The Reformers, appealing from tradition to individual reason and conscience, and to the Written Word, were great revivers of this duty. Of popular education, in fact, they may be said to have been the founders; for the educational charity of the middle ages was, for the most part, practically confined to poor children destined for the clerical order. The common school in America is the offspring of the Puritan church. To adapt it to a society of various creeds it has been in a certain sense secularised, but it still retains a religious character, as do the motives which support it, and is a bond not only of social and political but of Christian union in the nation. There are, I doubt not, great local inequalities and grave general defects in American education. In the higher education unquestionably there are grave defects, arising partly from the excess of the democratic spirit, which will not suffer academical authority to be exercised to the needful extent, and lavishes literary and scientific degrees through unqualified institutions, which afford no security for the proper tests. But America is the land in which the duty of educating the people has been most distinctly recognised, and most universally performed; in which, let me add, that duty has been performed most for its own sake, and least with the object of training children up in allegiance to any political or ecclesiastical system. And the nation receives its reward in high political intelligence pervading the whole people, and in industry which is the source of doubled wealth, because it is not only active but skilful, and not only skilful but inventive. The Patent Museum, at Washington, bears striking testimony to the inventiveness of American industry. The mansion of the President, at Washington, has now twice borne striking testimony to the political intelligence by which the whole people is pervaded, and which can, of a farmer or mechanic, make a ruler, the peer of those who were born to rule.

The first Christian society had all things in common. So for a time had the Puritan settlement in New England. This was in each case a primitive state destined soon to give way to the exigencies of existing civilisation. But perhaps before the final consummation of Christian history that primitive state may again be virtually realised, not by violence or sudden revolution, but through the gradual operation of Christian influences, which, whenever they decisively prevail, without taking away the landmarks of property, transmute proprietorship into duty. Possibly the communistic aspirations which break forth whenever the soul of Christian society is deeply moved may not, after all, be pure chimeras, but only chimerical anticipations of a result as yet indefinitely distant. Be this as it may, Christianity, if it does not absolutely exact, does certainly love as fair a distribution as may be of this world’s goods among those who are equal members of the Christian brotherhood. She abhors at least the hideous extremes of wealth and destitution. She abhors the sight of sumptuous palaces tenanted by Christians, with other Christians starving at their gates. The soul in truth is not so independent of the body that Christian aspirations and Christian excellence can easily exist where the whole being of great masses of the people is absorbed in the grim struggle with hunger. A very large proportion of crime is the offspring of want, and can be practically removed only by giving bread to the people. And how great an obstacle to Christianity are the feelings produced in the hearts of multitudes by the daily pressure of an unjust lot! How many evil tempers against which Christian ministers preach are inevitably aggravated by institutions which the preachers think it their political duty to support! In the United States the distribution of worldly goods is probably more equal, and the means of a decent livelihood are more assured to all than in any other country. Poverty, saving among the newly arrived emigrants, is rare; want of bread almost unknown, except as the consequence of vice. There are no workhouses full of penal paupers, nor multitudes of labourers outside the workhouses living with penal pauperism always in view. The inmates of the public almshouses, even in the great cities, are few in number, and, for the most part, as I was told, not Americans by birth; nor has American society been scared by the terrible cancer of indigence into treating destitution as half a crime. The houses seem those of one vast middle class. Nowhere do you see palaces; and, generally speaking, the eye of the European visitor looks around in vain for the hovels of the poor. The quarters of the Irish and German emigrants in the great seaboard cities (especially those of the Irish, who linger in their helplessness where they land) were the only haunts of misery and squalor that met my eye. I saw nothing so bad as the low quarters of Liverpool or of London in the cities; nothing approaching to the cabins of the English, much less to those of the Irish peasantry in the country. This is partly due to the bounty of nature in a rich and virgin land, which helps to solve so many difficulties in America, as, in justice to European legislators, we must always bear in mind. But it is also partly the effect of just laws. In the transit to the new world primogeniture and entail were left behind.

In England, the place of the old English yeoman knows him no more. In his stead the great proprietor reigns. But in the prairies of Illinois is a tract of deep rich soil, stretching for hundreds of miles each way in one vast plain, with only slight swells of undulation and without a stone for the plough to strike against—an ocean of cornland, monotonous to the eye, yet redeemed from dreariness by its glorious fruitfulness, which seems to bid all that hunger in the earth come there and be fed. Through the midst of it runs the railway, bringing down for the first time all the implements and resources of scientific agriculture into the virgin wilderness, and, like the Nile in its course through Egypt, turning everything round it into fertility and wealth. From the handling of those harvests stately cities have risen where forty years ago the Indian wigwams stood. There the English yeoman has found his home again. There he once more tills his own land, often broad lands, and once more lives frank and free among his peers. The dry American air has made his once burly frame more spare and sinewy: enterprise and education have developed his forehead, and lent keenness to his eye. But he still retains his solid English virtues, his kindliness, his good sense, his reverence for the law, and to judge by the Sunday aspect of his villages, his fear of God. He is still formidable to his foes under Grant and Sherman, as he was when he drew the bow with Edward and the Black Prince. Still, too, he loves his country, restless and ever moving westward though he be. Boys did the work of men in Illinois while her brave husbandmen were gone by thousands and tens of thousands to the war: and by the side of her villages is many a grave tenanted by the slain, brought from distant battle fields to protest against the calumny that hirelings only fought for the government of the people. It is a good thing to go to Greece and Italy and to look with grateful reverence on the monuments of the illustrious past: and it is a good thing also to go to Illinois and see the blessing of heaven resting on the future. No doubt this prosperity depends on the abundance of unoccupied and fertile land; and even that exhaustless store must some day be exhausted: but by that time perhaps great problems will have been solved.

A popular novelist, from whose unauthentic page Englishmen I suspect draw many of their notions of America, has represented the Americans as not honouring labour. If they do not, they are not good Christians; for Christianity bids all its professors work if they would eat, forbidding any man to live in mere uselessness by the labour of his fellow. But here, as in many other cases, as in the stories of duelling and stabbing, what was true only of the Slave States has been carelessly said of the Free. In the Free States probably labour is more honoured, idleness more despised, than in any other country in the world. Very rare are the instances, if my observation was correct, of men, however wealthy, who are merely living in luxury on their riches and adding nothing to the common store. As in Italy of old, so in America now, the merchant, however large the fortune he may have secured, seems almost always to retain his connection with commerce; and like the Bardi, the Pitti, and the founders of the house of Medici, to act as a chief of industry and trade. However high men have risen, they are proud to own that it was by labour, even manual labour, that they rose. To have split rails with his own hands was in the eyes of Northern men a proud addition to Mr. Lincoln’s escutcheon, and a recommendation to the highest office in the State. That the American community is immensely wealthy, its bitterest enemies cannot deny; and if labour were not honoured, whence could the wealth come?

In Europe divisions of class are sharp, as we feel to our cost whenever any political or social question is approached. And they run all down the scale. The farmer is an aristocrat, too often a very haughty aristocrat to the labourer; the great tradesman to the small. And each class is ever dreading the claims and struggling against the pretensions of those beneath it. In America class divisions, though by no means extinct, are comparatively faint, and the jealousies and dangers which they entail are mitigated in proportion. All are politically equal, all are comparatively on a level in education and even in pro