Volume Iii Part 17 (2/2)

We close this chapter with a word about the painful financial crisis that swept over the country in the autumn of 1857. Its causes are somewhat occult, but two appear to have been the chief, viz., the over-rapid building of railroads and the speculation induced by the prosperity and the rise of prices incident to the new output of gold.

Interest on the best securities rose to three, four, and five per cent.

a month. On ordinary securities no money at all could be had. Commercial houses of the highest repute went down. The climax was in September and October. The three leading banks in Philadelphia suspended specie payments, at once followed in this by all the banks of the Middle States, and upon the 13th of the next month by the New York banks.

Manufacturing was very largely abandoned for the time, at least thirty thousand operatives being thrown out of work in New York City alone.

Prices even of agricultural produce fell enormously. Tramps were to be met on every road. Easier times fortunately returned by spring, when business resumed pretty nearly its former prosperous march.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Cross section of cable; central conductor is about .25 inches in diameter; it is surrounded by layers of insulation and twelve .5 inch wires for protection.]

Sh.o.r.e End of Cable-exact size.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Barnacles on Cable.]

PERIOD IV.

CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION

1860-1868

CHAPTER I.

CAUSES OF THE WAR

[1861]

It were a mistake to refer the great Rebellion, for ultimate source, to ambiguity in the Const.i.tution or to the wickedness of politicians or of the people. It was simply the last resort in an ”irrepressible conflict”

of principle--in the struggle for and against the genius of the world's advance. Economic, social, and moral evolution, resulting in two radically different civilizations, had enforced upon each section unfaithfulness to the spirit and even to the letter of its const.i.tutional covenant. The South was not to blame that slavery was at first profitable; and if it deemed it so too long and even thought of it as a good morally, these convictions, however big with ill consequences to the nation, were but errors of view, not strange considering the then status of slavery in the world.

The South's pride, holding it to the course once chosen, was also no indictable offence. Nor could the North on its part be taxed with crime for its ”higher law fanaticism,” which was simply the spirit of the age; or for seeing early what all believe now, that slavery was a blight upon the land. Much as was ”nominated in the bond” of the Const.i.tution, neither law nor equity forbade free States to increase the more rapidly in numbers, wealth, and other elements of prosperity; and northern congressmen must have been other than human, if, seeing this increase and being in the majority, they had gone on punctiliously heeding formal obligation against manifest national weal. And when, in 1854, the great sacred compact of 1820 was set aside by the authority of the South itself, the North felt free even from formal fetters. All talk of extra-legal negotiations and understandings touching slavery was now at an end. The northern majority was at last united to legislate upon slavery as it would, subject only to the Const.i.tution. The South too late saw this, and fearing that the peculiar inst.i.tution, shut up to its old home, would die, sought separation, with such chance of expansion as this might yield.

The South had come to love slavery too well, the Const.i.tution too little. Upon conserving slavery all parties there, however dissident as to modes, however hostile in other matters, were unconditionally bent.

The chief argument even of those opposing disunion was that it endangered slavery. Our new government, said Alexander H. Stephens, soon to be vice-president of the Southern Confederacy, is founded, its cornerstone rests, upon the great physical, philosophical, and moral truth, to which Jefferson and the men of his day were blind, that the negro, by nature or the curse of Canaan, is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is, by ordination of Providence, whose wisdom it is not for us to inquire into or question, his natural and normal condition. As the apostle of such a principle the South could not but abjure the old establishment, whose genius and working were inevitably in the contrary direction. Many confessed it to be the essential nature of our Government, and not unfair treatment under it, against which they rebelled.

Slavery had also bred hatred of the Union indirectly, by fostering anti-democratic habits of thought, feeling, and action. ”The form of liberty existed, the press seemed to be free, the deliberations of legislative bodies were tumultuous, and every man boasted of his independence. But the spirit of true liberty, tolerance of the minority and respect for individual opinion, had departed, and those deceitful appearances concealed the despotism of an inexorable master, slavery, before whom the most powerful of slave-holders was himself but a slave, as abject as the meanest.” Over wide sections, unt.i.tled manorial lords, ”more intelligent than educated, brave but irascible, proud but overbearing,” controlled all voting and office-holding. Congressional districts were their pocket-boroughs, and they ignored the common man save to use him. The system grew, instead of statesmen, sectionalists, whom love for the ”peculiar inst.i.tution” rendered callous to national interests.

The vigorous secession movements in the South at once after Lincoln's election, raised a question of the first magnitude, which few people at the North had reflected upon since 1833, viz., whether or not non-revolutionary secession was possible. Almost unanimously the North denied such possibility, the South affirmed it. This was at bottom manifestly nothing but the old question of state sovereignty over again.

The South held the Union to be a state compact, which the northern parties thereto had broken. To prove the compact theory no new proof was now adduced. Rather did the southern people take the a.s.sertion of it as an axiom, with a simplicity which spoke volumes for the influence of Calhoun and for the indoctrination which the South had received in 1832.

Not alone Calhoun but nearly every other southerner of great influence, at least from the day of the Missouri Compromise, had been inculcating the supreme authority of the State as compared with the Union. The southern States were all large, and, as travelling in or between them was difficult and little common, they retained far more than those at the North each its original separateness and peculiarities. Southern population was more fixed than northern; southern state traditions were held in far the deeper reverence. In a word, the colonial condition of things to a great extent persisted in the South down to the very days of the war. There was every reason why Alabama or North Carolina should, more than Connecticut, feel like a separate nation.

This intense state consciousness might gradually have subsided but for the deep prejudices and pa.s.sions begotten of slavery and of the opposition it encountered from the North. Their resolution, against emanc.i.p.ation led Southerners to cherish a view which made it seem possible for them as a last resort to sever their alliance with the North. It was this conjunction of influences, linking the slave-holder's jealousy and pride to a false but natural conception of state sovereignty, which created in southern men that love of State, intense and sincere as real patriotism, causing them to look upon northern men, with their different theory, as foes and foreigners.

A very imposing historical argument could of course have been built up for the Calhoun theory of the Union. The Union emerged from the preceding Confederacy without a shock. Most who voted for it were unaware how radical a change it embodied. The Const.i.tution, one may even admit, could not have been adopted had it then been understood to preclude the possibility of secession. Doubtless, too, the gradual change of view concerning it all over the North, sprung from the multiplication of social and economic ties between sections and States, rather than from study of const.i.tutional law. We believe that the untruth of the central-sovereignty theory in no wise follows from these admissions, and that its correctness might be made apparent from a plenitude of considerations.

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