Unfortunately for them, in the course of his decision Chief Justice Taney used one unhappy phrase which gave even greater offense perhaps than the decision itself did. That phrase was in fact no part of the decision but was what the lawyers call an obiter dictum—a saying apart. It was a mere statement of what the Chief Justice believed to be a fact of history. It was not at all a ruling of the court. As an illustration of his meaning he made the perfectly true statement that before the time of the American Revolution—and he might have included a much later date—the negroes "had been regarded as beings of an inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit."
This statement of fact as to the attitude of the public mind toward the negro before the Revolution was entirely correct, as every educated reader knows, and as the history of the African slave-trade—carried on not only before the adoption of the Constitution but for a dozen years after 1808 when the constitutional prohibition of that nefarious traffic went into effect—perfectly and completely shows.
But Chief Justice Taney's simple statement of this historical fact was everywhere interpreted to be a part of his legal decision. This was natural enough under the circumstances for the reason that slavery itself, in behalf of which the decision seemed to have been rendered, rested solely upon the doctrine that a negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect.
Even if this unfortunate phrase had not been used and even if it had not been misinterpreted as it was, the decision itself must of necessity have wrought something like a revolution in the thought of the Northern people. The most conservative among them had reconciled themselves to the existence of slavery in certain of the states upon the ground that each state had a right to legislate for itself upon that question and therefore that each state was alone responsible for its own legislation. They were startled now by the challenge of a Supreme Court decision which denied to them even this relief of conscience and even this liberty of individual state action. They were asked to accept the doctrine that slavery was a national institution against which state laws were futile except in a very limited way.
This extreme decision in favor of slavery, coming as it did at the very time when civil war was on in Kansas, not only inflamed public sentiment at the North but alarmed it. Already the political party opposed to the extension of slavery had mightily grown in numbers and in enthusiasm. In 1852 it had cast less than 157,000 votes. In 1856 its vote amounted to 1,341,264, carrying with it 114 electoral votes as against 174 secured by its chief antagonist and eight thrown away on a third candidate.
During that four years the Anti-slavery party had drawn to itself through force of circumstance all of the Free-soil Democracy and the greater part of the Northern Whigs.
In 1856 for the first time in the Republic's history the election of a president was contested by a party strictly sectional in its composition and the fact was alarming not only at the South but almost equally so at the North. The conviction was general that such a contest meant mischief for the country. It was the first sure foreboding of that war which was destined to come a little later between the sections.
The Republican party existed exclusively at the North. It made no pretense of existing in the Southern half of the Republic. It did not even go through the empty form of nominating electors in the Southern states either in 1856 or four years later in 1860. It did not hope in either of those years for a single electoral vote from any state lying south of the Potomac or the Ohio. Its purpose was to carry the election and to control the country by a strictly sectional and geographical vote—a thing that had never before been attempted or thought of by any party, and a thing the very suggestion of which caused great alarm throughout the country. For, men anxiously asked, if one section of the Union is thus to dominate the other how shall we be able to maintain the Union in its present disturbed and distracted condition? Hitherto, they reflected, majorities have been drawn from all the states in contests that were purely national in their inspiration and in their significance, and all men have held themselves bound to submit to the will of such majorities, as representing the ultimate judgment of all the states and all the people; but, they anxiously asked themselves, how long will the states or the people of one part of the country consent to be governed by the elected candidates of a party which exists solely in the other part of the country; a party which does not even ask for votes except in that other part, in support of its candidates; a party whose platform is one of avowed hostility to the industrial, social and domestic labor system of the southern half of the Republic; a party which has no existence or recognition or representation in that part of the Union, and which includes among its most active and aggressive members those who openly declare their purpose to overthrow the domestic institutions of the South, in defiance of all constitutional guarantees, and by any means that may be available, even including servile war in states where the negroes outnumber the whites by two or three to one?
Considerations of this kind undoubtedly restrained many voters at the North in the election of 1856, and for a time after that election there seemed to be a promise of peace in the influence of conservatism on the one side and on the other in spite of what was going on in Kansas.
At the same time the state of feeling throughout the country was well-nigh indistinguishable from that which prevails during the existence of actual civil war. Only the old devotion to the Union which existed in both the Northern and Southern mind prevented men from flying at each other's throats.
Then, as if to emphasize the inevitableness of war and to hasten its coming, there occurred the raid of John Brown at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in the autumn of 1859—only a year before a presidential election must occur.
John Brown had been the chief leader of the Free State men in the warlike operations in Kansas. He was a man of extraordinary fanaticism, limitless daring, large capacity, and relentless determination. His hostility to slavery knew absolutely no bounds. With a courage which had no balance wheel of discretion to regulate it, he had no hesitation in undertaking great enterprises with ridiculously inadequate means, and in the end he showed that he had no flinching from the personal consequences of his acts.
In June, 1859, he went secretly to the neighborhood of Harper's Ferry, with a band so small that even after its reinforcement it was manifestly inadequate to be trusted by any but a madman to accomplish the work that Brown had laid out for it to do. He was both morally and materially supported by men of wealth and influence at the North who blindly entrusted him with arms, ammunition, and money, not knowing or inquiring whither he was going or what his purposes might be.
By the end of June, 1859, he had established himself near Harper's Ferry with a band of devoted followers about him. One by one the men who had enlisted in his service joined him until the company numbered twenty-two. Still his purpose was wholly unsuspected by his Virginian neighbors.
In the meanwhile the two hundred rifles contributed by George L. Stearns of Medford, Mass., in aid of the Kansas controversy, were delivered to John Brown who had, besides, a war chest of five hundred dollars in gold given to him by Boston enthusiasts in aid of an enterprise concerning which they had no definite information whatsoever.
His purpose was to establish in the mountain fastnesses near Harper's Ferry a fugitive slave camp which a few men could easily defend while the rest of those coming into it could be run off to Canada and freedom with ease and certainty. In effect he contemplated a general insurrection of the slaves, their concentration in easily defensible mountain camps and their removal to Canada from these military posts as rapidly as that end could be accomplished.
This program if successful could have resulted in nothing less than a slave insurrection and a bloody servile war.
But John Brown's program failed of its accomplishment for two reasons. There was far less of active discontent among the negroes of northern Virginia than John Brown had supposed. Most of those negroes in fact were entirely satisfied with their condition and treatment and so they refused to flee to him for rescue from an oppression which they did not feel.
It is noteworthy that Frederick Douglass, the ablest representative of the negro race and by all odds the ablest negro representative of abolitionism, disapproved and discouraged John Brown's enterprise. Especially Frederick Douglass advised against John Brown's policy of making war upon the United States. That was the second and the controlling cause of his failure. It seems to have been his thought that with the country in the tempestuous condition it was then in he might hopefully assail the National Government itself and that in such an assault he would have behind him the entire Northern people. How badly he misunderstood the signs of the times the events clearly show.
On the 16th of October, 1859, he marched with eighteen men upon the undefended United States arsenal at Harper's Ferry, broke down its doors and took forcible possession of the premises.
This in itself was an easy thing to do for the reason that the Government, seeing no occasion to apprehend violence of such sort, had made no adequate provision for the defense of its arsenal. But John Brown's act was a direct, open, and flagrant levying of war against the United States and it was promptly treated as such by the Government at Washington. A force of marines was sent to Harper's Ferry to eject the intruder and to repossess the national arsenal.
There was a little skirmish. Many of John Brown's men were killed and he and his surviving companions were promptly made prisoners, tried for treason, convicted and hanged.
In the number of men engaged, in the amount of damage done, and in its immediate consequences this raid of John Brown's was a matter of no moment whatever. It was conspicuously a failure so far as its ulterior purpose of inducing slaves to flee from bondage and engage in insurrection was concerned. It was still more conspicuously a failure in so far as it meant war upon the United States. A single company of marines brought it to an end without the necessity of calling in any larger force. But the raid had a very important influence nevertheless, upon the future history of the country.
It illustrated and emphasized as no previous event had done, the implacability of the sentiment hostile to slavery. It demonstrated, as the fact had never been demonstrated before, the hopelessly irrepressible character of the controversy concerning slavery. It alarmed and angered the South as it had never been alarmed and angered before. It indicated to the Southern people the fact that there were agencies active at the North which would stop at nothing that might help to the abolition of slavery; that even a servile war, with all the brutality and bloodthirstiness that servile war must mean to the South, was lightly contemplated by a certain and rapidly growing Northern opinion, as a legitimate means for the accomplishment of abolition. It indicated an implacability of sentiment against which there seemed to be no defense except in that dissolution of the Union which the extremists on both sides had so long and so freely invoked as a remedy for the hopeless division of the Republic into two antagonistic camps.
John Brown's invasion would have counted for little if it had stood alone. But the rifles that he had in possession, with which to arm fugitive slaves, had been contributed by a citizen of Massachusetts under urgency of conspicuous representatives of the political party that sought the abolition of slavery. The five hundred dollars that Brown carried with him as a part of the equipment with which he hoped to create a servile war, was contributed by Boston citizens and represented a hostility as unkind as it was unlawful. The sanction given to John Brown's insane and treasonable raid by many newspapers and a certain part of the public at the North served to convince even the most moderate and conservative men at the South that there was no longer any hope or prospect of reconciliation between the two sections upon any basis of reasonable and mutual concession.
It was in this mood that the country approached the presidential election of 1860. On either side there was a strongly surviving love for the Federal Union, an abiding conviction that it alone could guarantee the perpetuity of the American idea of local self-government and personal liberty. But on either side there was an aggressive party of disunion which must be reckoned with in politics. On the side of the North the disunionist party desired and insisted upon the utter and immediate and unconditional abolition of slavery as the sole condition of the Union's further existence. On the Southern side the extremists demanded that slavery should be recognized and protected as a national institution, with local and state freedom from it as a casual incident which should in no way be permitted to interfere with the right of the slaveholder to hold his slaves in bondage even when his convenience led him to carry them into any free state; and still further that the people of every territory should be free to decide for themselves whether or not slavery should be permitted within the domain controlled by them. Between these two opposing parties stood the overwhelming but rapidly weakening majority of the people, insisting that the perpetuity of the Union was of greater importance to liberty than either the maintenance or the extinction of slavery.
How these forces fought the matter out must be the subject of another chapter.
CHAPTER IX
The Election of 1860
When the time came to nominate candidates for the presidential election of 1860, something akin to despair had seized upon the minds of men—a despair that discouraged hopeful conservatism and prompted many to courses that could promise nothing other than disaster to the Union.
In the event, the election of that year showed that there was a majority of nearly a million votes against the Republican party, in a total vote of about four and a half millions. There was still an overwhelming majority of the people, therefore, who regarded the preservation and perpetuity of the Republic as the paramount concern. There is every reason to believe that if circumstances had so shaped themselves as to put that matter immediately in issue, and if the contest could have been fairly fought out between the two opposing sentiments the majority of nearly a million votes cast against what was regarded as a sectional party, representing a purely geographical sentiment, would have been swelled to two millions or more. For in all parts of the country the Union was still an object of adoration and the Constitution remained a text-book of patriotic study.
But the battle was not destined to be fought out on those lines. Those whose supreme concern was for the preservation of the Republic, with all that it signified of self-government among men, were divided in council and were in consequence defeated. It sounds like a paradox, but it is a simple statement of fact to say that the disruption of the Union was brought about by the disunion of the Union forces.
The story is an interesting bit of history and a most significant one. But in order to understand it clearly the reader should bear in mind the excessively strained state of feeling in the country which has already been set forth in these pages. In aid of that let us briefly recapitulate.
The events of the recently preceding years had gone far to unseat conservatism, to breed a hopeless discouragement, and to induce a very general despair. The civil war in Kansas had been lawless, criminal and murderous on both sides.
It is impossible for any honest mind to approve the doings of the men on either side in that struggle, or to regard them otherwise than as criminal attempts to substitute force for law and fraud for freedom of the ballot.
Yet on each side the tu quoque argument was freely and justly used; on either side the criminal doings of the partisans of that side were regarded as a necessary offset to the criminal doings of the partisans of the other side. At the North the "free state men" were encouraged and supported by a large part of the press and pulpit. Great preachers pleaded from their sacred desks for contributions of money with which to arm the Northern men for this conflict. Great leaders of radical opinion employed the press and platform in the like behalf.
On the other hand, at the South, with a far less orderly organization of the forces that control popular opinion and action, there was an equally strong disposition manifested to support and encourage those Southern youths who had gone into Kansas to struggle for the establishment of slavery there. And on each side there was a manifest willingness to shut eyes to such lawlessness and such crime as the partisans of that side might find it necessary and convenient to commit in behalf of the "cause" they were set to serve.
Then had followed John Brown's attempt at Harper's Ferry to bring about that most terrible of all catastrophes, a slave insurrection. The attempt itself was so absurd in its lack of means conceivably adequate to the end proposed, and so clearly the work of a madman in that it involved a direct assault upon a national arsenal, making itself thus the insane challenge of a mere handful of men to the whole power of the United States, that it might have been dismissed from men's minds as men are accustomed to dismiss the vagaries of demented persons, but for one fact. The John Brown raid was seriously and earnestly approved by so many persons and pulpits and prints at the North, as was shown by funeral services and otherwise, that it was regarded at the South as a preliminary, typical, and threateningly suggestive manifestation of what Northern sentiment intended to do to the South whenever it should have the necessary power. How largely it was thus sanctioned was later shown by the fact that during the succeeding war the song that celebrated John Brown's raid made itself a national anthem declaring that in the advance of the national armies his "soul was marching on."
To the Southern people John Brown's attempt to stir up servile insurrection meant all of horror, all of slaughter, all of outrage to women and children that it is possible to conceive. It meant to them the overturning of society. It meant the dominance of a subject and inferior race outnumbering the whites in many states, a race ignorant and passionate in Virginia and Kentucky, and well-nigh savage in the cotton states. It meant rapine and murder—rape, outrage and burning.
There were still many at the South who desired and earnestly advocated the extirpation of slavery by any means that could be adopted with tolerable safety to Southern homes, but John Brown's program of abolition by servile war—a program which seemed to them to be accepted by Northern public sentiment—offered them a threat of desolation against which, if they were men, they were bound to revolt with all the force they could command. It called into instant and aggressive activity that fundamental impulse of humanity, the all-controlling instinct of self-preservation.
On the other side the increasingly insistent demand of the Southern extremists for the nationalization of slavery and their apparent ability to force such nationalization, through fugitive slave laws against which the consciences even of the most devoted lovers of the Union at the North revolted, and through the decisions of the Supreme Court, bred in that quarter a similar despair of lasting union. Hundreds of thousands who did not sympathize with the purpose to stir up servile war despairingly felt that the time had come when the demands of what was called "the slave power" must be resisted at any and all risks, and resigned themselves to the employment of any means that might be found necessary to that end. They felt that all compromises had failed, that all efforts to enable this Nation, as Mr. Lincoln phrased it, "permanently to endure half slave and half free," had been defeated and shown to be futile.
In brief, on both sides of the line of cleavage, a spirit of despairing readiness for any remedy, however drastic it might be, had been created by the inexorable circumstances of the "irrepressible conflict."
There is no doubt whatever that if the situation had been clearly understood, nine in ten of all Northern people would have shrunk with horror from such a program of destruction as that which John Brown's raid implied and intended—namely the overthrow of the United States Government and the inauguration of a servile insurrection at the South.
But the conditions were not clearly understood upon either side. Upon neither side did the people really know precisely how the facts of the situation presented themselves to the people on the other side. On neither side was there enough of calm, impartial deliberation to distinguish between the excesses of sentiment and conduct and provoking self-assertion on the part of extremists on the other side and the settled purposes of the great majority. Still worse, on neither side was there enough resolute calmness to relegate the small body of extremists to their proper place as a minority, and to take matters out of their hands.
The thought of secession rapidly gained ground at the South. The "slangy" slogan of N. P. Banks—"Let the Union slide"—was accepted as a policy by increasing multitudes at the North.
It was in such conditions that political parties made their preparations for the presidential campaign of 1860.
The Democratic party represented the only opposition to Republicanism which had any hope or possibility of success. It was in a clear and commanding majority in the Nation. The old Whig party had dwindled to a remnant, and the greater part of that remnant would have voted for the Democratic candidate in an election directly presenting the issue of Democracy and nationalism against Republicanism and a geographical division of the people into parties.
But the Democratic party was itself hopelessly divided. The radical pro-slavery men at the South had made up their minds to disunion as a thing desirable and necessary. They did not want the Democratic or any other national party to win unless they could themselves dominate and control it. The extreme men among them wanted the Republicans to succeed in the election in order that there might be an excuse for secession.
The Democratic nominating convention met at Charleston, S. C., on April 23, 1860. Senator Stephen A. Douglas from the beginning was the first choice of a majority of the delegates as the party's candidate, but he could not command that two-thirds' vote which the party had always insisted upon as a condition precedent to nomination. In his Illinois campaign against Lincoln in 1858, Douglas had been logically forced to make certain admissions as to the right of the people in a territory to exclude slavery from it before it became a state, which deeply offended the extremists of the South. There was also in effective play the active desire of these extremists to disrupt the party and secure its defeat as a pretext for secession. To have nominated Douglas at that time would have been to elect him with absolute certainty, and to have elected him in 1860 would have been to postpone the program of secession for at least four years.
So from the beginning to the end the radical pro-slavery men held out against Douglas's nomination. They in the end seceded from the convention and after ten days of fruitless wrangling that body adjourned without making a nomination or adopting a platform, to meet again at Baltimore on the eighteenth of June.
This second meeting of the convention was the signal for still further and bitterer wrangling. The Southerners again withdrew and in the end two candidates were nominated—Douglas by that part of the convention which claimed to be national and Breckinridge by the Southern wing.
This was a direct invitation to defeat. It not only compelled such a division of the Democratic vote as to render the success of either Democratic candidate impossible, but it was accompanied by the still further division of the forces opposed to the strictly sectional and geographical Republican party. The old Whigs and those in sympathy with their desire to preserve the Union if possible, had met in convention in Baltimore on the ninth of May, adopted, as their platform, resolutions pledging devotion to "the Union, the Constitution and the enforcement of the laws," and under the name of "the Constitutional Union party" nominated John Bell of Tennessee for president and Edward Everett of Massachusetts for vice-president.
Their purpose was to bring to bear for the preservation of the Union the votes of a large body of men who would not vote for the Republican candidate on the one hand or for either of the Democratic candidates—presently to be nominated—on the other. Their hope was that among four candidates there would be no election, and that in an election by states in the House of Representatives their candidate might be chosen as one upon whom lovers of the Union could unite without regard to party.
When the election came they polled no less than 589,581 votes and carried thirty-nine electoral votes against Douglas's twelve and Breckinridge's seventy-two. But their hope of throwing the election into the House of Representatives was doomed to disappointment.
The Republican convention met at Chicago on May 16, and after some contest nominated Mr. Lincoln. When all the nominations were made, presenting three candidates in opposition to him, Mr. Lincoln's election was practically certain, with only the remote chance that the choice might be thrown into the House of Representatives, as a possible doubt of that result. In fact he was elected, though the majority against him on the popular vote was nearly a million.
In the meantime the canvass had mightily tended to additional embitterment. It had drawn the line more sharply than ever between the sections. It had completely disrupted and scattered into three warring groups all those forces that stood out against a party which had no being except in one section of the Union. It had familiarized men's minds with the idea of disunion. It had been a campaign of threats and defiances. It had well-nigh made an end of conservatism as a sentiment influential on either side. It had intensified distrust, accentuated hatred, embittered the relations of men, and prepared the minds of the people North and South for disunion and war.
The time had come which statesmen had so long foreboded when threats of disunion—oft repeated on both sides and usually received scoffingly as mere vaporings—took on a seriously menacing character. The time had come when the warring sectional interests, prejudices and principles were ready to make final appeal to the brutal arbitrament of steel and gunpowder. The situation had been strained to the breaking point, and the fact that it did not break at once was due to conditions and inspirations which need another chapter for their explanation.
CHAPTER X
The Birth of War
The election of Mr. Lincoln filled the whole country with alarmed apprehension. At the North no less than at the South men anxiously asked of themselves and of their neighbors "What is going to happen?"
What had already happened was something unprecedented in the history of the country. On its face it was merely the election of a president by a majority of the electoral college vote, against whose election there had been a heavy popular majority.
The like had happened several times before and the occurrence had never before excited the least apprehension or created the least alarm or suggested the smallest protest. It had been accepted in every case as a natural result of our complex electoral system, which combines representation of population with representation of the states as such without regard to population, and which gives to each state the right to cast the whole of its electoral vote in accordance with the will of a majority of its people. It was a recognized fact that under this system a president might easily be chosen by a minority vote of the people, provided that minority vote was so distributed among the states as to secure an electoral majority in his behalf. There was no ground of complaint, therefore, and in fact no complaint was anywhere made, that Mr. Lincoln was elected in the face of an adverse majority of about 950,000 popular votes.
But there was a much more significant, and, as it seemed to many minds, a much more alarming fact behind his election. That election was purely and exclusively sectional. Of the one hundred eighty electoral votes cast for him, not one had come from any state lying south of the Potomac or the Ohio nor had his candidacy been supported in the popular vote by even a handful in that half of the country. Both on the popular and on the electoral vote his support had been purely geographical, and even on geographical lines it had been little more than a majority. In the slave states he had had no support at all, while in the free states taken by themselves his popular majority was only 186,964, the vote of the free states standing 1,731,182 for him and 1,544,218 against him.
In other words, Mr. Lincoln was elected in face of an adverse popular majority of about 950,000 in the whole country, by a narrow popular majority of less than 200,000 in one section of the country. He was the candidate of a party which had absolutely no existence in the southern part of the Republic, and which existed avowedly only in antagonism to the institutions of that part of the country.
For the first time in the history of the Republic there had occurred a purely geographical election. For the first time, as the South interpreted the matter, one section of the country had assumed the right to govern another. For the first time a party dominating one section by a narrow majority and having no shadow of existence in the other section had come into power with authority to rule both, so far at least as executive and administrative power was concerned. For the first time that geographical division of the country had occurred in fear and dread of which as a possibility so many of the original states had hesitated to ratify the Constitution itself.
Worse still, so far as the future of the Republic was concerned, this purely geographical election had been sought and secured upon a purely geographical and sectional question. Refine the matter as the platform-makers might, and qualify and explain policies as the party did, the fact was as apparent then as it is now that the sole reason for the Republican party's existence was hostility to slavery and an earnest desire to abolish that institution in this land by whatever means there might be available to that end. That purpose alone held together in political union the otherwise discordant elements of which the party was composed. In other words a party founded exclusively upon hostility to the domestic institutions of the Southern States had elected a president by means of a purely sectional and geographical vote, against the expressed will of the people as reflected in a popular majority of nearly a million ballots.
These facts of history are here set forth not by way of condemnation and not at all with any intent to criticise them or the authors of them adversely, but solely in aid of understanding. They are set forth in order that the reader who was not born early enough in the nineteenth century to remember them may understand the conditions and circumstances that gave birth to the war.
The election of Mr. Lincoln under these circumstances and in this way was accepted by the extreme pro-slavery men at the South as a challenge to them to dissolve the Union if they dared. They proceeded to accept the challenge, but their influence was not dominant in Virginia or in those states which looked to Virginia for guidance in this crisis and the lack of such dominance was an embarrassment to them. South Carolina, in which state the extremists were most influential, adopted an ordinance of secession on the twentieth of December, 1860. The other cotton states followed South Carolina's lead until seven of them were counted as seceding states. But Virginia resolutely held aloof, and North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri awaited Virginia's leadership, while Maryland and Delaware stood firmly by the Union.
Without these states the attempt to disrupt the Union would of course have been an absurdity from the beginning. But unless Virginia could be drawn into the movement the other border states were resolute to withhold themselves from it, for the double reason that Virginia's influence as the mother of the states concerned was paramount, and that Virginia's geographical position, the numbers of her population, her importance in American history and her productiveness of those supplies upon which military operations must depend, rendered that state an absolutely indispensable member of the new Confederacy if its war of independence was to be in the least degree hopeful of success.
The seceding states sent delegates to a convention at Montgomery, Alabama, in early February, 1861, and there set themselves up as a new and independent republic under the name of "The Confederate States of America." But neither Virginia nor the other border states were represented in that convention.
Virginia, on the fourth of February, elected a constitutional convention to consider the question of secession. The result of that election was altogether hostile to the purposes of the secessionists. An overwhelming majority of the convention elected on that date consisted of men resolutely opposed to the policy of secession.
Here a nice distinction must be made. The Virginians generally, and their accredited representatives in the constitutional convention, believed absolutely and without a shadow of questioning in the constitutional right of any state to secede from the Union at will. They agreed also in the conviction that the National Government had no constitutional right or power to use force of any kind in order to prevent the secession of any state or in order to compel its return to the Union.
But while they held these doctrines to be absolutely indisputable, the Virginians resolutely rejected secession as a policy. They saw nothing in Mr. Lincoln's election to justify a resort to so extreme a remedy, and they refused their assent to that method of procedure. It is important to bear in mind the distinction between the Virginian conception of states' rights and the Virginian conception of policy in the conditions created by Mr. Lincoln's election, because upon that distinction hung the issue of peace or war in the Republic. For nothing could be more certain than that without Virginia's pith and substance, and without the assistance of the states that waited for Virginia's decision before rendering their own, the cotton states would not have undertaken, seriously, a war of independence, or if they had done so, would not have been able to maintain their struggle against the Federal power for any considerable time.
Everything hinged upon Virginia's course and Virginia resolutely repudiated the policy of secession, denying that Mr. Lincoln's election afforded any just occasion or any sufficient excuse for a resort to that extreme remedy.
Accordingly all the forces of secession were brought to bear upon Virginia. All the hotheads in the state and many from other states, were set to make speeches. Most of the newspapers were purchased and placed in control of intemperate radicals who could be depended upon to make life not worth living for any man who hesitated to precipitate war. John M. Daniel, a gifted man of extreme views and highly intemperate prejudices, came home from his consular mission abroad and resumed control of his newspaper, the Richmond Examiner, only to make of its columns a daily terror to every man in the convention or out of it who ventured to hope for peace and the perpetuity of the Union, through the efforts of John J. Crittenden's peace conference or through any other conceivable agency of compromise or reconciliation. Commodore, and afterwards Admiral, Farragut—himself a Southerner, and a resident at that time of Virginia,—said that Virginia was "dragooned out of the Union." The phrase is not quite accurately descriptive of what happened, but at any rate it correctly describes the attempts made to compel Virginia's secession and to secure with it the addition of all the strength of all the border states to the newly formed Confederacy.
The dragooning was attempted, but Virginia refused to yield. Her convention, undoubtedly representing with accuracy the will of her people, held out in opposition to every suggestion of the state's withdrawal from the Union.
Virginia stood thus as a bulwark against civil war for more than two moons, and there is little doubt that her influence and her attitude would have been effectual in preventing the war if only a technicality had been put aside in order that Virginia might not be forced to array herself against that Union of which she was largely the author and to which she still clung with loyal allegiance.
When in the middle of April, 1861, after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Mr. Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 men to form an army with which to coerce the seceding states into submission, and included Virginia in that call, the Virginians felt themselves bound to choose between a secession for which they saw no possible occasion, on the one hand, and the lending of Virginia's power on the other to a program of coercion for which they recognized no constitutional warrant and no moral right. In making such a choice they saw but one honorable course open to them. A convention which had stood out against secession in face of vituperation, contumely and every other force that could be brought to bear in that behalf, voted for secession at the last as an alternative to injustice and dishonor.
This act—which the wisely diplomatic omission of Virginia from the call for troops would have averted—made the war not only possible but a fact.
But this is getting well ahead of the story. Let us go back.
Mr. Lincoln was elected on the sixth of November, 1860. He could not take his seat until the fourth of March, 1861. In the meantime the Government must remain in the hands of the peculiarly irresolute administration of James Buchanan, whose sole concern seemed to be to postpone the outbreak of actual hostilities until the expiration of his own term of office.
Commissioners were sent to him from the seceding states to arrange for the peaceful dissolution of the Union. He had no constitutional power to negotiate with them and he very properly refused to receive them in their official capacity. But on the other hand he did absolutely nothing to prevent or to check or in any way to interfere with the organization of the seceding states as a power in open resistance to the Union. It is a fact now apparent to all students of history that but for Virginia's refusal to join the secession movement, carrying with it as it did the refusal of the other border states, there would have been an organized power ready, upon Mr. Lincoln's accession to office, to assert and maintain the independence of the Southern states against any force that the North could have brought to bear against them.
The regular United States army at that time was ridiculously inadequate in numbers to undertake any enterprise of consequence. Its feeble forces were scattered from Maine to Texas, from Florida to Oregon. Its hands were more than full with the task of holding the Indians in subjection and protecting the borders against the ravages of savage war. The Buchanan administration called no volunteers into the field, while in every Southern state there were musterings at every county seat and military organizations of a formidable character.
In the meantime the newly elected president and those who supported him had no opportunity to make preparation for meeting these conditions. They were not even privileged to advise.
The administration that still remained in power was rapidly disintegrating. Four of the cabinet officers resigned their places, thus still further paralyzing the hands of the President. At the North there was a fixed conviction that secession was merely a bit of political play which would never be pushed to the point of actual war and consequently there was very little of military preparation, while all the able-bodied young men of the South, and even of Virginia, which so emphatically refused to secede, were organizing and drilling and holding themselves in readiness for whatever might happen.
But everywhere there was apprehension. From the hour of the election returns in November until the incoming of Mr. Lincoln's administration on the fourth of March, conservative men at the North and at the South anxiously busied themselves in an endeavor to find a way out of the difficulty, to save the Union from disruption and the country from civil war.
On the second day of December the Albany Evening Journal, a newspaper edited by Thurlow Weed and the personal organ of Mr. Seward, appealed strongly and even passionately to patriotism throughout the country for "such moderation, and forbearance as will draw out, combine and strengthen the Union sentiment of the whole country."
But this and like appeals made by Union-loving, patriotic men North and South fell, not so much upon deaf ears as upon the ears of those who had lost control of their respective parties. Had the conservative men of the Nation been able to act together, they must undoubtedly have prevailed for peace in virtue of their majority of a million, but on both sides the radicals had seized upon the reins. At the South the secessionists were rejoicing in Mr. Lincoln's election under circumstances that gave excuse for the dissolution of the Union. At the North the radical abolitionists saw and welcomed in that event an opportunity to use the whole power of the Federal Government for the final extirpation of African slavery. At the North and at the South the extremists were in control, chiefly by virtue of their intensity and their clamor.
On neither side did the radicals desire the preservation of the Union; on neither side did they seek any amicable adjustment of the controversy. On the contrary they invoked controversy, invited disunion and courted war.
In Congress many efforts were made to find a plan and a basis of adjustment. By a vote of 145 to 38 the House of Representatives created a committee of one member from each state to consider the state of the Union and to report measures of pacification. The Senate adopted measures of like purport.
In that body Andrew Johnson of Tennessee—afterwards president—deliberately proposed a constitutional amendment to the effect that thereafter the president and vice-president should be chosen the one from the North and the other from the South and that the two sections should alternately enjoy the advantage of furnishing the incumbent of the higher office.
Even at that excited and unreasoning time there was probably no more insane proposal made than this. It would have put sectionalism into the Constitution itself. It would have limited both parties in their choice of candidates to men resident in one section or in the other; it would have made of the so-called Mason and Dixon's line a divisional boundary over which no political power, no popular preference, no vote, however overwhelming, could step; it would have changed the United States from the condition of a single, federal republic in which all the states and all citizens were possessed of equal rights into a bifurcated alliance between two antagonistic groups of states, the chief bond of union between which would have been an agreement that they should alternately govern each other.
Surely nothing more senseless, more absurd or more impracticable than this was ever proposed in any country by anybody pretending to be a statesman. But the fact that it was seriously proposed and earnestly urged by a senator who at the next election was nominated and elected vice-president and who became president by virtue of Mr. Lincoln's assassination, is suggestive at least and illustrative of the intensity with which the country and its statesmen were at that time longing for a way out of the difficulty and endeavoring to find it.
In the meanwhile the radicals and extremists on both sides laughed and jeered at all such endeavors to save a Union which they had doomed to destruction by their common fiat, though in nothing else were they agreed. They found means of thwarting every effort of conservatism, and, by intemperate and incessant vituperation, they succeeded in driving many thousands out of the ranks of patriotic conservatism on the one side or the other, and into support of their demand for disunion, chaos and black night.
It was frankly recognized by many leaders of public opinion at the North, that the Southerners were somewhat justified in their attitude by their misconception of the Republican party's purposes and views, a misconception to which the intemperate utterances of extreme anti-slavery men, very naturally ministered. It was in recognition of this natural misunderstanding that Senator Benjamin F. Wade, himself an earnest and even extreme anti-slavery man, said in the Senate, two days before South Carolina seceded:
"I do not so much blame the people of the South, because I think they have been led to believe that we, to-day the dominant party, who are about to take the reins of government, are their mortal foes, and stand ready to trample their institutions under foot."
That was precisely what the Southern people believed. They were firmly convinced that the success of the Republican party meant a merciless, relentless, implacable war upon their labor and social system and upon themselves as the supporters and beneficiaries of that system.
Nevertheless they clung to the Union and labored for its preservation. Virginia supported by the other border states made every effort to secure a pacification.
Chief among these efforts was that made in Congress by John J. Crittenden of Kentucky. On the nineteenth of December, the day before South Carolina's adoption of the ordinance of secession, Mr. Crittenden offered a series of resolutions in the Senate which were designed to compose the troubles of the time and to furnish a basis of peaceful settlement.
Mr. Crittenden proposed amendments to the Constitution providing:
1. That slavery should be prohibited in all territories north of the Missouri Compromise line while they remained territories and freely permitted in all territories south of that line, but with the provision that every state to be formed out of such territory, whether lying north or south of that line, should be free to decide for itself whether or not as a state it would permit slavery.
2. That Congress should have no power to abolish slavery in any place subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States—meaning, of course, the District of Columbia, the public reservations and the territories. It was especially provided that Congress should at no time abolish slavery in the District of Columbia without the consent of the state of Maryland and of the owners of slaves within the District.
3. That Congress should not in any way forbid the traffic in slaves from one slave state to another.
4. That the United States should be liable for the value of any fugitive slave whose recapture should be prevented by force or by intimidation and that the county in which the force or intimidation had been used should be liable to the United States for the mulct.
There were other details which need not here be considered in view of the general absurdity of the proposal. Not even Andrew Johnson's plan, already set forth, embodied more conspicuous elements of impossibility. The Northern States would never have consented to these constitutional provisions. The Southern States would never have been satisfied with them, because they carried with them no effectual provision for their own enforcement. It was folly and futility, from beginning to end, but at any rate it was patriotic folly and country-loving futility. It represented the dominant desire of the people to find some basis of reconciliation upon which the crumbling foundations of the Union might be rebuilt and securely buttressed.
The proposal—absurd and impossible as it was—was strongly supported both in Congress and in the country. Mr. Pugh of Ohio expressed in the Senate the opinion that it would command the support of nearly every state in the Union, and he pointed out the fact that no other proposal ever submitted to Congress had been supported by the petitions of so great a multitude of citizens. The conservative newspaper press passionately urged its adoption, declaring it to be a measure which would completely disarm the disunion sentiment on both sides, and suggesting to Mr. Seward that one word from him in its behalf would make a final end of the fearful threat of war which overshadowed the country.
But all these urgings were founded upon neglect to consider the all-controlling fact that the conflict between slavery and anti-slavery had become actually irrepressible, with the added element of what Charles Sumner called a "sacred animosity."
There was an active, aggressive, anti-slavery minority at the North whose members cared not one pin-point's worth for the Union except in so far as they hoped to use its power for the abolition of slavery in any way and upon any terms that might be available. They had already declared their hostility to the Constitution, and the insertion of Mr. Crittenden's amendments into that document would have served only to intensify their hatred of it and to stimulate their purpose to be rid of it. On the other hand there was an active and ceaselessly aggressive pro-slavery party at the South whose members were resolutely bent upon the destruction of the Union in order that a new Republic might be founded with African slavery as its corner stone.
Between these two radical parties there could be no peace and no neutral ground upon which to negotiate a peace. Each held the Union in contempt—the one because the Constitution protected slavery, the other because it did not adequately protect that institution. Each was ready to sacrifice the Union if by such sacrifice it might achieve its cherished purposes. The one had decried the Union and its Constitution as "a league with death and a covenant with hell" but now clung to it as a power that might be conveniently used for the accomplishment of cherished purposes. The other had despaired of its hope of using the Federal power further for its own ends. The Southern extremists wished to destroy the Union in order that its power might not be used for the extirpation of slavery; the Northern extremists, who had formerly been equally willing to "let the Union slide," were now eager for its preservation in order that its tremendous potentialities of force and compulsion might be employed in behalf of that extirpation of slavery for which alone they cared.
Neither of these extreme parties in the least degree sympathized with any effort to preserve the Union for its own sake by measures of compromise and reconciliation. The Northern radicals wanted the South to secede in order that military force might be employed for the compulsory abolition of slavery. The Southern radicals wanted the Union dissolved in order that slavery might be no further interfered with.
Neither at the North nor at the South were the radicals even yet in a majority. But in both sections they held a sort of balance of power and in both they were in effect dominant.
Under such conditions, with a conflict so truly and hopelessly irrepressible confronting the country, what conceivable hope was there of a peaceful adjustment by means of Mr. Crittenden's resolutions, or by any other means that patriotic ingenuity might devise?
The first gun had not yet been fired, but there was war on, nevertheless, and no paper resolutions however plausibly phrased could stop its progress to the cannon and musket stage.
Mr. Crittenden's proposal of Amendments to the Constitution did not and could not command the two-thirds majority in Congress necessary to their submission to the several states for ratification. The cry of the Northern extremists was "No backing down! No inch of concession to the slave power! No surrender of the fruits of the victory we have won!" The cry of the Southern radicals was: "There is no use in paper guarantees! We cannot trust them! Our enemies have not kept faith in the past and will not keep faith in the future. Let us abandon the hopeless effort for compromises that cannot be enforced! Let us secede and set up a new republic of our own!"
Then came Virginia into the breach, as she had so often come before. Standing as she did for conservatism and for that Union which her legislature had been the first to suggest and which her statesmen had done so much to bring into beneficent being, she appealed to the sentiment of Union and patriotism throughout the land. Her legislature asked that all the states should appoint delegates to a great peace conference at Washington, whose statesmanlike duty it should be to devise and agree upon some plan of adjustment by which the danger that overshadowed the Republic might be averted. This appeal for peace was made on the nineteenth day of January, 1861,—more than a fortnight before the date appointed for the election of a constitutional convention in Virginia to consider the crisis.
It is idle to speculate upon the "might have been." What actually happened was that many of the states appointed to that peace conference delegates of radical views and intemperate minds, whose endeavors from first to last were ceaselessly devoted not to the task of finding a way out, but to the preconceived purpose of defeating the objects of the peace conference.
In the end a committee of that body did indeed recommend a policy practically identical with that outlined in Mr. Crittenden's proposed amendments to the Constitution. But the extremists on both sides and especially the politicians on both sides who sniffed preferment in the air of radicalism, were by that time so far dominant that the proposal came to nothing. It failed of acceptance in either house of Congress when put to a vote within a brief time before the end of the session.
Nevertheless Virginia still resolutely held out against secession and five other border states stood by her in that patriotic attitude for a month and a half more.
Mr. Lincoln was inaugurated on the fourth of March, and straightway there set in a rivalry among the Republican leaders for the control of his administration. Even those who had most actively aided in his election gravely misunderstood and seriously underestimated the character of the man they had chosen to be president. They assumed from the beginning that somebody, other than himself, must direct his administration, and there was eager rivalry among them to usurp that function.
They did not know Abraham Lincoln or realize his intellectual or moral power. The extreme abolitionists beset him with plans to make war upon the seceding states with the avowed purpose of abolishing slavery in all the states by the high hand and without regard to that Constitution which they had declared to be a "league with death and a covenant with hell." To these Mr. Lincoln replied that while they were free to advocate any policy they pleased, he at least, was bound by his official oath to support and maintain the Constitution of the United States. In the end, of course, and when strenuous war was on he did indeed take a different view. As a "war measure" he in the end proclaimed emancipation, without even a pretense of constitutional authority to do so, and indeed in direct defiance of the Constitution. But at least he hesitated to do this, and waited before doing it until the exigencies of an uncertain war seemed to force that extreme measure upon him as one of national self-defense.
At the first he decided as his fixed policy to assert the authority of the National Government in the seceding states, to insist upon the enforcement of the laws there, to recover such government property as those states had seized upon and to use such force as might be required for these ends. He clearly understood that there were men by hundreds of thousands in the North who would stand by him in an endeavor thus to restore and maintain the Union, but who would instantly and angrily desert him should he proclaim a war for the extirpation of slavery within the states in which that institution constitutionally existed.
Accordingly he addressed all his endeavors solely to the task of asserting and maintaining the national authority in the seceding states.
Had all the Southern states seceded before he assumed office his problem would have been an easy one. He would simply have had to call upon the Northern states for military forces sufficient to carry out this program of law enforcement. But Virginia had not seceded, and five other Southern states had submitted their course to Virginia's decision. Virginia was anxiously busying herself to find some ground of reconciliation, some means of accomplishing that preservation of the Union which Mr. Lincoln had declared to be his own and only object of endeavor.
But if Mr. Lincoln was to enforce the laws in the seceding states, and thus to maintain the Union, he must have troops. The little regular army could not furnish them. Either the militia must be called out or volunteers must be summoned for the purpose.
Mr. Lincoln called upon all the states that had not yet seceded for their several quotas required to make up an army of 75,000 men, with which in effect to coerce the seceding states into submission. He demanded that Virginia should furnish her quota of troops for this purpose, and Virginia, deeming the purpose to be an unlawful and iniquitous one, decided to secede—as she had thitherto resolutely refused to do—rather than aid in a coercion which all her Union-loving and peace-loving people regarded as a wrong, an injustice, an unconstitutional and unlawful aggression upon the rights of sovereign states.
Virginia seceded unwillingly and not at all because her people regarded Mr. Lincoln's election as affording any just ground for the withdrawal of any state from the Union, but solely because the mother state was forced to choose between secession on the one hand and the lending of active assistance on the other to what all Virginians regarded as a wicked and wanton warfare by the Federal Government upon sovereign states for having exercised what all Virginians held—as most Americans had previously and sometimes aggressively held—to be their reserved rights under the Constitution.
It was on the fifteenth day of April, 1861, that Mr. Lincoln called upon Virginia for her quota of troops with which to coerce the seceding states into submission. It was on the sixteenth day of April that Virginia's constitutional convention, bravely resolute in its love for the Union and in its antagonism to the policy of secession, was confronted with the choice of furnishing troops to aid in what its members almost unanimously regarded as a political crime or the alternative of joining that secession movement from which the sober and conservative thought of Virginia had so long and so courageously held aloof in defiance of criticism and in face of contempt and contumely.
To men of high minds, holding these views, there could be but one choice in such a case. They decreed that Virginia should prefer a secession which that state overwhelmingly disapproved, to a dishonor which no Virginian could contemplate with a satisfied mind. Accordingly Virginia's strongly pro-Union convention reluctantly adopted an ordinance of secession, on the seventeenth day of April, 1861, not of choice but upon a conviction of necessity. The other border states that had waited for Virginia's decision to determine their own, became at once members of the new Southern Confederacy and the question of war or peace was finally decided in behalf of war—war to the limit of possibility, war to the utmost end of endurance, war to the point of exhaustion on the one side or the other.
A wise prophet, basing his prophecies upon the patent facts of the situation, could not have failed to foretell the outcome of such a war with precision and certainty. The utmost that the South could do—even by "robbing the cradle and the grave" as was wittily and sadly said at the time, was to put 600,000 men into the field, first and last. The North was able to enlist an aggregate of 2,778,304, or, if we reduce this to a basis of three years' service for each man, the Union enlistments for three full years numbered no less than 2,326,168—or nearly four times the total enlistments in the Confederate army from beginning to end of the war. Yet the Confederate armies included practically every white man in the South who was able to bear arms. There was in effect a levy en masse, including the entire white male population from early boyhood to extreme old age.
Again the Federal Government had a navy and the Confederates none. It was certain from the beginning that the Federal authorities would completely shut the South in by blockading and closely sealing every southern port. Thus the Federals—as was apparent in advance—were destined to have the whole world to draw upon for soldiers, for supplies, for ammunition, for improved arms and for everything else that contributes to military strength, while the South must rely absolutely upon itself—ill armed, and unequipped with anything except courage, devotion and heroic fortitude.
There were no facilities at the South for the manufacture of arms. There was not an armory in all that land that could turn out a musket of the pattern then in use, not a machine shop that could convert a muzzle-loading rifle into a breech-loader or give to any gun so much as a choke bore. There were foundries that could cast iron cannon of an antique pattern, but not one that could make a modern gun. There were machine shops—a very few—in which the Northern-made locomotives then in use on Southern railroads could be repaired in a small way, but there was not in all the South a shop in which a useful locomotive could be built. Nor were there any car builders who had had experience in the making of rolling stock fit for service.
In brief the South was an agricultural region accustomed to depend upon the North and upon Europe for its mechanical devices and the outbreak of war was clearly destined to be the signal for the shutting off of both Northern and European supplies. Even in the matter of medicines—and greatly more soldiers die of disease than of wounds—the South had no adequate supply and no assured means of creating one for itself. Quinine, calomel and opium were scarcely less necessary than gunpowder and bullets to the conduct of military operations. Yet there was nowhere in the South a "plant" that could produce any one of those drugs. Nor was there anywhere a mercury supply from which calomel might be made. Early in the war it became impossible to procure so much as a Seidlitz powder in the South. There was nowhere a factory that could make a scalpel, to say nothing of more ingeniously contrived surgical implements. The materials for making gunpowder were so wanting that citizens were urged a little later to dig up the earthen floors of their smoke-houses and their tobacco barns and were instructed in the art of extracting the niter from them. In the towns women were officially solicited to save their chamber lye and deliver it to the authorities in order that its chemicals might be utilized in the creation of explosives. Farmers were by law forbidden to burn corn cobs in their fire places and required to turn them over instead to the authorities in order that their sodas and potashes might be utilized in the manufacture of gunpowder. Women were urged to grow poppies and instructed in the art of so scarring the plants as to secure the precious gum from which opium could be made for the relief of suffering in the hospitals. They were taught also how to harvest and stew dog-fennel in order to secure a substitute for quinine. The negro boys were set at work to dig up the roots of the dogwood, and women were taught to extract from the bark of such roots a bitters which served as a substitute for the unobtainable quinine.
In short, at every point the South was lamentably lacking in supplies, and the blockade, established early in the war, forbade the incoming of such things as were needed except at serious risk of capture and confiscation.
Even food supplies were from the first to the last meager. The South produced very little corn, pork, wheat, and the like, in comparison with the production of the great northwestern states or in comparison with the need that was created by the enlistment of all the able-bodied white men of that region in the Confederate army.
Thus the South was at a fearful disadvantage from the first; the wiser men of the South knew the fact in advance. They had courage and they had little else. Their achievement in maintaining a strenuous war for four years in face of such disparities of force and resources, must always be accounted to their credit as brave and resourceful men.
It was certain from the first that the South must be beaten in its struggle—unless by dash and daring it should win at once, or unless, by some remote chance, assistance should come from without. The chance of that was very small but it existed as a factor in the problem. The chief hope the Southern people had of winning the war upon which they entered with courage and enthusiasm was born of the delusive belief that the god of battles awards victory, not to the strong but to the righteous. They devoutly believed that their cause was righteous, and, in spite of all the teachings of history, they expected God to interpose in some fashion to give them the victory. They believed themselves to be battling for the same right of self-government among men that their revolutionary ancestors had fought for, and they refused to recognize any disparity of resources between the contending forces as a sufficient reason for their failure under the rule of a just God in whose reign over human affairs they devoutly believed.
They were sentimentalists. They believed that ideas rather than facts ruled the world and its affairs. They had been nurtured upon the Bible and Scott's novels, and they believed in both.
Had any prophet arisen among them who should have measured their resources against those of their adversary, they would have refused to listen to his prophesyings. They would have gone on believing that they were entirely certain of success and victory by reason of what seemed to them the indisputable righteousness of their cause.
There were men among them who rightly recognized the enormous disparity between the resources of the North and those that the South could command. But such men were few and their counsel counted for nothing.
As for the extremists, they anticipated military commissions and political preferment for themselves, and they cared for little else than to occupy a conspicuous place in public attention for a little while. They were in spirit gamblers, ready to stake everything upon uncertain chance. They wanted war for the sake of what war might bring to them of advantage, and they were ready to stake everything upon the hazard of their own fortune.
It was in Virginia mainly that there were men of soberer minds, as had been demonstrated in the Virginians' choice of men to represent them in their constitutional convention. But even in Virginia there were hotheads and fools a plenty, who believed that a war was to be won by hurrahs, and that enthusiasm was an effective substitute for ammunition.
The secession of Virginia made the war a fact and a necessity. So long as that had been delayed there had remained a hope of reconciliation and adjustment by peaceful devices. When that event occurred it was certain that the question at issue must be fought out upon bloody battlefields.
The final stage of the controversy had been reached. The case had been appealed to the arbitrament of steel and gunpowder. Argument was at an end and brute force had come in as umpire. It was a melancholy spectacle over which the gods might well have wept. But men on both sides greeted it joyously as if it had been a holiday occasion.