What a path perilous was this for Douglas's feet! The path up the edge of the Matterhorn is a foot wide, yet it is granite, even if the climber does look down thousands of feet upon his right and thousands of feet upon his left. But Lincoln made Douglas walk not upon a narrow granite way, but on a sharp sword. He who tries to walk a tight rope across Niagara has two alternatives—he either arrives, or he does not. Yonder is Stephen Douglas, trying to walk a tight rope over the Niagara.
Forced to an answer, Douglas finally spoke:
"It matters not what way the Supreme Court may hereafter decide as to the abstract question whether slavery may or may not go into any territory under a constitution. The people have the lawful means to exclude it if they please, for the reason that slavery cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere unless it is supported by local police legislation. Those police regulations can only be established by the local legislature; and if the people are opposed to slavery they will elect representatives to that body who will by unfriendly legislation effectually prevent its introduction into their midst; if, on the contrary, they are for it, their legislation will favour its extension." Douglas had decided. Southern newspapers took up his statement and the tide of anger rose against the "little giant" that cost him the presidency. Lincoln had digged a pitfall for unwary feet, and the great opportunist fell therein.
After this, Douglas became bitter, excited, and increasingly angry, for the tide was plainly beginning to run against him. Lincoln's speeches fairly blazed with quotable sentences. "If you think you can slander a woman into loving you, or a man into voting for you, try it till you are satisfied." Again: "Has Douglas the exclusive right in this country to be on all sides of all questions?" Again: "The plainest print cannot be read through a gold eagle." Again: "Douglas shirks the responsibility of pulling the national house down, but he digs under it, that it may fall of its own weight."
To the astonishment of the country, when the debate was over, Lincoln carried Illinois on the popular vote, although he lost the senatorship through the arrangement of legislative districts that gave the election to the Democrats. Disappointed, Lincoln retained his good humour, and laughed over what he called the little episode. "I feel," said Lincoln, "like the boy who stubbed his toe; it hurt too hard to laugh, and he was too big to cry. But I have been heard on the great subject of the age, and though I now sink out of view and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone."
Lincoln had now become a national figure. In February, 1860, Mr. Beecher and Henry C. Bowen invited him to speak in New York. The first plan was for him to speak in Plymouth Church, but later considerations led to a change to Cooper Institute. Lincoln arrived in the city late in the week; on Sunday morning he heard Mr. Beecher preach. He sat in the Bowen pew, just back of the Beecher pew, in the morning; in the evening he arrived very late, and sat in a front pew, in the gallery, with Mr. Bowen and a friend who had waited in the hall for Mr. Lincoln's arrival. Lincoln spent the afternoon at the Sunday-school mission, over in Five Points. As the superintendent of the mission was always casting about for somebody to talk to his ragamuffins, he asked the tall stranger if he would say a few words. When they reached the platform, the superintendent asked Lincoln by what name he should introduce him, to which Lincoln gave the answer, "Tell them Abraham Lincoln of Illinois," which was answer enough. The meeting the next day in Cooper Institute was perhaps the most memorable assembly ever held in New York. William Cullen Bryant presided, Horace Greeley sat on Lincoln's right, Peter Cooper close by. "No man," said the Tribune, "since the days of Clay and Webster, spoke to a larger assemblage of the intellect and mental culture of our city. The speech was packed with reason, facts, but stripped bare of rhetorical flourish. Its keynote was, 'Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.'" Four morning newspapers reported the speech in full, and Greeley called him the Great Convincer, saying no man ever before made such an impression in his first appeal to a New York audience. That speech probably made Lincoln President.
By universal consent, Lincoln's nomination in 1860 is one of the mysteries of politics. Every man of light and leading conceded Seward's nomination in advance, and two-thirds of the delegates went to the convention pledged, while eight of the Illinois delegates were against Lincoln in his own State. The East could not believe that the sceptre could pass from their hands. Special trains from New York carried brilliant banners, and New York bands and drilled clubs marched and countermarched up and down the streets of Chicago. A great wooden wigwam set up for the occasion held 10,000 spectators. The placing of Seward in nomination was wildly applauded. But, to the surprise of everybody, the naming of Lincoln was the signal of an outburst of such enthusiasm as had never been known. Men held their breath as the votes were registered. Seward had 173½ against Lincoln's 102. As noted in a former chapter, it has been thought that Horace Greeley's standing out for Governor Bates of Missouri made possible the shifting of votes for another Western man. At all events, on the third ballot Lincoln was nominated. Now hundreds of correspondents began to write stories of this great unknown. The next day Wendell Phillips demanded from Boston: "Who is this county court advocate?" But there was a man in Washington who could speak intelligently concerning the great unknown—his name was Stephen A. Douglas.
In that hour Douglas knew the great mistake he had made. The Democratic convention of that year at Charleston split their party asunder; the Southerners clamoring for secession should Lincoln be elected, and nominating John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky; the Northerners standing fast for the Union and compromise, and nominating Stephen A. Douglas; while a "Constitutional Union" party of old-line Whigs nominated John Bell of Tennessee. Lincoln's election was the signal for secession.
In all the subsequent turmoil, Douglas vigorously sustained the Union and the Constitution, both in Congress and before the people. When Sumter was fired upon, he hastened to pledge his influence to Lincoln as well as to the Union. "There are no neutrals in this war—only patriots and traitors." Douglas hurried back to Illinois to unify the state for the Union; he had borrowed $80,000 for his campaign, and he staggered under the burden of debt. Also he had injured his constitution by excess, and burned the candle at both ends by overwork. But above all else was the thought that he had made the great mistake, and lost his place in history, in saying that he did not care whether a new State voted slavery up or voted slavery down. During his last sickness he murmured incessantly, "Failure—I have failed." His last words were: "Telegraph to the President and let the columns move on."
Douglas died on June 3, 1861, at the age of forty-eight. The lesson of his life is the danger of compromise, the peril of refusing adherence to the highest ideals of principle, and the failure of expediency and opportunism.
As Douglas's star went down, Lincoln's star began to climb the sky. It was Douglas himself who held Lincoln's hat while he made his first inaugural address. By the irony of fate it was Chief Justice Taney of the Dred Scott Decision who inaugurated Lincoln into office, that Lincoln might later make Taney's decision forever null and void.
And that no dramatic note might be wanted, both Taney and Douglas heard Lincoln plead with indescribable pathos, majesty and beauty, for the very Union whose existence their words had threatened. "Physically speaking, we [the North and South] cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them. Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws? Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws can among friends? Suppose you go to war? You cannot fight always, and after much loss on both sides and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions as to terms of intercourse are again upon you. In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it. I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriotic grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
But the great debate through arguments was ended. Henceforth, the appeal was to arms.
The seven debates between Lincoln and Douglas convinced both the North and the South: but, confirming the one for union and liberty, it confirmed the other for independence and slavery. Lincoln convinced the North that the Union could not endure permanently half slave and half free; on the other hand, the South saw just as clearly that the Union, if it endured, must become all free or all slave. When the men of light and leading in the North fully understood Lincoln's "House-divided-against-itself" speech, they went over to the Republican party, and nominated and elected Lincoln president, that he might put slavery in a position of gradual extinction, by forbidding its future growth. The South acted with even greater energy and decision, by making ready to secede, and arming her citizens for the defense of slavery. The great debate, through words, had lasted thirty years; now the South made its appeal to regiments of armed men.
At that moment slavery controlled the President, the Cabinet, the Senate and the House. And yet immediately after the election, and before the inauguration of Lincoln, the Secretary of War, Floyd, secretly began the transfer of munitions of war from the nation's arsenals to the Southern States.
Late one December day in 1860, a Southern gentleman hastened to the White House. On the steps he met an old friend who had just left Buchanan. Waving his hat, he shouted, "This is a glorious day! South Carolina has seceded!" That night an impromptu banquet was held in Washington, at which the Southern leaders drank to the success of the slave empire that was to be founded, and talked about a Southern army, a Southern navy, the annexation of Mexico and the West India Islands. Then swiftly followed the secession of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Florida.
Almost every week during the winter of 1861 witnessed the spectacle of Southern Senators and Representatives saying good-bye to Congress and announcing the withdrawal of their State from the Union. Those were days of thick darkness at Washington. Gloom fell upon the North. Already the shadow of the great eclipse was stealing across the face of Abraham Lincoln. It seemed as if the government, "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal," was about to "perish from the earth." Hamilton had called the Republic "the last, best hope of earth." Burke had characterized the Constitution "an event as wonderful as if a new star had arisen on the horizon to shine as bright as the planets." Now the star was to fall out of the sky! Up to the day of his inauguration Lincoln could not believe the South would ever fire on the flag, or take up arms against the Union. "We are friends, and not enemies—we must not be enemies." But it was not to be as Lincoln wished. There are some diseases so terrible that they must be cured by the knife and the cautery. Slavery had fastened on the very vitals of the South. Therefore, God permitted the surgery of war.
Lincoln's inaugural address on March 4, 1861, caused a certain solemn hush to fall upon the land. Its logic, the facts it contained, the principles it presented, were so convincing for the intellect and yet so suffused with pathos and beauty and majesty, that the people, North and South alike, stood uncertain and expectant.
But the silence was premonitory. In summer, after a hot, sultry day, when the great city has exhaled poisonous gases, the clouds are piled mountain high on the horizon. Then a hush comes. Not a leaf stirs. It is hard to breathe. Suddenly one bolt leaps from the east to the west—the precursor of ten thousand fiery darts that are to burn the poison away, and of the heavy rains and winds that will wash the air and make it sweet and clean. On the 12th of April the silence for the nation was broken by the shot fired at Fort Sumter. The bomb that went shrieking through the air was the precursor of a million men in arms, the most frightful carnage, the most terrible war in history, when brother took up arms against brother, and the whole land became one vast cemetery.
It is often said that South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter and began an aggressive war to destroy the Union, before the South was ready. Probably the fact in the case is that South Carolina was trying to "fire the Southern heart," and force the State of Virginia into the secession movement. The Old Dominion State was naturally a Union State. It was a Virginian who uttered the most impassioned words in the history of liberty—Patrick Henry at Williamsburg. It was a Virginian who led the colonial armies to victory—Washington. It was a Virginian who wrote the Declaration of Independence—Thomas Jefferson. He too, a Virginian governor, made the great protest to King George against the further imposition of slavery by force of arms. He too, a Virginian, the founder of Washington and Jefferson College, had called upon the men of the Dominion State to rise up and destroy the curse of slavery. But from the moment when that shell rose through the pathless air, curved slightly and burst above Sumter, the die was cast. Five days later, Virginia passed her ordinance of secession.
Oh, if the veil could have been lifted from Beauregard's eyes when he began that bombardment! If he could but have seen the riches become poverty, cities become a waste, happy homes a desolation, the Southern hillsides covered with graves, the Southern plantations grown up with weeds, and the whole secession movement futile, what a vision would have fallen upon the soldier!
On the 15th, President Lincoln called for 75,000 troops. If he had asked for a million, the President would have had them. That shot had kindled a fire of patriotism that swept across the North like a prairie fire. In one day the college students deserted the lecture halls, the students of law and medicine and theology closed their books, the farmer left his plow in the furrow, the woodsman dropped his ax, the carpenter his hammer, and the young men of twenty-three States sprang to arms. What astonished the South most of all was the attitude of Douglas, and the Northern Democrats, who had been confidently counted upon to stand by secession. One Southern fire-eater had said that "Douglas and the Democrats will fight Lincoln and the Republicans, and it will be another case of the Kilkenny cats, leaving the South in peace to build up a great empire." But the first thing that Stephen A. Douglas did was to go to the White House and pledge his support to Lincoln, as did the leading Democrats of the North. "The attack upon Sumter," said Douglas, "leaves us but two parties—patriots and traitors." And now the war was on,—the one side fighting for the Federal Union and liberty for all men, and the other side fighting for State sovereignty and slavery.
These great events bring us front to front with the question as to how Southern men justified their firing upon the old flag and attacking the Union. Let us confess that men do not make martyrs of themselves unless they have a cause that commands the intellect and conquers the will.
Skeptics used to say that the apostles invented the character of Jesus. As if men first of all invent a lie and inflate a bubble myth, and then go out in support of it to get themselves mobbed, kicked through the streets, thrown from windows, tortured on the rack, crucified and burned alive after incredible heroism for thirty years! To say that the disciples invented the story of Jesus and then martyred themselves for their falsehood is as intellectually stupid and silly as it is morally monstrous! Not otherwise these leading men of the South were men of the loftiest character, of great personal worth, patriotic, high-minded, and they did not devastate their land and martyr themselves for idle abstractions. Here is John C. Calhoun, ranked by all as one of the triumvirate—Webster, Calhoun and Clay. Here is Gen. Robert E. Lee, of whom Lord Wolsey said that for one State to have given birth to two such men as Washington and Lee was to have lent it immortal renown. Lincoln and Grant and our Northern generals understood the Southern men, sympathized with them, and therefore because the intellect grasped their position, Grant's heart forgave Lee, and made the two friends. To understand this, go to-day to a great battle-field of that conflict and hear the Northern generals and the Southern generals rehearse the story of the Civil War, and you will understand the magnanimity of the Northern leader and the argument of the Southern soldier. History has destroyed the old delusion that secession was a conspiracy, organized by a few malignant leaders. All historians to-day, Northern and Southern alike, concede that it was a great popular uprising of the Southern people.
Indeed, it was not altogether a contest between Northern blood on the one side, and Southern blood on the other.
Twenty-one of the Southern generals who fought for the Rebellion were born in New York and New England. Eighty distinguished Confederate officers were born north of Mason and Dixon's line, were graduates of West Point, yet these Northern soldiers rejected Webster's argument for the Union, and accepted Calhoun's theory of State sovereignty. On the other hand, many of our greatest Union leaders were Southern men by birth and education, but as Southerners they rejected Calhoun's philosophy, and accepted Webster's. Virginia gave us the commander-in-chief of our army, Gen. Winfield Scott; gave us George H. Thomas, the Rock of Chickamauga. The South gave us Farragut, our greatest admiral. Twelve of the commanders of our battle-ships that captured the Mississippi River and made it possible for Lincoln to say, "Once more the Father of Waters goes unvexed to the sea," were Southern men. The South also, through Kentucky, gave us the great President, Abraham Lincoln. It was, therefore, in large measure, a philosophic contest. The Union forces were the disciples of Daniel Webster, whose spirit invisible rode upon the wings of the wind, and whose arm bore the gorgeous ensign, on which were written the words, "Liberty and Union." On the other hand, the Confederate forces were made up of the disciples of John C. Calhoun, who followed a banner on which the great citizen of South Carolina had inscribed these words, "Sovereignty is natural and inalienable; government is secondary and artificial and can be changed at the will of the people." In terms of cannon and gun, Grant and Lee were the leaders of the two opposing armies, but fundamentally the two armies were led by Daniel Webster on the one side and John C. Calhoun on the other.
Further, Calhoun's influence explains the attitude of the non-slaveholding South towards secession. Of the six million white people in the South, two millions of them did not own slaves, and most of these were opposed to the slave traffic. Thousands of Southerners freed their slaves before the war, and moved into Ohio and Pennsylvania. Other thousands declined to participate in the traffic. A North Carolinian named Hinton Rowan Helper published in 1857 a very striking volume called "The Impending Crisis in the South, and How to Meet It." Dedicated to the non-slaveholding whites, and not on behalf of the blacks, its theme was slavery as a blight upon Southern white people and their institutions, and a political peril. Not Garrison himself ever made so vigorous and powerful an arraignment of slavery as did this Southerner. Helper pronounced slavery the enemy of invention, the foe of manufacturing plants, an obstacle to the development of the land, a barrier to the progress of the sons of white men. He held that slavery starves to death masters in the long run, while for the moment it seemingly enriches them. Slavery was like sin, it wore the garb of an angel of light; while secretly it sharpened a dagger, with which to stab to the heart the angel of civilization. Within two years this book sold over 150,000 copies, and set the whole South in a fever of unrest. Nevertheless, when the storm broke, the large non-slaveholding element in the South took up arms for the doctrine of State sovereignty. If they resented interference with slavery, it was because slavery was a Southern domestic institution. But this was only an incident; the one thing they wished was the vindication of the sovereignty of each State of the Union, and the right of its people to govern themselves without regard to other States who had the same right of self-government.
The character of the Southern leaders throws light upon Calhoun's principle. Than Robert E. Lee, what general has been more idolized by those who knew him best? His first ancestor in America was a cavalier who left England rather than endure the tyranny of Charles II. The son of "Light Horse Harry" of Revolutionary fame, he loved the Union. Educated at West Point, he left the institution after four years without a demerit, and won distinction both in the army during the Mexican War, and later as an engineer. He was a man of such probity, purity and lofty character that his followers loved him to the point of worship. He was deeply religious, and the best expression we can use is that Lee, like Enoch, walked with God. He was offered the position of commander-in-chief of the Northern forces. But he could not bear to lead an invading army against his old college, his ancestral homestead, and against Washington's house at Mount Vernon, or become the enemy of his own people in Virginia. On April 17th, Virginia passed her ordinance of secession, and on the 20th, Lee resigned his commission in the United States army, because he could not take part against his native State,—"in whose behalf alone," he said, "will I ever again draw my sword." By the Calhoun doctrine, Virginia was his country, and no one has ever doubted his sincerity. Lee is the Sir Philip Sidney of the Civil War.
Wellington, the Iron Duke, is reported to have said, "A man of fine Christian sensibilities is totally unfit for the position of soldier." But Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. Jackson prayed as they fought; in victory and in defeat alike they turned towards God. Jackson, who won the name of "Stonewall," might have been the son of old Ironsides himself. During his entire career he turned his camps into revival meetings when he was on the Potomac and the Rappahannock, and was a Puritan of Puritans. It is said that literally hundreds of men who entered his regiments, careless, profane, drinking boys, went home to join churches on profession of their faith in Christ. After the battle of Bull Run, Jackson sent a letter home to his Presbyterian minister at Lexington, Va. The people assembled to hear the minister read the letter that would give an account of the conflict. It contained only one sentence: "I forgot to send you my contribution for the coloured Sunday-school of which I am superintendent." When Jackson lost his left arm, General Lee wrote to him, "You have lost your left arm, but I have lost the right arm of my army." Eight days after, Jackson lay dying, having been accidentally shot by his own men at Chancellorsville. Suddenly he cried out, "Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees;" a companion had just read the great general that verse in the Psalm, "There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God." These two men have been a fountain of inspiration to Southern youth, and their story makes a bright chapter in the history of all heroism.
Southern leaders there were also who opposed secession as inexpedient and wrong. One of the finest exponents of this group was Alexander H. Stephens, a self-made man, inured in childhood to hardship, and made sympathetic through his own struggles. Orphaned at fifteen, he worked his way through college; admitted to the bar at twenty-two, he achieved fame as a lawyer; elected to Congress, he was one of the noted figures in the House of Representatives for sixteen years. His slight physique and his frail health were sad handicaps. He was dyspeptic, sleepless, a nervous wreck. He ordinarily weighed seventy-two pounds, and during the best years of his life only ninety-two. When in February, 1865, Lincoln met Stephens for a peace conference, he saw the commissioner take off a great outer coat, and unwrap layer after layer of tippet from his throat, peeling down and down, until finally there stood this tiny man. Lincoln whispered to his friend, "Did you ever see so small a nubbin that had so much husk on it?"
Within ten days after the election of Lincoln, Stephens began his campaign against secession. He urged that Lincoln was friendly to the South; that he had neither the desire nor the power to destroy slavery; that John Brown's attack represented the individual and not the millions of the North; that nothing could be gained by haste nor lost by delay, and that the Southern people should heed Lincoln's inaugural. Finally, he despaired; he wrote Toombs that "the South was wild with frenzy and passion—that whom the gods would destroy they first make mad." He afterwards explained his later acquiescence with secession by the statement that when two trains were running under full steam towards a head-on collision, he got off at the first station.
As vice-president of the Confederacy, Stephens was not always in sympathy with Jefferson Davis; he was very frank in his criticism of the Confederate leader. "While I never have regarded Davis as a great man, or statesman on a large scale, or a man of any marked genius, yet I have regarded him as a man of good intentions; weak and vacillating, timid, petulant, peevish, obstinate, but not firm."
To understand Jefferson Davis, however, we must take a broader outlook.
Rhodes ventures the judgment that if the Pilgrim Fathers had settled in South Carolina they might have held slaves by 1850, and might have fought to maintain slavery; while if the cavalier had settled in Boston, where the snow and the winter are unfriendly to the coloured man, the cavalier would have founded abolition societies. If all scholars do not see their way clear to fully accept Rhodes' statement, they must confess that the Scotch-Irish soldiers that followed Cromwell, and after the restoration of Charles II moved to North Carolina, at last became slave-holders; while many Southerners, young men who were educated in Northern colleges and married Northern girls, finally freed their slaves and moved North, becoming abolitionists. Circumstances, environment, and association, modify men so profoundly that Buckle believed that climate and grains determine men's civilization.
Again, in 1820, Northern leaders became alarmed at the invasion by slavery of the Northern and Western territories, and Northern representatives threatened to withdraw from the Union if slavery was extended, just as in 1861 the Southern leaders not only threatened but withdrew,—the only difference being this, that the North would rather withdraw from the Union than have slavery, while the South preferred to secede rather than have free labour enforced.
Nor must we forget that Calhoun's principle of the absolute independence of each State in political government is freely accepted by all Congregationalists in church government. In 1875, when a Congregational Association tried to interfere with Mr. Beecher and the government of Plymouth Church, Plymouth told them plainly that every church is an independent and self-governing organization, that sovereignty is natural and government artificial, and that government by the Association might be transferred but had not been so transferred. The Congregational principle in church government is pure democracy.
But the United States were a federal representative republic, under a constitution; and, to recur again to ecclesiastical illustration, the Presbyterian form of government is representative and federal. The Presbyterians base their government on our political institutions. For the political township, they have a Presbyterian church; for the county, they set up the Presbytery; for the State, they organized a synod; for congress, they organized the General Assembly; for the president, they substituted a moderator.
In politics we believe in representative government, but as to the church, Congregationalists believe in pure democracy, and the independent principle.
Now John C. Calhoun took this Congregational principle and translated it into terms of politics, and called it the States' rights or State sovereignty theory. If John C. Calhoun had been struggling, not for a political theory, but for an ecclesiastical one, Henry Ward Beecher would have backed him to a finish. If there is any one group of people on earth, therefore, who ought not only to understand but to appreciate John C. Calhoun's argument, they are the Independents. Now for twenty years John C. Calhoun went up and down the South, analyzing his argument, explaining and enforcing it. At the very time Northern boys were reading in their readers Webster's speech for the Union, Southern boys were reciting Calhoun's speech for the independence of the States.
Not in consequence of the Calhoun doctrine but in harmony with it, having always held that the Union was subordinate to the sovereignty of the States, Jefferson Davis, United States senator from Mississippi, became the chief organizer of secession after Lincoln's election. A West Point graduate, a brilliant officer in Indian fights and the Mexican War, a governor of Mississippi, United States senator, a singularly efficient Secretary of War under President Pierce, and again an influential senator, a man of charming personality with many friends, Mr. Davis was so prominent in the secession movement that he was the free choice of the Southern people for president of their Confederacy. And, despite Mr. Stephens' opinion, he probably did as well in that difficult place as another could have done. To the end of his life he held to the doctrine of State sovereignty.
But one question persistently forces itself into the foreground. Why was it that the people of the North did not "let the erring sisters go," to use Horace Greeley's expression? Just across the Northern line dwells another nation—Canada. Why should there not have been a second nation to the south of Mason and Dixon's line, with Mobile or New Orleans for a capital—a great slave empire, that would have included Texas, Mexico and Central America? The answer is very simple. The Constitution stood in the way. Men saw clearly that if this republic, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal, could be destroyed by the minority, that would not respect the rights of the majority, there was no hope for civilization save in the revival of despotism, with a monarch ruling the people by military force. The North by a majority of States and votes had chosen Lincoln, with his statement that the Union could not permanently endure, half slave and half free. The minority then answered: "If we cannot have our way, we will destroy the government." Analyzed, this is seen to be sheer anarchy.
In that hour men remembered what their fathers had endured to found the Republic and free institutions. When the news came of the attack upon Fort Sumter, the better angels of men's natures did touch "the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land," and the tones swelled the chorus of the Union. What other land offered poor men an opportunity for office, wealth and honours, with full liberty of thought and speech? Had not the fathers lived and died to make education democratic through the public schools? Had not the fathers given life itself to establish the freedom of the printing-press and freedom of discussion? Had not the fathers bought at great price their political liberty, and the rights of the ballot? Was not the land dedicated to toleration and charity in religion? Was the work of Washington and Jefferson and Hamilton to go down in ruin and nothingness? While the old world, with her tyrannies, scoffed at the failure of the Republic, men thought of Bunker Hill and Valley Forge and Yorktown. They thought of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They recalled the tribute of one of the greatest of English statesmen, who characterized the American Constitution as "the greatest political instrument ever struck off by the unaided genius of man."
And now the Republic was to be destroyed, the Constitution torn into shreds and stamped under foot, the Declaration of Independence made a thing of jibes and scorn in the palaces of Madrid and Constantinople, while slavery, with black fingers, was to knit its claws into the throat of the angel of liberty and choke the life out. Suddenly men saw that the only way to insure liberty for the white race was to destroy slavery for the black races. Men determined that the majority had their rights, and that these rights should not be wrested away by the minority, fighting in the interests of slavery. Democracy, the "last, best hope of earth," should not fail! In that moment Liberty stretched forth her sceptre of justice, "red with insufferable wrath," and her clarion voice rang to the outermost corners of the land. Three millions of men assembled to swear fealty to God and country. Then they marched away, through the towns and across the prairies, into thickets and swamps, to be pierced by bullets, torn by shells, to eat crusts, wear rags, shiver in the cold, burn in the heat, famish in the prison, welter in the bloody trench, above them a fiery hail, beside them their dying comrades falling into the arms of death. It is a strange, wild, chivalrous, divine story of the world's greatest enthusiasm, our fathers' enthusiasm for liberty and democracy! What God thinks of freedom, is written in the price that people paid for it! What God thinks of slavery is in the woe and sorrow and wreckage it has always brought upon those who have sought to live on the sweat of other men's faces!
The Russian would not fight against the Japanese because the Russian peasant owned no lands, had no schoolhouse, no ballot box, no free printing-press, no religious liberty. The Russian stood sullenly in the trenches and had to be flogged into the battle. If the Russian peasant lost, he lost nothing, because he had nothing to lose; if the peasant won, he gained nothing, because the Russian aristocrat and the baron took all of the treasure; therefore he would not fight. But the Northern soldier had everything to fight for. No such treasures were ever thrown on the earth to be struggled for. Liberty and the Union were worth a thousand lives and ten thousand deaths.
It was an awful and a gallant fight, waged by the finest of the world's manhood on both sides. The Southerner fought for local self-government and the right to enslave and govern other men; the Northerner fought for universal self-government and the institutions which had made that possible without injustice to other men. There can be no choice as between the splendid qualities that entered into the contest—of sincerity, earnestness, devotion and fidelity on either side: but the South lost because slavery had eaten out the enduring vigour of its resources; the North won because free labour and the rights of man had given it the greater effective power. At last, the theory on which the South stood for self-justification crumbled under the supreme test.
One November morning in the White House, Abraham Lincoln kept his Cabinet waiting while he finished reading a newspaper, containing an account of Beecher's speeches in England. At last he laid the paper on the table before them, and in substance said to Stanton, "When this war is fought to a successful issue, this man, Henry Ward Beecher, will have earned the right to lift the old flag back to its place on Fort Sumter, for without these speeches England might have recognized the Confederacy, and then there might have been no flag to raise."
Long time has passed since that Friday morning in the capital, and now all men recognize the justice of the words of the martyred President. History is a stern judge, and the centuries have given opportunity for contrast. When a great country, a great emergency, a critical hour, and a great man meet, a spark is struck out, called great eloquence. Such a conjunction of city, peril and man once met in Athens, and for twenty-four centuries boys have been translating Demosthenes' oration against Philip. Demosthenes spoke, but Philip marched on. Greece bowed her neck to the yoke, and became subject to Macedonia; Demosthenes failed. Another crisis came in Westminster Hall, in London, when Edmund Burke made his plea for the millions of outraged folk in India pillaged by Warren Hastings. But Hastings became a lord; he died honoured in his palace; India was left to stagger onward; Burke's splendid oratory failed. That was a great hour in the history of eloquence when Patrick Henry and Fisher Ames and Josiah Quincy became voices for liberty and the new republic. But these orators spoke to sympathetic hearers, and simply returned to the multitude in a flood what they had received from the people in dew and rain.
Henry Ward Beecher spoke to mobs, pleaded with unfriendly critics, and was asked to change hate to love, ice to fire, weapons for attack into weapons for defense. He went against the English mob as one goes up against a castle that is locked, barred and bristling with arms, and he gave sops to Cerberus, charmed the keys out of him who kept the fortress gate, cast a spell upon those who guarded the walls, stole all the weapons, and, single handed, at last lifted the banner of victory above the ramparts of granite. The history of eloquence holds no other achievement of the same rank and class. What a volume, that contains the speech delivered within the limit of nine days, with the introduction at Manchester, the three great arguments at Glasgow, Edinburgh and Liverpool, and the peroration in Exeter Hall, London! What physical reserves as the basis of sustained public speech! What mastery of all the facts of liberty and democracy, not less than slavery! What familiarity with English law not less than American! The orator moves across the scene in history like some refulgent planet in the sky. The story of those nine wonderful days makes illustrious forever the history of eloquence and patriotism.
The winter of 1862 and '63, with its high-wrought excitements, brought Beecher the peril of a nervous breakdown. His exhaustion illustrates the fact that some men who stayed at home endured as much as others who went to the front. Generals and their marching regiments often suffered much, but they were not alone in their fortitude and faith. Women who toiled on farm or in hospital, working men who laboured to support the boys at the front, orators who went up and down the land inciting patriotism in the people, preachers who realized that the breakdown of conscience meant the breakdown of the cause—these all were citizen soldiers who defended the Union and kept the faith.
Among them all no man poured out his life more generously than Henry Ward Beecher. Since 1850, through the intensities of the Fugitive Slave Law, the Fremont campaign, the Kansas troubles, the Lincoln election, the era of secession and the first two years of the war, he had been preaching, writing, lecturing, making public addresses, attending to his great pastorate, and active in every civic and national interest. And during the war, back and forth, across the land, from city to city, in church, hall and armoury, he lifted up his voice in the presence of multitudes, telling the story of the founding of the Republic, showing that the Republic, with its self-government, was the last, best hope of man, reminding boys that they must fight and live for the Union that their fathers had died to found. When at length Antietam was won, and Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and the rebellion staggered like a giant stunned by a crushing blow, Beecher was lifted into the seventh heaven of hope, and had the vision of coming victory. In that hour he told his people that he was ready to die, that God might peel him, and strip away all the leaves of life, and do with him as He pleased; that he had lived fifty years, that he had had a good time, that he had "hit the devil many blows and square in the face, that it was joy enough to have uttered some words because they were incorporated into the lives of men and could not die."
But we all know that it is possible to stretch the strings of the mental harp too tightly. Excitement burns the nerve as an electric current consumes a wire. During those days Beecher wore a garment whose warp and woof was fiery enthusiasm, and fierce flaming patriotism. The human body is like a cask of precious liquor. One way to drain off the treasure is to knock out the bung-hole, and in a few minutes drain the rich fountain dry; another way is to bore innumerable apertures, that drop by drop the liquor may waste. And so it was with Beecher, during those exciting days, with this difference, that sometimes it seemed as if one great event would drain out all his life in a tumultuous flood, while at the same time innumerable petitioners taxed his life, drawing away his strength, drop by drop. Alarmed, the officers and friends in Plymouth Church insisted upon rest and vacation. They determined to put the sea between the preacher and his task, planning to lose him for a little time that they might have him for a long time.
The popular opinion is that Beecher went to England, not openly, but secretly as a messenger of the government. Like other myths, the fable grew slowly, but is now well entrenched in the minds of multitudes. There is no foundation for the story. Indeed, Mr. Beecher is on record plainly, stating that no request, no suggestion, no hint, even, came from Washington. At the time, his relations with the Cabinet were strained. Seward was unfriendly. Stanton was hurt by his insistence, through the Independent, upon immediate emancipation. For a time even Lincoln classed him with Horace Greeley, as extremist. His editorials during the spring of 1862 had one thought, "Carthago delenda est." It was only after Lincoln came around by a gunboat into New York Harbour, and secretly met General Winfield Scott in a friend's house, and had another secret interview with Henry Ward Beecher, and returned (letters exist from Secretary Hay, following an interview with him over the records in Washington, which establish this trip to New York to see Scott and Beecher), that Beecher changed the tone of his editorials, and went over to Lincoln's position,—that the Union was first, and the destruction of slavery the secondary thing. The Great Emancipator loved and trusted Beecher, but the Cabinet was critical, and Lincoln, as he said, "did not have much influence with the administration."
The only power and the whole power behind Beecher was that of Plymouth Church, that gave him the money for all of his expenses, and took from him a pledge that if he spoke at all he was to speak at their expense, but under no circumstances to either preach or lecture until he had recovered his strength. He was ill during the entire voyage, and was not able to appear on deck until the vessel entered the Mersey. The news of Beecher's coming had preceded him, and on opening the papers he found even church leaders antagonistic. They deplored his coming, lest he increase the excitement. The nobility was in favour of the South, as were the ship-builders, the mill-owners, the bankers and all who had investments or loans in the cotton industry of England and of the South.
One hundred and fifty Congregational ministers greeted Beecher with a breakfast in London. They asked him to preach and speak on religious topics, but to avoid all reference to slavery on account of the inflamed condition of the English mind. The man who introduced him deplored the war, and described the patience of God in permitting the North to go on. When Beecher arose to speak he was in a towering rage. He told them that he would neither preach nor lecture nor speak in a mother land that was openly hostile to her own daughter, and unfriendly to every principle of liberty that was dear to England and embedded in English tradition and history.
In substance, he said: "Your conscience here in England is very sensitive on the subject of war, providing some one else is fighting the war, but England has no conscience at all as to war when she is prosecuting the campaign." At that very hour England was fighting a war in Japan, and a war in China, and a war in New Zealand for territory. Three wars being quite proper, if England fought them, but oh, the patience of God in permitting the North to exist even for one moment, while fighting for liberty, the Union and the emancipation of slaves! He told them that they thought it was a crime for the North to have a war for emancipation, but quite proper for England to threaten a war over two men named Mason and Slidell! Beecher understood Old England. No nation in history ever conducted so many wars. No other nation's statesmen ever had such skill to invent moral excuses for seizing territory, in Africa, Egypt, India, Thibet, Australia, New Zealand and all the islands of the sea. He best described it in his final speech in London, when returned from the Continent: "On what shore has not the prow of your ships dashed? What land is there with a name and a people where your banner has not led your soldiers? And when the great reveillé shall sound, it will muster British soldiers from every clime and people under the whole heaven." What? "Speak in England on religion and keep still on slavery, and the North and the South?" When an engine is full of steam, it is a bad thing to sit on its safety-valve. Figuratively speaking, the chairman and the hundred and fifty ministers, who were trying to get Beecher to speak on religion and keep still on slavery, sat passively and serenely on the safety-valve for about five minutes, but finally the engine blew up. Mr. Beecher was not the man to stifle his convictions in the name of peace, for he knew that in an evil world a good man has no right to dwell at peace with the devil and his minions. So he declared his hostility, turned his back on England, and went to the Continent; and thus ended the first chapter in the European trip.
Looking backward, it is easy to discover the explanation of England's attitude towards slavery and the Southern leaders. During the early forties England had herself passed through an industrial revolution. Because she had little agricultural land, and thirty millions of people, the cost of living was high. When the cry of the people for bread became bitter, Cobden, Bright and their associates inaugurated and carried through the Free Corn Movement. With the incoming of free raw materials England became the great manufacturing centre. What her farmers lost through free trade in selling grain they gained in the lowered price on which they bought. Within ten years after the victory of free trade England became a hive of industry, filled with clustering cities, while the whole land resounded with the stroke of engines. Abundance succeeded to poverty and work trod closely upon the heels of want. So prosperous had England become that by 1860 she was importing two million bales of cotton from Southern States. The shipyards of Glasgow built ships to carry cotton, the bankers in London made loans to Southern planters, the mill-owners in Manchester bought shares in the Southern cotton fields. The rich men of the South were constant guests of the mill-owners in Central England and of the bankers in London. Little by little England was drawn in through financial channels, and cast her lot in with the production of cotton,—and slavery.
Then came the Civil War. The planters went to the front with Lee's army; the slaves freed from overseers would not work. The production of cotton was halved. The Northern navy blockaded the exit of cotton ships from the Southern ports. English ships hung around the Southern shores trying in vain to find access, hoping to run the gauntlet and obtain a cargo of cotton. One by one the great English mills shut down for want of raw material, and when two winters had passed, and the autumn of 1863 had come, and the English working people fronted a third winter, the spectacle became pathetic and terrible. Gaunt Famine stalked the land. The skeleton Want stood in the shadow of the poor man's house. But the courage and fidelity of the English cotton spinners held out for two years. The poor always love the poor. The classes have always been wrong, the masses have always been right. Luxury puts wax into the ears of the aristocrats, but want makes the hearing of the poor very sensitive to a sob of pain. The sympathy of the cotton spinner was with the Northern working man. An English working man did not want to be put in the same class with a Southern slave. He saw that any law that riveted fetters on black slaves in the South helped forge a manacle for the cotton spinner's wrist in the mother land. These poor English folk believed in the dignity of labour, in the right to a good wage, and in the necessity for all working people standing together.
But the mill-owner wanted raw cotton. The banker wanted the mill-owner to have his cotton that his loans might be paid. The ship-builders wanted Southern cotton that their industry might thrive. Investors who for two years had had no interest on their Southern loans sympathized with the South; the politicians, controlled by their financial interests, wanted the South to succeed. In that hour of temptation Avarice drew near and choked Justice. Greed offered bribes to Conscience. Old England's ruling classes, with the full sympathy of men like Gladstone and hundreds of others, favoured the speedy recognition of the Southern Confederacy in the hope that that would end the war and restore England's prosperity.
In a word, the situation was this: The North had to fight the South, and England with her influence as well. For here was the North, struggling for the principles of the Pilgrim Fathers, for liberty, for democracy and for the slaves, and just in the darkest hour of the struggle, when she was burying her dead and the whole North was hung with funeral crape, England, with ships on every sea, England, strong and powerful, taking advantage of the capture of two Southern emissaries—Mason and Slidell—from the British ship Trent on the high seas, declared she would send an army to Canada and ships to batter down our Northern cities. Even Gladstone bought Southern bonds, but later Gladstone deeply lamented his sympathy with slavery and the South, and asked the world to forgive and forget it. Yet if the North has long ago forgiven England, it must be a hard thing for England to forgive herself that she gave to slavery every ounce of influence she had, her threats, her frowns, her diplomacy and her ships. Long afterwards a court of arbitration in Geneva punished England with an enormous fine for the American shipping that she helped destroy in her effort to help break down the North and defeat liberty in a war that her own statesman, John Bright, has characterized as one of the few wars not only justifiable but glorious in all history.
Now this was the attitude of England. Her upper classes and financial interests were all on the side of slavery and the South. Her great middle class were largely in favour of liberty. Her working people were naturally on the side of free labour and the North, but they were weakened by starvation till their endurance and fortitude were almost gone. And then it was that Beecher entered the scene, returning from the Continent to England. Recognition of the Confederacy and other unfriendly official acts were trembling in the balance; yet there was hesitation, on account of the common people, who sympathized with the North. In telling of this afterwards, Mr. Beecher said: "To my amazement I found that the unvoting English possessed great power in England; a great deal more power, in fact, than if they had a vote. The aristocracy and the government felt, 'These men know they have no political privileges, and we must administer with the strictest regard to their feelings or there will be a revolution.'" There were many noble exceptions among the higher classes, and the Queen, doubtless under the influence of the Prince Consort Albert, who died in 1861, and had been a firm friend of America, was also friendly to the North; but her Government was not.
The argument finally used to persuade Beecher to speak was that the English Anti-Slavery Society was already discredited, unpopular, and frowned upon by the nobility and the upper classes, and that if Beecher would not recognize them by at least one speech their cause and ours would be still further weakened.
He began his work with a speech at Manchester, the very centre of the cotton spinning industry. For weeks the streets had been placarded against him. On his way to the Free Trade Hall he found, not a multitude, but a mob, filling the streets. The meeting had been packed in advance. Within five minutes after his introduction the storm let loose its fury. There were two or three centres of conflict that became veritable whirlpools of excitement. All the rest of the audience climbed on their chairs to see what was going on in the tumultuous centres. Everybody seemed to be yelling, some for order, and others with the purpose of breaking up the meeting. Mr. Beecher saw that many were determined that he should not speak, and he realized that if they broke him down, other cities would withdraw their invitation, and it would appear that all England was unalterably opposed to the North, so that the recognition of the Confederacy might follow. When his enemies began to wear themselves out and the tumult to subside, Mr. Beecher shot a few sentences into the noise. "I have registered a vow that I will not leave your country until I have spoken in your great cities. I am going to be heard, and my country shall be vindicated."
The orator soon found that about one-quarter of the audience were bitterly hostile. Another quarter applauded his sentiment. The great mass was hesitant, undecided, unconvinced, and he determined to conquer that undecided class, and add them to that portion that was friendly. He scornfully reminded them that he had before met men whose cause could not bear the light of free speech. He roused them by saying that American institutions were the fruit of English ideas, and that the fruit of American liberty was from seed corn that was English.
When some one shouted that he was harsh and unfair, he answered, What if some exquisite dancing master should stand on the edge of a battle-field where a hero lifted his battle-axe, and criticize him by saying that "his gestures and postures violated the proprieties of polite life!" He added, "When dandies fight they think how they look; when men fight, they think only of deeds." He said that what the North desired was not material aid, but simply that England should keep hands off, and that France should keep hands off. He affirmed that even if they both interfered, the North would fight on, that slavery must be destroyed, and that liberty must be established on the American continent; that the victory of democracy and liberty in the North would mean their victory over the North and South American continent, and that if the day ever should come when the old flag should wave again over every state in the South, and the atrocious crime of slavery should be destroyed, there should be liberty for the press, and liberty for the poor in the schoolhouse; if plantations should be broken up and distributed among the poor farmers, and the privileges of civil liberty be won, that it would be worth all the blood and tears and woe.
When he said that Great Britain had frowned upon the North, but hastened to fling her arms around the neck of the imperious South, one Englishman waved his arms and shouted: "She doesn't!" and the six thousand people began to cheer the disclaimer of England's being Romeo. To which Beecher answered: "I have only to say that she has been caught in very suspicious circumstances."
Beecher's unshakable good humour, his witty, lightning-like answers to their questions and contradictions, his solid sense and—when he got the chance—his flaming eloquence, finally quelled and captured them. Then he traversed the entire history of slavery in its relation to the Colonies, the States, and the different forms of legislation up to the Kansas and Nebraska Bill. When he concluded his speech, and the sentiment of the audience was called for, to the astonishment of his friends, men lifted up their voices with a sound like the sound of many waters, and lined up for the North and liberty. The enthusiasm was overwhelming. Within three hours January's frost had turned to the bloom of June, and the moment was radiant with hope. The London Times contained four columns of this speech, and the address became the topic of the hour in every club in England. And either of these facts in those days meant that Henry Ward Beecher was famous in England.
His speeches in Glasgow and Edinburgh took up the second and third steps in the development of slavery and liberty on the American continent. He told these ship-builders in Glasgow how the providence of God seemed to be exhibiting to all the peoples of the world the reflex influence of slavery upon the strongest people and the richest resources, and how slavery cursed whatever it touched. That the lesson might be the clearer He gave liberty an unfriendly clime, and gave slavery a rich arena. To the North He gave short summers, bleak skies, the rocks of New England hills, the thin soil of New York, the sand dunes of Michigan. To the South He gave sunny Virginia, the riches of the Gulf States, the fruitful skies, the abundant rains, the treasures of the cotton, the sugar and the rice. Above all, God sifted all the nations of the Old World to find blood rich enough to people the Southern States. The men who laid the foundations of the great South were people of a heroic type, giants and heroes of fortitude. God brought the Huguenots, and the very flower of French chivalry into Florida and Georgia. He sifted all Scotland and North Ireland for outstanding men for South Carolina. He took the best blood of England for Virginia. These Southern founders and fathers had fought in France, endured for their convictions in Scotland, conquered their enemies in England and North Ireland, and God rewarded them with the richest, choicest meadows and valleys of the sunny South. And yet Slavery wrought weakness, while Liberty made the bleak North to blossom like the rose.
It is said that plants exude poison from the roots, and soon destroy the soil unless there is a rotation of crops. Slavery was a noxious plant, deadlier than the nightshade, and it poisoned the South. The longer slavery existed, the weaker the Southern giant became, until, toiling on, the South became bankrupt through slavery, and toiling on, every year of the war under free labour found the North growing ever richer and stronger. Liberty is a giant that when it touches the soil renews its strength.
Oh, if the South had but had a better cause! History affords nothing finer than the bravery of Southern soldiers and their leaders; had they been fighting for liberty, or some great cause that would have supported them during the struggle instead of bankrupting them as slavery did, it is doubtful whether any army could have defeated their soldiers.
In Liverpool Beecher literally fought with the lions of Ephesus. The bill-boards were posted with placards in red type. All men in England who had investments in the South and wanted to break Beecher and his cause seemed to have assembled. From the moment he entered the room the great audience became a mob, and with groans, hisses, cat-calls, epithets, men interrupted the orator with cheers for the South. Speaking was like lifting up one's voice in the midst of a hurricane, or trying to speak while a typhoon was raging on the sea. For one hour the tumult raged. From time to time the police would succeed in carrying out some obstreperous individual but there were enough men scattered through the hall, each bellowing like a bull of Bashan, to make hearing impossible. To add to the tumult, from time to time, an Englishman would climb on his chair and shout, "I am ashamed of Liverpool and my country," and the confusion would break out afresh. It took one hour to wear the voices out. When Beecher told the reporters that he would speak slowly so they could hear, and thus he could reach all England, the audience grew quieter.
Beecher urged three arguments,—first, that the national prosperity is dependent upon the production of wealth, and this meant independence for the producer; second, that prosperity depends upon manufacturing and that means a high quality of educated workman; third, that prosperity is dependent upon commerce and the exchange of commodities between nations, and that means brotherhood. He urged that the more intelligent and prosperous the workman, the higher his wage, and, therefore, the better he supports as a buyer. A slave uses his feet and hands, and produces a few cents a day. A poor white labourer uses his hands and his lower head, and earns fifty cents a day. An intelligent Northern working man uses his hands and his creative intellect, and he produces a dollar a day. A highly educated worker becomes an inventor as well as a freeman, and earns five dollars a day. With this wage he buys comforts, tools, products of the loom, builds up manufactures, and promotes prosperity. For that reason a few patricians only in the South buy in the English market, while the millions of slaves demand from Sheffield only whips and manacles. Therefore slavery starves English trade.—And at last Liverpool heard him.
In Exeter Hall in London, Beecher closed his argument: "Shall we let the South go, and carry slavery with her? If a Northern working man has a mad dog by the throat shall he let that animal go to spread death? Letting the South go as a free nation is one thing, but letting her go to spread slavery over Mexico and Central America is another thing. When we kill the mad dog we will talk about letting the South go."
Beecher returned home to find himself the hero of the hour. In Plymouth Church, on Sunday morning, the audience stood for five minutes, and with their tears and silence told him of their gratitude and love. From that hour Stanton asked for his friendship, and was weekly and even daily in correspondence. He promised Beecher that immediately upon the receipt of any news from the battle-field he would send him a telegram. Indeed, the first news that the country had from Stanton of one of the great victories came to Beecher's pulpit and was read over his desk. Other great men, the President, secretaries, the generals, the statesmen, editors, lecturers, preachers, did their part, but high among co-workers ranks Henry Ward Beecher. God gave him a great task, and armed him for the battle. He loved the poor, he broke the shackles from the slave, he discovered to the world the love of God, and dying he flung his helmet into the thick of the enemy. It is for us and our children to fight our way forward to that helmet, and fling our own at last into some new fight for the emancipation of the mind and heart of earth's troubled millions.
It must be confessed that the aristocracy of England and her upper middle class, in the main, still sympathized with the South, while the English cabinet tried to maintain neutrality. Four-fifths of the House of Lords were "no well-wishers of anything American, and most of the House of Commons voted in sympathy with the South."
But the attitude of the "classes" of England was only the reflection of her scholars. Carlyle, whose early books had no sale in England, and who wrote Emerson that he had received his first money to keep him from starvation from Boston and New York, "when not a penny had been realized in England," had no sympathy with liberty and the North. As soon as his own physical wants were supplied by the American check which Emerson sent him, Carlyle began to call the war "a smoky chimney that had taken fire." "No war ever waged in my time was to me more profoundly foolish looking." (Slovenly English, contradictory thinking, and poor morals!) "Neutral I am to a degree." Then Carlyle tried to sum up his view of the situation: "Now speaks the Northern Peter to the Southern Paul: 'Paul, you unaccountable scoundrel! I find you hire your servants for life, not by the month or year as I do. You are going straight to hell.' Paul: 'Good words, Peter; the risk is my own. Hire you your servants by the month or day, and go straight to heaven. Leave me to my own method.' Peter: 'No, I won't. I will beat your brains out.' And he's trying dreadfully ever since, but cannot quite manage it."
No one knew better than Carlyle that there is a world diameter between the South hiring a man for life, and by force holding him in slavery. But Carlyle for three years poured out such vapid humbug, cant and hypocrisy as this, and never once was sound in his thinking or fair in his view-point during the entire war.
Even Charles Dickens, who had written denouncing slavery in his "American Notes," returned to England in the spring of 1863 to predict the overwhelming victory of the South, and to characterize the hopes of Lincoln as "a harmless hallucination." But little by little, English sentiment began to change. Goldwin Smith, of Oxford University, consented to speak at a meeting in Manchester to protest against the building and sending out of piratical ships in support of the Southern Confederacy. He affirmed boldly that "no nation ever inflicted upon another more flagrant or more maddening wrong" [in permitting the Alabama to escape]. No nation with English blood in its veins had ever borne such a wrong without resentment.
Richard Cobden wrote to Mr. Beecher as to the feeling in England: "In every other instance ... the popular sympathy of this country has always leaped to the side of the insurgents the moment a rebellion has broken out. In the present case, our masses have an instinctive feeling that their cause is bound up in the prosperity of the United States. It is true that they have not much power in the direct form of a vote; but when the millions of this country are led by the religious middle class they can together prevent the government from pursuing a policy hostile to their sympathies."
When Beecher appeared and spoke, he aroused, intensified, unified, and made effective this great underlying force of English popular feeling, and the unfriendly purposes of the governmental and "upper-class" element were paralyzed.
Beecher himself was very modest about his achievement. Said he: "When in October you go to a tree and give it a jar, and the fruit rains down all about you, it is not you that ripened and sent down the fruit; the whole summer has been doing that. It was my good fortune to be there when it was needed that some one should jar the tree; the fruit was not of my ripening."
Beecher returned home in November of 1863, conscious that he had risked everything in the service of his imperilled country. He found the entire North had constituted itself a Committee of Reception to welcome him home. A great public meeting was arranged in the Academy of Music in New York, and the Music Hall was crowded from pit to dome with the leaders of the city and of the North. Mr. Beecher entered the room at eight o'clock, and the whole audience rose to its feet to greet him, but not until many minutes had passed in tumultuous cheering did he have an opportunity to speak. From that hour his influence in the country was second only to that of the President, two or three members of his cabinet, and General Grant. Abraham Lincoln wrote to Mr. Beecher words of warmest gratitude and invited him to the White House. "Often and often," wrote Secretary Stanton, "in the dark hours you have come to me, and I have longed to hear your voice, feeling that above all other men you could cheer, strengthen, quiet and uplift me in this great battle, where by God's providence it has fallen upon me to hold a part, and perform a duty beyond my own strength." When therefore Lee surrendered, and the war came to a close, President Lincoln and the cabinet felt that Beecher's service to the cause of liberty had earned for him the most unique distinction granted to any man during the war. And so it came about that four years after Beauregard fired upon Fort Sumter, and the flag of the Union was lowered to give place to the flag of Secession, that not a general nor an admiral, but that a minister, Henry Ward Beecher, was selected to lift into its place again the old flag, that proclaimed to all the nations of the earth that government of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.