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THE

CONTINENTAL MONTHLY:

DEVOTED TO

LITERATURE AND NATIONAL POLICY.

THE PROGRESS OF LIBERTY IN THE UNITED STATES.

There are three classes of persons in the loyal States of this Union who proclaim the present civil war unnecessary, and clamor for peace at any price: first, a multitude of people, so ignorant of the history of the country that they do not know what the conflict is about; secondly, a smaller class of better-informed citizens, who have no moral comprehension of the inevitable opposition of democracy and aristocracy, free society and slave society, and who believe sincerely that a permanent compromise or trade can be negotiated between these opposing forces in human affairs; thirdly, a clique of demagogues, who are trying to use these two classes of people to paralyze the Government, and force it into a surrender to the rebels on such terms as they choose to dictate: their separation from the United States or recall to their old power in a restored and reconstructed Union.

It will be my purpose, in this article, to show the complete fallacy of this notion, by presenting the facts concerning the progress of the different portions of our country in the American idea of liberty during the years preceding this war. The census of 1860, if honestly studied, must convince any unprejudiced man, at home or abroad, that the Slave Power deliberately brought this war upon the United States, to save itself from destruction by the irresistible and powerful growth of free society in the Union. This war had the same origin and necessity of every great conflict between the people and the aristocracy since the world began.

Every war of this kind in history has been the result of the advancement of the people in liberty. Now the people have inaugurated the conflict against the aristocracy, either in the interest of self-government, or an imperial rule which should virtually rest upon their suffrage. Now the aristocracy has risen upon the people, who were becoming too strong and free, to conquer and govern them through republican or monarchical forms of society. There has always been an irrepressible conflict between aristocracy and democracy; in times of peace carried on by all the agencies of popular advancement; but in every nation finally bursting into civil war. And every such war, however slow its progress, or uncertain its immediate consequence, has finally left the mass of the people nearer liberty than it found them.

The northern Grecian states represented the cause of the people; and the oriental empires the cause of the few. These little states grew so rapidly that the despots of Asia became alarmed, and organized gigantic expeditions to destroy them. At Marathon and Salamis, the people's cause met and drove back the mighty invasion; and two hundred years later, under the lead of Alexander, dissolved every Asiatic empire, from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates, to its original elements.

Julius Caesar destroyed the power of the old Roman aristocracy in the interest of the people of the Roman empire. Under the name of 'The Republic,' that patrician class had oppressed the people of Rome and her provinces for years as never was people oppressed before. After fifty years of civil war, Julius and Augustus Caesar organized the masses of this world-wide empire, and established a government under which the aristocracy was fearfully worried, but which administered such, justice to the world as had never before been possible.

The religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which involved the whole of Europe for eighty years, were begun by the civil and religious aristocracy of Europe to crush the progress of religious and civil liberty among the people. These wars continued until religious freedom was established in Germany, Holland, and Great Britain, and those seeds of political liberty sown that afterward sprang up in the American republic.

The English civil wars of the seventeenth century were begun by the king and great nobles to suppress the rising power of the commons, and continued till constitutional liberty was practically secured to all the subjects of the British empire.

The French Revolution was the revolt of the people of France against one of the most cruel and tyrannical aristocracies that ever reigned; and continued, with brief interruptions, till the people of both France and Italy had vindicated the right to choose their emperors by popular suffrage.

During the half century between the years 1775 and 1825, every people in North America had thrown off the power of a foreign aristocracy by war, and established a republican form of government, except the Canadas, which secured the same practical results by more peaceful methods.

The historian perceives that each of these great wars was an inevitable condition of liberty for the people, and has exalted their condition. In all these struggles there were the same kinds of opponents to the war: the ignorant, who knew nothing about it; the morally indifferent, who could not see why freemen and tyrants could not agree to live together in amity; and the demagogues, who were willing to ruin the country to exalt themselves. But we now understand that only through these red gates of war could the peoples of the world have marched up to their present enjoyment of liberty; that each naming portal is a triumphal arch, on which is inscribed some great conquest for mankind.

The present civil war in the United States is the last frantic attempt of this dying feudal aristocracy to save itself from inevitable dissolution. The election of Mr. Lincoln as President of the United States, in 1860, by the vote of every Free State, was the announcement to the world that the people of the United States had finally and decisively conquered the feudal aristocracy of the republic after a civil contest of eighty years. With no weapons but those placed in their hands by the Constitution of the United States, the freemen of the republic had practically put this great slave aristocracy under their feet forever. That portion of the Union which was controlled by the will of the whole people had become so decidedly superior in every attribute of power and civilization, that the slave aristocracy despaired of further peaceful resistance to the march of liberty through the land. Like every other aristocracy that has lived, it drew the sword on the people, either to subdue the whole country, or carry off a portion of it, to be governed in the interests of an oligarchy.

There has always been a conflict in our country between this old slave aristocracy and the people. The first great victory of the people was in the war of the Revolution. That war was inaugurated and forced upon the country by the masses of the people of the New England and Middle States. The aristocracy of the South, with their associates in the North, resisted the movement to separate the people from the crown of Great Britain, till resistance was impossible, and then came in, to some extent, to lead the movement and appropriate the rewards of success. But the free people of the North brought on and sustained the war. Massachusetts was then the fourth province in population; but she sent eight thousand more soldiers to the field during those bloody eight years than all the Southern States united. Virginia was then the empire State of the Union, and Rhode Island the least; but great, aristocratic Virginia furnished only seven hundred more soldiers than little, democratic Rhode Island. New England furnished more than half the troops raised during the Revolution; and the great centres of aristocracy in the Middle and Southern States were the stronghold of Toryism during the war. Indeed, a glance at the map of the Eastern and Middle States reveals the fact that the headquarters of the 'peace party' in the Revolutionary and the present war are in precisely the same localities. The 'Copperhead' districts of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania are the old Tory districts of the Revolution. The Tories of that day, with the mass of the Southern aristocracy, tried to 'stop the war' which was to lay the foundations of the freedom of all men. The Tories of to-day are engaged in the same infamous enterprise, and their fate will be the same.

Had the Slave Power been united in 1776, we should never have gained our independence. But it was divided. Every State was nominally a Slave State; but slaveholders were divided into two classes. The first was led by Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and other illustrious aristocrats, North and South; and, like the Liberal lords of Great Britain, threw their influence on the side of the people. This party, very strong in Virginia, very weak in the Carolinas, dragged the South through the war by the hair of its head; and compelled it to come into the Union. It also resolved to abolish the Slave Power, and succeeded in consecrating the whole Northwestern territory to freedom as early as 1790. The opposition party had its headquarters at Charleston, was treasonable or luke-warm during the war, and refused to come into the Union without guarantees for slavery.

The first thirty years was a period of incessant activity by the slave aristocracy. It incurred a nominal loss in the abolition of slavery in eight Eastern and Middle States, and the consecration of the great Northwestern territory to freedom; out of which three great Free States had already been carved; making, in 1820, eleven Free States. But it had gained by the concentration of its power below the line of the Ohio and Pennsylvania boundary, the division of the territory belonging to the Carolinas, and the Louisiana purchase; whereby it had gained five new Slave States; making the number of Slave States equal to the Free--eleven. It put forward the liberal aristocracy of Virginia to occupy the Presidential chair during thirty-two of the thirty-six years between 1789 and 1825; thus compelling Virginia and Maryland to a firm alliance with itself. It had manuvred the country through a great political struggle and a foreign war, both of which were chiefly engineered to secure the consolidation of the slave aristocracy. In 1820 its power was extended in eleven States, containing four hundred and twenty-four thousand square miles, with one hundred and seventy-nine thousand square miles of territory sure to come in as Slave States; and the remainder of the Louisiana purchase not secure to liberty. It had a white population only seven hundred thousand less, while its white and black population was a million more than all the Free States.

The North was barely half as large in area of States: two hundred and seventy thousand square miles, with only one hundred thousand square miles in reserve of the territory dedicated to liberty. With an equality of representation in the Senate of the United States, and a firm hold of all the branches of the Government, the prospect of the oligarchy for success was brilliant. In every nation the aristocracy first gets possession, organizes first, and proceeds deliberately to seize and administer the government. The people are always unsuspicious, slow, late in organizing, and seem to blunder into success or be led to it by a Providence higher than themselves. In this Government the slave aristocracy first consolidated, and in 1820 appeared boldly on the arena, claiming the superiority, and threatening ruin to the republic in the event of the failure of their plans. It had managed so well that there was now no division in its ranks, and for the last forty years has moved forward in solid column to repeated assaults on liberty.

But spite of these great advantages at the outset--spite of its incredible political activity and admirable concentration, the slave aristocracy was finally defeated by the people. How this was done is the most interesting narrative in modern history. Never has the intrinsic superiority of a democratic over an aristocratic order of society been so magnificently vindicated as during the last forty years of our national career. During that period the free portion of this Union has grown to an overwhelming superiority over the slave portion, and compelled the slaveholders to draw the sword to save themselves from material and providential destruction.

An aristocracy always exhibits the uttermost pitch of human policy in its career, and amazes and outwits society by its marvellous display of executive ability. But the people are always moved by great supernatural forces that are beyond their comprehension, often disowned or scorned by them, but which mould their destiny and lead them to a victory spite of themselves. The people always grow without conscious plan or method, and rarely know their own strength. But there are always a few great men who represent their destiny, and, often against their will, direct them in the path to liberty. History will record the names of three great men who, during the last forty years, have been the most notable figures in this consolidation of the people in this republic; three men that the implacable hatred of the Slave Power has singled out from all other Northern men as special objects of infamy; men who represent the industrial, moral, and political phases of the people's growth to supremacy. Each came when he was wanted, and faithfully did his work; and their history is the chronicle of this advance of liberty in the republic.

This was the providential movement of a great people, organizing a method of labor which should overthrow the American aristocracy. Of course the people did not know what all this meant; thousands of the men who were foremost in organizing Northern industry did not suspect the end; but De Witt Clinton knew. The wiseacres of the city of New York nicknamed his canal 'Clinton's Ditch.' It was the first ditch in that series of continental 'parallels' by which the people of the North have approached the citadel of the Slave Power. They have dug in those vast intrenchments for forty years, to such purpose that in 1860 the great guns of free labor commanded every plantation in the Union. Pardon them, then, O lieutenant-generals of the slavery forces, if they still think well of the spade that has dug their highway to power. The Northern spade is a slow machine--but it will yet shovel the slave aristocracy into the Gulf of Mexico as sure as God lives!

Glance over this field of industrial and material growth in the free portion of the Union, as it appeared in 1860.

Look at the position and value of these possessions of freedom. In 1850 liberty secured the great State of California, and in 1860 the State of Kansas. These States insure the possession of the whole Pacific coast, the entire mineral wealth of the mountains, the Indian Territory, and the vast spaces of Northwestern Texas to freedom, and open Mexico to Northern occupation. In the East, freedom had already secured the best harbors for commerce; in the Northwest, the granary of the world; the inexhaustible mineral wealth of Lake Superior, and the navigation of thousands of miles upon the great inland seas that separate the republic from the Canadas. From the Northern Atlantic and the Pacific it commanded the trade of Europe and Asia. This region embraces the best climates of the continent for the habitation of a vigorous race of men, and contains all the elements of imperial power.

The increase of iron manufactures in ten years was forty-four per cent.; the coal mines reached a treble yield in ten years; ,000,000, of clothing were produced in 1860. The lumber trade had increased sixty-four percent, in ten years, reaching 0,000,000. Flouring mills showed sixty-five per cent, increase, reaching 5,000,000; spirits, ,000,000; cotton manufactures had increased seventy-six per cent, in ten years, reaching 5,000,000; woollens had increased sixty-seven per cent.; boots and shoes walked up to ,000,000, and leather to ,000,000. The fishermen of New England increased mightily. The gold of California, copper of the Northwest, the salt of New York and Michigan had reached colossal proportions. Whoever studies the manufacturing statistics of the North for the past ten years will be at no loss to know why the manufacturers of Great Britain are willing to sever the Slave States from the Union, to gain a customer it was thus supplying in 1860.

Now add to this array of agriculture, manufactures, extent of territory, and excess of population, the superiority of the Free States in commerce. The tonnage of the Union was twenty-six millions in 1860, the fourth of which was the growth of the ten years previous. Out of the one thousand and seventy-one ships built in 1860, the 'nation' of South Carolina produced one steamer and one schooner! Contemplate the money power of the city of New York, the vast capital invested in trade, in banks, insurance, and the like, in the North. The slave aristocracy was becoming imprisoned in a vast web of financial dependence--a web that war and wholesale repudiation of debts alone could break through.

In 1860 there were in the Union 30,- 600 miles of railroad, costing ,134,- 452,909, four times the extent of 1850. In 1850 only one line of railroad connected the Atlantic with the Mississippi. Now, of the eight great railroad and canal routes connecting the sea coast with this valley, six run through the Free States; transportation on these avenues costs but one tenth the old methods. Governor Letcher declares the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad has 'abolitionized' Northern and Western Virginia, and the Southern rebellion has been especially savage on railroads. Whoever would understand one secret of the consolidation of the people should study the railroad map of the Northern States, and contrast it with the South. It was a fine tribute to the value of the railroad that the first use the people made of their new political supremacy in 1860 was to pass the bill for connecting the Atlantic and Pacific by the iron rail and the telegraphic wire.

It could not be denied that the Free States were making wonderful strides, during these forty years, in mental cultivation and power. The free industry of the North was an education to the people, and nowhere has so much popular intelligence been carried into the business of life as here. This period also witnessed the organization of the free school everywhere outside of New England, its home; the daily press, the public lecture, the creation of an American literature, all Northern; the growth of all institutions of learning and means of intellectual and artistic cultivation unparalleled in any other age or land. No well-informed person could also deny the astonishing progress in furnishing the means of religious instruction, the multiplication of churches, great ecclesiastical organizations, and philanthropic leagues. Notwithstanding the apparent absorption of the North in its material prosperity, no people ever was so busy in furnishing itself with the means of spiritual improvement; and though a population of several millions of ignorant and superstitious foreigners was thrown in upon it during these eventful years, it came out at the end the most intelligent people, the best provided with the apparatus of religion, that was ever known.

In every such conflict as this the aristocracy has a great advantage, especially if it can choose its own time to begin the war. Never was an oligarchy more favored in its preparations than ours. Since 1820 it had contemplated and prepared for this very hour. It had almost unlimited control over fifteen States of the Union. Society was constructed in all these States on a military basis, the laboring class being held in place by the power of the sword. An aristocracy is always preceded by military ambition; for all subordinate orders of its people have acquired the habit of respect for rank and implicit obedience to superiors, so essential to success in war. When the war broke out, the Slave Power was ready. Its arms and ammunition and forts were stolen; its military organizations had been perfected in secret societies; its generals were selected--its president perhaps the best general of all; its military surveys were made, every Southern State mapped, and every strategical point marked; its subordinate officers, in which the real efficiency of an army consists, had been educated in military schools kept by such teachers as Hill and Stonewall Jackson. It had a full crop of cotton as a basis for finance. Its government was practically such a despotism as does not exist in the world. At the sound of the first gun in Charleston, the aristocracy sprang to arms; in a fortnight every strategical point in fifteen States was practically in its possession, and Washington tottered to its fall.

For more than three years have the people of the United States waged this gigantic war thus precipitated upon them by their aristocracy to arrest the irresistible growth of modern society in the republic. Every year has been a period of great success, though our peaceful population, unacquainted with war, and often ignorant of the vast issues of this conflict, have often inclined to despondency. Of course the aristocracy fought best, at first, as every aristocracy in the world has done. With half our number of better disciplined troops, better commanded and manuvred, and the great advantage of interior lines, supported by railroad communications, and possessing in Virginia, perhaps, the most defensible region in the Union, they held our Army of the Potomac at bay for two years; have thrice overrun Maryland and the Pennsylvania border, and yet hold their fortified capital; while every step of our victorious progress in the Southwest has been bitterly contested. Yet this war of martial forces has been strangely like the long, varied war of material, moral, and political forces of which it is the logical sequel.

The Union navy won the earliest laurels in the war. The navy has been the right arm of the people in all ages. The Athenian navy repelled the invasion of Greece by the Persian empire. Antony, Pompey, Caesar, the people's leaders in Rome, built up their youthful power upon the sea. The Dutch and English navies saved religious and civil liberty in the sixteenth century; and all the constitutional Governments that now exist in Europe came out of the hold of a British man-of-war. The United States, in 1812, extemporized a navy that gained us the freedom of the seas. And now the navy has led the way in the war for the freedom of the continent. The aristocracy felt, intuitively, the danger of this arm of defence, and discouraged, scattered, and almost annihilated our naval power before they entered upon the war. When we learn that our active navy, in April, 1861, consisted of one frigate, too large to sail over the bar of Charleston harbor, and one two-gun supply ship; and that in the three successive years it has shot up into a force of five hundred vessels; that our new ironclads and guns have revolutionized the art of naval warfare; that we have established the most effective blockade ever known along two thousand miles of dangerous coast; have captured Port Royal and New Orleans, aided in the opening of the Mississippi and all its dependencies which we now patrol, penetrated to the cotton fields of Alabama, occupied the inland waters of North Carolina and Virginia, seized every important rebel port and navy yard save four, and destroyed every war ship of the enemy that has ventured in range of our cannon, we are pronouncing a eulogy of which any people may be proud. One year more will swell this maritime power to a force amply sufficient to protect the coast of the whole republic from all assault of traitors at home or their friends abroad.

But the army of the Union has not been content to remain permanently behind the navy. Even in the first year of the conflict, when it was only a crowd of seventy-five thousand undisciplined militia, contending against a solid body of well-disciplined and commanded forces, it wrested two States from the foe, and baffled his intentions for the capture of all our great border cities. But since the opening of the campaign of 1802, the real beginning of war by the North, we have conquered from the aristocracy and now hold fast in Slave States an area of two hundred thousand square miles, inhabited by four millions of people--a district larger than France. Three years ago, every Slave State was virtually in the grasp of the rebels, and the Union was really put upon the defensive to protect freedom in the Free States and the national capital. Now, by a masterly series of campaigns in the West and Southwest, ranging from the Alleghanies to the Gulf, in which we have never lost a decisive battle, we have saved all the Territories of the United States, cut the 'Confederacy' in two equal parts, holding the western division at our mercy, opened the Mississippi and all its tributaries, and crowded the rebellion into the five States nearest the Atlantic coast. In the east we have fought a score of battles with the most formidable army ever marshalled on this continent, composed of the flower of the rebel soldiery led by their best generalship, and, spite of frequent repulses, have forced it from the Potomac and below the Rappahannock to the James, away from the smell of salt water, holding firmly every seaport from Washington to Wilmington, North Carolina, and a belt of land and water commanding the approach to the interior of every Atlantic State. The military force of the rebellion is rapidly being crowded into one army, not exceeding two hundred and fifty thousand men, against which the mighty power of the Union can be marshalled in overwhelming array. I know well enough that the decisive moment will really come when we confront that desperate and veteran host, on which the fate of aristocratic government upon this continent depends. But we shall then have a great army of veterans, marshalled under commanders fit to lead them in the name of liberty and the people.

It is not strange it has taken us three years to find who can fight among us. The Germans fought fifty years against religious despotism before they found Gustavus Adolphus to lead them to victory. The English fought ten years before Cromwell took command of his Ironsides. The French blundered ten years before the 'little corporal' led the army of the republic over the Alps to dethrone half the monarchs of Europe. The people had but one great general in the Revolutionary War. Until 1860 the aristocracy had furnished the only great American commander. But great generals have now appeared among the people; and if we fight stoutly and treat men fairly, our commander will appear when his army of veterans is ready.

We do not prophesy just when or how the people will triumph. The victory, we believe, will come; but whether all at once, or through temporary revulsions of purpose and alternate truce and war, whether finished by arms or yet cast again into the arena of polities, whether by occupying all this three millions of square miles of territory or gaining on despotism year by year, nobody knows. The Slave Power has not yet played its trump card. It has a hundred devilish resources yet to foil us. It may yet try to use the negroes it still holds against us by emancipation. It may yet drag us into a war with Europe, and Saratoga and Lake Erie and Plattsburg, and Long Island and Trenton and Bunker Hill, and Detroit and New Orleans may yet be fought over again. But we have seen how, for the last forty years, the people of the United States have strode on toward supremacy, led by a Power they did not always recognize, and sometimes scorned, but led to victory spite of themselves.

THE UNDIVINE COMEDY-A POLISH DRAMA.

Dedicated to Mary

A song! a new song!

Who will begin it? Who will end it?

Give me the Past, clad in steel, barbed with iron, floating in knightly plumes! With magic power I would invoke before you gothic towers and castellated turrets, bristling barbacans and mighty arches, baronial halls and clustered shafts; I would throw around you the giant shadows of vaulted domes and of revered cathedrals: but it may not be; all that is with the Past: the Past is never to return!

Speak, whosoever thou mayst be, and tell me in what thou believest! It is easier to lose thy life than to invent a faith; to awaken any belief in it!

Shame upon you all, great and small, for all things pursue their own course in defiance of your schemes! You may be mean and wretched, without hearts and without brains, yet the world hastens to its allotted destiny; it hurries you on whether you will or no, throws you in the dust, tosses you into wild confusion, or whirls you in resistless circles, which cease not until they grow into dances of Death! But the world rolls on--on; clouds and storms arise and vanish; then it grows slippery--new couples join the dance of Death--they totter--fall--lost in an abyss of blood--for it is slippery-blood-human blood is gushing everywhere, as if the path to peace led through a charnel house!

Behold the crowds of people thronging the gates of the cities, the hills, the valleys, and resting beneath the shadows of the trees! Tents are spread about, long boards are placed on the trunks of fallen trees or on pikes and sticks to serve as tables; they are covered with meat and drink, the full cups pass from hand to hand, and, as they touch the eager mouth, threats, oaths, and curses press forth from the hot lips. Faster and faster fly the cups from hand to hand, beaded, bubbling, glittering, always filling, striking, tinkling, ringing, as they circle among the millions: Hurrah! hurrah! Long live the cup of drunkenness and joy!

How fiercely they are agitated; how impatiently they wait! They murmur, they break into riotous noise!

Poor wretches! scarcely covered with their miserable rags, the seal of weary labors deeply stamped upon their sunburnt faces set with uncombed, bristling hair, the sweat starting from their rugged brows, their strong and horny hands armed with scythes, axes, hammers, hatchets, spades!

Look at that broad youth with the pickaxe; at the slight one with the sword. Here is one who holds aloft a glittering pike; another who brandishes a massive club with his brawny arm! There under the willows a boy crams cherries into his mouth with the one hand, and with the other punches the tree with a long, sharp awl. Women are also there, wives, mothers, daughters, poor and hungry as the men, Not a single trace of womanly beauty, of healthful freshness upon them; their hair is disordered and sprinkled with the dust of the highways, their tawny bodies scarcely covered with unsightly rags, their gloomy eyes seem fading into their sockets, only half open as if gluing together in very weariness: but they will soon be quickened, for the full cup flies from lip to lip, they quaff long draughts: Hurrah! hurrah! Long live the cup of drunkenness and joy!

Hark! a noise and rustling among the masses! Is it joy, or is it grief? Who can read the meaning of a thing so monstrously multiform!

This man is the idol of the people, their passion, the ruler of their souls, the stimulator of their enthusiasm. He promises them bread and money, and their cries rise like the rushing of a storm, widening and deepening in every direction: 'Long live Pancratius! Hurrah! Bread and money! Bread for us, our wives, our children! Hurrah! hurrah!'

At the feet of the speaker, leaning against the table on which he stands, rests his friend, companion, and disciple. His eye is dark and oriental, shadowed by long and gloomy lashes, his arms hang down, his limbs bend under him, his body is badly formed and distorted, his mouth is sensual and voluptuous, his expression is sharp and malicious, his fingers are laden with rings of gold--he joins the tumult, crying with a rough, hoarse voice: 'Long live Pancratius!' The speaker looks at him carelessly for a moment, and says: 'Citizen, Baptized, hand me a handkerchief!'

Meantime the uproar continues; the cries become more and more tumultuous: 'Bread for us! Bread! bread! Long live Pancratius! Death to the nobles! to the merchants! to the rich! Bread! bread! Bread and blood! Hurrah! hurrah!'

A tabernacle. Lamps. An open book lies on a table. Baptized Jews.

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