Harpers+28

Harper's Weekly, April 22, 1865, page 242 (Editorial)
 * WHAT NEXT? **

The overwhelming victory of the government turns every mind to the consideration of the means of restoring its normal and tranquil operation. But in our present ignorance of the real condition of public sentiment at the South, it is impossible to do more than see what should not be done. The victory of the Government must not be thrown away. The terrible war, under which the country pants and bleeds, must not have been fought in vain. Justice, liberty, and peace must not be imperiled in a swash of weakness called by a fine name. If the Southerners are our brethren, the Northerners are not less so. If we ought not to punish deluded rebels, neither ought we to betray true men.

We all say, and undoubtedly not without reason, that the South was unwillingly precipitated into rebellion, and that only certain leaders are actually morally guilty. But there can be no doubt whatever that the heart of the South had been long and systematically alienated from the Union. The doctrine of State sovereignty, sedulously taught, had destroyed all true sense and pride of nationality. "In every house," said a Southerner who served two years in the rebel army, and was never north of Mason and Dixon’s line until he was brought as a prisoner, "the works of Calhoun lay side by side with the Bible." That the United States Government was a league of consenting sovereign powers, each of which might withdraw at its pleasure, was a fundamental article of faith. The Southerners were proud of being Carolinians, Georgians, Virginians, not of being Americans. "Yankee" was a term of contempt and reproach, and the free expression of opinion by American citizens in the South, if unfavorable to slavery, was punished and annihilated by every form of insult and crime, from a glass of wine flung in the face at the table of "the hospitable Southern gentleman," to the arrest and trial by a secret committee, and hanging, burning, maiming, and expulsion, according to the whim of the mob.

Such things reveal the state of public opinion. Hostility to the Union and to the essential principles of a free government were not exceptional at the South; they were general. They were carefully enforced by every appeal to the basest prejudice and the profoundest ignorance. Millions of American citizens, of the greatest intelligence and of the highest character, could venture into the whole Southern section of their country only at the risk of outrage and the peril of their lives, or upon condition of the most shameful and treacherous silence. The union of sympathy, of purpose, of national pride and feeling, was gone long before the shot at Sumter; and such a union can be restored only by time and careful thought, by patience and unshrinking firmness, not by sentimental emotion.

We recall these facts not for the sake of recrimination but of instruction. It was cowardice, calling itself conservatism, that led us into the war; and we may be very sure that blindness, calling itself magnanimity, will not lead us out of it. If we would establish the Government in tranquil permanence, we must look backward as well as forward.

The Southern people, who had grown up in ignorance and prejudice, the extent of which we can hardly comprehend, and who have been deluded into the active support of so enormous a conspiracy, have been deluded because their minds were prepared for delusion. Even Alexander H. Stephens—who was not considered peculiarly a Southern man, and to whom many persons now look as a possible mediator—diligently fostered this delusion. He was a Union man in the Southern sense. That is to say, he believed that the Union was essential to the prosperity of the South, but upon the sole condition that the South controlled the Government in its own interest. When he retired from Congress, in 1858, he publicly stated that he withdrew because he was not needed, because the South had carried every point in the long debate with the North, and because its future supremacy in the Union was absolutely assured by the decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case. "The Union," said Alexander H. Stephens—and we quote his words—"has always been to me, and ought to be to you, subordinate to Southern security in it." This was said two years before the war, and neither Calhoun nor Jefferson Davis ever stated the doctrine of secession more forcibly or persuasively. His famous "Union" speech at Milledgeville, before the Georgia Legislature, in November, 1860, was an effort to show that dissolution was an unnecessary risk even for the purposes of the South, enforced by a prophecy of the horrors of war. It was a passionate appeal to the South to remember that it had always controlled the government; that the election of Mr. Lincoln, while the South held the Senate, the House, and the Supreme Court, did not really endanger its policy; and that if it only stood fast it would control the Union forever, and permanently establish the state of things then existing, which was a practical subversion of the essential principles of the government. And when he asked Toombs why, under the circumstances, he wished to risk every thing by drawing the sword, the fiery Toombs replied, substantially, "Don’t be uneasy. I will agree to drink every drop of blood that will be shed in the war; and I draw the sword only to show the edge, and precipitate by terror, and the consequent submission of the country, the very supremacy of the South in the Union which you advocate."

The public sentiment of the South was radically hostile to the Union because it was opposed to the principles upon which alone the Union was possible. If it could have its own way it was satisfied. If it could suppress free speech, if it could indefinitely extend slavery, and prostitute the National Government to its protection by giving it a Constitutional sanction, as Stephens believed it had effectively done, it was willing to continue to use the Union as its tool. This, and this only, was the Unionism of the South. It was a Union subordinate to State sovereignty. It was a Union which had no power of coercion except against the enemies of the Southern policy. It was a Union whose Government had no right to enforce its authority against any citizen of the United States if the State in which he lived released him from his allegiance. And it was because this was not only the argument of the leaders but the conviction of the people of the South, that those leaders were able to begin and maintain with remarkable unanimity of popular support this long and strenuous rebellion against the national authority.

The practical question now is how much this opinion is changed by the war. Cannon conquer, but they do not necessarily convert. The South has learned that it can not necessarily convert. The South has learned that it can not establish State sovereignty by force of arms; but does it any the less believe that every State is rightfully sovereign? If it still holds that view, can the Government of the United States wisely recognize the resumption of political power by the people of the South until it is satisfied that that power will not be used against the Union? Must not the resumption of that power be preceded by an acknowledgment upon oath, in every instance, of the supreme authority of the nation, and the relinquishment of the doctrine of State sovereignty in the Southern sense? Is the present triumph of the national power to prove merely that this particular revolt of State sovereignty has failed, or that all rebellion upon that ground is hereafter to be impossible? Unless we utterly mistake the feeling of the American people, they are resolved that no man shall henceforth serve in their army or navy who recognizes any flag before the Stars and Stripes; nor any man sit in their Congress who does not solemnly swear that he holds the government of the United States, and not of any individual State, to be the supreme political authority in the country. We have no less faith in the common sense than in the magnanimity of the nation.


 * 1. Did the South willingly revolt, or was it forced to by a few leaders? **
 * 2. Why were the Southerners so anti-nationalistic? **
 * 3. Who was Toombs? **