The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862

Our armies, eventually, must triumph, but to restore, throughout the revolted States, the supremacy of the Constitution, we must continue to maintain the just distinction between the loyal and disloyal; the deluded masses and the rebel leaders. We must also remember, that the reign of terror has long been supreme in the South, and that thousands have been forced into apparent support of the rebellion by threats, by spoliation, by conscription, by the ruin of their homes, and the loss of their means of subsistence.

With the exception of South-Carolina, whose normal condition for more than thirty years before she struck down our flag at Sumter, was that of incipient treason and revolt, no other State really desired to destroy the Union. A secret association and active armed conspiracy, and an organized system of falsehood and misrepresentation, drove the masses, by sudden action, violence, and terror, into this rebellion; but a large majority of the aggregate popular vote of the South was against secession.

It was a Northern President, yielding to secession leaders, in opposition to the patriots of the South, who, by the whole power of Executive influence and patronage, attempted to force slavery into Kansas, by the crime, heretofore without a name or an example, the forgery of A Constitution. This was the tolling of the first bell, alarming to patriots, but the concerted signal for the grand movement of the assassins, then conspiring the death of the Union. It was also a Northern President who urged the Lecompton forgery upon Congress, thus mainly contributing to the downfall of the Union; yet, when the vote was taken in the fall of 1860, a majority of the popular suffrage of the South was given to those candidates for the Presidency who had denounced and opposed this measure, over the candidate, (now in the traitor army,) who gave it his support. Thus, on this, as on every other occasion, where the people of the South have not been overborne by violence and terror, they have rejected at the polls the action of the secession leaders.

But the disaster was precipitated, when the same President, rejecting the advice of the patriot Scott, refused to reinforce our forts, when menaced or beleaguered by traitors, and announced, in his messages, to our country and all the world, the secession heresy, fatal to all government, that we had no right to repel force by force, on the part of a State seeking, by armed secession, to destroy the Union. The absurd political paradox was then announced by the President, that a State has no right to secede, but that the Government has no right to prevent its secession. It was this wretched dogma, that paralyzed our energies when they were most needed, gave immunity to treason, and invited rebellion, rendered our stocks unsalable, and induced thousands, at home and abroad, to believe that the Federal Government was a phantom, which existed only in name.

If Andrew Jackson had then been President, the rebellion would have been crushed by him in embryo, as it was in 1833, without expenditure of blood or treasure.

Surely, it is some palliation of the course of the deluded masses of the South, that they heard such pernicious counsels, and from such a source.

If, as our army advances, there has not been an open, general return of the masses to the Union, we must recollect, that when we did occupy parts of the South, and then withdrew, how soon the resurging tide of the rebellion swept over the devoted region, what scenes of horror and desolation ensued, how the homes of those who had welcomed our flag were given to the flames, whilst death was the portion of others. But let us crush out the very embers of this rebellion, cherish the devoted patriots of the South, drive out to other lands the rebel leaders, give to the ruined and deluded masses ample assurance of permanent protection, and they will resume their allegiance to the Union.

As a final result, we should not desire to hold the Southern States as provinces, for that would fatally exasperate, and tend to perpetuate the contest, increase our expenses, destroy our wealth and revenue, render our taxes intolerable, and endanger our free institutions. When the rebellion is crushed, we should seek a real pacification, the close of the war and its expenses, a cordial restoration of the Union, and return of that fraternal feeling, which marked the first half century of our wonderful progress. To insure these great results, the policy of the Government must be firm, clear, unwavering, and marked by discriminating justice and perfect candor. The country is in imminent peril, and nothing but the truth will avail us. The North and South must understand each other. The South must know that we realize the evident truth, that slavery caused the rebellion. Efforts were made on other questions to shake the Union, but all had proved impotent in the past, as they must in the future, until we were divided by slavery, the only issue which could produce a great rebellion. Nor will angry denunciations of the discordant elements of slavery and abolition now save us, for still the fact recurs, that without slavery there would have been no abolition, and, consequently, no secession. Slavery, therefore, was the cause, the causa causans, and whilst we should use all wise and constitutional means to secure its gradual disappearance, yet we should act justly, remembering how, when, and under what flag slavery was forced upon the protesting and opposing South, then feeble colonies of England. And yet, for nearly thirty years past, England has constantly agitated this question here, with a view to dissolve our Union, and has thus been mainly instrumental in sowing here the seeds of discord, which fructified in the rebellion.

And then, when the tide of battle seemed adverse, England, giving her whole moral aid to the rebellion, demanded from us restitution and apology in the case of the Trent, for an act, which had received the repeated sanction of her own example. Her press then teemed with atrocious falsehoods, insulting threats, and exulting annunciations of our downfall. Her imperious ultimatum, excluding arbitrament, was accompanied by fleets and armies, her cannon thundered on our coast, and she became the moral ally of that very slavery which she had forced upon the South, but which, for nearly thirty years past, she made the theme of fierce denunciation of our country, and constant agitation here, with one ever-present purpose, the destruction of this Union. And now let not England suppose, that there is an American, who does not feel the insult and understand the motive. England beheld, in our wonderful progress, the ocean's scepter slipping from her grasp, our grain and cotton almost feeding and clothing the world, our augmenting skill and capital, our inventive genius, and ever-improving machinery, our educated, intelligent, untaxed labor, the marvelous increase of our revenue, tonnage, and manufactures, and our stupendous internal communications, natural and artificial, by land and water. The last census exhibited to her, our numbers increasing in a ratio, making the mere addition, in the next twenty-five years, equal to her whole population, and our wealth augmenting in a far greater proportion. She saw our mines and mountains of coal and iron, (her own great element of progress,) exceed hers nearly twenty times, our hydraulic power, incalculably greater than that of Great Britain; a single American river, with its tributaries, long enough to encircle the globe, and that England might be anchored as an island in our inland seas. She witnessed Connecticut, smaller than many English counties, and with but one sixth the population of some of them, appropriating more money for education in that State, than the British Parliament for the whole realm; that we had more heads at work among our laboring classes than all Europe, and she realized the great truth, that knowledge is power, reposing on common schools for the whole people. She measured our continental area, laved by two oceans, as also by the lakes and the gulf, with a more genial sun, and a soil far more fertile and productive than that of England, and nearly thirty times greater in extent. She saw us raise within the loyal States a volunteer army of three fourths of a million, without a conscript, the largest, and far the most intelligent and effective force in the world, and millions more ready, whenever called, to rush to the defense of the Union, whilst a great and gallant navy rose, as if by enchantment, from the ocean. She marked the rapid transfer of the command of the commerce of the world from London to New-York. She observed the transcendent success of our free institutions, and with that 'fear of change, perplexing monarchs,' she dreaded the moral influence of our republican system. But why should any friend of his country, or of mankind, object to this, if it promoted the welfare of the people? We reject all force or intervention. Our only influence is that of our example. If our system was a failure, the institutions of England were not endangered, but strengthened by such a result. It was their success only that made them dangerous, not to the people of England, but to dynastic ambition, to aristocratic rule, and to selfish interests. To insure our permanent division, was to destroy us. Hence, she encouraged the South, acknowledged her as a belligerent, welcomed the rebel flag and war vessels into her ports, protected them there, enabled them to elude our cruisers, and prepared to aid and sustain slavery. For a time, with the exception of Cobden and Bright, we seemed to have had scarcely an influential friend in England. Her masses favored us, but five sixths of them are excluded from the polls by restricted suffrage. For a time, King Cotton never had more loyal subjects, than those who then controlled the press and government of England. Our Union was to be severed, the Southern confederacy acknowledged, the blockade broken, free trade between the South and England established, cotton given her, and refused us; we were to be forever cut off from the gulf and the lower Mississippi; Portland (the star of the East) was to become a British city, and Maine, always loyal and patriotic, was to be wrested from us, and reannexed to the British crown. It was the carnival of despots, exulting over our anticipated ruin, in our death-struggle in the great cause of human liberty and human progress.

And yet it was England that forced slavery upon the South against its earnest protest, and colonial acts vetoed by the British crown. Then, during our colonial weakness and dependence, the kings, and queens, and parliaments of England, not only legalized and encouraged the African slave-trade, but gave charters and monopolies for the wretched traffic. Then the lords and noble ladies, the blood royal, the merchant-princes, and even the mitred prelates of England, engaged most extensively in this accursed commerce, and thousands of the rich and noble of England enjoy now, by inheritance, fortunes thus accumulated. British vessels, sailing from British ports, openly displayed there upon their decks the shackles that were to bind the victims, thousands of whom, in the horrors of the middle passage, found unshrouded in an ocean grave, a happy escape from sufferings and misery indescribable. It was to these, our then infant, feeble, and dependent, but protesting colonies of the South, most of these slaves were forced by British avarice, and royal vetoes on colonial acts of the South prohibiting the traffic. Most justly then did Mr. Jefferson, in the original of our Declaration of Independence, announce the terrible truth as follows:

'He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them, thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another.'

The flag of England was then the flag of slavery, and not of slavery only, but of the African slave-trade; and wherever slavery now exists, England may look upon it and say, This is the work of my hands—mine was the price of blood, and mine all the anguish and despair of centuries of bondage.

This war, then, is mainly the work of England. She forced slavery here, and then commenced and inflamed here the anti-slavery agitation, assailing the Constitution and the Union, arresting the progress of manumission in the Border States, and finally culminating in the rebellion. Here, then, in the South are slavery and rebellion, branches of that Upas tree, whose seeds were planted in our soil by England.

England, then, should never have reproached us with slavery. The work was hers, and hers may yet be the dread retribution of avenging justice. Had the contest she provoked in the Trent affair then happened, the result might have been very different from her expectations. Instead of a ruined country, and divided Union, and God save the King played under the cross of St. George in Boston, New-York, and Philadelphia, she might have heard the music of Yankee Doodle, Hail Columbia, and the Star-Spangled Banner on the heights of Quebec, reëchoed in fraternal chorus over the Union intended by God, under one government, of the valley of the lakes and the St. Lawrence. Looking nearer home, she might have beheld that banner, whose stars she would have extinguished in blood, floating triumphantly, in union with the Shamrock, over that glorious Emerald Isle, whose generous heart beats with love of the American Union, and whose blood, now as ever heretofore, is poured out in copious libations in its defense. Indeed, but for the forbearance of our Government, and the judgment and good sense of Lord Lyons, the conflict was inevitable.

The hope was expressed by me in England that 'those glorious isles would become the breakwater of liberty, against which the surges of European despotism would dash in vain.' This was her true policy, justice to Ireland, successive reforms in her system, a further wise extension of the suffrage, with the vote by ballot, a cordial moral alliance with her kindred race in America, and a full participation, mutually beneficial, in our ever enlarging commerce. But her oligarchy has chosen coalition with the South and slavery, and war upon our Union and the republican principle. Divide and conquer is their motto, suicide will be their epitaph.

England is now playing her part in the fourth act of the drama of slavery. During the first act, for more than a century, she was actively engaged in the African slave-trade, and in forcing the victims, as slaves, upon the colonies, against their protest.

With the close of the first act came the American Revolution, when, in the truthful language of Mr. Jefferson, before quoted, England 'excited the slaves to rise in arms among us, and to purchase the liberty of which she had deprived them, by murdering the people on whom she had obtruded them.'

The third act, from 1834 to 1861, presented England engaged in fierce denunciations of American slavery. The British pulpit, press, and hustings, her universities, literature, courts, bar, statesmen, and orators, were all devoted to assaults on American slavery, and upon our Constitution, for tolerating the system, even for a moment. Her Parliament most graciously favored us with one of its own members, to denounce in the North, the slavery of the South, inflaming sectional passions and hatred, with the fixed purpose of dissolving the Union. As all the slaves whom England had sent to Boston, had been manumitted in 1780, and there was no slavery there, the object was, not to abolish slavery, or the mission would have been to the South, where the institution and the power over it existed, but the movement was made in the North, not to destroy slavery, but to dissolve the Union. England having failed to accomplish our overthrow in the two great wars of 1776 and 1812, she commenced the third war upon us, not from the mouths of her cannon, but in zealous efforts, continued now for more than a fourth of a century, to divide the Union, by the agitation of this question. We are indebted to England for the curse of slavery, and then for the slavery agitation. In this she has been but too successful North and South; but if slavery should perish in the conflict, she will mourn the result, because it removes our only dangerous element of discord.

And now the curtain has risen on the fourth act, and England, as always heretofore, is the chief actor. And where now is the great anti-slavery agitator? Why, England has reversed her position, and suddenly discovered the surpassing beauty and perfection of secession and slavery. Secession, an anarchical absurdity, destructive of all law, and all government, she kindly adopts as the true theory of our system. This heresy was discarded by Washington, Madison, Hamilton, and all the illustrious founders of the Constitution. It was exposed, in all its deformity, by Jackson, Clay, and Webster, in 1833, when it was rejected by every State, except South-Carolina. But England repudiates the doctrine at home, and abroad also, except for our country. Substituting her wishes for the fact, she declares we are not a nation, and that any State has a legal and moral right to secede and dissolve the Union. Deplorable would have been the folly of such a system, and well then might England have exulted over the failure of republics. Nothing but her intense desire for this failure could have induced England to adopt this absurd doctrine. The whole world perceives the motive for so false a pretense, and history will expose and denounce it.

And now, as to slavery, let us compare the England of 1834 and 1860, and all the intermediate period, with the England of 1861 and 1862. What a revolution? Where now are her daily denunciations of slavery? Where now is Exeter Hall, so lately teeming with anti slavery harangues, but now cheering the slavery rebellion? Where are the abolition lords and ladies of England; where the reverend clergy; where the public press, and Parliament? Has England been struck dumb in a moment, that she can no longer denounce a system which, up to the hour of pro-slavery secession, she had, from day to day, during more than a fourth of a century, declared to combine all the crimes of the decalogue? Where now are the compliments that were lavished upon Uncle Tom's Cabin and its gifted writer? Where are the notices in England, of our recent great anti-slavery work, Among the Pines, by the celebrated Edmund Kirke, 'who awoke one morning and found himself famous'? The book is read and circulated here by thousands, but none will notice or take it now in England.

But England is not silent. Her press, her statesmen, and even members of her cabinet, declare that the rebellion has dissolved our Union, and destroyed our Government. They say we can never conquer the rebellion; that we should abandon the contest, acknowledge the South as an independent power, give it all the Gulf, two thirds of the Atlantic, all the Chesapeake, half the Ohio, all the lower Mississippi and its mouth, cut our territory into two parts, acknowledge the right of secession, and the absolute dissolution of the Union. Such is the assurance of rightful and certain success by which England encourages the rebels, while surrender, is the advice she gratuitously urges upon us, from day to day. But England is not the only false prophet whose predictions were based only on her wishes. Indeed, many of her presses and statesmen openly avow their belief and desire that the Union should be overthrown. Our area, they say, is too large, although all compact and connected by the greatest arterial river-system of the globe. But England is not large enough, and new possessions are constantly added by the sword, although her territory is double our own, and scattered over all the continents, and many of the isles of the world. If, before or shortly after this struggle began, England had spoken a word of friendship and sympathy for us—if she had but repeated her former denunciations of slavery, and given us the moral weight of her opinion—the rebellion would have been crushed long since. If—claiming to be our mother—she had only, in this crisis, acted as such, in her hour of need a kindred race would have rallied to her rescue. But now, so long as this wicked oligarchy rules her destiny never—never! It was England forced slavery upon us. It was England fastened upon our feeble, youthful limbs, this poisoned shirt of Nessus, and then, when we were tearing it from us, even though the vitals and the life-blood might follow, England exulted in what she believed to be our dying agonies.

This is no fancy sketch, but a dread reality. It has filled our cup with sorrow; it is mingled with every tear that falls upon the dying patriot's couch; it is wafted with every agonizing sigh that follows the departed spirit; it is felt in every house of mourning, and is seared, in letters of fire and blood, upon the memory of every American.

But England now says that Slavery was not the cause of the war. Yet it was so avowed in every secession ordinance, and in the confederate constitution. None but a slave State revolted; none but a slave State can be admitted into the rebel confederacy; and slavery is extended by their constitution over all existing or after-acquired territory. If England should ever form a part of slavedom, slavery would be extended there, and slaves could be bought and sold in London. Other revolts have been against tyranny, but this is a rebellion of slavery against freedom, of the few against the many, of the bayonet against the ballot, of capital invested in man as a chattel, against free labor and free men. The tariff was scarcely referred to in the contest at the South. The tariff then existing was a free-trade measure, prepared by the leaders of this rebellion, and passed in 1856, by the aid of their votes. That tariff was twenty per cent lower than the revenue act of 1846. The tariff of 1846 was proposed in the Treasury Report of December, 1845, which report was quoted by Sir Robert Peel in his speech of January, 1846, and made the basis of his motion to repeal the corn laws. But the free-trade bill of 1856 (duties on exports being prohibited) was the law of the land when the Cotton States seceded in December, 1860, and January and February, 1861, and inaugurated the rebel government. It was not until after all this, that this measure was repealed, in March, 1861. This repeal could never have occurred but for the prior withdrawal of the Cotton States from Congress. The great agricultural and exporting North-west was opposed to high tariffs; so also was New-York, the great mart of foreign commerce. The South has always been greatly divided on this question, and, since the act of 1846, the aggregate popular vote of the North has always been nearly double that of the South against high tariffs. The author of the tariff of 1846, is now, as always heretofore, devoting all his energies to the support of the Union. So is the distinguished Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, the author of the celebrated anti-slavery Wilmot Proviso, who, with many other Republican Senators and members supported the tariff of 1846. So is the eminent ex-Vice-President, (who gave the celebrated casting vote for the tariff of 1846,) supporting the Union. But it is enough that a majority of Mr. Lincoln's Cabinet supported the tariff of 1846. No, the tariff had nothing to do with the rebellion. It was slavery alone that produced the revolt. There are, however, thousands who favored the act of 1846, and even of 1856, desiring enlarged trade between friendly nations, who regard England now, as the enemy of our Union, the champion of secession, and the friend of this infernal pro-slavery rebellion.