The Southern Confederacy was compelled to face the unpleasant fact that this constituted the first flouting of the Nation’s authority by a single State which had come about (except in the matter of reluctant payment of taxes). The Confederate Secretary of War ordered a disposition of troops along the borders of Louisiana and Arkansas, the Secretary of the Navy sent warships to lie outside Galveston and Corpus Christi. There was now more chance of open warfare between Texas and the Confederacy than between the Confederacy and the North. But the brigades did not move, and thousands of wary Texans stood ready to dispute their passage into the State … cannon were being moved into position to defend the harbors.
When, on April 21st (the anniversary of the Battle of San Jacinto) a wildly enthusiastic legislature at Austin declared for secession from the Confederacy, and when, two days later, Houston Lockey was named as provisional President of the second Republic of Texas, not a shot was exchanged between opposing forces along the State’s margins.
Nor did the United States draw its sword. A perplexing no-man’s-land of baked plains and rough hillocks stood assimilated by Texas. The Indian Territory problem no longer existed, and the Northern public appeared glad to be rid of it.
A basic doctrine of self-determination by a commonwealth had been reasserted and redemonstrated, to the Confederacy’s vexation. But the loss of Texas redounded to the eventual advantage of the Southern nation, since the need for a strong centralized authority of government had become sadly apparent; and from that time forth the political tide flowed toward delocalization of sovereignty.
“I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”
“There must be the position of the superiors and the inferiors; and … I, as much as any other man, am in favor of the superior position being assigned to the white man.”
These were not the utterances of a Toombs or a Stephens or a Barksdale, and the words were spoken not south of the Ohio River but north of it. They were spoken by Abraham Lincoln at Charleston, Illinois, in September, 1858. They were not exactly a defense of human slavery, but neither did they intimate that Lincoln would ever promulgate an Emancipation Proclamation. Seasons and circumstances may alter original attitudes.
Dolorously the Confederate States of America heard and felt the mutterings of abolition within their own bulk. It was the trend of the nineteenth century and could no longer be ignored or denied. Equally it was impossible in the Republic of Texas (although slaves proportionately were fewer there) for men to escape eternally from an humanitarian obligation.
Such a nation as Argentina, laboring supposedly under an archaic system, had decreed that all children born to slaves after January 31st, 1813, should be free. Mexico freed her slaves in 1829. Officially there were no slaves in British colonies after 1838, nor in French colonies after 1848. Texas and the Confederate States labored under the weight of an institution as unsound economically as it was repugnant spiritually.
Defenders of a designated Holy system—those who invoked Biblical texts to support their tenet—were dying out. New voices were heard, and some of them rose from surprising sources. The Jeffersonian party was a force to be reckoned with. It had been founded in the certainty that liberation must come about; and was named for the revered statesman who had, long before, manumitted his own slaves. So had Robert E. Lee, so had hosts of other eminent Confederates.…
Admired officials such as Stephen Dodson Ramseur (he owned a brilliant record during the war of 1861–63, and became Confederate Secretary of War in 1880) lent their strength to the Jeffersonians. Emotionally and intellectually the Confederacy could not with blandness ignore the belief and example of those very men who had been most instrumental in securing the prized independence. A former chief-of-staff of the army, General Robert E. Rodes, made bold to sit upon a platform with State chairmen of the Jeffersonian party, shortly after he resigned his commission in 1878. (Rodes wished to put down the Texas rebellion by force of arms, and was chagrined at the failure of his Government to act.) Even General John Pegram, who succeeded Rodes in command, was alleged to embrace the same principles.
The Dutch began a liberation policy in 1863, the United States of America ratified the thirteenth amendment late in 1865. Spain, in 1870, had decreed the freedom of all slaves reaching the age of sixty years, and made provision for the gradual emancipation of younger ones. Even Brazil adopted a twenty-one-year clause in 1871, which eventually would bring freedom to all.
The Southern republics of North America sat alone, clinging uncertainly to a system no longer justified by plutology or in the philosophy of their enlightened citizens.
Various States had acted independently. Virginia and Kentucky went “Free” during the last year of the Lee administration; North Carolina joined them in 1876. In Texas there had been a vigorous attempt to insert a liberation clause in the constitution of the Republic, though this was voted down.
“A Divine light may be seen at times,” wrote a venerable bishop and former Confederate lieutenant general, as he assembled the impressions received during his busy life.* “It reveals the errors of humanity as assuredly it illuminates the pathway toward which a traveler must turn if he is to avoid any duplication of the same ambuscades. Both Honor and Devotion demand the acceptance of a route which, though it may lead temporarily amid wastes of humiliating regret and mortification, is the unprofaned highway toward a repentant Future.”
The implication in this statement is that the South had a choice. Actually it had none. Progressive enlightenment and reform among the nations at large had deleted any excuse for a protraction of human slavery. No longer might the question be, What? but only When? and How? Sullen or hysterical resistance by stubborn cliques in the various States could but accelerate an exertion of power by the central government. When Maryland and Tennessee declared for liberation (by the 1880s, freed blacks in the Confederacy nearly equaled the slave population) the Jeffersonians received multitudes of fresh converts from younger and more liberal elements in other States as well.
Now there was little resistance worthy of the name. The Liberation Act (with provision for financial restitution of slaveowners) passed both houses of Congress early in 1885 by a comfortable margin, as did an accompanying constitutional amendment. Ratification of the latter was accomplished speedily by every State. Remarkable transportational and mechanical developments of the previous decade played their part in the decision, most certainly; but a long view of ethical and moral principles had its salubrious effect throughout the population.
People of the new Republic of Texas duplicated their neighbors’ resolution only four months later.
“We stand fortunate,” said President James Longstreet, in a message to the Nation on Freedom Day (April 13th, 1885), “in that this reform has been accomplished by self-determination, and not by the infliction of a discipline which could and should have been resented. We must award increasing reverence to the memory of martyrs who died to achieve our independence. Had we, the Confederate States of America, gone down in defeat, there might have ensued a period of enforced amalgamation replete with every imaginable domestic horror. A common hatred directed against the Negro, which we do not now demonstrate or even possess, would have been the inevitable result.”
President Longstreet went on to point out the high degree of literacy and skills already demonstrated by the blacks, and to praise the efforts of citizens who had established the Freedmen’s Agricultural and Mechanical Schools.
“Public funds shall be employed to extend such benefits to all. I foresee a time when even the aptitude for suffrage may be gained by those emancipated. Let us welcome these faithful people into our economic structure, and profit mutually through them and with them. Let us give thanks to Almighty God that this great good was achieved in accord with a changing time, and in harmonious acceptance by all. I believe that a fevered dislocation of our entire system would have but substituted bru
tality for human courtesy, suspicion for common trust, and would have engendered a fundamental antagonism.”
* * *
Many of the best minds, both in the United and in the Confederate States, were keenly aware of benefits accruing twenty-two years previously by the cessation of a fratricidal war within twenty-eight months after its beginning. This opinion was reaffirmed constantly by spokesmen, North and South, throughout the decades. It grew to be an international attitude; and eventually was reiterated even by fundamentalists at the North, who insisted originally that the tragedies of Gettysburg and Vicksburg dealt the United States of America a blow fully mortal.
No less a personage than James Birdseye McPherson, nineteenth President of the United States, referred to this fact in his second inaugural address, which is now familiar to most schoolboys.
“Both we and our respected neighbors at the South,” said President McPherson, “must look upon the separation which ensued as a matter transcending national boundaries but of deepest concern to our combined American spirit. The Confederate States were indeed victorious, and the doctrine of Federal resistance to a choice of secession was disproved. But the human heart, and the American human happiness, achieved a victory far more extensive. Had the hideous attrition of the campaigns in 1862 and 1863 been extended—or perhaps even intensified—for another two years, the vigor of the young population upon our Continent might have been bled into whiteness. Vast populations, now living heartily and productively, might be mere relic bones in Virginia loam or in Georgia clay. We must turn toward the Past without recrimination, and, by the same token, face our Future with that thankfulness which is born only of high courage. We must reach across that boundary which is no longer fortified, no longer the sentry-beat of armed men. We must embrace those patriots of the South, no longer to be typified as dissident and rebellious, and with them declare: ‘Give thanks to God that it ended when it did! Better two alert nations, still strong in the muscle and spirit of youth, than one confused and weakened entity dyed deeply with the sentiment of sectionalism, and befouled by angry wounds which might not heal for a century to follow!’”
President McPherson’s expressed opinions drew immediate and favorable response from Confederate leaders. The colorful Southern Senator and former cavalry chief, Jeb Stuart, for example, applauded the Northern Executive’s sentiments by telegraph, by personal letter which followed, and by a speech in the Confederate Senate at Washington only a week later. A. P. Hill, at the time Confederate Secretary of War, also concurred, although perhaps less flamboyantly, President McPherson’s utterance had met with some lack of acceptance by certain segments of the Northern press; but was greeted with enthusiasm by Confederate editors.
Still, it was not Senator Stuart himself, but his son, R. E. L. Stuart—the Rel Stuart of dashing Spanish war fame, hero of the brief Confederate campaign waged in Cuba in 1898—who became eventually a vital and articulate proponent of those principles peculiar to the Consolidation parties. (These appeared in the three nations during early years of the twentieth century.) Consolidationists found their most effective leadership (in the Confederacy, at least) in the person of that great Virginian, Woodrow Wilson, eleventh President of the Confederate States of America.
Rel Stuart, born in 1867, had all of his father’s intrepidity and assertiveness. These qualities, which some people found distasteful in the picturesque sire, were disciplined in the case of the son by application of a calm and tolerant restraint. Rel Stuart did not join in the numerous filibustering expeditions to Cuba which became the plaything of young Confederates and Texans during the 1880s and 1890s. Stuart, although trained for a military career, resigned from the C.S. Army at the age of twenty-nine to go to Congress. There he distinguished himself quickly by displaying perceptive qualities of leadership. When the battleship Mississippi was blown up and sunk, in Havana harbor on the night of February 15th, 1898, Robert E. Lee Stuart affirmed (along with the rest of the Congress) that a state of war existed and should exist between the kingdom of Spain and the Confederate States.
Within forty-eight hours following the decisive action at Washington he had resigned as Representative, and accepted a commission, taking immediate command of a brigade under General Fitzhugh Lee, who was to head the expeditionary force. Soon in command of a division, Rel Stuart, in a lightning campaign, swept through Cuba and nullified Spanish resistance. It was regarded as the decisive land operation of that brief but violent war. It was not unexpected that he should come to be known (following the treaty of peace signed on December 10th, 1898) as “The Modern Father of Cuban Annexation.” Fervently interested in the rehabilitation of the Cuban people, and in the rebuilding of cities and plantations destroyed by warfare, Stuart served successively as Military Governor of the occupied island, provisional Governor of the Territory, following its establishment; and for two terms as Governor of the State of Cuba, after its admission into the Confederacy. He is credited, also, with having been a major force in the establishment of Cuba’s eventual wealth as sugar capital of the world, rising from an influx of both Confederate States’ and United States’ money. He was considered to be the author of economic concessions which attracted a flow of funds from New York and New England, so necessary to profitable development of the sugar industry.
In his elder years, while serving as Ambassador to the United States, the internationally admired Rel Stuart often referred humorously to the fact that his life might not have been lived had the war of the 1860s been extended. “Any old campaigner knows,” he is reported as having said at a Gridiron Dinner in Columbia in 1930, “that a man in the field can thrust out his neck only about so long, and then the axe of Fate will fall against it. My late father, bless him, was not noted for any reluctance to personally engage the enemy. Suppose one of your Yankee grandfathers had managed to reach him with a pistol bullet, during some minor encounter in Virginia—let us say, at a hamlet like Appomattox Court, Gum Spring, or Yellow Tavern! Why, I should never have been born!—and the great United States of America should have had to worry along without the cooperative services of a brilliant Confederate Ambassador such as myself!”
Stuart was well-loved throughout the American nations, having served as a diplomatic representative to the Republic of Texas, prior to his ambassadorship to the United States. The entire continent was plunged into mourning in 1931, when Rel Stuart—vigorous, active and influential in his sixty-fifth year—died in an airliner crash in Kansas. It was the same catastrophe which claimed the life of Knute Roekne, famous Notre Dame football coach.
* * *
The six and one-half decades of Rel Stuart’s life were marked by the posing of, and by the complicated ascendancy of, a distinct problem—one to which the twenty-nine years following his death have brought no equable solution. It was the problem of the Negro, and the extent to which a free colored population might be assimilated into the country’s economic, political and social structures.
President Longstreet (in the message of April, 1885, quoted ante) seemed to assume that eventual difficulties would be minimized because emancipation had not been foisted upon a prostrate South in one fell swoop. But his hopes for a smooth and temperate transition could not be realized. Friction was recognizable immediately; it compounded through the years. The color question became, within a generation or two, the most painful disputation within the Nation.
“There are those who think that this issue will not be resolved short of a thousand years hence,” wrote a Confederate statesman of our own time.* “Others are convinced that the pressure of world opinion will bring at least political and economic—if not social—equality to the Negro, before the end of this century. In creasingly plagued by controversy lies the uneasy head of our Country! Sagacious moderates are still stanch in their efforts to achieve a fair adjustment in professional, commercial and industrial enterprise, in rural economics, and in higher education. But the extremists of both factions wrap the barbed-wire of fresh entanglements along the path
s of conciliation.”
And the dilemma of the Southern Nation was not hers alone, but became a mournful dowry which necessarily she would fetch along into any future amalgamation of Americans.
* * *
Throughout his public life Woodrow Wilson carried an ambition for unity. Despite a boyhood spent in Virginia (some biographers have said because of it) he became imbued early with a fierce belief that Americans could not achieve their true destiny except in communion. Beyond that, his hopes were for an extension of democratic ideal throughout the world, embracing eventually a fruitful future for all peoples therein.
He was realist enough to observe that such a widespread Utopian enterprise could not be brought about in his own lifetime—perhaps not in many decades to follow. But the hope was there, and he felt that an initial linking-up of the American nations must and should occur, as a brilliant example of what might be accomplished, inter-continentally, in a later age.
Also he possessed sufficient political sagacity to refrain from public utterances which might be interpreted as too radical, until he was safely ensconced behind the pulpit of the Confederate Presidency in 1910. Then he began to speak; his own Country and others listened to him—at first with incredulity, often with hostility, but always with awareness.
“A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations.”
“It must be a league of honor, a partnership of opinion.”
“The principle for which the South fought meant standstill in the midst of change; it was conservative, not creative; it was against drift and destiny; it protected an impossible institution and a belated order of society; it withstood a creative and imperial idea, the idea of a united people and a single law of freedom.”
If the South Had Won the Civil War Page 5