most part farmers in northern New York, Pennsylvania, and the states lying farther west, and their descendants still constitute one of the stanchest elements of our agricultural strength. Many of the Canadians also became farmers, but a larger number were engaged in the great northern pine forests as lumbermen.1

It is notable that the foreign immigrants settled in the North and West, and almost none of them went to the South. The natural advantages of the South are quite equal to those of the North, but home seekers found little to attract them where slave labor was supreme and where their social standing would not be above that of the poor whites. And further, the slaveholders did not encourage free men to settle among them, for they well knew that every increment to the free labor in their section would tend to weaken the institution of slavery.

1 See Thorpe's "History of the American people," p. 426.

CHAPTER XXVI

DRIFTING TOWARD HOSTILITIES

CAUSES AND PRELIMINARIES

MANY causes have been given by various writers as bringing about the Civil War; but after all there was only one cause slavery. Let us go back for a hurried glance at the great events of forty years that pointed toward war. It is true that there were muttered rumblings, arising from the slave question, since the founding of the government, but there was no general aligning of the North and the South on opposite sides until the great agitation of 1820 that resulted in the Missouri Compromise. This compromise, though it doubtless aided in keeping slavery out of the Northwest, was an immediate victory for the South.

Then came the Texas question. The South longed for Texas. The North objected, but only feebly, and Texas came in as a slave

Remote causes.

state. Hard on this came the Mexican War. Its object we have noticed in a former chapter — more slave territory. Another victory for the slaveholder? Not exactly; for it happened that the people and not the politicians had it to decide whether California should be a slave or a free state, and they decided for freedom. Next followed the Compromise of 1850, and this was a victory for the South; for the one feature objectionable to the slaveholder-the admission of free California— had already been decided by the people and was therefore not a part of the compromise, and the other feature to attract the chief attention - the Fugitive Slave Law - was forced by the slaveholder upon the North.

Four years then passed, when the slaveholder, scored his greatest victory thus far in the Kansas-Nebraska bill, repealing the Missouri Compromise. By this he received back what he had paid for Missouri. This might have troubled his conscience a little-for he still kept Missouri - until the highest tribunal in the land decided, through

CAUSE OF THE WAR

625

the Dred Scott case, that the slaveholder had been too good to his opponents in granting the Missouri Compromise line, that he had exceeded his powers, like a son bartering away an entailed estate, which he had no power to sell-in other words, that the bargain had been null and void all along. This was hardly fair to the North, for the slaveholder had eaten his cake, he had settled Missouri with slaves, and yet he took back the price he had paid for the privilege.

This ended the victories of the slaveholder. He made one more terrific struggle for Kansas - but he lost. Why? Because, as in California, the people had the matter to settle. It is a very notable fact that in all these minor struggles antedating the war the South won in each case, except in those of California and Kansas; and in these two only had the people an opportunity to decide. All the others were decided by the ruling class, so-called.

From these facts we reach the twofold conclusion: first, that the slaveholder dominated the government for many years before the war; second, that the people in general were not in sympathy with him. If then the people, the source of all power, did not approve the slaveholder's rule, why did they not take matters into their own hands, as they had the right and the power to do? It may be answered that they did this eventually. First they defeated the Democratic party for waging the Mexican War; then they slew the Whig party for the compromise measures. But such mild treatment was ineffective in dealing with such a powerful, audacious, determined oligarchy as the slave power of the South. Seeing that heroic measures were necessary, the people therefore founded a new political party, based it on the non-extension of slavery, and elected their President. This was a notice that the extension of slavery must cease; and this the slaveholder could not endure - hence came the

war.

Some say

The cause of the war was slavery, and slavery alone. that the war arose from the different interpretations of the Constitution on the question of state sovereignty, miscalled state rights. But what caused this difference of interpretation? Slavery. State

1 One cause of the people's tardiness was their indifference. It required many years for the North to learn that the Union could not continue half slave and half free. 2 It is true that fewer than half the people voted for Lincoln; many were too timid to vote their convictions, others could not break away from the historic party of their fathers; but it is certain that by 1860 a large majority of the people of the country opposed the further extension of slavery.

sovereignty was but a weapon, the most convenient and effective, with which the slaveholder battled for his favorite institution. Why should he wish to destroy the Union which his fathers had helped to form? Why should he be less loyal than the New England manufacturer, the Pennsylvania miner, or the Ohio farmer? It was not so at the beginning of the century; it is not so to-day, since the apple of discord has been removed. For sixty years no state or statesman had threatened the Union through state rights per se. In every case, when so used, it was some grievance that led to the use of state rights as the handiest effective weapon. When Jefferson abandoned his extreme state rights views for a stronger union, the status of that doctrine would have been settled except on account of other grievances for which it was made a mask. But for slavery state rights would have adjusted itself; and this it was doing, for it was less prominent in 1840 than at the beginning of the century. State rights in the abstract had nothing to do with bringing on the

war.

Very true; but what say that the election But why was Lincoln

Others say that secession caused the war. caused secession? Slavery. Still others will of Lincoln brought about secession and war. objectionable to the South, except on account of his views and the attitude of his party on slavery? The Kansas-Nebraska Law, the Dred Scott decision, the border strife in Kansas, — each played its part in hastening the war, but they were all slavery questions. In short, all the various causes that converged to bring about the dreadful conflict may be summed up into one sweeping cause of causes slavery.

In a remoter sense, however, climatic and economic conditions, which rendered slave labor remunerative at the South and not at the North, may be said to have caused the war; but these conditions would have brought no war without slavery. The Northern states emancipated soon after the Revolution, not that the people were more righteous than those of the South, for they were not, but

1 New England had a quarrel with the government during the War of 1812, and appealed to state sovereignty; Pennsylvania had a similar experience in 1808, Ohio in 1820, South Carolina in 1832. As Alexander Johnson truly says: "Almost every state in the Union in turn declared its own sovereignty, and denounced as almost treasonable, similar declarations in other cases by other states." But the doctrine was given up in other sections while it was retained in the South because of the peculiar institution. Thus at the South the generation preceding the war was thoroughly indoctrinated with state rights, and it was this that led such men as Robert E. Lee to side with the South. But this condition was brought about wholly by slavery.

because slavery had not taken such a hold on the North. Slavery in the one section and not in the other brought about a growing dif ference in social, economic, and political conditions, and the two sections drifted apart for many years. The statement that the causes of the war were 66 numerous and varied" is misleading if unexplained, for every cause had its root in slavery. It is morally certain that there would have been no war but for slavery unless it must be admitted that no people are capable of adjusting in right proportion the relations of the great opposing tendencies, Nationality and Democracy, without bloodshed.

The slaveholder was remarkably shrewd, but he made blunders. One was his forcing the Fugitive Slave Law upon the northern conscience. This led the northerner to see slavery in its ugliest form. The pleasant relations between the master and slave he did not see; he saw only the fleeing black man and heard his tale of woe; again, he saw the fugitive seized and dragged back to the land of bondage. Such scenes awakened in the people of the North a moral resentment against slavery as nothing else could have done.

The most serious blunder of the slaveholder was his forcing the war by an attempt to break up the Union. This was a daring leap, and it proved to be a fatal blunder. He had been pro- The slavetected by the Constitution and by his influence over the holder's northern politicians; now he shattered the Constitution blunder. and alienated his northern friends; he appealed his case from the lower court, the Constitution and the government, to the higher tribunal, the people. Had he not learned by the fate of California and Kansas, by the rough handling of the Whig party and of the Kansas-Nebraska Democrats, that the people were not with him? The slaveholder knew that the North was immeasurably stronger than the South; he certainly knew that in an exhausting war, a fight to the finish, between the Union and the slave power, both could not survive. Did he underestimate the Union sentiment, the love for the old flag at the North? Did he expect to be permitted to depart in peace? Or did he rely on foreign recognition and aid? The slaveholder was admirably brave and daring, but in some ways he miscalculated, and he made a fatal blunder in permitting his cause to be appealed to the sword.2

1 Macy's "Political Parties," p. 117.

2 The line of discussion in this section is similar to that of Chapter IV of my "Side Lights," Series II.