The Brothers' War
JohnCalvin Reed
9781465507693
pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
I would explain the real causes and greater consequences of the bloody brothers’ war. I pray that all of us be delivered, as far as may be, from bias and prejudice. The return of old affection between the sections showed gracious beginning in the centennial year. In the war with Spain southerners rallied to the stars and stripes as enthusiastically as northerners. Reconcilement has accelerated its pace every hour since. But it is not yet complete. The south has these things to learn: 1. A providence, protecting the American union, hallucinated Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Mrs. Stowe, Sumner, and other radical abolitionists, as to the negro and the effect of southern slavery upon him, its purpose being to destroy slavery because it was the sine qua non of southern nationalization, the only serious menace ever made to that union. This nationalization was stirring strongly before the federal constitution was adopted. The abolitionists, as is the case with all forerunners of great occurrences, were trained and educated by the powers directing evolution, and they were constrained to do not their own will but that of these mighty powers. 2. The cruel cotton tax; the constitution amended to prevent repentance of uncompensated emancipation, which is the greatest confiscation on record; the resolute effort to put the southern whites under the negroes; and other such measures; were but natural outcome of the frenzied intersectional struggle of twenty-five years and the resulting terrible war. Had there been another event, who can be sure that the south would not have committed misdeeds of vengeance against citizens of the north? 3. We of the south ought to tolerate the freest discussion of every phase of the race question. We should ungrudgingly recognize that the difference of the northern masses from us in opinion is natural and honest. Let us hear their expressions with civility, and then without warmth and show of disrespect give the reasons for our contrary faith. This is the only way for us to get what we need so much, that is, audience from our brothers across the line. Consider some great southerners who have handled most exciting sectional themes without giving offence. There is no invective in Calhoun’s speech, of March 4, 1850, though he clearly discerned that abolition was forcing the south into revolution. Stephens, who had been vice-president of the Confederate States, reviewed in detail soon after the brothers’ war the conflict of opinion which caused it, and yet in his two large volumes he spoke not a word of rancor. When congress was doing memorial honor to Charles Sumner, it was Lamar, a southerner of southerners, that made the most touching panegyric of the dead. And the other day was Dixon’s masterly effort to prove that the real, even if unconscious, purpose of the training at Tuskegee is ultimately to promote fusion, which the southern whites deem the greatest of evils. His language is entirely free from passion or asperity. He wonders in admiration at the marvellous rise of Booker Washington from lowest estate to unique greatness. And he gives genuine sympathy to Professor DuBois, in whose book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” as he says, “for the first time we see the naked soul of a negro beating itself to death against the bars in which Aryan society has caged him.” These examples of Calhoun, Stephens, Lamar, and Dixon should be the emulation of every southerner speaking to the nation upon any subject that divides north and south. This done, we will get the audience we seek. It was this which not long ago gave Clark Howell’s strong paper opposing negro appointments to office in the south prominent place in Collier’s, and which last month obtained for Dixon’s article just mentioned the first pages of the Saturday Evening Post. When we get full audience, other such discussions as those of Howell and Dixon, and that in which Tom Watson, in the June number of his magazine, showed Dr. Booker Washington a thing or two, will be digested by the northern public, to the great advantage of the whole country. The last I have to say here is as to differing opinions upon social recognition of prominent negroes. We of the south give them great honor and respect. Could not Mr. Roosevelt have said to us of Georgia protesting against his entertainment of Booker Washington, “Have I done worse than you did when you had him to make that address at the opening of your Exposition in 1895, and applauded it to the echo?” Suppose, as is true, that hardly a man in the south would eat at the same table with Dr. Washington or Professor DuBois, how can that justify us in heaping opprobrium upon a northern man who does otherwise because he has been taught to believe it right? What has been said in denunciation of the president and Mr. Wanamaker for their conduct towards Booker Washington seems to me rather a hullabaloo of antediluvian moss-backs than the voice of the best and wisest southerners
