Slavery is really a barbaric element, and is in direct antagonism to American civilization.The whole force of the national life opposes it, and must finally eliminate it, or become itself extinct and it is no mean proof of their utter want of sympathy with all the living forces of modern civilization, that the leading men of the South and their prominent friends at the North really persuaded themselves that with cotton, rice, and tobacco, they could effectually resist the anti-slavery movement, and perpetuate their barbaric democracy.They studied the classics, they admired Greece and Rome, and imagined that those nations became great by slavery, instead of being great even in spite of slavery.They failed to take into the account the fact that when Greece and Rome were in the zenith of their glory, all contemporary nations were also slaveholding nations, and that if they were the greatest and most highly civilized nations of their times, they were not fitted to be the greatest and most highly civilized nations of all times.They failed also to perceive that, if the Graeco-Roman republic did not include the whole territorial people in the political people, it yet recognized both the social and the territorial foundation of the state, and never attempted to rest it on pure individualism; they forgot, too, that Greece and Rome both fell, and fell precisely through internal weakness caused by the barbarism within, not through the force of the barbarism beyond their frontiers.The world has changed since the time when ten thousand of his slaves were sacrificed as a religious offering to the manes of a single Roman master.The infusion of the Christian dogma of the unity and solidarity of the race into the belief, the life, the laws, the jurisprudence of all civilized nations, has doomed slavery and every species of barbarism; but this our slaveholding countrymen saw not.
It rarely happens that in any controversy, individual or national, the real issue is distinctly presented, or the precise question in debate is clearly and distinctly understood by either party.Slavery was only incidentally involved in the late war.
The war was occasioned by the collision of two extreme parties;but it was itself a war between civilization and barbarism, primarily between the territorial democracy and the personal democracy, and in reality, on the part of the nation, as much a war against the socialism of the abolitionist as against the individualism of the slaveholder.Yet the victory, though complete over the former, is only half won over the latter, for it has left the humanitarian democracy standing, and perhaps for the moment stronger than ever.The socialistic democracy was enlisted by the territorial, not to strengthen the government at home, as it imagines, for that it did not do, and could not do, since the national instinct was even more opposed to it than to the personal democracy; but under its antislavery aspect, to soften the hostility of foreign powers, and ward off foreign intervention, which was seriously threatened.The populations of Europe, especially of France and England, were decidedly anti-slavery, and if the war here appeared to them a war, not solely for the unity of the nation and the integrity of its domain, as it really was, in which they took and could take no interest, but a war for the abolition of slavery, their governments would not venture to intervene.This was the only consideration that weighed with Mr.Lincoln, as he himself assured the author, and induced him to issue his Emancipation Proclamation; and Europe rejoices in our victory over the rebellion only so far as it has liberated the slaves, and honors the late President only as their supposed liberator, not as the preserver of the unity and integrity of the nation.This is natural enough abroad, and proves the wisdom of the anti-slavery policy of the government, which had become absolutely necessary to save the Republic long before it was adopted; yet it is not as the emancipator of some two or three millions of slaves that the American patriot cherishes the memory of Abraham Lincoln, but, aided by the loyal people, generals of rare merit, and troops of unsurpassed bravery and endurance, as the saviour of the American state, and the protector of modern civilization.His anti-slavery policy served this end, and therefore was wise, but he adopted it with the greatest possible reluctance.
There were greater issues in the late war than negro slavery or negro freedom.That was only an incidental issue, as the really great men of the Confederacy felt, who to save their cause were willing themselves at last to free and arm their own negroes, and perhaps were willing to do it even at first.This fact alone proves that they had, or believed they had, a far more important cause than the preservation of negro slavery.They fought for personal democracy, under the form of State sovereignty, against social democracy; for personal freedom and independence against social or humanitarian despotism; and so far their cause was as good as that against which they took up arms; and if they had or could have fought against that, without fighting at the same time against the territorial, the real American, the only civilized democracy, they would have succeeded.It is not socialism nor abolitionism that has won; nor is it the North that has conquered.The Union itself has won no victories over the South, and it is both historically and legally false to say that the South has been subjugated.The Union has preserved itself and American civilization, alike for North and South, East and West.
