Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 1050
In 1854, during the presidency of Franklin Pierce, two new territories, those of Kansas and Nebraska, were declared, the Act providing for what was then called squatter-sovereignty — that is to say, that the inhabitants had to decide for themselves whether or no they should have slavery. A rehearsal of the Civil War took place, it being signalized by the sack of Lawrence by “border ruffians”; and the battle of Osawatomie, in which abolitionists, led by John Brown, committed a number of murders. In 1857 James Buchanan, an irresolute Democrat, became President and in the same year the Supreme Court delivered the Dred Scott decision. This declared that according to the Constitution of the United States neither negro slaves nor their descendants whether slaves or free were eligible for citizenship. The Missouri Compromise was also declared unconstitutional.
In the meanwhile the sudden influx of gold had had its normal results in the North and terrible commercial disorganization and distress stalked abroad throughout the country.
Public business had come almost to a standstill. Days on end were taken up in both Houses of the legislature by the howlings of imprecations from one side of the chambers to the other, and the imprecations ended inevitably in assaults. The South was enraged to breaking-point by the murders at Osawotamie and the fact that Texas and Nebraska had finally gone abolitionist — the territories being in neither case in any way suited to slave labour. The North was reduced to despair and to threats of secession by the unceasing series of commercial failures and by the results of the Dred Scott case. A secession convention was called in Worcester, Mass., but was unable to meet, the State being unable to find funds for the expenses. In Canada John Brown held a convention of two and propounded a “Provisional Constitution and Ordinance for the People of the United States.” William Lloyd Garrison in the Liberator called incessantly either for secession or the abolition of the Constitution. Of what good, he cried, is it to live under a Constitution when the Constitution itself makes you slaves to insupportable laws? As against that the leading statesmen of the South were shouting that they would not be the slaves of laws that should take their slaves from them.
In the meanwhile, beneath the surface smouldered the bitterness engendered by “nullification.” The business menof the North cared nothing whatever whether the South should or should not have slaves as long as they submitted to tariffs, which, they said, alone could save the trade of the country. That is why Halleck in his suggestions that Sherman should burn Charleston to the ground and sow its site with salt spoke of it as the birthplace of nullification and secession but forgot to adopt Garrison’s phrase: “the viper’s nest of the peculiar institution.”
In October, John Brown, with his army of less than a score of men, seized the Federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry and entrenched himself in the fire station. It is fair to say that Garrison and the more reasonable heads of the Abolitionist Movement did not give him financial support when they learned that his scheme called for the complete massacre of the slave-holding population at the hands of a negro rising.... Brown succeeded in killing a free negro and the mayor of Harper’s Ferry. Federal Marines under an officer called R. E. Lee eventually extracted Brown and his men from the fire station and Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859. The North had its solitary martyr and the South had two more to add to the long roll of men that Brown had murdered... the free negro and the mayor. One does not hear that their souls went marching on.
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In November 1860 Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was elected the first Republican President of the United States. He received all but three of the electoral votes of the Northern States and none at all from the Southern ones.
On December 20, 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union and by January 1861 Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and North Carolina had followed the hornet State. Texas came in in February, Virginia not till April, and Tennessee and Arkansas in May. A provisional Confederate Government had been formed in February and Jefferson Davis was installed as its President. He was a man of the scholarly type, a very bad judge of men, obstinate rather than resolute, hampered by constant ill-health.
His Government was, above all, anxious to avoid war and immediately after the accession of Lincoln tried to open negotiations with the Federal Government. Lincoln, on the other hand, determined on war, refused any negotiations at all and despatched warships for the coercion of Charleston. The Southern Government was thus forced into the technically unfortunate position of firing the first shot... which they did on Fort Sumter, an unfinished harbour fortification in which the Federal garrison of the port had taken refuge. Had they waited until Lincoln’s battleships arrived they must have lost Charleston and South Carolina as they had lost Baltimore and Maryland. But the firing, not on the fort but on the flag — for no one was killed on either side... that technical insult to Old Glory was skilfully used by Lincoln as a fiery cross to call for the rising of the Northern Clans which till then — if we regard as Clans the bulk of the industrial classes of the North — had remained rather surlily indifferent to the situation.... The war was, in essence, on both sides an Employers’ War, the Industrial Employers of the North having the better war-cries whilst the cause of the Planters was hampered by political intrigues and the temperamental incapacity of their civilian leaders. In its purposes the war reproduces all the other wars that have harried the surface of the Great Route. It was the incursion for plunder of a climatically unpleasing North with ideals of enormous wealth into a region beneath the 40th parallel N. where life was easy, traditions strong, and great wealth by no means either desired or necessary for the leading of an agreeable, highly stylized life.... The parallel with, say, the conquest of Provence by the North French is exact. The civilization of the Troubadours was of a highly cultured feudal type, its wealth based on agriculture. In each case the North made skilful use of a moral cry to induce enthusiasm in a rather indifferent world; and again in each case the result, as far as our world of to-day is concerned, was the blotting out of a fairly satisfactory political system and a traditional civilization of a certain beauty... in the case of Provence of a very great beauty indeed.... And as a result, in Provence as in the South, you have had the spectacle of a subject population staging a comeback to real prosperity by means of truck-gardening — and cultivating local arts.
... And once more, to-day in both cases, the prosperity of either set of truck-gardeners is threatened by the tariff wars of their northern neighbours.
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One may make the further paralleling note that all raids from North to South from the days of Brennus to this moment of writing have been Plutarchian — and have been successful just because they have been Plutarchian. Their peoples have been wantingin political passions or intelligence; their troops have been distinguished by dogged perseverance and acquisitiveness rather than fired by the desire for personal distinction; their territories have always been over-populated; their generals, of the push-ahead order that is as a rule of no strategic talent and which relies on big battalions that may be mercilessly squandered on direct attacks, have as a rule had neither political intelligence nor ambition.
(It has been estimated — and I believe correctly — that in the Civil War the South took prisoner, incapacitated or killed more Federal soldiers than were to be found in all the troops they put into the line from 1861 to 1865. Grant’s losses in the Cold Harbour phase of the end of the war were so enormous that they were never officially reported in full. His army refused to attack further although they knew that they outnumbered Lee’s men by four to one.)
This renders the task of the cold-headed politician-advocate of the type of Simon de Montfort or Lincoln or even Bismarck one of comparative ease. He has almost no political intrigues to hamper his business in hand; he can afford to be relatively indifferent to the cause he supports; he need not fear the personal ambitions of his generals and he can be confident of having at his disposal great masses of men who will either murder or be murdered without much questioning. Souths, on the other hand, leading lives of relative leisure, have always found time for political discussions not merely among their representatives but in all classes of society; separate interests form; discords arise.... Thus any South, whether it be France in any wars or the South in the Civil War, will almost always present a cracked and divided front to the solid, wedge-shaped phalanx coming from the direction of the Pole. Jefferson Davis was probably the worst leader that the South could have found. In contradistinction to Lincoln, who treated the Constitution with contempt whenever he had the occasion, - Lee was almost hypo-chondriacally attached to the Confederate Constitution of i860, using its provisos to bolster up his most irritating actions and bringing his nation finally to such a pitch of exasperation as to paralyse himself and bring the nation to the ground. Compared with Lincoln as a member of society he was a gentleman and, if you like, a half-saint as against a sharp lawyer; but compared with Lincoln as the defender of a cause he was a dyspeptic pettifogger-pedant against... once again a sharp lawyer... and one who knew instinctively every rule of the game in the dreadful court in which their suit was tried out. Lee could let his slaves at! Briercliff form a commonwealth of their own — which was a fine, and even successful, adventure. But he was utterly incapable of using Stephens’ written constitution, which, if you must have a written constitution at all, would have been relatively workable in the hands of any commonplace man with a little knowledge of statecraft and some power of selecting the right civilian and military assistants.... It contains, it is tragi-comic to observe, a proviso that any form of commercial protection tariff shall be for ever unconstitutional.
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Another disadvantage of any South is that she will always be wanting in conviction when it comes to sending military expeditions against any North. The North has its eyes always on the South; its national anthem might well be: Kennst du das Land we die Citronen bluehn, and when the time comes for its over-population to overflow it sets out to pick the lemon flowers with sword, torch, morgernstern, poison gas... and Gargantuan enthusiasm.
But the South has no such cause to turn its eyes towards the North. It figures all that as aridities not worth the consideration of serious men. It is true that the Romans penetrated as far as the North Wall in Britain and into Hyrcania. But that was much more with a purpose of pushing the barbarians always further from the metropolis and solidifying the Pax Romana in its inner territories than with any idea that there was anything worth having in England... beyond the tribute of oyster shells.
Similarly in the general large process of establishing their sway as far South as Naples and Sicily, the Normans invaded England from France, which literallyis the South of England. But that was merely consolidating a piece of strategic ground that commanded their sea-route to the Mediterranean — an interior affair of Nordic peoples. Equally the Napoleonic campaigns into Germany and even Russia were strategic and dynastic, failing because France was rather under-than over-populated.... Whereas, if you want proof of the relative efficiency of a relatively Northern people in the realms of plunder by organized murder, you have only to go to the Louvre in Paris to-day and see the spoils from Italy and Egypt brought back by the troops of the Directorate under the generalship of Bonaparte.... Or it would be still more to my purpose if you would ask a normal Spaniard of to-day what he thought of France. You would be astonished to hear him speak of the bloodthirsty Northern plunderers who under Napoleon in the Peninsular War left Spain a desert when retreat was forced upon them... and incidentally benefited the United States by setting loose the great herds of merino-sheep whose progeny even to-day so distinguish, as I have pointed out, the flocks of Pennsylvania and the other Middle States.
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The Directorate and Napoleonic wars would be well worth our study, from our special point of view, if we had the time. They began — like the Crusades against Provence or the Civil War — with a Nordic moral revulsion against Meridional ideas. All North Europe and even the United States revolted against the French republican ideal and expressed their reprehensions, as is usual, in terms of murder. Even Washington participated in the feeling of horror at the executions of the French sovereigns and consented to become the lieutenant-general of the provisional army which was raised for the little war that in 1797 broke out between the two republics... the war in which the U.S.S. Constellation captured l’Insurgente a month before Washington’s eyes closed for ever.
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I have always wondered what, upon his deathbed, must have been the thoughts of that great man at that expression of Virginia in the evolution of the institutions of mankind. There were the stars of the glorious banner, typified by the Constellation, fighting in their courses against the idea of human liberty typified by l’Insurgente — the men of Washington murdering, practically in the name of Monarchy, the sea-mates of De Grasse and Rochambeau who had enabled those stars to fly upon that banner. And the banner was the banner of men that would certainly, could they have caught him, have shortened George III by a head.
(There exists in the records of a State that I am always, except for that, gay at entering, the record of a judgment rendered against certain criminals. It says — in the time-honoured ceremonial phrase of British jurisprudence when about to do murder—”You shall be taken from this place to the place from which you came.”... And there upon an appointed day they — seven of them — should be hanged by the neck. And they should be taken down alive and under their eyes their bowels should be taken out and their bodies should be dismembered... and so on... I do not wish to distress myself by turning up the record, but those words are so near the original as to make no difference, and if anybody doubts them I will provide them with the reference.... The point is that the crime of those abhorred miscreants was that of not being traitors to their king and country. So I think I may allow myself to think that such was the nature of the times that, if they could have caught him, the heroes of the Revolution would have executed George III.)
I am glad to be able to disinter this instance of want of taste on the part of Washington and Virginia; for the greatest soldier and the best individual man that the country of my birth ever produced and the only one of its colonies to deserve the name of civilized would otherwise appear to me to be too marmoreally unflawed to be supportable. One does not want often to think of flaws in the character of a man who is first in the hearts of both his fellow-citizens and his countrymen. But it is comforting to have, tucked away in the back of one’s mind, the consciousness that, two years before his death, the father of his country — who was also a very enlightened part-time farmer — should have made the gesture of taking up arms against the fellow-citizens of Lafayette.... It is, I mean, agreeable to me to think that, in three or four days, going in an automobile between the city and university of Baton Rouge, I shall have a heated argument with Mr. John Gould Fletcher. It will be as to the greatness of the military genius and unshakable determination of Washington. And whilst I, with the meridional passion that comes from long baking in the suns of Tarascon — whilst I shower superlatives on the strategy of the Yorktown campaign — which even Cornwallis cordially applauded — Mr. Fletcher with the English reserve and cynicism which his character has contracted from too long sojourning in the mists that surround the Crystal Palace in Thames Valley — Mr. Fletcher then shall be a little backward in confirming the superlatives that I shall be showering on the character of his distinguished meridional fellow-countryman, who, if he did not have the luck to be born actually in Little Rock, Arkansas, came from very near that rose with its agreeable old official buildings, and admirable cooking — though, alas, the patient New Yorker having gone back to New York will not be able to countersign my statement that the Tates and I and others there did eat a really very passable public meal.... And let that truth be recorded though the heavens fall.... But, indeed, next day we shall eat, on crossing the Louisiana border, some really admirable if rather unduly costly sea-food à la créole. And indeed, in spite of the scorn and contempt that that amiable Manhattanite pours out upon the public cooking of his entire country, I will here interpolate the statement that the sea-food of the whole coastline from New York to New Orleans is uniformly admirable in quality, its preparation increasing in excellence as it goes south.... The unfortunate New Yorker, however, does not appreciate the products of the finny tribe....
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That, however, falls two or three days hence.... Or no, it doesn’t, I am getting the chronology of this voyage entangled. It is now June and my argument with Mr. Fletcher took place in April — because I had to hurry back to New York to be present at the opening of an exhibition of pictures of Provence.... See how the influences of the Great Route travel backwards and forwards and are inextricably mixed! To return, however, to the question of the attributes of the South when attacked by the North — any South by any North....
I was glad then, when in Louisiana I was able, whilst pouring eulogies over Washington as soldier, farmer, and even statesman... for I must by now have made it plain that I do not like politicians... I was able, then, to make a little mental reservation as to his attitude towards the French during their revolution. It absolves one from saying as to everything that he did the fatal words: “Aristides is a just man.”
On the other hand the difficulties between the two Republics were successfully smoothed out by two Southerners who have never been in danger of being too marmorealized. The one was Napoleon Bonaparte of Corsica, the other Thomas Jefferson of Monticello and sometime of Nîmes in Provence. The reasons for not considering Napoleon a saint jump sufficiently to the eye.... But I have never understood why Jefferson’s fellow-countrymen have never accorded the author of at least two documents that shook the world a celebration of his birthday equal to that accorded, say, to Columbus... who, though he discovered land in the Western hemisphere, hoped — and believed to his dying day — that it would turn out to be part of Asia... which seems to be rather insulting.
