The Civil War Once More

One takes up Professor Edward Channing’s volume on the “War for Southern Independence” with considerable eagerness. Professor Channing stands high among America’s historians of the Old Guard and this is Volume VI of his magnum opus. Moreover, he is a New Englander, born nine years before the close of the tragic struggle of which he writes, and he has been instructor in Harvard for more than forty years. Can Professor Channing write dispassionately of this subject? Has he mastered the results of abundant recent inquiry in this large and complex field? Will this volume, like the previous installments of his great work, be characterized by a masterly balance and occasional outbursts of originality? Does a scholar of sixty-nine possess the mental agility to reckon with all those economic, social, and psychical factors which are the stock in trade of the New School? These are some of the questions which occupy the mind as one begins to thumb the pages of the book now under review.

A careful perusal of the volume convinces the reader of Professor Channing’s familiarity with every important book and monograph bearing on the subject. He is also convinced that the Harvard professor is entirely free from bias. Nothing in the work would indicate the author’s New England origin and training, if Professor Channing did not frequently remind himself of his Northern up-bringing and environment in an endeavor to be strictly fair to the South. One reads that Jefferson Davis is “a man of great natural abilities, thoroughly schooled in the arts of administration and of war, and actuated by a singleness of purpose and a love of country—or of a section—that are rarely found in statesmen and politicians.” One reads that “Stonewall” Jackson is “one of the few military geniuses that the war produced”, the “greatest soldier” of the Confederacy. Lee, while not extravagantly lauded, stands out as a very able general and a noble character of the “lost cause”. The author does not even indulge in severe criticism of Joseph E. Johnston and J. B. Hood, as largely responsible for fatal losses to the Confederacy in the West. And John Brown is hardly portrayed as a hero. With reference to him, Channing says: “Like so many men of one idea in ancient and in modern times, John Brown in earlier life had herded cattle and tended sheep. Long vigils and hours of solitude had led him to that excessive contemplation which seems to be the breeding ground of fanaticism.” In another passage he refers to him as a fit subject for an insane asylum. Nor does the author bestow fervent praise upon such agitators as Harriet Beecher Stowe, for in this connection he remarks: “From the time of Peter the Hermit to Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, mankind has been ruled by the propagandist. Whether right or wrong, he has only to shout loudly enough or write virulently enough and public opinion sooner or later will turn in his favor. He will crush his opponent. The New England literary and oratorical group has a great responsibility on its shoulders.”

Professor Channing gives evidence both of familiarity with the viewpoints of the so-called New School and of an original mind. Although it is plain that he is not attempting to re-interpret the whole period and paint the crisis in entirely new colors, nevertheless one is delighted with his able revision of certain details and his occasional flights of imagination. For instance, he notes that east-west railways as much as the hostility of the Northwest to slavery, were responsible for the gradual detachment of this region from the South; he contends that “more slaves, not more land, was the need of the South”; and he makes the somewhat startling discovery that Northern wheat was perhaps more important to Europe, particularly England, in 1861 than cotton, for the simple reason that there had been an overproduction of this latter staple and the manufacturers had a supply in their warehouses. Again, he points out that emancipation would eventually and gradually have been forced upon the South by the operation of natural law. Overproduction and the growing scarcity of slaves were bankrupting the planters. England and the North would not have permitted the cheapening of the slave supply by the reopening of the slave trade, nor would the South itself—cleft in two by slave-raising and a growing diversity of interests in the upper portion—have been likely to agree upon this measure.

Somebody has declared concerning the recent World War that “both sides to the conflict resembled nothing so much as prehistoric tribes meeting accidentally in the night and, precipitated into a panic, fighting in the belief that each was being attacked by the other.” Now Professor Channing does not literally set down such a remark in regard to the Civil War, but he does make it clear that the South charged the North with injuries which the South brought on itself by its own mistaken economy, that both regions were needlessly alarmed, and that a furore was often raised over matters of no great consequence. The right to introduce slaves north of 36 degrees and 30 minutes was made a passionately contested issue when a few years would have shown the utter futility of the attempt of the Southerners to occupy the region. Many bitter words were exchanged over the question of the return of fugitive slaves when only a few hundred escaped annually. The presence of John Brown and a score or two of men at Harper’s Ferry aroused the South to a frenzy in spite of the fact that the slaves revealed absolutely no enthusiasm for their would-be liberator. The South insisted on hanging Brown when it ought to have demanded his confinement as a hopeless lunatic. Northerners had visions of the introduction of negro slavery into every state of the Union and the perpetuation of the rule of the slave power when as a matter of fact slavery was doomed to slow extinction by the opposition of England and the Upper South to the renewal of the slave trade and by the thousands of immigrants who were augmenting the strength of the North with every year that passed. Southerners feared that Lincoln had designs on slavery in the Southern States when nothing of the kind was true. It may be that Professor Channing did not intend to put the matter quite so strongly, and I am not sure that he does, but I am sure that the careful reader will receive the impression that Channing would hardly agree that the conflict was “irrepressible”. A tragedy might have been avoided by the confinement of a few fanatics on both sides. Some day a bold historian may assert that Lincoln must be classed among these fanatics for his refusal to listen to compromise on the issue of allowing slavery to be extended into the territories. Then a war of pens will break out!

There is one point over which the reviewer feels like quibbling with Professor Channing. One of the main theses of his book appears to be that the able and aggressive Southerners had been running the government from the beginning and were determined to run it to the end or else secede from the Union. In taking this stand he is in agreement with almost every modern investigator; but do the facts support this view? I am quite willing to grant that Southern men were continually found in the high places of the federal government, but they were there by virtue of a combination of Southerners, Northerners, and Westerners into a single party. Such combinations cannot be effected and preserved without concessions, as evidenced by the antebellum high tariff and the gradual advent of universal white manhood suffrage—neither of which pleased Southern planters. The three measures which would have perpetuated negro slavery and with it the prosperity of the South and Southern rule were the unlimited importation of Africans, the restriction of free immigration to the North, and a low tariff. These measures the South failed to secure either because it lacked vision and unity of purpose or because it lacked strength. Perhaps indeed it lacked both. It was not always able to run the nation and, when it was, it was never sure what the South desired or what was best for it. Because the South was unable to increase the supply of slave labor by the importation of negroes, because it could not free itself from an unprofitable dependence upon the protected industry of the North and keep out the ever enlarging stream of immigrants who voted the anti-slavery ticket, demanded free land, and sold their labor to the manufacturers of the North for a song, the South was doomed to a declining prosperity and a subordinate position in the Union. Even this position it would perhaps grumblingly have accepted if it could have been assured against interference with slavery in the states where it already existed. When this assurance appeared to be removed by a fringe of lunatics known as the Abolitionists and by the John Brown raid, Southern radicals and hotspurs gained the upper hand and the Union was dissolved. And, to return once more to Lincoln, it must be noted that the Republican Presidentelect not only refused to accept the compromise which the Southern moderates proposed but also declined to make any further pledge regarding the security of slavery anywhere. Was this Sphinxlike silence in presence of the crisis wise? “If they will not hear Moses and the prophets neither would they be convinced if one arose from the dead.” —But perhaps the analogy does not hold. One can not help wishing that Lincoln had given more encouragement to that group of Southerners who were fighting to prevent secession. In view of the war and its aftermath one feels that a conciliatory patience might have served better the interests of all concerned.