SOUTHERN STATESMEN AND THEIR POLICY.

THE boast of the Democracy, in the recent canvass, of "a solid South," seemed to illustrate the madness of those whom the gods have determined to destroy, since it repelled the last cherished hope of a reviving loyalty, and presented for the judgment of the nation the views and aims of the Southern leaders.

Among the subjects connected with the outcome of the rebellion, to which slight justice has yet been done, from which political leaders on both sides have appeared to shrink, and which await the criticism of publicists and the judgment of history, are the degree of wisdom exhibited by the representatives of the North who planned and executed their scheme of reconstruction for the Southern States, with extended powers and slender guarantees; and next, the policy and methods resorted to by the champions of "the lost cause," to recover the control of their section and ultimately of the republic.

The Convention which framed the American Constitution was called by Jefferson "an assembly of demigods," and Mr. Gladstone has spoken of that Constitution as "the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain or purpose of man." It remains to be seen whether other Jeffersons and Gladstones will apostrophize as superhuman the virtue, wisdom, and foresight that presided at Washington over the reconstruction of the South, and commend that work as a masterpiece of statesmanship, wonderful and godlike, to the admiration of the world.

Small reverence has thus far been expressed for it by the Republicans themselves, as their triumphant party gradually fell from the height of power to the valley of humiliation; as they watched those recently in rebellion against the Government, reconquering loyal States and resuming the control of the Senate and the House; and as in utter helplessness they saw fraud, intimidation, and vioVOL. CXXXI.-NO. 289.

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lence spreading over the South-the murder-rate rising to a degree unknown to the rest of Christendom; Southern citizens who stood by the Government ostracized and punished; while with a bad faith, at which the world still marvels, the ballot of the freedman, for which the South claimed an increase of electors, was arrested by assassination.

The policy of conciliation and confidence on which the Government based its scheme of reconstruction was at the time pronounced by European statesmen sentimental and dangerous. It was the exaggerated counterpart of that feeble and fatal policy of conciliation and concession into which the nation had been so long deluded by the Slave-power under assurances of its devotion to the Union, until what was deemed a convenient period arrived for its dissolution.

However conciliatory and magnanimous our policy, there were things clearly demanded by the safety and honor of the nation. We might waive indemnity for the past, but we had no right to waive security for the future: security for the Union whites, security for the enfranchised blacks, security for republican government in each State, with public schools for all on a permanent basis, and a fair and equal administration of the law so far as depended on the national Government, in a manner calculated to impress the Southern mind and to encourage loyalty to the national Constitution.

If the reconstruction policy was to be one of conciliation, there was the more reason for its execution in a way to attract to the side of the Government the ablest and most influential of the Southern leaders. Alexander Hamilton said—and the statesmen of his day knew how to reduce maxims to practice—“Our prevailing opinions are ambition and interest, and it will ever be the duty of a wise government to avail itself of those passions in order to make them subservient to the public good, for these ever induce us to action."

General Longstreet, Mr. ex-Secretary McCrary, Colonel Mosby, and a few other prominent Southrons who can almost be counted on one's fingers, accepted the situation, repudiated what Washington, with prophetic vision, called "the monster," State sovereignty, and accepted in good faith the results of the war and the constitutional amendments.

But the Southern leaders of opinion-men like Mr. Alexander H. Stephens, General Wade Hampton (so recently a prince among the

great slaveholders), General Robert Toombs, Mr. Senator Hill, Senator Vance, Governor Colquitt, of Georgia, Mr. Call, of Florida, Mr. Garland, of Arkansas, and others of equal prominence, seem to have adhered with new energy to their olden views engendered by slavery and, if they have admitted that the slave is free, they have resisted with their ancient pertinacity his advance to political equality and they have claimed as proudly as before, the rights, privileges, and prejudices of an aristocratic class. They belong, so the "Charleston Mercury" assures us, to a master-race, and have looked upon Northern Puritans as the Cavaliers looked upon Saxon serfs. Their treatment of the freedmen is disclosed by the official proofs glanced at by Judge Tourgee; and a Southern paper, the "Meriden Mercury," ventures to prophesy that "the negro in these States will be a slave again, or cease to be. His sole refuge from extinction will be in slavery to the white man." The faith seems to linger among this class of Southern gentlemen that the right to enslave the negro is the most sacred of all liberties.

The Southern leaders who visited the North during the canvass, and spoke at the assemblage presided over by Mr. Belmont, avoided the discussion of these questions, and but little of the Southern policy so frankly developed in the Southern Historical Society, and occasionally by their impulsive orators, could be learned from the speeches of their accomplished spokesmen, Messrs. Bayard, Carroll, Whyte, Hampton, Richardson, Mackay, Waddell, Williams, Hill, and Garland. Mr. Bayard was inclined to treat as a party invention the idea of a solid South, apparently forgetting Democratic boasts like that of Mr. Blackburn, of Kentucky: "Let the radicals cease their brawl about a 'solid South.' She is solid, thank God; she was solid for Jeff Davis in 1860, and we will be solid for Hancock in 1880." Mr. Carroll alluded to the one hundred and thirty-eight votes solid against the Republican party in a tone which seemed to intimate that they intended to claim these votes as valid, and that they really expected that the Republicans would recognize them as valid, despite the plain rule so clearly stated by General Hancock that "neither force nor fraud must be allowed to subvert the rights of the people," and that unless there is "a full vote, free ballot, and fair count," the foundation is taken away, and the whole structure of republican government falls.

There was no allusion to the well-known fact that, of the States counted in the solid South, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, with thirty-three votes, had an unquestionable Repub

lican majority; a fact which recalls the declaration of General Toombs, in the Georgia Convention, which framed the present Constitution of that State, as quoted by the author of the "Fate of Republics":"They [the freedmen] are to be governed as every race of paupers is governed by those who own the property and give them bread. . . . As his friends tried to govern him by force and fraud, we will control him by force and fraud to prevent his bringing us to ruin."

The efforts of the Southern leaders since the war to recover the control of the republic will supply an instructive chapter for our national history. Whatever may be thought of the judiciousness of their policy or the morality of their methods, those most at variance with them on these points can still admit that their devotion to "the lost cause" has been worthy of a higher and nobler end: and that they have exhibited a steadiness of resolution, a boldness of conception, and an audacity in execution which, if exemplified by sounder aims and purer methods, might well command approval and respect.

Perhaps their ablest leader since the war has been Mr. Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia, who, in his eloquent protest against secession in 1860, said: ". . . I fear, if we rashly take that step, that instead of becoming gods we shall become demons, and at no distant day commence cutting one another's throats."

His next great effort, known at the South as the "corner-stone speech," was delivered on the 21st of March, 1861; and in February, 1866, Mr. Stephens made a third speech, of which extracts are given in an admirable address at Atlanta, April 2, 1879, of the Hon. J. E. Bryant. Mr. Stephens said: "Secession was tried. That has failed. Our only alternative now is either to give up all hope of constitutional liberty or retrace our steps, and to look for its vindication and maintenance in the forums of reason and justice, instead of on the arena of arms; in the courts and halls of legislation instead of on the field of battle."

In support of this view, Mr. Stephens found encouraging example and hope in the history of the mother-country.

His idea that the cause lost on the battle-field should be prosecuted with faith and perseverance in politics was promptly accepted; and in 1868 General Wade Hampton was reported as having said to the alumni of Washington College, Virginia, in allusion

*Boston: Estes & Lauriat, 1880, p. 232.

to their "martyred dead," "The cause for which Jackson and Stuart fell can not be in vain, but will in some form revive."

In 1873 the Southern Historical Society was founded at Montgomery, by the representation of twelve States, not simply to secure materials for a history of the war, but to exert "a moral influence through the whole South; . . . to repel the insidious advances of those vicious principles which are now so fearfully undermining the civilization of the North." Mr. Jefferson Davis was present, and it is said was received "as President Davis, with all the honors due to the President of the United States."

In October, 1873, General Wade Hampton addressed the Southern Historical Society in the Senate-chamber at Richmond, and said: "Now, when that country is prostrate in the dust, weeping for her dead who have died in vain to save her liberties, every patriotic impulse should urge her surviving children to vindicate the great principles for which she fought."

In their behalf he drew an augury of their future success from an historic parallel, drawn from Continental Europe, in which the South was likened to Prussia and the North to France. When Napoleon, in the campaign of Jena, had struck down the whole military strength of Prussia, no hope was left but in the unconquered and unconquerable patriotism of her sons. But a few years passed before her troops turned the scale of victory at Waterloo, and the Treaty of Paris atoned in part for that of Tilsit. The orator next pictured Prussia as educating her children to be good citizens in time of peace and formidable soldiers in war, with the awakened spirit of the Fatherland for half a century, until she met her old antagonist, and the extorted contributions had been repaid, and shameful defeats wiped out by glorious victories.

A little later, on the 1st of July, 1875, General John S. Preston, of South Carolina, addressed the alumni of the University of Virginia on their fiftieth year, and he referred to the difference between "the turbulent fanatic of Plymouth Rock and the Godfearing Christian of Jamestown" as lying at the basis of the present antagonism of the North and South, as forbidding for ever the bonds of brotherhood, and as verifying anew the irreversible maxim of the Greek philosopher: "You may combine for the pursuit of trade, or form alliances for defense, but Corinth and Megara can never be one state; they are two peoples."

With reference to the war, General Preston said: "Let your historian say, 'We were not subdued when Lee surrendered