The Brothers' War - The Original Classic Edition. John Calvin

life demands the very best and highest art.

       In my last two chapters I do all I can to clear up the race question, which is now densely beclouded with northern misunderstanding and southern prejudice. The negro has a nature that in some material particulars differs so widely from that of the Caucasian that it ought[Pg 24] to be duly allowed for; and yet as people are so prone to think all others just like themselves, this is hardly ever done. Now, forty years after emancipation, we see that the promptings and consequences of his nature just emphasized in combination with the social forces operating upon him have caused changes in the situation, of the gravest import to him. His native idleness, coming back stronger and stronger the further he gets in time from the steady work of slavery, his lack of forecast, his vice, inveter-

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       ate pauperism, increasing disease and insanity, on one side; the hostility excited against him by the inexpressibly unwise grant to him of equal political rights, and the rapid invasion by white labor since the early nineties of the province which he appropriated during the years when the whites had not recovered from the paralyzing shock and surprise of emancipation, on the other side, example these changes. There has evolved a division of the southern negroes into two classes. One class, which I most roughly distinguish as the upper, contains all those who are not compelled by their circumstances to be unskilled laborers in country and town. It hardly amounts to one-twentieth of the whole. The millions are all in the other class, which I again most roughly distinguish as the lower. Ponder what I tell you of them, their helplessness, their accelerating degradation, their mounting death rate, their gloomy pros-

       pects. I try hard also to have the upper class well understood. To a southerner it is amazing how many outside people of education, intelligence, and fair-mindedness assume that the multitude in the lower class are the same in every material detail of character and ability as those few who by various favors of fortune have found place in the upper class. To stress here, in the beginning, a fact as its very great importance demands, nearly all the negroes who get high station are[Pg 25] part white. Dumas, the father, was at least half white. The son Dumas was probably three-quarters white. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Anglo-African composer, is half white.

       Such as these are the samples by which nearly all the continent and England, and many northerners, estimate the capacity of the pure negroes of the south, grovelling in depths out of which one climbs only now and then by a miracle. The men just mentioned are not real negroes. It is the same with nearly all the so-called negroes of America, from Douglass to Dr. Washington, who have become famous. They are but examples of what whites can do against adversity. The coalblack equalling these in achievement would be as rare among his fellows as Hans, the Berlin thinker, is among horses. This palpable distinction between men who are largely, if not nearly all, Caucasian, and men who are purely West African in descent, is utterly overlooked by many most conscientious and earnest ones of the north, like Mr. Louis F. Post, who is always telling us of the south what the negro is--not, and how we should treat him, magisterially reading us lessons in A B C democracy.

       There will be fewer and fewer part-white negroes in the south by reason of the steadily increasing hostility of each race to mixed procreation. This upper class has long shown a drift northward. Under the expulsion of many of its members from certain occupations by white competition, lately commenced and fast increasing, this drift now gathers strength. From what I see every day it seems to me that the destiny of much the greater part of this upper class is disappearance partly by absorption and partly by euthanasy.

       It is the millions of the lower class that should be our deepest concern. If they be left where their utopian emancipators and enfran-chisers have placed them, it is[Pg 26] almost certain that nearly the whole will go into the jaws of destruction, now opening wide before them and sucking them in. Such a result of the three amendments--that is, to have annihilated hosts upon hosts of pure negroes in order to make just a few part-whites all-white--would be a fit monument to the statesmanship of the maddest visionaries in all history. We must come resolutely and lovingly to the help of these wretched creatures. I tell you at large how it is our duty to give the black man his own State in our union, and supervise him in it even better than we are now doing for the Philippine.

       I believe that the foregoing, re-enforced by a glance over the chapter-titles, will give a reader the preconception which he ought to get from an introduction to a book which he is about to begin. In dealing with the causes and some of the more important consequences of the brothers' war my method is rationale rather than narrative. My first purpose is to indicate how everything happened according to laws that with cosmic force reared two great economic powers, divided the whole land into a vast host standing up for one of the two in the south, and a still larger host standing up for the other in the north, and how these same laws were most faithfully served by all the actors on each side. I try to set out and explain what are the principles of evolution and the ways of human action, and especially the commanding view-points, which must be rightly attended to in their supreme importance before the greater one of the two critical American eras can have its fit history. The man who writes it will be entirely free from the monomania and orgiastic fury of both fire-eater and root-and-branch abolitionist, from their excessively emotional assumptions, their explosive and exclamatory argumentation; he will have the industry,[Pg 27] the undisturbed vision, and the perfect fairness of the foremost sociologists of our time; he will show how each side was right from first to last in upholding its own separate country,--all belonging to it, statesmen, agitators, demagogues, fanatical fire-eaters and abolitionists, generals and soldiers. He will show that such things which

       in expedience ought not to have been done were unavoidable, and therefore to be excused. He will show what erroneous judgments of each section should now be challenged and kept from working injury. Especially do I emphasize it, he will convince every average reader that north and south were equally conscientious, honest, heroic, and lovable from beginning to end. Such a history will

       be even greater than that by which Thucydides realized his soaring ambition to give the world an everlasting possession; and it will

       become the bible of America, treasured and loved alike by the people both north and south.

       This bible is coming, as many signs show. I will illustrate by examples from three northern authors, given not exactly in the order of time, but in that of their approximation to full attainment. After a circumstantial description of each one of the three days' fighting at Gettysburg, fair and impartial in the extreme, Mr. Vanderslice eulogizes both sides, without invidious distinction, for "their fidelity and gallantry, their fortitude and valor," and because there was nothing done by either "to tarnish their record as soldiers," and most becomingly emphasizes the "martial fame and glory" thereby won "for the American soldier." But just here he sounds a most unpleasantly discordant note by saying, "One was right and the other wrong."[4] He forgot that brothers who fight as those did at Gettysburg are all right, and that whenever[Pg 28] one falls on either side flights of angels sing him to his rest.

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       In June, 1902, Mr. Charles F. Adams, making an academic address at Chicago, startled many of his auditors with this outspoken

       vindication of the south:

       "Legally and technically,--not morally,-- ... and wholly irrespective of humanitarian considerations,--to which side did the weight of argument incline during the great debate which culminated in our civil war?... If we accept the judgment of some of the more modern students and investigators of history,--either wholly unprejudiced or with a distinct union bias,--it would seem as if the weight of argument falls into what I will term the confederate scale."[5]

       Mr. Adams, having made further inquiry of his own, December 22 of the same year, announced a still more advanced conclusion. He had said at Chicago that the confederate scale preponderated; but now his vision having become more certain he said the scales hung even.[6] Note that in the passage just quoted from him I have italicized the two words "not morally." I do not understand that in the Charleston speech he meant to revoke the italicized words, and to say anything more than that each side was right in its own view of the nature of the government. Even with this reservation, the utterances of Mr. Adams evince a grateful improvement upon the dogmatism which characterizes nearly every other northerner or southerner who has treated the subject.

       Professor Wendell sees clearly that