The Complete PG Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

O >> Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist) >> The Complete PG Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.


The same persons who abuse the reformers, and lay all our troubles at
their door, are apt to be severe also on what they contemptuously
emphasize as "sentiments" considered as motives of action. It is
charitable to believe that they do not seriously contemplate or truly
understand the meaning of the words they use, but rather play with them,
as certain so-called "learned" quadrupeds play with the printed
characters set before them. In all questions involving duty, we act from
sentiments. Religion springs from them, the family order rests upon
them, and in every community each act involving a relation between any
two of its members implies the recognition or the denial of a sentiment.
It is true that men often forget them or act against their bidding in the
keen competition of business and politics. But God has not left the hard
intellect of man to work out its devices without the constant presence of
beings with gentler and purer instincts. The breast of woman is the
ever-rocking cradle of the pure and holy sentiments which will sooner or
later steal their way into the mind of her sterner companion; which will
by and by emerge in the thoughts of the world's teachers, and at last
thunder forth in the edicts of its law-givers and masters. Woman herself
borrows half her tenderness from the sweet influences of maternity; and
childhood, that weeps at the story of suffering, that shudders at the
picture of wrong, brings down its inspiration "from God, who is our
home." To quarrel, then, with the class of minds that instinctively
attack abuses, is not only profitless but senseless; to sneer at the
sentiments which are the springs of all just and virtuous actions, is
merely a display of unthinking levity, or of want of the natural
sensibilities.

With the hereditary character of the Southern people moving in one
direction, and the awakened conscience of the North stirring in the
other, the open conflict of opinion was inevitable, and equally
inevitable its appearance in the field of national politics. For what is
meant by self-government is, that a man shall make his convictions of
what is right and expedient regulate the community so far as his
fractional share of the government extends. If one has come to the
conclusion, be it right or wrong, that any particular institution or
statute is a violation of the sovereign law of God, it is to be expected
that he will choose to be represented by those who share his belief, and
who will in their wider sphere do all they legitimately can to get rid of
the wrong in which they find themselves and their constituents involved.
To prevent opinion from organizing itself under political forms may be
very desirable, but it is not according to the theory or practice of
self-government. And if at last organized opinions become arrayed in
hostile shape against each other, we shall find that a just war is only
the last inevitable link in a chain of closely connected impulses of
which the original source is in Him who gave to tender and humble and
uncorrupted souls the sense of right and wrong, which, after passing
through various forms, has found its final expression in the use of
material force. Behind the bayonet is the law-giver's statute, behind the
statute the thinker's argument, behind the argument is the tender
conscientiousness of woman, woman, the wife, the mother,--who looks upon
the face of God himself reflected in the unsullied soul of infancy. "Out
of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength, because
of thine enemies."

The simplest course for the malcontent is to find fault with the order of
Nature and the Being who established it. Unless the law of moral
progress were changed, or the Governor of the Universe were dethroned, it
would be impossible to prevent a great uprising of the human conscience
against a system, the legislation relating to which, in the words of so
calm an observer as De Tocqueville, the Montesquieu of our laws, presents
"such unparalleled atrocities as to show that the laws of humanity have
been totally perverted." Until the infinite selfishness of the powers
that hate and fear the principles of free government swallowed up their
convenient virtues, that system was hissed at by all the old-world
civilization. While in one section of our land the attempt has been
going on to lift it out of the category of tolerated wrongs into the
sphere of the world's beneficent agencies, it was to be expected that the
protest of Northern manhood and womanhood would grow louder and stronger
until the conflict of principles led to the conflict of forces. The
moral uprising of the North came with the logical precision of destiny;
the rage of the "petty tyrants" was inevitable; the plot to erect a slave
empire followed with fated certainty; and the only question left for us
of the North was, whether we should suffer the cause of the Nation to go
by default, or maintain its existence by the argument of cannon and
musket, of bayonet and sabre.

The war in which we are engaged is for no meanly ambitious or unworthy
purpose. It was primarily, and is to this moment, for the preservation
of our national existence. The first direct movement towards it was a
civil request on the part of certain Southern persons, that the Nation
would commit suicide, without making any unnecessary trouble about it.
It was answered, with sentiments of the highest consideration, that there
were constitutional and other objections to the Nation's laying violent
hands upon itself. It was then requested, in a somewhat peremptory tone,
that the Nation would be so obliging as to abstain from food until the
natural consequences of that proceeding should manifest themselves. All
this was done as between a single State and an isolated fortress; but it
was not South Carolina and Fort Sumter that were talking; it was a vast
conspiracy uttering its menace to a mighty nation; the whole menagerie of
treason was pacing its cages, ready to spring as soon as the doors were
opened; and all that the tigers of rebellion wanted to kindle their wild
natures to frenzy, was the sight of flowing blood.

As if to show how coldly and calmly all this had been calculated
beforehand by the conspirators, to make sure that no absence of malice
aforethought should degrade the grand malignity of settled purpose into
the trivial effervescence of transient passion, the torch which was
literally to launch the first missile, figuratively, to "fire the
southern heart" and light the flame of civil war, was given into the
trembling hand of an old white-headed man, the wretched incendiary whom
history will handcuff in eternal infamy with the temple-burner of ancient
Ephesus. The first gun that spat its iron insult at Fort Sumter, smote
every loyal American full in the face. As when the foul witch used to
torture her miniature image, the person it represented suffered all that
she inflicted on his waxen counterpart, so every buffet that fell on the
smoking fortress was felt by the sovereign nation of which that was the
representative. Robbery could go no farther, for every loyal man of the
North was despoiled in that single act as much as if a footpad had laid
hands upon him to take from him his father's staff and his mother's
Bible. Insult could go no farther, for over those battered walls waved
the precious symbol of all we most value in the past and most hope for in
the future,--the banner under which we became a nation, and which, next
to the cross of the Redeemer, is the dearest object of love and honor to
all who toil or march or sail beneath its waving folds of glory.

Let us pause for a moment to consider what might have been the course of
events if under the influence of fear, or of what some would name
humanity, or of conscientious scruples to enter upon what a few please
themselves and their rebel friends by calling a "wicked war"; if under
any or all these influences we had taken the insult and the violence of
South Carolina without accepting it as the first blow of a mortal combat,
in which we must either die or give the last and finishing stroke.

By the same title which South Carolina asserted to Fort Sumter, Florida
would have challenged as her own the Gibraltar of the Gulf, and Virginia
the Ehrenbreitstein of the Chesapeake. Half our navy would have anchored
under the guns of these suddenly alienated fortresses, with the flag of
the rebellion flying at their peaks. "Old Ironsides" herself would have
perhaps sailed out of Annapolis harbor to have a wooden Jefferson Davis
shaped for her figure-head at Norfolk,--for Andrew Jackson was a hater of
secession, and his was no fitting effigy for the battle-ship of the
red-handed conspiracy. With all the great fortresses, with half the ships
and warlike material, in addition to all that was already stolen, in the
traitors' hands, what chance would the loyal men in the Border States
have stood against the rush of the desperate fanatics of the now
triumphant faction? Where would Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri,
Tennessee,--saved, or looking to be saved, even as it is, as by
fire,--have been in the day of trial? Into whose hands would the
Capital, the archives, the glory, the name, the very life of the nation
as a nation, have fallen, endangered as all of them were, in spite of the
volcanic outburst of the startled North which answered the roar of the
first gun at Sumter? Worse than all, are we permitted to doubt that in
the very bosom of the North itself there was a serpent, coiled but not
sleeping, which only listened for the first word that made it safe to
strike, to bury its fangs in the heart of Freedom, and blend its golden
scales in close embrace with the deadly reptile of the cotton-fields.
Who would not wish that he were wrong in such a suspicion? yet who can
forget the mysterious warnings that the allies of the rebels were to be
found far north of the fatal boundary line; and that it was in their own
streets, against their own brothers, that the champions of liberty were
to defend her sacred heritage?

Not to have fought, then, after the supreme indignity and outrage we had
suffered, would have been to provoke every further wrong, and to furnish
the means for its commission. It would have been to placard ourselves on
the walls of the shattered fort, as the spiritless race the proud
labor-thieves called us. It would have been to die as a nation of
freemen, and to have given all we had left of our rights into the hands
of alien tyrants in league with home-bred traitors.

Not to have fought would have been to be false to liberty everywhere, and
to humanity. You have only to see who are our friends and who are our
enemies in this struggle, to decide for what principles we are combating.
We know too well that the British aristocracy is not with us. We know
what the West End of London wishes may be result of this controversy.
The two halves of this Union are the two blades of the shears,
threatening as those of Atropos herself, which will sooner or later cut
into shreds the old charters of tyranny. How they would exult if they
could but break the rivet that makes of the two blades one resistless
weapon! The man who of all living Americans had the best opportunity of
knowing how the fact stood, wrote these words in March, 1862: "That Great
Britain did, in the most terrible moment of our domestic trial in
struggling with a monstrous social evil she had earnestly professed to
abhor, coldly and at once assume our inability to master it, and then
become the only foreign nation steadily contributing in every indirect
way possible to verify its pre-judgment, will probably be the verdict
made up against her by posterity, on a calm comparison of the evidence."

So speaks the wise, tranquil statesman who represents the nation at the
Court of St. James, in the midst of embarrassments perhaps not less than
those which vexed his illustrious grandfather, when he occupied the same
position as the Envoy of the hated, newborn Republic.

"It cannot be denied,"--says another observer, placed on one of our
national watch-towers in a foreign capital,--"it cannot be denied that
the tendency of European public opinion, as delivered from high places,
is more and more unfriendly to our cause"; "but the people," he adds,
"everywhere sympathize with us, for they know that our cause is that of
free institutions,--that our struggle is that of the people against an
oligarchy." These are the words of the Minister to Austria, whose
generous sympathies with popular liberty no homage paid to his genius by
the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars has ever
spoiled; our fellow-citizen, the historian of a great Republic which
infused a portion of its life into our own,--John Lothrop Motley.

It is a bitter commentary on the effects of European, and especially of
British institutions, that such men should have to speak in such terms of
the manner in which our struggle has been regarded. We had, no doubt,
very generally reckoned on the sympathy of England, at least, in a strife
which, whatever pretexts were alleged as its cause, arrayed upon one side
the supporters of an institution she was supposed to hate in earnest, and
on the other its assailants. We had forgotten what her own poet, one of
the truest and purest of her children, had said of his countrymen, in
words which might well have been spoken by the British Premier to the
American Ambassador asking for some evidence of kind feeling on the part
of his government:

"Alas I expect it not. We found no bait
To tempt us in thy country. Doing good,
Disinterested good, is not our trade."

We know full well by this time what truth there is in these honest lines.
We have found out, too, who our European enemies are, and why they are
our enemies. Three bending statues bear up that gilded seat, which, in
spite of the time-hallowed usurpations and consecrated wrongs so long
associated with its history, is still venerated as the throne. One of
these supports is the pensioned church; the second is the purchased army;
the third is the long-suffering people. Whenever the third caryatid
comes to life and walks from beneath its burden, the capitals of Europe
will be filled with the broken furniture of palaces. No wonder that our
ministers find the privileged orders willing to see the ominous republic
split into two antagonistic forces, each paralyzing the other, and
standing in their mighty impotence a spectacle to courts and kings; to be
pointed at as helots who drank themselves blind and giddy out of that
broken chalice which held the poisonous draught of liberty!

We know our enemies, and they are the enemies of popular rights. We know
our friends, and they are the foremost champions of political and social
progress. The eloquent voice and the busy pen of John Bright have both
been ours, heartily, nobly, from the first; the man of the people has
been true to the cause of the people. That deep and generous thinker,
who, more than any of her philosophical writers, represents the higher
thought of England, John Stuart Mill, has spoken for us in tones to which
none but her sordid hucksters and her selfish land-graspers can refuse to
listen. Count Gasparin and Laboulaye have sent us back the echo from
liberal France; France, the country of ideas, whose earlier inspirations
embodied themselves for us in the person of the youthful Lafayette.
Italy,--would you know on which side the rights of the people and the
hopes of the future are to be found in this momentous conflict, what
surer test, what ampler demonstration can you ask--than the eager
sympathy of the Italian patriot whose name is the hope of the toiling
many, and the dread of their oppressors, wherever it is spoken, the
heroic Garibaldi?

But even when it is granted that the war was inevitable; when it is
granted that it is for no base end, but first for the life of the nation,
and more and more, as the quarrel deepens, for the welfare of mankind,
for knowledge as against enforced ignorance, for justice as against
oppression, for that kingdom of God on earth which neither the
unrighteous man nor the extortioner can hope to inherit, it may still be
that the strife is hopeless, and must therefore be abandoned. Is it too
much to say that whether the war is hopeless or not for the North depends
chiefly on the answer to the question, whether the North has virtue and
manhood enough to persevere in the contest so long as its resources hold
out? But how much virtue and manhood it has can never be told until they
are tried, and those who are first to doubt the prevailing existence of
these qualities are not commonly themselves patterns of either. We have
a right to trust that this people is virtuous and brave enough not to
give up a just and necessary contest before its end is attained, or shown
to be unattainable for want of material agencies. What was the end to be
attained by accepting the gage of battle? It was to get the better of
our assailants, and, having done so, to take exactly those steps which we
should then consider necessary to our present and future safety. The
more obstinate the resistance, the more completely must it be subdued.
It may not even have been desirable, as Mr. Mill suggested long since,
that the victory over the rebellion should have been easily and speedily
won, and so have failed to develop the true meaning of the conflict, to
bring out the full strength of the revolted section, and to exhaust the
means which would have served it for a still more desperate future
effort. We cannot complain that our task has proved too easy. We give
our Southern army,--for we must remember that it is our army, after all,
only in a state of mutiny,--we give our Southern army credit for
excellent spirit and perseverance in the face of many disadvantages. But
we have a few plain facts which show the probable course of events; the
gradual but sure operation of the blockade; the steady pushing back of
the boundary of rebellion, in spite of resistance at many points, or even
of such aggressive inroads as that which our armies are now meeting with
their long lines of bayonets,--may God grant them victory!--the progress
of our arms down the Mississippi; the relative value of gold and currency
at Richmond and Washington. If the index-hands of force and credit
continue to move in the ratio of the past two years, where will the
Confederacy be in twice or thrice that time?

Either all our statements of the relative numbers, power, and wealth of
the two sections of the country signify nothing, or the resources of our
opponents in men and means must be much nearer exhaustion than our own.
The running sand of the hour-glass gives no warning, but runs as freely
as ever when its last grains are about to fall. The merchant wears as
bold a face the day before he is proclaimed a bankrupt, as he wore at the
height of his fortunes. If Colonel Grierson found the Confederacy "a
mere shell," so far as his equestrian excursion carried him, how can we
say how soon the shell will collapse? It seems impossible that our own
dissensions can produce anything more than local disturbances, like the
Morristown revolt, which Washington put down at once by the aid of his
faithful Massachusetts soldiers. But in a rebellious state dissension is
ruin, and the violence of an explosion in a strict ratio to the pressure
on every inch of the containing surface. Now we know the tremendous
force which has compelled the "unanimity" of the Southern people. There
are men in the ranks of the Southern army, if we can trust the evidence
which reaches us, who have been recruited with packs of blood-hounds, and
drilled, as it were, with halters around their necks. We know what is
the bitterness of those who have escaped this bloody harvest of the
remorseless conspirators; and from that we can judge of the elements of
destruction incorporated with many of the seemingly solid portions of the
fabric of the rebellion. The facts are necessarily few, but we can reason
from the laws of human nature as to what must be the feelings of the
people of the South to their Northern neighbors. It is impossible that
the love of the life which they have had in common, their glorious
recollections, their blended histories, their sympathies as Americans,
their mingled blood, their birthright as born under the same flag and
protected by it the world over, their worship of the same God, under the
same outward form, at least, and in the folds of the same ecclesiastical
organizations, should all be forgotten, and leave nothing but hatred and
eternal alienation. Men do not change in this way, and we may be quite
sure that the pretended unanimity of the South will some day or other
prove to have been a part of the machinery of deception which the
plotters have managed with such consummate skill. It is hardly to be
doubted that in every part of the South, as in New Orleans, in
Charleston, in Richmond, there are multitudes who wait for the day of
deliverance, and for whom the coming of "our good friends, the enemies,"
as Beranger has it, will be like the advent of the angels to the
prison-cells of Paul and Silas. But there is no need of depending on the
aid of our white Southern friends, be they many or be they few; there is
material power enough in the North, if there be the will to use it, to
overrun and by degrees to recolonize the South, and it is far from
impossible that some such process may be a part of the mechanism of its
new birth, spreading from various centres of organization, on the plan
which Nature follows when she would fill a half-finished tissue with
blood-vessels or change a temporary cartilage into bone.

Suppose, however, that the prospects of the war were, we need not say
absolutely hopeless,--because that is the unfounded hypothesis of those
whose wish is father to their thought,--but full of discouragement. Can
we make a safe and honorable peace as the quarrel now stands? As honor
comes before safety, let us look at that first. We have undertaken to
resent a supreme insult, and have had to bear new insults and
aggressions, even to the direct menace of our national capital. The
blood which our best and bravest have shed will never sink into the
ground until our wrongs are righted, or the power to right them is shown
to be insufficient. If we stop now, all the loss of life has been
butchery; if we carry out the intention with which we first resented the
outrage, the earth drinks up the blood of our martyrs, and the rose of
honor blooms forever where it was shed. To accept less than indemnity
for the past, so far as the wretched kingdom of the conspirators can
afford it, and security for the future, would discredit us in our own
eyes and in the eyes of those who hate and long to be able to despise us.
But to reward the insults and the robberies we have suffered, by the
surrender of our fortresses along the coast, in the national gulf, and on
the banks of the national river,--and this and much more would surely be
demanded of us,--would place the United Fraction of America on a level
with the Peruvian guano-islands, whose ignoble but coveted soil is open
to be plundered by all comers!

If we could make a peace without dishonor, could we make one that would
be safe and lasting? We could have an armistice, no doubt, long enough
for the flesh of our wounded men to heal and their broken bones to knit
together. But could we expect a solid, substantial, enduring peace, in
which the grass would have time to grow in the war-paths, and the bruised
arms to rust, as the old G. R. cannon rusted in our State arsenal,
sleeping with their tompions in their mouths, like so many sucking lambs?
It is not the question whether the same set of soldiers would be again
summoned to the field. Let us take it for granted that we have seen
enough of the miseries of warfare to last us for a while, and keep us
contented with militia musters and sham-fights. The question is whether
we could leave our children and our children's children with any secure
trust that they would not have to go through the very trials we are
enduring, probably on a more extended scale and in a more aggravated
form.

It may be well to look at the prospects before us, if a peace is
established on the basis of Southern independence, the only peace
possible, unless we choose to add ourselves to the four millions who
already call the Southern whites their masters. We know what the
prevailing--we do not mean universal--spirit and temper of those people
have been for generations, and what they are like to be after a long and
bitter warfare. We know what their tone is to the people of the North;
if we do not, De Bow and Governor Hammond are schoolmasters who will
teach us to our heart's content. We see how easily their social
organization adapts itself to a state of warfare. They breed a superior
order of men for leaders, an ignorant commonalty ready to follow them as
the vassals of feudal times followed their lords; and a race of bondsmen,
who, unless this war changes them from chattels to human beings, will
continue to add vastly to their military strength in raising their food,
in building their fortifications, in all the mechanical work of war, in
fact, except, it may be, the handling of weapons. The institution
proclaimed as the corner-stone of their government does violence not
merely to the precepts of religion, but to many of the best human
instincts, yet their fanaticism for it is as sincere as any tribe of the
desert ever manifested for the faith of the Prophet of Allah. They call
themselves by the same name as the Christians of the North, yet there is
as much difference between their Christianity and that of Wesley or of
Channing, as between creeds that in past times have vowed mutual
extermination. Still we must not call them barbarians because they
cherish an institution hostile to civilization. Their highest culture
stands out all the more brilliantly from the dark background of ignorance
against which it is seen; but it would be injustice to deny that they
have always shone in political science, or that their military capacity
makes them most formidable antagonists, and that, however inferior they
may be to their Northern fellow-countrymen in most branches of literature
and science, the social elegances and personal graces lend their outward
show to the best circles among their dominant class.