A failure to recognize these things would have been absurd and ridiculous in an extreme degree. It would have been to ignore the most obvious facts in modern history and to substitute a lot of lawyers' quibbling prevarications for the modern world's greatest wonder story of war. It would have been to regard a dozen or twenty of the greatest battles ever fought on earth as the conflicts of a sheriff's posse with turbulent gangs of rioters. It would have been to treat as merely disorderly outbreaks and operations for their suppression, the great military campaigns which have passed into history as superbly illustrative, on the one side and upon the other, of all that is most brilliant in strategy and all that is most heroic in endeavor and in endurance. It would have been to discredit the national defense by belittling the occasion for it. It would have been to rub off the tablets of human memory equally the achievements of Grant and Meade and Sherman and Thomas and Farragut and the rest, and the record of what Lee and Jackson and Beauregard and the two Johnstons and Stuart and Early and Longstreet had done. It would have been to rob the nation of the credit it had won in the most strenuous conflict in which it had ever been engaged and of the glory of the genius and the heroism manifested by Americans upon either side. It would have been a perversion of history, a degradation of great deeds, a reckless wasting of the Nation's accumulated store of cherished memories of heroism.
We must bear these truths in mind if we are rightly to understand the great struggle which for convenience and quite incorrectly we call the Civil war. We must remember that it was a struggle of giants; that it was a conflict between two powers, each of which was possessed of a tremendous fighting capacity; that it called forth the most brilliant strategy of modern times; that it was inspired on both sides by a heroism worthy of celebration in song by the most gifted of ballad-makers; that it involved the very vitals of republican self-government among men; that it wrought a revolution more stupendous, more far-reaching and more lasting in its effects than any other in recorded history; that it overthrew old institutions and created new ones in their stead; that it reversed the history of a hundred years; that it wrote anew the fundamental law of the greatest nation of all time; that it created a new epoch and made a new national power the dominant force and influence in the ordering of human affairs.
Only by such appreciation of the nature, the magnitude and the significance of our war, shall we justly estimate its place in the record of human affairs or properly understand the meaning it is destined to carry with it into history.
It is with an abiding conviction that the story of this war is the most precious memory of all the American people, the record of their highest achievements, the supreme demonstration of their right to a foremost place among the peoples of the earth that this telling of that story is undertaken.
CHAPTER II
The Growth of the National Idea
The causes of the war of 1861–65 were deeply imbedded in the history of the country, in the peculiar manner of its development, in the complex interests of men, and in those primary instincts of human nature which account for everything but which are themselves often unaccountable.
It is difficult, indeed it is impossible to trace and unravel to the full the influences which in 1861 brought the North and South into armed conflict and created a war of stupendous proportions between men who had for generations rejoiced in a common heritage of liberty; men who had cherished alike the memory of Bunker Hill and Yorktown; men who had worshiped the same household gods and honored the same heroes as their national demigods; men to whom the history of the Republic was, to all alike on both sides, the story of their fathers' and grandfathers' heroic deeds.
Yet if the historical event of 1861 is to be at all adequately understood or interpreted, the historian must in some degree at least discover the conditions, near and remote, that gave occasion for the strange catastrophe.
There is a short and easy method of dealing with the matter as there always is a short and easy method of solving historical puzzles by referring them to some complex cause and treating that cause as a matter of the utmost simplicity. It is easy to say that the war of 1861–65 grew out of slavery; that slavery existed and was defended at the South while it was antagonized at the North, and that the conflict arose out of that. But no reader of intelligence is satisfied with such a reference as a substitute for explanation. Every such reader knows not only that the great and overwhelming majority of Northern people in 1861 would have angrily rejected a proposal that the nation should wage a war for the extermination of slavery in the states in which it legally existed. Every reader who is in the least instructed in the history of that time knows that Mr. Lincoln himself was at the utmost pains to avoid even the appearance of such a purpose and that during nearly half the period of the war's duration he resolutely refused to commit the government to that cause by issuing a proclamation of emancipation, even as a measure helpful to the national arms.
Instead of this short and easy catechism of causes which has satisfied so many, especially those foreigners who have more or less ignorantly written as historians or critics of our war, it is necessary to go back to the early history of the country, to study there the conditions that laid the foundations of discord, to find in the fundamental characteristics of human nature and in the varying self-interests of men the explanation of events that are otherwise inexplicable.
The American colonies were separately founded. Their settlers were persons of very diverse mind and often of hostile interest but they were all inspired by an abiding sense of the main chance. The minutely studious historians who have written in our later time have differed in many things but they are all agreed that the early settlers upon these shores, whether in Virginia first or in New York a little later or in New England still later, were not heroes of romance blown hither by adverse winds of fate or by the buffeting of the gods, but plain, ordinary and very commonplace men, ignorant for the most part, narrow-mindedly selfish, and altogether intent upon the bettering of their own fortunes as the chief end of human life. The higher inspirations which we are accustomed to attribute to them in our American Aeneid did not exist. Those things were born later of admiring imagination as higher aspirations usually are in the discussion of national beginnings.
The colonies were far more remote from each other than we can easily conceive. From Boston to Williamsburg in the seventeenth century was a journey more difficult, more toilsome and more dangerous than a circling of the globe is in our time. And even in the eighteenth century Charleston in South Carolina was farther removed from Charlestown in Massachusetts than either is to-day from Yokahama or Hong Kong.
This element of remoteness cannot be too much insisted upon as a cause of estrangement between the widely separated colonies. The means of communication between the several settlements of English-speaking people were few and meager and painfully uncertain. There were no railroads, no steamships, no telegraphs, and in effect no mails. For not until Franklin near the revolutionary epoch laid the rude foundations of our postal system, was there any tolerably trustworthy post in this land. We find in old letters Abigail Adams in Boston apologizing to her statesman husband in Philadelphia for having allowed three weeks to elapse without a letter and offering as a sufficient excuse the fact that during those weeks she had "found no opportunity" to send a letter, no "trustworthy hand going from these parts to yours." And she and other correspondents of that time whose letters have been preserved as precious historical material, refer frequently to the public post as a means of communication to which no rational person would think of entrusting letters of any consequence.
In the same way Eliza Lucas, afterwards Eliza Pinckney