THE CRITICAL MOMENT IN THE SOUTH.
TR!crisis in the North has been decisive, and has been, as ,ve believe, a crisis of convalescence. But the crisis in the South has scarcely been less momentous, and we fear it has been one of those false crises which result in an aggra- vation of the disease—in which the fever, after an apparent abatement, completely masters the constitution and runs on into delirium. We noticed a few weeks back that the gover- nors of the Confederate States assembled at Augusta had proposed to prove the truth of Mr. Davis's recent assertion that this was not a war 'for slavery but for independence' by emancipating some 200,000 of their slaves, and requiring them to fight for the Confederacy. This would practically have involved, we believe, the emancipation also of their families—in other words, the diminution of the number of remaining slaves by at least one-half, and ultimately most likely the emancipation of the other half. It was the true test-question to determine which the South loved best, independence or slavery. They have lost two- thirds of the original territory occupied on the breaking out of the rebellion ; their armies urgently need replenishment ; their last port is in imminent danger of being closed ; they have lost battle after battle throughout the autumn without winning one of any significance ; the North have declared their determination to continue the fight, and to continue it against slavery as well as secession, and all the Southern intrigues with the opposition have signally failed. But there was this one great resource left, which might not only have proved a mighty one to themselves, but a still more mighty blow to their oppon- ents,—which might not only have put a formidable weapon into their own hands, but paralyzed the hand with which their an- tagonists held a similar weapon. They might have surrendered the only point originally in dispute to prove how far they had travelled beyond that point. They might have sacrificed the passion for slavery under the less ignoble impulse of the pas- sion for victory. They might have resigned the evil dream which inspired their imagination for the sake of a new career and a fair commencement. They might have thrown over- board the cargo for the sake of which they had seized the ship to save themselves from drowning or capture. And all this they certainly would have done had there been even a basis of truth in Mr. Davis's often repeated assertion that they have been fighting not for slavery, but for independence. But this course it seems the Government of the Confederate States dare not take. Mr. Davis himself is, we think, still in- clined to it, for his large intellect has grasped the only possible condition of success, and he cautiously proposes even now a very small measure in the same direction—namely, to impress the negroes already used as teamsters, &c., and reserve their emanci- pation till they have served, and served well, only to give it as a reward for good conduct in battle ; and to fill up their places with bought slaves. But this is an experiment absurdly too small and tentative for the crisis ; and even against this much the Richmond organs of the slaveholders are raising a cry of dismay and reprehension. Even this much of concession, says the Richmond Whig, "is a repudiation of the opinion held by the whole South and by a large proportion of mankind in other countries, that servitude is a divinely appointed con- dition for the highest good of the slave." And it adds with a significant emphasis, "If the slave must fight, he should fight for the blessings he enjoys as a slave, and not for the miseries that would attend him if freed." There we see the true heart of the Southern oligarchy, and the slaves are not so stupid as to misunderstand what it means when coupled with Mr. Davis's suggestion of a future and conditional emancipation as a reward for special valour. The slaves will never fight for the South on such terms as these, and we cannot doubt that Mr. Davis with all his anxiety for success has been compelled by the passionate strength of Southern opinion to neglect the only opportunity he may ever have of redeeming the for- tunes of the war. The official class—the governors of States and the Government of the Confederation—love power better even than slavery. But their constituents the slaveholders also love power; and for them such power is iden- tified with the institution to which they thus tenaciously and fondly cling. Independence to them is nothing without slavery, and they have rejected almost the last chance of independence rather than pronounce its doom. We call it almost the last chance, because to arm the slaves with any effect, effective and well-disciplined and greatly preponderating regiments of white men must be brigaded with them. The whole force Mr. Davis now has in the field in Georgia and Virginia is scarcely 200,000 men, and if the next spring campaign of the North brings it any success at all like the campaign how closing, it will no longer be in the power of the South to use any large number of slaves in their armies without entrusting them with dangerous power. Besides, any advance of the North liberates absolutely a large number of slaves, and the end of another year may very likely leave the South no sufficient prospect of advantage from such a measure, to make an experiment which is to them so repulsive worth the risk. As Mr. Davis is compelled to reject this expedient at such a moment in his Message to Congress, he can only have done it because he knows that the elaveholding aristocracy of the South,—not even at the beginning of the war much above 300,000 in all,—hold absolute failure, ruin; submission,
preferable to the humiliation of living as political equals with their own property, nay, owing their salvation to the poor wretches whom they had vowed in their hearts to make the drudges of a society in which they themselves would not soil their hands with labour.
And that this is in fact the feeling of the ruling class in the South is rendered probable not only by Mr. Davis's refusal to recommend the manumission of slaves for the army, but by a very remarkable letter written to the paper which is the only great advocate of this step at present—the Richmond Enquirer, by a planter who speaks with an authority and force which only men who feel a powerful class feeling behind them can use. He admits at once that if negroes are to be enlisted the negroes must be free,—nay, that they must for practical pur- poses be treated as the equals of those for whose liberties they are so disinterestedly fighting,—that it would be a sheer moral impossibility to treat again as slaves chattels once employed as their comrades or protectors. There is, unfortunately for the South, a voluntary element in fighting. Slaves driven into the field as they are driven into the cotton rows would be of no use. You must appeal to their honour, their courage, their manly qualities, and then you spoil them utterly as chattels. This the correspondent of the Rich-zond Enquirer distinctly sees. He thinks it would be impossible even to keep their wives and children in slavery. He holds that a negro soldier would have to be given at once all the rights of a freeman. And what does he think of such a moral necessity ? It fills him with loathing. He does not hesitate to say that the war now raging with the North would be nothing to the civil war which would rage in the South itself if such a proposal were to be carried by Congress :—" Messrs. Editors," lie says, "if you had sought in the political body of the Confe- deracy for some spot at which to aim and strike one blow which should at once deprive it of life, you could not have found one more vital, or have struck with more deadly certainty than you have done by the advocacy of such a scheme, and if there is any member of Congress so lost to his sense of the duty which he owes to his country and the constitution which he has sworn to defend; if there is one who is not tired of the scenes of blood, and ruin, and devastation which have stained and desolated many portions of our beloved land, but yet desires to see more and yet a thousandfold more of the strife and woe and misery begotten by civil revolution, let him persuade Congress to pass such a law and attempt to carry out such a system, and the things which have been will be nothing to the things which shall be—the revolution and war, born and nurtured and raging in our midst, shall be nothing when com- pared to that struggle in which we are now engaged, as the wild and desolating tornado, compared to the mild summer wind—as the angry fury of the ocean waves, when lashed by fierce blasts, to the smooth surface of the mountain lake." This is the proper exalte style of the aristocratic slaveholder, who feels that independence is dirt if it is to be shared with an inferior, who cares for victory precisely as he cares for the right of beating his slave,—not as the guarantee of freedom, but as the gratification of a domineering passion. And feeling thus, of course you cannot expect that he will sacrifice for the short momentary pleasure of beating,—as Mr. Jefferson Davis put it the other day at Columbia—" the Yankee spanie]s," the permanent exercise of the same right over the race that lie regards as created for that purpose. No one could be more downright than this Southern planter on the real drift of the Secession movement. He says in so many words that when Mr. Jefferson Davis spoke of fighting, "not for slavery but independence," he meant it only as a convenient mode of denying the right of any external power to interfere in their domestic concerns,—in short, that he did not really mean it at all,—for that nothing but slavery has been at issue throughout the struggle. When has the Spectator ever used stronger or more forcible language to describe the real gist of the conflict, than the Southern planter roused to wrath by the mere sound of the word "emancipation" uses in the following lines ?—" He [Mr. Jefferson Davis] never intended to ignore the question of slavery or to do aught else but express the determination to be independent in this as well as in all other matters. What has embittered the feelings of the two sec- tions of the old Union ? What has gradually driven them to the final separation ? What is it that has made two nationali- ties of them, if it is not slavery ? It was slavery that caused them to denounce us as inferiors, it was slavery that made the difference in our Congressional representatives; it was slavery that made the difference in our pursuits, in our interests, in our feelings, in our social and political life; it is slavery which now makes of us two peoples as widely antagonistic and diverse as any two people can be, and it only needs a difference of language to make the Northerner and Southerner as opposite as the Frenchman and the Englishman. You say The liberty and freedom of ourselves and children, the nationality of our country, &c., are involved in this struggle.' Yes, and of this nationality you would deprive us ; for instead of being, as we now are, a nation of freemen holding slaves as our property, you would make us a nation of white men with free negroes for our equals." The Southern planter does not hesitate to say that he and his fellows could not live in a country inhabited by such a class. Either, he says, the freed negroes or their former masters must leave it ; the latter could not and would not live near the for- mer, if once they had laid down the despotic au- thority which alone renders close social contact with negroes not only tolerable, but pleasant. The revolution was planned expressly to found or secure a law of caste which was sup- posed to be endangered by the Union.. For that purpose—far dearer to the South than either life or freedom—the Southern planters are still fighting, and if the hand of the Government should threaten the only prize for which they engaged in the conflict, the planter hints by no means obscurely that he and his class would be obliged to overthrow the Government. And this is announced not in the sanguine moment of the first secession, when it was hoped in the South that the North would not fight at all,—but after four years of fierce and exhausting conflict, nudes a prodigious debt, with no resources to meet it, and at the gloomiest moment of the South's military fortunes. Who shall now say that the South is not fighting, and fighting desperately, for an idea ;—and that idea at once the most attractive and the most degrading, the most brilliant and the most destroying, by which the soul of man was ever beset ? The passion for this kind of domination is one few true men are unable to understand, and which, if they understand, they fear for themselves with all their power. It sits as close to the mind as the fiery shirt of Dejanira, but unlike it, eats away the nature of those who wear it with a sense of pleasure instead of anguish,—a sense of pleasure which only secures their more effectual and speedy destruction.
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