THE YANKEEFICATION OF THE SLAVE STATES.
[FROM OUR SPECLAL CORRESPONDENT.]
New York, January 15th, 1864. THAT the hare should be caught before much time or attention is given to the manner of cooking him is an excellent rule, and one which—believe it, or not, as you please—obtains with no less force in our political kitchens than in yours. The difference is that here the turnspits and the helpers are allowed to talk much more than is the case with you, and you, in judging of the conduct of your neighbour's household, make the mistake of considering rather what is said than what is done. But as our civil war gradually approaches its end, we inevitably look forward and endeavour to foresee what will follow, and to prepare for it beforehand. Some of you are also endeavouring to forecast our future, and your candid and magnanimous contemporary, the London Times, in one of its numbers which has lately reached us, declares that although the Confederated slaveholders may be finally worn out, so that they will be incapable of further organized resistance, yet "even when the North has surrendered her liberty and beggared her finances, she will not be able permanently to hold these immense countries and keep down their hostile populations on these terms," i. e., the terms of the President's proclamation of amnesty.
Now, we know as well as other people, and perhaps, in relation to our own affairs, we might presume to know better than other people, that when the insurrection is quelled there will await us a task of the greatest gravity that was ever laid upon a nation, one the very shadow of which, falling back upon us from the future, may well darken our joy even at the preservation of the nation's life. The political contest which is to succeed the physical struggle promised to be fearful, implacable, one year ago, and now the look-out thitherward is stormy. But the duration and the destructiveness of the war, and the thoroughly revolution- ary character which it has assumed by reducing and simplifying the issues, reducing them, in fact, to two—national preservation or national extinction ; slavery, or no slavery ; have nearly resolved
the people both of the Slave and the Free States into two directly opposed and sharply defined parties, those who are for preserving the Republic at whatever cost to slavery, and those who are for preserving it only if slavery can be let alone. Now the longer the war lasts the smaller the latter party becomes, not only in the Free, but in the Slave States. Evidence of this abounis, and some of it I have laid before the readers of the Spectator. It has been chiefly, however, in regard to the change which has been going on in the south and south-west. But in the north and north-west the last nine months have seen a most noteworthy defection from the ranks of the Copperheads, and a corresponding increase of numbers and assurance in the party of patriotism and freedom. In the city of New York itself, the place in all the country most demoralized by the narrow sordid doctrines of pro slavery democracy, where both extremes of the social scale met on the common ground of selfish interest, the high in social station rest- ing securely on the votes of the foreign-born and foreign-bred rabble, and the rabble following blindly the lead of men who, though politically their equals, and when in office almost their creatures, are socially their superiors as much as with you a peer is the superior of a ploughman ; here Copperheadism is crawling into holes and corners, begging to be allowed to hide itself out of sight.
Nay, more, it repents and confesses, and prays to be allowed to cast aside its reptile shape, and come among men ; and being re- garded with suspicion even in its penitence, it is but coldly re- ceived until it shows its new faith by new works. I have seen this myself in many ways and in many instances. I have seen men of great wealth and social culture seeking, earnestly seeking, and not always successfully, positions and consideration which two years ago they might have commanded ; the sole reason for their com- pelled change of attitude being that they had been found guilty of recreancy for lukewarmness in the country's cause. One instance is peculiarly significant. A few days ago one of the most influen- tial clubs in New York, the one, perhaps, into which admission is most eagerly sought by the best sort of men—the Century—elected its officers for the coming year ; and the outside world was as- tonished at learning that Gulian C. Verplanck, LL.D., who had been for many years its president, had been displaced, and Mr. George Bancroft, the historian, and formerly our Minister at the Court of St. James, elected in his stead by a majority of nearly two to one. Mr. Verplanck, though little known among you, for he has not written a great deal, has a high and well deserved repu- tation here as a scholar and a man of letters. His social position is the highest possible with us, and he has carried with him into a green old age the regard and respect, almost the reverence, of the wide circle in which he is known. He was regarded as the father of the Century club, the younger members of which looked up to him with affection and pride. But having been a member of the old so-called Democratic party, he has throughout our revolu- tion been mildly Copperheadish.
Mr. Bancroft, in spite of his reputation, is not generally liked in the club. But he, being of the same party with Mr. Verplanck, was one of those who in the very beginning said to the seceders, "We have thus far defended your right to your slaves because that right was in the compact which is the organic law of the Republic ; but now you have violated that compact, and would destroy the Republic that you may extend and perpetuate slavery, we defy you! If you either extend slavery or destroy the Republic we will know the reason why." For this reason, and for no other, Mr. Verplanck was displaced in his favour ; and I know that many who voted for the new President did so in sorrow. One year ago this would not, perhaps could not, have been done. Not so much that there was not then the same dissatisfaction which has brought about the change, but that there was not quite the assurance and the strong conviction of necessity which nerved the blow. People now generally feel that it is not proper that a man who will allow party ties or personal considerations to prevent an entire devotion to the country and to freedom should be retained in a prominent and influential position. I, of course, speak of positions which, unlike that of the mayoralty of New York, are not in the gift of the Irishry. This feeling, and the action conse- quent upon it, will make some hypocrites. But that is hypocrisy's affair.
I'Ve do not expect, however, to establish peace in the Slave States by electing loyal club-officers in the Free States. how, then, do we propose to sustain that loyal tenth of the population in the seceded States in whose hands the President proposes
to place the political power of these States ? Your Times says plausibly, but whether with craft or in ignorance, I cannot tell. "These men will be no more able to maintain themselves than were the Thirty Tyrants of Athens without the aid of the Lacedte.
monism garrison. They will form a detested oligarchy, like the Normans in Saxon England, only that they will rule over men braver and more warlike than themselves." " More war- like," we confess ; for we of the Free States do regard with horror mutual slaughter at the word_ of command, whether the combatants be two or two hundred thousand. Only loss of honour, of liberty, or monstrous crime are in our eyes more dreadful. But "braver?" Does that follow ? As to that, we say
nothing. You will see that I have assumed that these tenth men
are Yankees. And so, in a great measure, will those men be upon whom we rely for the pacification of the seceded States, which shall be restored to the Union by our arms. For we have neither the desire, the hope, nor the purpose of holding the South by vio- lence and terror. It is a general and peaceful submission to the authority of the Government which we propose and expect to bring about in the conquered States. Some force will, of course, be needed at the first ; but the pacification of the South will mainly be brought about by the Yankeefication of the South. We are going down there with Yankee votes and Yankee ideas, to do the governing and the thinking of that part of our country, as we have thus far done for this part. I do not mean by this that at the close of the war there will be an immediate rush of two or three millions of Yankees into the reclaimed territory of the Republic. But, what with the troops which we shall keep there, and the traders who will follow in the wake of our army, establishing themselves wherever rebellion seems no longer possible, and the farmers and the land speculators who will go southward and buy the wasted, the deserted, and the confiscated estates, which will be sought more eagerly than they were before the war, be- cause they will be no longer cursed by slavery, there will be such an infusion of Yankee thought, and such an acces- sion of Yankee ballots, all protected by Yankee arms, that the people who will avail themselves of the proclamation of amnesty, although they will be very many more than one- tenth or one-fifth of the old residents, will be so penetrated with Yankeeism in all its forms that the country will become completely Yankeefied. It needs be that this must come ; for after the war it will be the South that will be exhausted of money and of men, and at the North will be the money and the men to supply, in a measure at least, the need. There will be, too, not only material, but mental exhaustion and self-distrust (though, of course, not among the malignant rebels), and the people who have found them- selves worsted by men whom they will discover are not their enemies, will lean for counsel and aid upon their friendly con- querors.
But is not this, you will ask, something very like conquest after the flishion of the olden time—well, say as old as Clive and Hastings? Not at all. Even if what it has just been said will not take place should take place, and two or three millions of Yankees should go into the Cotton states and "locate," and if the whole army should become in reality an army of occupation, and remain upon the land which it had restored to the Republic, only that would be done on a large scale which has always been done on a small one, and there would not be even a technical ground of opposition to be taken against this method of holding and ruling the South. I suppose that this statement will surprise you. For it seems to me that nearly all European writers upon our affairs recently have forgotten, if they ever knew, that State lines are no limits to political rights, and that before the war a man might go from Maine to Texas, and stopping in one State after another just long enough to acquire domiciliary right, vote there for every officer from President down to constable.
Thus, if a resident of New York, born there, should go to Europe or Massachusetts, and remain there three months, he would lose his vote in New York, and could not go to the polls until he had re-acquired his right of domicile. And not only so ; but on his return from Europe he could not re-acquire his political rights a day sooner in New York, where he was born and bred, than in Virginia, or Arkansas, or 'Connecticut, where he might never have been in his life, and where he would have exactly the same political right, even down to his voice in the control of the minutest municipal and county matters, as a man born and bred in the State to which he chose to return. This is no statement of a mere political theory, but of a theory which has been so incessantly in practice since we were a nation that we have long since ceased to talk or to think about it. In considering the question of our political future, there is no more important point than this political solidarity of the Republic, and the point of next importance is that the only obstacle to actual solidarity thus far, and that a partial one, ha been slavery, which the war will remove. As to the notion that the "different but free civilizations naturally pro-
duced outside and within the tropics will once again reveal North and South their inherent antagonism," pardon m for saying that it could only have been formed by one who did not know that there is no such difference in this country, no antagonism whatever except that which is in some way a consequence of slavery. Why, already a very large proportion of the slaveholders and of the rabid slavery propagandists of the South are men, to their shame, born and bred in the Free States, or the sons of such men. Our task after the wax, and by the war, is to destroy the oligarchical control of the South which rested entirely on slavery. That done, the rest follows of itself; the South will be Yankeefied. And this leads me to point out to you, what you seem not to have seen, why the President excluded from amnesty all the leaders of the rebellion, the Gene- rals and all who had been in the civil as well as in the military ser- vice of the United States before the war, the wisdom of which exception you have doubted. That amnesty is not a poultice, but a wedge driven between the slave oligarchy of the South and their white slaves ; and it will surely drive them asunder. Those of the slaveholders who have always preferred their country to their slaves will be content, and those who have had their eyes opened by the war will also be content. As to any attempt to placate the malignant leaders of this revolt, you might as well attempt to put out Vesuvius with a flask of olive oil. They must be held down
Previous page
