Various - The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864

Having conquered the aristocracy by its industry, education, religion, and politics—driven it from every position on the great field of American society in an era of peace—the people slowly awoke to the conviction that they must now conquer it on the field of arms. They were slow to come to that conviction. Their ablest leaders were not war-statesmen, and did not comprehend at once the full meaning of the war. They called it a 'conspiracy,' a 'rebellion,' an 'insurrection,' a 'summer madness,' anything but what it was— the American stave aristocracy in arms to subdue the people of the United States with every other aristocracy on earth wishing it success . But the people did not refuse the challenge. In April, 1861, they rushed to the capital, saved their Government from immediate capture or dispersion, and then began to prepare, after their way, for—they hardly knew what—to suppress a riot or wage a civil war.

In every such conflict as this the aristocracy has a great advantage, especially if it can choose its own time to begin the war. Never was an oligarchy more favored in its preparations than ours. Since 1820 it had contemplated and prepared for this very hour. It had almost unlimited control over fifteen States of the Union. Society was constructed in all these States on a military basis, the laboring class being held in place by the power of the sword. An aristocracy is always preceded by military ambition; for all subordinate orders of its people have acquired the habit of respect for rank and implicit obedience to superiors, so essential to success in war. When the war broke out, the Slave Power was ready. Its arms and ammunition and forts were stolen; its military organizations had been perfected in secret societies; its generals were selected—its president perhaps the best general of all; its military surveys were made, every Southern State mapped, and every strategical point marked; its subordinate officers, in which the real efficiency of an army consists, had been educated in military schools kept by such teachers as Hill and Stonewall Jackson. It had a full crop of cotton as a basis for finance. Its government was practically such a despotism as does not exist in the world. At the sound of the first gun in Charleston, the aristocracy sprang to arms; in a fortnight every strategical point in fifteen States was practically in its possession, and Washington tottered to its fall.

The people, as the people always are, were unprepared for war. Their entire energies had been concentrated for forty years in organizing the gigantic victory of peace which they had just achieved. When they woke up to the idea that there was yet another battle to be fought before the aristocracy would subside, they began to learn the art of war . And never did the people begin a great war so unprepared. The people of Europe have always had military traditions and cultivation to fall back upon in their civil wars. The North had no military traditions later than the Revolution, for no war since that day had really called forth their hearty efforts. Three generations of peace had destroyed even respect for war as an employment fit for civilized men. There were not ten thousand trained soldiers in all the nineteen States in April, 1861. There were not good arms to furnish fifty thousand troops in the possession of the National or loyal State Governments. Most of the ablest military men of the North had left the army, and were engaged in peaceful occupations. Halleck was in the law; McClellan, Burnside, Banks, on the railroad; Mitchel and Sigel teaching schoolboys; Hooker, Kearny, McCall, Dix, retired gentlemen; Fremont digging gold; Rosecrans manufacturing oil, and Grant in a tanyard; and so on to the end of the chapter; while Scott, the patriot hero, who was but once defeated in fifty years' service, was passing over into the helplessness of old age. Of course such a people did not realize the value of military education, and fell into the natural delusion that a multitude of men carrying guns and wearing blue coats is an army; and any 'smart man' can make a colonel in three months. There was not even a corporal in the Cabinet, and Mr, Lincoln's military exploits were confined to one campaign, in the war of 1812, and one challenge to fight a duel. There were not ten Northern men in Congress who could take a company into action. In short, we had the art of war to learn; even did not know it was necessary to learn to fight as to do anything else; especially to fight against an aristocracy that had been studying war for forty years.

For more than three years have the people of the United States waged this gigantic war thus precipitated upon them by their aristocracy to arrest the irresistible growth of modern society in the republic. Every year has been a period of great success, though our peaceful population, unacquainted with war, and often ignorant of the vast issues of this conflict, have often inclined to despondency. Of course the aristocracy fought best, at first, as every aristocracy in the world has done. With half our number of better disciplined troops, better commanded and manœuvred, and the great advantage of interior lines, supported by railroad communications, and possessing in Virginia, perhaps, the most defensible region in the Union, they held our Army of the Potomac at bay for two years; have thrice overrun Maryland and the Pennsylvania border, and yet hold their fortified capital; while every step of our victorious progress in the Southwest has been bitterly contested. Yet this war of martial forces has been strangely like the long, varied war of material, moral, and political forces of which it is the logical sequel.

The Union navy won the earliest laurels in the war. The navy has been the right arm of the people in all ages. The Athenian navy repelled the invasion of Greece by the Persian empire. Antony, Pompey, Cæsar, the people's leaders in Rome, built up their youthful power upon the sea. The Dutch and English navies saved religious and civil liberty in the sixteenth century; and all the constitutional Governments that now exist in Europe came out of the hold of a British man-of-war. The United States, in 1812, extemporized a navy that gained us the freedom of the seas. And now the navy has led the way in the war for the freedom of the continent. The aristocracy felt, intuitively, the danger of this arm of defence, and discouraged, scattered, and almost annihilated our naval power before they entered upon the war. When we learn that our active navy, in April, 1861, consisted of one frigate, too large to sail over the bar of Charleston harbor, and one two-gun supply ship; and that in the three successive years it has shot up into a force of five hundred vessels; that our new ironclads and guns have revolutionized the art of naval warfare; that we have established the most effective blockade ever known along two thousand miles of dangerous coast; have captured Port Royal and New Orleans, aided in the opening of the Mississippi and all its dependencies which we now patrol, penetrated to the cotton fields of Alabama, occupied the inland waters of North Carolina and Virginia, seized every important rebel port and navy yard save four, and destroyed every war ship of the enemy that has ventured in range of our cannon, we are pronouncing a eulogy of which any people may be proud. One year more will swell this maritime power to a force amply sufficient to protect the coast of the whole republic from all assault of traitors at home or their friends abroad.

But the army of the Union has not been content to remain permanently behind the navy. Even in the first year of the conflict, when it was only a crowd of seventy-five thousand undisciplined militia, contending against a solid body of well-disciplined and commanded forces, it wrested two States from the foe, and baffled his intentions for the capture of all our great border cities. But since the opening of the campaign of 1802, the real beginning of war by the North, we have conquered from the aristocracy and now hold fast in Slave States an area of two hundred thousand square miles, inhabited by four millions of people—a district larger than France. Three years ago, every Slave State was virtually in the grasp of the rebels, and the Union was really put upon the defensive to protect freedom in the Free States and the national capital. Now, by a masterly series of campaigns in the West and Southwest, ranging from the Alleghanies to the Gulf, in which we have never lost a decisive battle, we have saved all the Territories of the United States, cut the 'Confederacy' in two equal parts, holding the western division at our mercy, opened the Mississippi and all its tributaries, and crowded the rebellion into the five States nearest the Atlantic coast. In the east we have fought a score of battles with the most formidable army ever marshalled on this continent, composed of the flower of the rebel soldiery led by their best generalship, and, spite of frequent repulses, have forced it from the Potomac and below the Rappahannock to the James, away from the smell of salt water, holding firmly every seaport from Washington to Wilmington, North Carolina, and a belt of land and water commanding the approach to the interior of every Atlantic State. The military force of the rebellion is rapidly being crowded into one army, not exceeding two hundred and fifty thousand men, against which the mighty power of the Union can be marshalled in overwhelming array. I know well enough that the decisive moment will really come when we confront that desperate and veteran host, on which the fate of aristocratic government upon this continent depends. But we shall then have a great army of veterans, marshalled under commanders fit to lead them in the name of liberty and the people.