THE ISSUES OF THE WAR

The life of the soldier is one of constant anxiety and suspense. He never knows with any certainty to-day what he shall have to do to-morrow. Upon seemingly the greatest calm may suddenly burst the most terrific storm. There is little incentive to thought, except of that practical kind which directs the activities of the soldier's perilous life. Here we are, thousands of us, an acting mass rather than an assemblage of thinking individuals. Indeed, it is not strictly military to think; implicit and unquestioning obedience is the law. When the order was finally given on Monday night (September 21st) for the whole army to fell back on Chattanooga, the writer remarked:

'Well, if we shall not have to go any farther—if we can hold Chattanooga, we are not defeated;—it is even a victory, and we have won Chattanooga at the battle of Chickamauga.'

'We want none of your speculations,' retorted our Prussian commander; 'it is a soldier's business to obey, and not to think.'

But, it is hardly natural for an American soldier to execute a movement without inquiring the wherefore. And if we are marched over mountains, and down the Lookout at Alpine Pass, within a few miles of Rome; and then marched back again, up the perilous steep, and northward to Stevens's Gap, and down again;—why, even common soldiers, without the evidence of brains which there is, or ought to be, in shoulder straps, inquire of each other for the strategic value there may be in all this marching and countermarching, and find it hard to believe that it was all provided for in the original programme.

But in a still higher sense is the American soldier given to thinking. He is quite likely to have an opinion as to the origin and cause of the war—as to the issues involved therein, and the results which it is likely to bring about. There is, moreover, a multiplicity of views, and not the unanimity of dulness.

The causes, the issues, the results of the war—momentous themes! and likely to be thoroughly canvassed by those whom they so vitally concern—the American citizen and our citizen soldiery.

The causes, issues, and results of the war are so intimately related that we can scarcely think of one without also thinking of the others. The causes are more especially a thing of the past—they already belong to history: the results belong more particularly to the future; the issues pertain to the present. It is these with which we have more immediately to do, and which it behooves us, as intelligent actors in the great drama, to understand. We should not be indifferent to results, and we are not; but if there are real issues of right and wrong involved in the contest, and we are in the right, we may rest assured that the results of a successful prosecution of the war will be worthy of all our sacrifices, and honorable to us as a people and nation.

In the midst of a beleaguered camp, with no notes of former reading, or books of reference, it is a poor place for the elaboration of one's ideas;—the writer, nevertheless, proposes to make a brief inquiry into the issues involved in this terrible war.

The fact exists that there is a war between the North and South, brought about, as we believe, by unwarranted and aggressive acts of the Slave Power. This slave oligarchy of the South either had, or affected to have, a profound contempt for what they supposed was the want of spirit in the Northern people. It was a current swagger that we should barely furnish them with an opportunity to show their superior military prowess. 'This war shall be waged on Northern soil,' they said. Events have shown that they miscalculated; but the raids of Jackson, Lee, Morgan & Co. show how great their will has been to carry out their threats of invasion. When the rebel guns opened upon Sumter, there was no alternative left us but fight now, or soon. Had we hesitated and compromised then, the arrogant spirit of the insurgents would have been still further flattered and puffed up, and their contempt for the submissive North made genuine, whatever it may have been before. A compromise then would have made no lasting peace; the South would soon have become tired of being merely 'let alone;' her exactions and aggressions would have become more and more insolent and intolerable, till warlike resistance or ignoble submission and slavery would have been our only alternative. This war is, therefore, on our part and in one sense, a war in self-defence; and this may be regarded as one of its issues.

Every loyal soldier is fighting for the security of our Northern homes; and the issue resolves itself into this: The resistance of invasion; the vindication of our manliness as a people; the protection of our own firesides—else be overrun, outraged, desolated, enslaved by the minions of a Southern oligarchy, which indulges the insane conceit that it is born to rule.

Unfortunately for our country, it embraces two distinct forms of society, of dissimilar, if not of antagonistic character. It is a heritage from our ancestors; but none the less an evil for its prestige from the sanctities of time; and we are now reaping its bitter fruits in the manifold and hideous forms of a great civil war. Taking human nature as it is, there appears to be no escape from this cruel ordeal. We of the North claim that we have transcended that type of society whose vital and informing element is chattel slavery. There is natural and irrepressible antagonism between the two forms of society; they cannot subsist in peace and good feeling by the side of each other, and still less under the same Government. Conflict was inevitable, and it came.

At this stage of the war and of elucidation respecting its cause and origin, this may be only commonplace, yet necessary to fulness of statement.

Slavery felt the necessity of efforts to save herself from impending ruin; she became taunting and aggressive in her manners and acts, and resorted at length to violence, reminding one of the oft-repeated proverb, 'Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.' History has no readings for the comfort of slavery. There is a progress in human affairs, and the tide of that progress is against her. Threatening attitudes and impetuous dashes do not appear to come with salvation; and the promise—of glory for freedom, and doom for her—now is that, as a turbulent and rebellious power, she will be completely overthrown; a sudden and deserved judgment, the legitimate consequence of her own violence and desperation.

This struggle between a progressive and triumphant civilization, on the one hand, and a crude, unprogressive, and waning one on the other—if civilization it can be called—is another of the issues of this war. It is but the ultimate, the closing catastrophe of the 'irrepressible conflict.'

Involved in this feature of the war, there is much beside the naked issue of freedom and slavery.

Slavery has no respect for the affections, as is evinced by the mercilessness with which she sunders every family tie. The refining culture of growth in civilization demands respect for the domestic loves, even of an inferior race. Where chattel slavery exists, labor is not held in honor, and just in proportion to the depth to which one class sinks by industrial oppression, does the other sink through enervating indolence and exhausting indulgence. Where there is chattel slavery, there cannot be free speech: the utterance of truth may indeed be incendiary, and the rickety, combustible institution standing out of its time, must needs protect itself. There must not be free education or free inquiry. It would never do to teach the slaves; and it is likewise the interest of this form of society to retain the lower strata of the nominally free population in ignorance equally dense and impenetrable. A cringing servility must be generated and maintained on the one side, and a haughty and exacting superciliousness on the other.

All these may be regarded as constituting minor issues, which are dependent for their vitality on that which is greater; and when the fate of the issue between chattel slavery and its antagonist shall have been determined, there will be no further trouble with the collaterals. When the main trunk is torn up by the root, the branches will all die.

But while the issue between slavery and freedom thus comprehends within itself a class of issues which are subordinate, may there not be a still greater issue which dwarfs that of slavery and freedom into a secondary, and comprehends within itself this and other issues of equal magnitude and importance?

Our Government has never given out that its object in the prosecution of the war is the extinction of slavery. It claims to have adopted emancipation only as a war measure; the great purpose of the war being avowedly the recovery of Governmental possessions and the restoration of the Union. Many moralists, failing, as we believe, to see the real significance of the idea of political unity, have looked upon the proposed object of the Government as a low and unworthy one; but have, nevertheless, rejoiced that the hand of Providence is in the work, and overruling it to bring out of these meaner aims a great and noble result.

It may be well to recollect in this connection that it is not always when great moral ends are the real aim and purpose of a movement that the greatest good has been accomplished. The greatest moral results have often followed when the movement proposed no moral end whatever; while efforts having a direct moral aim have resulted in signal failure, and sometimes in disaster even to the very end proposed. Well-meant efforts to save the heathen in a spiritual way have sometimes resulted in their physical destruction, through the stealthy obtrusion of the pests of civilization.

It is by no means as yet a settled question that emancipation will enhance the happiness of our negro population, or that it may not be the beginning of a series of disasters to the race which will eventuate in its extinction on this continent. The settlement of the slave question may be the beginning of the negro question; and the end of one difficulty the beginning of another.

It may be that sympathy for the negro is seeking to put in train a series of changes which would terribly revulse those same sympathies, if the end could be seen from the beginning. Yet these sympathies, even if mistaken in their direct object, may be working to a great and desirable end, which they do not as yet recognize. The Crusaders aimed at what they considered a good, but, failing in that, accomplished a real good of which they had no conception. They did not make themselves permanent masters of the Holy Land, but through their intercourse with each other and with the more cultivated people of the East, they nourished the germs of a forthcoming civilization in the West.

In the natural history of the world we discover that certain tribes of sentient beings prey upon certain other tribes; and this seems, on a cursory view, to be very shocking to the finer sensibilities of our nature; yet it is an arrangement which results in a larger amount of sentient enjoyment than could otherwise obtain among these lower denizens of our inexplicable world. The most vigorous—that which embodies within itself the greatest and the most various elements of vitality and power—the most vigorous, I say, prevails; and if the negro race of our continent should begin to wane and finally go as the 'poor Indian' has done—a fate which I do not here predict for him—the field thus vacated will not be lost, but occupied at once, and in time to its fullest extent, by a race of greater capabilities for culture, progress, and enjoyment. The physical world has attained to its present advanced geological condition through much of violence and pain; the same is true in a moral sense of mankind at large; and there may be still quite a great deal of this same career to run.