6-30 eBook - pdf - With Lee in Virginia: A Story of the American Civil War. Supplemental Reading for Lesson XXX. - McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader (revised edition)

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XXX. WAR. (148)

Charles Sumner. 1811-1874, was born in Boston. He studied at the Latin school in his native city, graduated from Harvard University at the age of nineteen, studied law at the same institution, and was admitted to practice in 1834. He at once took a prominent position in his profession, lectured to the law classes at Cambridge for several successive years, wrote and edited several standard law books, and might have had a professorship in the law school, had he desired it. In his famous address on "The True Grandeur of Nations," delivered July 4, 1815, before the municipal authorities of Boston, he took strong grounds against war among nations. In 1851 he was elected to the United States Senate and continued in that position till his death. As a jurist, as a statesman, as an orator, and as a profound and scholarly writer, Mr. Sumner stands high in the estimation of his countrymen. In physical appearance, Mr. Sumner was grand and imposing; men often turned to gaze after him, as he passed along the streets of his native city. 

The Coming of the Civil War:

     ...And yet he was extremely well supplied. Now obviously there was a plot. That was the most obvious thing. A plot to create a slave revolt. The south was right at that point. The plot however, was a very small one and a foolish one. The Secret Six and a handful of others, and John Brown and a small handful, it was a hair-brained scheme, it accomplished nothing but the execution of Brown and those involved in the plot with him, that is on the acting end, some of the wealthy members of the Secret Six immediately took fright, fearful that Brown would talk, and left the country. However, then as now people are ready to imagine conspiracies, and where there are real conspiracies, simply because their fears magnify them, they blow them up into a fantastically large thing. And so the belief in the South was that virtually every foreigner was involved in a conspiracy to have their slaves rise up during the night, and to creep into their bedrooms and slit their throats and rape their women, and there was a tremendous amount of hysteria created by John Brown. So that, while the Secret Six and John Brown made a very absurd attempt, they were impractical men, it was a foolish, hare brained scheme, surprisingly it did succeed because there was an equally hare brained reaction in the South. The fright, the terror that it created made them ready when Lincoln was elected, not too many days after, to feel that this is the end. We are going to face slave revolution, we are going to face every kind of horror, secession, this is the answer. And South Carolina led the way in Secession, and afterwards led the way in firing the shot on Fort Sumter.

     The irony of it was too at the same time the Democratic Party split two ways, between Breckenridge and Douglas. Some of the Cotton Whigs of the North who wanted peace, put a southern candidate in the running, Bell of Virginia, to try to have a peace candidate, so the vote was divided even further, although Lincoln gained only 40 percent of the votes, the popular votes, he gained an overwhelming majority of the electoral votes because he carried one state after another in that the vote was split four ways. Lincoln had a hundred and eighty electoral votes, Breckenridge, 72, Bell 39, and Douglas only 12. And so the war began. There was only one winner.

     In a sense it was John brown, the Secret Six, the hotheads. It was in congress, the work of two of the most contemptible characters the senate and the house had yet seen in Washington. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, and Thaddeus Stevens in the House of Pennsylvania. They were the real winners. They were the ones who foisted their ideas which were essentially totalitarian and socialist upon the Union. They were the ones who continually troubled the North, and the South, and Lincoln. Sumner was a Unitarian to the core, who had a hatred of God and of Christianity, who had been a champion of Horace Mann and the state controlled public school system, Thaddeus Stevens was a club footed man whose body was nowhere as near as deformed as his mind was. An exceedingly brilliant man, in terms of intelligence a very superior man, but a man contorted and twisted by hatred. A statist to the core in most areas. His mistress was a colored woman, a devout Catholic, He himself a rampant Atheist who hated Christianity.
These men governed.” 

Contents:

• 1 Lesson
• 2 Again, a whole school of historians are insistent upon...
• 3 So there was a steady movement towards paying them...
• 4 You see, what has happened is that so many southerners...
• 5 But once the rabble rousing element, especially in...
• 6 Consider what would happen if one third of the men...
• 7 The whole nation breathed a sigh of relief...
• 8 He did it in the name of popular sovereignty, an issue...
• 9 The net outcome however was that finally instead of...
• 10 Now this kind of fear of slavery you, as I said earlier...
• 11 And yet he was extremely well supplied...
• 12 The irony of it was too at the same time the Democratic...
• 13 Are there any questions at this point about anything...

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I need not dwell now on the waste and cruelty of war. These stare us wildly in the face, like lurid meteor lights, as we travel the page of history. We see the desolation and death that pursue its demoniac footsteps. We look upon sacked towns, upon ravaged territories, upon violated homes; we behold all the sweet charities of life changed to wormwood and gall. Our soul is penetrated by the sharp moan of mothers, sisters, and daughters—of fathers, brothers, and sons, who, in the bitterness of their bereavement, refuse to be comforted. Our eyes rest at last upon one of these fair fields, where Nature, in her abundance, spreads her cloth of gold, spacious and apt for the entertainment of mighty multitudes—or perhaps, from the curious subtlety of its position, like the carpet in the Arabian tale, seeming to contract so as to be covered by a few only, or to dilate so as to receive an innumerable host. Here, under a bright sun, such as shone at Austerlitz or Buena Vista—amidst the peaceful harmonies of nature—on the Sabbath of peace—we behold bands of brothers, children of a common Father, heirs to a common happiness, struggling together in the deadly fight, with the madness of fallen spirits, seeking with murderous weapons the lives of brothers who have never injured them or their kindred. The havoc rages. The ground is soaked with their commingling blood. The air is rent by their commingling cries. Horse and rider are stretched together on the earth. More revolting than the mangled victims, than the gashed limbs, than the lifeless trunks, than the spattering brains, are the lawless passions which sweep, tempest-like, through the fiendish tumult.

Horror-struck, we ask, wherefore this hateful contest? The melancholy, but truthful answer comes, that this is the established method of determining justice between nations!

The scene changes. Far away on the distant pathway of the ocean two ships approach each other, with white canvas broadly spread to receive the flying gales. They are proudly built. All of human art has been lavished in their graceful proportions, and in their well compacted sides, while they look in their dimensions like floating happy islands on the sea. A numerous crew, with costly appliances of comfort, hives in their secure shelter. Surely these two travelers shall meet in joy and friendship; the flag at the masthead shall give the signal of friendship; the happy sailors shall cluster in the rigging, and even on the yardarms, to look each other in the face, while the exhilarating voices of both crews shall mingle in accents of gladness uncontrollable. It is not so. Not as brothers, not as friends, not as wayfarers of the common ocean, do they come together; but as enemies.

The gentle vessels now bristle fiercely with death-dealing instruments. On their spacious decks, aloft on all their masts, flashes the deadly musketry. From their sides spout cataracts of flame, amidst the pealing thunders of a fatal artillery. They, who had escaped "the dreadful touch of merchant-marring rocks"—who had sped on their long and solitary way unharmed by wind or wave—whom the hurricane had spared—in whose favor storms and seas had intermitted their immitigable war—now at last fall by the hand of each other. The same spectacle of horror greets us from both ships. On their decks, reddened with blood, the murderers of St. Bartholomew and of the Sicilian Vespers, with the fires of Smithfield, seem to break forth anew, and to concentrate their rage. Each has now become a swimming Golgotha. At length, these vessels—such pageants of the sea—once so stately—so proudly built—but now rudely shattered by cannon balls—with shivered mast's and ragged sails—exist only as unmanageable wrecks, weltering on the uncertain waves, whose temporary lull of peace is now their only safety. In amazement at this strange, unnatural contest—away from country and home—where there is no country or home to defend—we ask again, wherefore this dismal duel? Again the melancholy but truthful answer promptly comes, that this is the established method of determining justice between nations.

NOTES.—Austerlitz, a small town in Austria, seventy miles north from Vienna. It is noted as the site of a battle, in December, 1805, between the allied Austrian and Russian armies, and the French under Napoleon. The latter were victorious. Buena Vista, a small hamlet in eastern Mexico, where, in 1847, five thousand Americans, under Gen. Taylor, defeated twenty thousand Mexicans, under Gen. Santa Anna.

Dreadful touch.—Quoted from Merchant of Venice, Act III, Scene II.

St. Bartholomew.—A terrible massacre took place in France, on St. Bartholomew's day, August 24, 1572. It has been estimated that twenty thousand persons perished.

Sicilian Vespers, a revolt and uprising against the French in Sicily, March 30, 1282, at the hour of vespers.

Smithfield, a portion of London noted as a place for execution during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.