I have seen various essays purporting to describe the causes of this civil war between the North and South; but they have generally been written with the view of vindicating either one side or the other, and have spoken rather of causes which should, according to the ideas of their writers, have produced peace, than of those which did, in the course of events, actually produce war. This has been essentially the case with Mr. Everett, who in his lecture at New York, on the 4th of July, 1860, recapitulated all the good things which the North has done for the South, and who proved — if he has proved anything — that the South should have cherished the North instead of hating it. And this was very much the case also with Mr. Motley in his letter to the London Times. That letter is good in its way, as is everything that comes from Mr. Motley, but it does not tell us why the war has existed. Why is it that eight millions of people have desired to separate themselves from a rich and mighty empire — from an empire which was apparently on its road to unprecedented success, and which had already achieved wealth, consideration, power, and internal well-being?

One would be glad to imagine, from the essays of Mr. Everett and of Mr. Motley, that slavery has had little or nothing to do with it. I must acknowledge it to be my opinion that slavery in its various bearings has been the single and necessary cause of the war; that slavery being there in the South, this war was only to be avoided by a voluntary division — secession voluntary both on the part of North and South; that in the event of such voluntary secession being not asked for, or if asked for not conceded, revolution and civil war became necessary — were not to be avoided by any wisdom or care on the part of the North.

The arguments used by both the gentlemen I have named prove very clearly that South Carolina and her sister States had no right to secede under the Constitution; that is to say, that it was not open to them peaceably to take their departure, and to refuse further allegiance to the President and Congress without a breach of the laws by which they were bound. For a certain term of years, namely, from 1781 to 1787, the different States endeavored to make their way in the world simply leagued together by certain articles of confederation. It was declared that each State retained its sovereignty, freedom, and independence; and that the said States then entered severally into a firm league of friendship with each other for their common defense. There was no President, no Congress taking the place of our Parliament, but simply a congress of delegates or ambassadors, two or three from each State, who were to act in accordance with the policy of their own individual States. It is well that this should be thoroughly understood, not as bearing on the question of the present war, but as showing that a loose confederation, not subversive of the separate independence of the States, and capable of being partially dissolved at the will of each separate State, was tried, and was found to fail. South Carolina took upon herself to act as she might have acted had that confederation remained in force; but that confederation was an acknowledged failure. National greatness could not be achieved under it, and individual enterprise could not succeed under it. Then in lieu of that, by the united consent of the thirteen States, the present Constitution was drawn up and sanctioned, and to that every State bound itself in allegiance. In that Constitution no power of secession is either named or presumed to exist. The individual sovereignty of the States had, in the first instance, been thought desirable. The young republicans hankered after the separate power and separate name which each might then have achieved; but that dream had been found vain — and therefore the States, at the cost of some fond wishes, agreed to seek together for national power rather than run the risks entailed upon separate existence. Those of my readers who may be desirous of examining this matter for themselves, are referred to the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution of the United States. The latter alone is clear enough on the subject, but is strengthened by the former in proving that under the latter no State could possess the legal power of seceding.

But they who created the Constitution, who framed the clauses, and gave to this terribly important work what wisdom they possessed, did not presume to think that it could be final. The mode of altering the Constitution is arranged in the Constitution. Such alterations must be proposed either by two-thirds of both the houses of the general Congress, or by the legislatures of two-thirds of the States; and must, when so proposed, be ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the States, (Article V.) There can, I think, be no doubt that any alteration so carried would be valid — even though that alteration should go to the extent of excluding one or any number of States from the union. Any division so made would be made in accordance with the Constitution.

South Carolina and the Southern States no doubt felt that they would not succeed in obtaining secession in this way, and therefore they sought to obtain the separation which they wanted by revolution — by revolution and rebellion, as Naples has lately succeeded in her attempt to change her political status; as Hungary is looking to do; as Poland has been seeking to do any time since her subjection; as the revolted colonies of Great Britain succeeded in doing in 1776, whereby they created this great nation which is now undergoing all the sorrows of a civil war. The name of secession claimed by the South for this movement is a misnomer. If any part of a nationality or empire ever rebelled against the government established on behalf of the whole, South Carolina so rebelled when, on the 20th of November, 1860, she put forth her ordinance of so-called secession; and the other Southern States joined in that rebellion when they followed her lead. As to that fact, there cannot, I think, much longer be any doubt in any mind. I insist on this especially, repeating perhaps unnecessarily opinions expressed in my first volume, because I still see it stated by English writers that the secession ordinance of South Carolina should have been accepted as a political act by the Government of the United States. It seems to me that no government can in this way accept an act of rebellion without declaring its own functions to be beyond its own power.

But what if such rebellion be justifiable, or even reasonable? what if the rebels have cause for their rebellion? For no one will now deny that rebellion may be both reasonable and justifiable; or that every subject in the land may be bound in duty to rebel. In such case the government will be held to have brought about its own punishment by its own fault. But as government is a wide affair, spreading itself gradually, and growing in virtue or in vice from small beginnings — from seeds slow to produce their fruits — it is much easier to discern the incidence of the punishment than the perpetration of the fault. Government goes astray by degrees, or sins by the absence of that wisdom which should teach rulers how to make progress as progress is made by those whom they rule. The fault may be absolutely negative and have spread itself over centuries; may be, and generally has been, attributable to dull, good men; but not the less does the punishment come at a blow. The rebellion exists and cannot be put down — will put down all that opposes it; but the government is not the less bound to make its fight. That is the punishment that comes on governing men or on governing a people that govern not well or not wisely.

As Mr. Motley says in the paper to which I have alluded, “No man, on either side of the Atlantic, with Anglo-Saxon blood in his veins, will dispute the right of a people, or of any portion of a people, to rise against oppression, to demand redress of grievances, and in case of denial of justice to take up arms to vindicate the sacred principle of liberty. Few Englishmen or Americans will deny that the source of government is the consent of the governed, or that every nation has the right to govern itself according to its will. When the silent consent is changed to fierce remonstrance, revolution is impending. The right of revolution is indisputable. It is written on the whole record of our race, British and American history is made up of rebellion and revolution. Hampden, Pym, and Oliver Cromwell; Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, all were rebels.” Then comes the question whether South Carolina and the Gulf States had so suffered as to make rebellion on their behalf justifiable or reasonable; or if not, what cause had been strong enough to produce in them so strong a desire for secession, a desire which has existed for fully half the term through which the United States has existed as a nation, and so firm a resolve to rush into rebellion with the object of accomplishing that which they deemed not to be accomplished on other terms?

It must, I think, be conceded that the Gulf States have not suffered at all by their connection with the Northern States; that in lieu of any such suffering, they owe all their national greatness to the Northern States; that they have been lifted up, by the commercial energy of the Atlantic States and by the agricultural prosperity of the Western States, to a degree of national consideration and respect through the world at large which never could have belonged to them standing alone. I will not trouble my readers with statistics which few would care to follow; but let any man of ordinary every-day knowledge turn over in his own mind his present existing ideas of the wealth and commerce of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburg, and Cincinnati, and compare them with his ideas as to New Orleans, Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, Richmond, and Memphis. I do not name such towns as Baltimore and St. Louis, which stand in slave States, but which have raised themselves to prosperity by Northern habits. If this be not sufficient, let him refer to population tables and tables of shipping and tonnage. And of those Southern towns which I have named the commercial wealth is of Northern creation. The success of New Orleans as a city can be no more attributed to Louisianians than can that of the Havana to the men of Cuba, or of Calcutta to the natives of India. It has been a repetition of the old story, told over and over again through every century since commerce has flourished in the world; the tropics can produce, but the men from the North shall sow and reap, and garner and enjoy. As the Creator’s work has progressed, this privilege has extended itself to regions farther removed and still farther from southern influences. If we look to Europe, we see that this has been so in Greece, Italy, Spain, France, and the Netherlands; in England and Scotland; in Prussia and in Russia; and the Western World shows us the same story. Where is now the glory of the Antilles? where the riches of Mexico and the power of Peru? They still produce sugar, guano, gold, cotton, coffee — almost whatever we may ask them — and will continue to do so while held to labor under sufficient restraint; but where are their men, where are their books, where is their learning, their art, their enterprise? I say it with sad regret at the decadence of so vast a population; but I do say that the Southern States of America have not been able to keep pace with their Northern brethren; that they have fallen behind in the race, and, feeling that the struggle is too much for them, have therefore resolved to part.

The reasons put forward by the South for secession have been trifling almost beyond conception. Northern tariffs have been the first, and perhaps foremost. Then there has been a plea that the national exchequer has paid certain bounties to New England fishermen, of which the South has paid its share, getting no part of such bounty in return. There is also a complaint as to the navigation laws — meaning, I believe, that the laws of the States increase the cost of coast traffic by forbidding foreign vessels to engage in the trade, thereby increasing also the price of goods and confining the benefit to the North, which carries on the coasting trade of the country, and doing only injury to the South, which has none of it. Then last, but not least, comes that grievance as to the Fugitive Slave Law. The law of the land as a whole — the law of the nation — requires the rendition from free States of all fugitive slaves. But the free States will not obey this law. They even pass State laws in opposition to it, “Catch your own slaves,” they say, “and we will not hinder you; at any rate we will not hinder you officially. Of non-official hinderance you must take your chance. But we absolutely decline to employ our officers to catch your slaves.” That list comprises, as I take it, the amount of Southern official grievances. Southern people will tell you privately of others. They will say that they cannot sleep happy in their beds, fearing lest insurrection should be roused among their slaves. They will tell you of domestic comfort invaded by Northern falsehood. They will explain to you how false has been Mrs. Beecher Stowe. Ladies will fill your ears and your hearts too with tales of the daily efforts they make for the comfort of their “people,” and of the ruin to those efforts which arises from the malice of the abolitionists. To all this you make some answer with your tongue that is hardly true — for in such a matter courtesy forbids the plain truth. But your heart within answers truly, “Madam, dear madam, your sorrow is great; but that sorrow is the necessary result of your position.”

As to those official reasons, in what fewest words I can use I will endeavor to show that they come to nothing. The tariff — and a monstrous tariff it then was — was the ground put forward by South Carolina for secession when General Jackson was President and Mr. Calhoun was the hero of the South. Calhoun bound himself and his State to take certain steps toward secession at a certain day if that tariff were not abolished. The tariff was so absurd that Jackson and his government were forced to abandon it — would have abandoned it without any threat from Calhoun; but under that threat it was necessary that Calhoun should be defied. General Jackson proposed a compromise tariff, which was odious to Calhoun — not on its own behalf, for it yielded nearly all that was asked, but as being subversive of his desire for secession. The President, however, not only insisted on his compromise, but declared his purpose of preventing its passage into law unless Calhoun himself, as Senator, would vote for it. And he also declared his purpose — not, we may presume, officially — of hanging Calhoun, if he took that step toward secession which he had bound himself to take in the event of the tariff not being repealed. As a result of all this Calhoun voted for the compromise, and secession for the time was beaten down. That was in 1832, and may be regarded as the commencement of the secession movement. The tariff was then a convenient reason, a ground to be assigned with a color of justice because it was a tariff admitted to be bad. But the tariff has been modified again and again since that, and the tariff existing when South Carolina seceded in 1860 had been carried by votes from South Carolina. The absurd Morrill tariff could not have caused secession, for it was passed, without a struggle, in the collapse of Congress occasioned by secession.

The bounty to fishermen was given to create sailors, so that a marine might be provided for the nation. I need hardly show that the national benefit would accrue to the whole nation for whose protection such sailors were needed. Such a system of bounties may be bad; but if so, it was bad for the whole nation. It did not affect South Carolina otherwise than it affected Illinois, Pennsylvania, or even New York.

The navigation laws may also have been bad. According to my thinking such protective laws are bad; but they created no special hardship on the South. By any such a theory of complaint all sections of all nations have ground of complaint against any other section which receives special protection under any law. The drinkers of beer in England should secede because they pay a tax, whereas the consumers of paper pay none. The navigation laws of the States are no doubt injurious to the mercantile interests of the States. I at least have no doubt on the subject. But no one will think that secession is justified by the existence of a law of questionable expediency. Bad laws will go by the board if properly handled by those whom they pinch, as the navigation laws went by the board with us in England.

As to that Fugitive Slave Law, it should be explained that the grievance has not arisen from the loss of slaves. I have heard it stated that South Carolina, up to the time of the secession, had never lost a slave in this way — that is, by Northern opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law; and that the total number of slaves escaping successfully into the Northern States, and there remaining through the non-operation of this law, did not amount to five in the year. It has not been a question of property, but of feeling. It has been a political point; and the South has conceived — and probably conceived truly — that this resolution on the part of Northern States to defy the law with reference to slaves, even though in itself it might not be immediately injurious to Southern property, was an insertion of the narrow end of the wedge. It was an action taken against slavery — an action taken by men of the North against their fellow-countrymen in the South. Under such circumstances, the sooner such countrymen should cease to be their fellows the better it would be for them. That, I take it, was the argument of the South, or at any rate that was its feeling.

I have said that the reasons given for secession have been trifling, and among them have so estimated this matter of the Fugitive Slave Law. I mean to assert that the ground actually put forward is trifling — the loss, namely, of slaves to which the South has been subjected. But the true reason pointed at in this — the conviction, namely, that the North would not leave slavery alone, and would not allow it to remain as a settled institution — was by no means trifling. It has been this conviction on the part of the South that the North would not live in amity with slavery — would continue to fight it under this banner or under that, would still condemn it as disgraceful to men and rebuke it as impious before God — which has produced rebellion and civil war, and will ultimately produce that division for which the South is fighting and against which the North is fighting, and which, when accomplished, will give the North new wings, and will leave the South without political greatness or commercial success.

Under such circumstances I cannot think that rebellion on the part of the South was justified by wrongs endured, or made reasonable by the prospect of wrongs to be inflicted. It is disagreeable, that having to live with a wife who is always rebuking one for some special fault; but the outside world will not grant a divorce on that account, especially if the outside world is well aware that the fault so rebuked is of daily occurrence. “If you do not choose to be called a drunkard by your wife,” the outside world will say, “it will be well that you should cease to drink.” Ah! but that habit of drinking, when once acquired, cannot easily be laid aside. The brain will not work; the organs of the body will not perform their functions; the blood will not run. The drunkard must drink till he dies. All that may be a good ground for divorce, the outside world will say; but the plea should be put in by the sober wife, not by the intemperate husband. But what if the husband takes himself off without any divorce, and takes with him also his wife’s property, her earnings, that on which he has lived and his children? It may be a good bargain still for her, the outside world will say; but she, if she be a woman of spirit, will not willingly put up with such wrongs. The South has been the husband drunk with slavery, and the North has been the ill-used wife.

Rebellion, as I have said, is often justifiable but it is, I think, never justifiable on the part of a paid servant of that government against which it is raised. We must, at any rate, feel that this is true of men in high places — as regards those men to whom by reason of their offices it should specially belong to put down rebellion. Had Washington been the governor of Virginia, had Cromwell been a minister of Charles, had Garibaldi held a marshal’s baton under the Emperor of Austria or the King of Naples, those men would have been traitors as well as rebels. Treason and rebellion may be made one under the law, but the mind will always draw the distinction. I, if I rebel against the Crown, am not on that account necessarily a traitor. A betrayal of trust is, I take it, necessary to treason. I am not aware that Jefferson Davis is a traitor; but that Buchanan was a traitor admits, I think, of no doubt. Under him, and with his connivance, the rebellion was allowed to make its way. Under him, and by his officers, arms and ships and men and money were sent away from those points at which it was known that they would be needed, if it were intended to put down the coming rebellion, and to those points at which it was known that they would be needed, if it were intended to foster the coming rebellion. But Mr. Buchanan had no eager feeling in favor of secession. He was not of that stuff of which are made Davis, and Toombs, and Slidell. But treason was easier to him than loyalty. Remonstrance was made to him, pointing out the misfortunes which his action, or want of action, would bring upon the country. “Not in my time,” he answered. “It will not be in my time.” So that he might escape unscathed out of the fire, this chief ruler of a nation of thirty millions of men was content to allow treason and rebellion to work their way! I venture to say so much here as showing how impossible it was that Mr. Lincoln’s government, on its coming into office, should have given to the South, not what the South had asked, for the South had not asked, but what the South had taken, what the South had tried to filch. Had the South waited for secession till Mr. Lincoln had been in his chair, I could understand that England should sympathize with her. For myself I cannot agree to that scuttling of the ship by the captain on the day which was to see the transfer of his command to another officer.

The Southern States were driven into rebellion by no wrongs inflicted on them; but their desire for secession is not on that account matter for astonishment. It would have been surprising had they not desired secession. Secession of one kind, a very practical secession, had already been forced upon them by circumstances. They had become a separate people, dissevered from the North by habits, morals, institutions, pursuits, and every conceivable difference in their modes of thought and action. They still spoke the same language, as do Austria and Prussia; but beyond that tie of language they had no bond but that of a meager political union in their Congress at Washington. Slavery, as it had been expelled from the North, and as it had come to be welcomed in the South, had raised such a wall of difference that true political union was out of the question. It would be juster, perhaps, to say that those physical characteristics of the South which had induced this welcoming of slavery, and those other characteristics of the North which had induced its expulsion, were the true causes of the difference. For years and years this has been felt by both, and the fight has been going on. It has been continued for thirty years, and almost always to the detriment of the South. In 1845 Florida and Texas were admitted into the union as slave States. I think that no State had then been admitted, as a free State, since Michigan, in 1836. In 1846 Iowa was admitted as a free State, and from that day to this Wisconsin, California, Minnesota, Oregon, and Kansas have been brought into the union; all as free States. The annexation of another slave State to the existing union had become, I imagine, impossible — unless such object were gained by the admission of Texas. We all remember that fight about Kansas, and what sort of a fight it was! Kansas lies alongside of Missouri, a slave State, and is contiguous to no other State. If the free-soil party could, in the days of Pierce and Buchanan, carry the day in Kansas, it is not likely that they would be beaten on any new ground under such a President as Lincoln. We have all heard in Europe how Southern men have ruled in the White House, nearly from the days of Washington downward; or if not Southern men, Northern men, such as Pierce and Buchanan, with Southern politics; and therefore we have been taught to think that the South has been politically the winning party. They have, in truth, been the losing party as regards national power. But what they have so lost they have hitherto recovered by political address and individual statecraft. The leading men of the South have seen their position, and have gone to their work with the exercise of all their energies. They organized the Democratic party so as to include the leaders among the Northern politicians. They never begrudged to these assistants a full share of the good things of official life. They have been aided by the fanatical abolitionism of the North by which the Republican party has been divided into two sections. It has been fashionable to be a Democrat, that is, to hold Southern politics, and unfashionable to be a Republican, or to hold anti-Southern politics. In that way the South has lived and struggled on against the growing will of the population; but at last that will became too strong, and when Mr. Lincoln was elected, the South knew that its day was over.

It is not surprising that the South should have desired secession. It is not surprising that it should have prepared for it. Since the days of Mr. Calhoun its leaders have always understood its position with a fair ............