Chapter 44 closes out Edward Pollard's history of the Civil War, written in the year after it ended. He considers some final consequences and looks to the future. The South was devastated.
That war closed on a spectacle of ruin, the greatest of modern times. There were eleven great States lying prostrate ; their capital all absorbed ; their fields desolate ; their towns and cities ruined ; their public works torn to pieces by armies ; their system of labour overturned ; the fruits of the toil of generations all swept into a chaos of destruction ; their slave property taken away by a stroke of the pen ; a pecuniary loss of two thousand millions of dollars involved in one single measure of spoliation—a penalty embraced in one edict, in magnitude such as had seldom been exacted unless in wars synonymous with robberies.
The future was in the hands of Washington. "Restoration" vs "restriction" is how Pollard characterizes it, noting that the party of restriction and revenge was in charge. But that would lead to further division, not healing.
But to men who had read the lessons of history it was clearly apparent that this policy would be destructive of the very ends it proposed ; that it would increase the acerbity of feeling at the South ; that it would deliver the two races over to the most violent discord ; and that it would be the occasion of immeasurable chaos and interminable anarchy.
The conservative party in the north favored Reconstruction with the States already in the Union, having never left in their view, and punishment exacted against individuals who had "resisted the authority of the Union". Lincoln had taken this view, but...
...the tragical death of President Lincoln, in a public theatre, at the hands of one of the most indefensible but courageous assassins that history has ever produced, the Executive office passed to the Vice-President, Andrew Johnson, the Southern people ignorantly deplored the change as one to their disadvantage, and the world indulged but small expectations from the coming man.
But Pollard praises Johnson for stepping up and taking the right approach. He met the challenges of the hour as he should have, and was "second only to George Washington". He recognized the rights of states, and occupied the middle ground between either group of extremists in Washington.
So how did the future look to Pollard, in 1866? Not so good.
At the time these pages are committed to the press, a series of measures has already been accomplished or introduced by the Radical party in the Congress at Washington that' would accomplish a revolution in the American system of government, the most thorough and violent of modern times. Propositions have been made so to amend the Constitution as to deprive the States of the power to define the qualifications of electors ; propositions to regulate representation by the number of voters, and not of population ; propositions to declare what obligations assumed by the States shall be binding on them, and what shall be the purposes of their taxation. What is known as the Civil Rights Bill (passed over the President's veto) has not only established negro equality, but has practically abolished, on one subject of jurisdiction at least, State laws and State courts. In short, the extreme Black Republican party at Washington has sought to disfranchise the whole Southern people, to force negro suffrage upon the South, to prevent the South from being represented in Congress so as to perpetuate the power of the Radicals, and afford them the means of governing the Southern States as conquered and subjugated territories.
It's "despotism" says Pollard, and the Radicals do not understand the resentment they're producing by their actions. He speaks directly to the Northern people, advising them that the South must be freed from "oppression" and "confiscation", and that the South must recover economically.
It is not by political agitation that this interest is to be promoted ; not under the hand of the Fanaticism that sows the wind that there are to grow up the fruits of industry. When the Southern people obtain political reassurance, and are able to lift the shield of the Constitution over their heads, they will be prepared for the fruitful works of peace ; they will be ready then for the large and steady enterprises of industry.
The loss of state power in favor of national power is clearly a concern for Pollard. The war may have decided some issues, but not all, he says:
He must be blind who does not perceive in the indications of Northern opinion and in the series of legislative measures consequent upon the war the sweeping and alarming tendency to Consolidation. It is not only the territorial unity of the States that is endangered by the fashionable dogma of the day, but the very cause of republican government itself.
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The State Rights put in question by the propositions we have referred to in Congress, are not those involved in the issue of Secession, and, therefore, decided against the South by the arbitration of the war. The Radical programme, which we have noted above, points the illustration that the war did not sacrifice the whole body of State Rights, and that there was an important residuum of them outside of the issue of Secession, which the people of the South were still entitled to assert, and to erect as new standards of party. It is precisely those rights of the States which a revoltionary party in Congress would deny, namely : to have their Constitutional representation, to decide their own obligations of debt, to have their own codes of crimes and penalties, and to deal with their own domestic concerns, that the Southern States claim have survived the war and are not subjects of surrender.
The future peace and security of the nation is at stake, Pollard says. It's interesting to me that a year after the war he's already wondering if another lies down the road.
Has the past war merely laid the foundation of another? The pregnant lesson of human experience is that few nations have had their first civil war without having their second ; and that the only guaranty against the repetition is to be found in the policy of wise and liberal concessions gracefully made by the successful party.
Pollard offers one last gracious comment about Jefferson Davis, and his prediction about the future. The struggle is not yet over.
There is a better judgment already read by the Southern people of what the war has decided as against themselves. The last memorable remark of Ex-President Davis, when a fugitive, and before the doors of a prison closed upon him, was : " The principle for which we contended is bound to reassert itself, though it may be at another time and in another form." It was a wise and noble utterance, to be placed to the credit of
an unfortunate ruler.
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... a great struggle of constitutional liberty yet remains, and that there are still missions of duty and glory for the South.
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The people of the South have surrendered in the war what the war has conquered ; but they cannot be expected to give up what was not involved in the war, and voluntarily, abandon their political schools for the dogma of Consolidation. That dogma, the result has not properly imposed upon them ; it has not " conquered ideas." The issues of the war were practical : the restoration of the Union and the abolition of slavery ; and only so far as political formulas were necessarily involved in these have they been affected by the conclusion. The doctrine of secession was extinguished ; and yet there is something left more than the shadow of State Rights,
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It is to be feared that in the present condition of the Southern States, losses will be experienced greater than the immediate inflictions of fire and sword. The danger is that they will lose their literature, their former habits of thought, their intellectual self-asssertion, while they are too intent upon recovering the mere material prosperity, ravaged and impaired by the war.
Pollard is deeply concerned about the future of the Southern people, and that they do not allow the loss of the war to change who they are and what they hold to be important. His pride in the people of the South is on full display, as is, sadly, his racism towards the black man.
Defeat has not made " all our sacred things profane." The war has left the South its own memories, its own heroes, its own tears, its own dead. Under these traditions, sons will grow to manhood, and lessons sink deep that are learned from the lips of widowed mothers.
It would be immeasurably the worst consequence of defeat in this war that the South should lose its moral and intellectual distinctiveness as a people, and cease to assert its well-known superiourity in civilization, in political scholarship, and in all the standards of individual character over the people of the North.
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The war has not swallowed up everything. There are great interests which stand out of the pale of the contest, which it is for the South still to cultivate and maintain. She must submit fairly and truthfully to what the war has property decided. But the war properly decided only what was put in issue : the restoration of the Union and the excision of slavery ; and to these two conditions the South submits. But the war did not decide negro equality ; it did not decide negro suffrage ; it did not decide State Rights, although it might have exploded their abuse ; it did not decide the orthodoxy of the Democratic party; it did not decide the right of a people to show dignity in misfortune, and to maintain self-respect in the face of adversity. And these things which the war did not decide, the Southern people will still cling to, still claim, and still assert in them their rights and views.
This is not the language of insolence and faction. It is the stark letter of right, arid the plain syllogism of common sense. It is not untimely or unreasonable to tell the South to cultivate her superiourity as a people ; to maintain her old schools of literature and scholarship ; to assert, in the forms of her thought, and in the style of her manners, her peculiar civilization, and to convince the North that, instead of subjugating an inferiour country, she has obtained the alliance of a noble and cultivated people, and secured a bond of association with those she may be proud to call brethren !
The book ends with Pollard telling the South to stand tall, and preserve who they are.
In such a condition there may possibly be a solid and honourable peace ; and one in which the South may still preserve many things dear to her in the /past. There may not be a political South. Yet there may be a social and intellectual South. But if, on the other hand, the South, mistaking the consequences of the war, accepts the position of the inferiour, and gives up what was never claimed or conquered in the war ; surrenders her schools of intellect and thought, and is left only with the brutal desire of the conquered for " bread and games ; " then indeed to her people may be applied what Tacitus wrote of those who existed under the Roman Empire : " We cannot be said to have lived, but rather to have crawled in silence, the young towards the decrepitude of age and the old to dishonourable graves."
I'll try to put together a summary, and since it's Pollard's views and when he wrote them that make this particular history of the war interesting to me, that's what I'll focus on. Since I took this book on originally as an attempt to see how much of the lost cause came out of "The Lost Cause", I think that will be a useful approach for me to take.