XXXII THE SHADOW FALLS

WITH the autumn came that shadow over the land which Arthur Brent had so greatly dreaded. Mr. Lincoln’s election was quickly succeeded by the secession of South Carolina. One after another the far Southern States followed, and presently the seceding states allied themselves in a new confederacy.

The whole country was in a ferment. The founders of the Union had made no provision whatever for such a state of things as this, and even the wisest men were at a loss to say what ought to be done or what could be done. There seemed to be nowhere any power or authority adequate to deal with the situation in one way or in another. All was chaos in the coolest minds while the hotheads on either side were daily making matters worse by their intemperate utterances and by the unyielding arrogance of their attitude.

In the meantime the administration at Washington seemed intent only upon preventing the outbreak of open war until its term should end on the fourth of March, 1861, while those into whose hands the government must pass on that date had not only no authority to act but no privilege even of advising.

It seemed fortunate at the time, that Virginia refused to join in the secession movement. Her refusal and her commanding influence over the other border states seemed for a time to provide an opportunity for wise counsels to assert themselves. There were radical secessionists in Virginia and uncompromising opponents of secession on any terms. But the attitude of the great majority of Virginians, as was shown in the election of a constitutional convention on the fourth of February, was one of earnestness for peace and reconciliation and the preservation of the Federal Union.

The Virginians believed firmly in the constitutional right of any state to withdraw from the Union, but the majority among them saw in Mr. Lincoln’s election no proper occasion for the exercise of that right. They regarded the course of the cotton states in withdrawing from the Union as one strictly within their right, but as utterly unwise and unnecessary. On the other hand they firmly denied the right of the national government to coerce the seceding states or in any manner to make war upon them.

Arthur Brent was an uncompromising believer in the right of a state to secede, and equally an uncompromising opponent of secession as a policy. That part of Virginia in which he lived was divided in opinion and sentiment, with a distinct preponderance of opinion in behalf of secession. But when the call came for the election of a constitutional convention to decide upon Virginia’s course the secessionists of his district were represented by two rival candidates, both fiercely favoring secession. The only discoverable difference in their views was that one of them wanted the convention to adopt the ordinance of secession “before breakfast on the day of its first assembling,” while the other contended that it would be more consonant with the dignity of the state to have muffins and coffee first.

Neither of these candidates was a person of conspicuous influence in the community. Neither was a man of large ability or ripe experience or commanding social position—the last counting for much in Virginia in those days when there was no such thing as a ballot in that state, and when every man must go to the polls and openly proclaim his vote.

Under these circumstances a number of the conservative men of the district got together and decided to make Arthur Brent a candidate. It was certain that the secession vote would be in the majority in the district, but if it were divided between the two rival candidates, as it was certain to be, these gentlemen were not without hope that their candidate might secure a plurality and be elected.

Arthur strenuously objected to the program so far at least as it concerned his own candidacy. He had a pronounced distaste for politics and public life, and he stoutly argued that some one who had lived all his life in that community would be better able than he to win all there was of conservatism to his support. He entreated these his friends to adopt that course. It was significant of the high place he had won in the estimation of the community’s best, that they refused to listen to his protest, and, by a proclamation over their own signatures, announced him as their candidate and urged all men who sincerely desired wise and prudent counsels to prevail in a matter which involved Virginia’s entire future, to support him at the polls.

Thus compelled against his will to be a candidate, Arthur entered at once upon a canvass of ceaseless activity. He did not mean to be defeated. He spoke every day and many times every day, and better still he talked constantly to the groups of men who surrounded him, setting forth his views persuasively and so convincingly that when the polls closed on that fateful fourth of February, it was found that Arthur Brent had been elected by a plurality which amounted almost to a majority, to represent his district in that constitutional convention which must decide Virginia’s commanding course, and in large degree, perhaps, determine the final issue of war or peace.

When the convention met nine days later it was found that an overwhelming majority of the members held views identical, or nearly so, with those of Arthur Brent. There were a very few uncompromising secessionists in the body, and also a few unconditional Union men, who declared their hostility to secession upon any terms, at any time, under any circumstances. Among these unconditional Union men, curiously enough were two who afterwards became notable fighters for the Southern cause—namely Jubal A. Early and William C. Wickham.

But the overwhelming majority opposed secession as a mistaken policy, uncalled for by anything in the then existing circumstances, and certain to precipitate a devastating war; while at the same time maintaining the constitutional right of each state to secede, and holding themselves ready to vote for Virginia’s secession, should the circumstances so change as to render that course in their judgment obligatory upon the state under the law of honor.

That change occurred in the end, as we shall presently see. But, in the meantime, these representatives of the Virginia people wrought with all their might for the maintenance of peace and the preservation of the Union. They counselled concession and sweet reasonableness, on both sides. They urged upon both the commanding necessity of endeavoring, in a spirit of mutual forbearance, to find some basis of adjustment by which that Union which Virginia had done so much to bring about, and under which the history of the Republic had been a matter of universal pride both North and South, might be preserved and established anew upon secure foundations. More important than all this was the fact that these representative men of Virginia denied to the seceding cotton states the encouragement of Virginia’s sanction for their movement, the absolutely indispensable moral and material support of the mother state.

For a time there was an encouraging prospect of the success of these Virginian efforts. Nobody, North or South, believed that the cotton states would long stand alone in their determination, if Virginia and the other border states that looked to her for guidance—Kentucky, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Maryland—should continue to hold aloof.

In the meantime Mr. Lincoln, after his inauguration, had a somewhat similar problem to deal with at the North. There was a party there clamorous for instant war with a declared purpose of abolishing slavery. The advocates of that policy pressed it upon the new president as urgently as the extreme secessionists at the South pressed secession upon Virginia. Mr. Lincoln saw clearly, as these his advisers did not, that their policy was utterly impracticable. From the very beginning he insisted upon confining his administration’s efforts rigidly to the task of preserving the Union with the traditional rights of all the states unimpaired. He saw clearly that there were men by hundreds of thousands at the North, who would heart and soul support the administration’s efforts to preserve the Union, even by war if that should be necessary, but who would antagonize by every means in their power a war for the extirpation of slavery at cost of Federal usurpation of control over any state in its domestic affairs.

Accordingly, Mr. Lincoln held to his purpose. He would make no attempt to interfere with slavery where it constitutionally existed, and he would make no direct effort to compel seceding states to return to the Union; but he would use whatever force he might find necessary to repossess the forts, arsenals, post-offices and custom houses which the seceding states had seized upon within their borders, and he would endeavor to enforce the Federal laws there.

But in order to accomplish this, military forces were necessary, and the government at Washington did not possess them. There was only the regular army, and it consisted of a mere handful of men, scattered from Eastport, Maine, to San Diego, California, from St. Augustine, Florida to Puget’s Sound, and charged with the task—for which its numbers were utterly inadequate—of keeping the Indians in order and proper subjection. It is doubtful that Mr. Lincoln could have concentrated a single full regiment of regulars at any point, even at risk of withdrawing from the Indian country the men absolutely necessary to prevent massacre there. He therefore called for volunteers with whom to conduct such military operations as he deemed necessary. He apportioned the call among the several states that had not yet seceded. He called upon Virginia for her quota.

That was the breaking point. Virginia had to choose. She must either furnish a large force of volunteers with which the Federal government might in effect coerce the seceding states into submission, or she must herself secede and cast in her lot with the cotton states. To the Virginian mind there was only one course possible. The Virginians believed firmly and without doubt or question in the right of any state to withdraw from the Union at will. They looked with unimagined horror upon every proposal that the Federal power should coerce a seceding state into submission. They regarded that as an iniquity, a crime, a proceeding unspeakably wrongful and subversive of liberty. They could have nothing to do with such an attempt without dishonor of the basest kind. Accordingly, almost before the ink was dry upon the call upon Virginia for volunteers with which to make war upon the seceding Southern States, the Virginia, pro-Union convention, adopted an ordinance of secession, and the Civil War was on.

The men who had, so long and so earnestly, and in face of such contumely, labored to keep Virginia in the Union and to use all that state’s commanding influence in behalf of peace, felt themselves obliged to yield to the inevitable, and to consent to a sectional war for which they saw no necessity and recognized no occasion. They had wasted their time in a futile endeavor to bring about a reconciliation where the conflict had been all the while hopelessly “irrepressible.” There was nothing for it now but war, and Virginia, deeply deprecating war, set herself at work in earnest to prepare for the conflict.

In accordance with his lifelong habit of mind, Arthur Brent in this emergency put aside all thoughts of self-interest, and looked about him to discover in what way he might render the highest service to his native land, of which he was capable. He was unanimously chosen by each of two companies of volunteers in his native county, to be their captain. In their rivalry with each other, they agreed to make him major in command of a battalion to be formed of those two companies and two others that were in process of organization.

He peremptorily declined. “I know nothing of the military art,” he wrote to the committee that had laid the proposal before him. “There are scores of men in the community better fit than I am for military command. Especially there is your fellow citizen, John Meaux, trained at West Point and eminently fit for a much higher command than any that you can offer him. Put him, I earnestly adjure you, into the line of promotion. Elect him to the highest military office within your gift, and let me serve as a private under him, in either of your companies, if no opportunity offers for me to render a larger service and a more valuable one than that. There is scarcely a man among you who couldn’t handle a military force more effectively than I could. Let your most capable men be your commanders, big and little. I believe firmly in the dictum ‘the tools to him who can use them.’ For myself I see a more fruitful opportunity of service than any that military command could bring to me. I have a certain skill which, I think, is going to be sorely needed in this war. It is my firm belief that the struggle upon which we are entering is destined to last through long years of suffering and sore want. We are mainly dependent upon importation not only for the most pressingly necessary of our medicines but for that absolute necessity of life, salt. If war shall shut us in, as it is extremely likely to do, we must find means which we do not now possess of producing these and other things for ourselves, including the materials for that prime requisite of war—gunpowder. It so happens that I have skill in such manufactures as these, and I purpose to turn it to account whenever the necessity shall come upon us. In the meantime, as a surgeon and, upon occasion, as a private soldier I may perhaps be able to do more for Virginia and for the South than I could ever hope to do by assuming those functions of military command for which I have neither natural fitness nor the fitness of training.”

All this was deemed very absurd at the time. The war, it was thought, could not last more than sixty days—an opinion which Mr. Secretary of State Seward, on the other side of the line, confidently shared, though his anticipations of the end of it were quite different from those entertained at the South. Why a young man of spirit, such as Arthur Brent was, should refuse to enter upon the brief but glorious struggle in the capacity of a major with the prospect of coming out of it a brigadier-general, his neighbors could not understand. Nor could any of them, with one exception, understand his anticipations of a long war, or his conviction that, end as it might, the war would make an early end of slavery, overturning the South’s industrial system and bringing sore poverty upon the people. The one exception was Robert Copeland, the thrifty young man who had lost caste by “making too many hogsheads of tobacco to the hand.” He shared Arthur’s views, and he acted upon them in ways that Arthur would have scorned to do. He sent all his negroes to Richmond to be sold by auction to the traders to the far South. He converted his plantation, with all its live stock and other appurtenances into money, and with the proceeds of these his sellings he hurried to New York and purchased diamonds. These he bestowed in a belt which he buckled about his person and wore throughout the war, upon the principle that whatever value there might or might not be in other things when the war should be over, diamonds always command their price throughout the civilized world. When after this was done he sought to enlist in one of the companies forming in his neighborhood, he was rejected by unanimous vote, because he had sold negroes, while the men of the company held rigidly to a social standard of conduct which he had flagrantly defied. He went to Richmond. He raised a company of ruffians, which included many “jailbirds” and the like. He made himself its captain, and went into the field as the leader of a “fighting battery.” He distinguished himself for daring, and came out of the war, four years later, a brigadier-general. As such he was excluded from the benefits of the early amnesty proclamation. But he cared little about that. He went to New York, sold his diamonds for fifty per cent more than their cost, and accepted high office in the army of the Khedive of Egypt. He thus continued active in that profession of arms in which he had found his best opportunity to exercise his peculiar gift of “getting out of men all there is in them”—which was the phrase chosen by himself to describe his own special capabilities.[C]