It is also Christianity. The pacifist, let me parenthetically observe,
is scarcely a Christian. There be technical Christians and there be
Christians. The technical Christian sees nothing but the blurred letter
of the law, which he misconstrues. The Christian, animated by its holy
spirit and led by its rightful interpretation, serves the Lord alike of
heaven and hosts when he flies the flag of his country and smites its
enemies hip and thigh!
Chapter the Eleventh
Andrew Johnson—The Liberal Convention in 1872—Carl Schurz—The
“Quadrilateral”—Sam Bowles, Horace White and Murat Halstead—A Queer
Composite of Incongruities
I
Among the many misconceptions and mischances that befell the slavery
agitation in the United States and finally led a kindred people into
actual war the idea that got afloat after this war that every
Confederate was a Secessionist best served the ends of the radicalism
which sought to reduce the South to a conquered province, and as such
to reconstruct it by hostile legislation supported wherever needed by
force.
Andrew Johnson very well understood that a great majority of the men
who were arrayed on the Southern side had taken the field against their
better judgment through pressure of circumstance. They were Union men
who had opposed secession and clung to the old order. Not merely in the
Border States did this class rule but in the Gulf States it held a
respectable minority until the shot fired upon Sumter drew the call for
troops from Lincoln. The Secession leaders, who had staked their all
upon the hazard, knew that to save their movement from collapse it was
necessary that blood be sprinkled in the faces of the people. Hence the
message from Charleston:
_With cannon, mortar and petard We tender you our Beauregard_—
with the response from Washington precipitating the conflict of
theories into a combat of arms for which neither party was prepared.
The debate ended, battle at hand, Southern men had to choose between
the North and the South, between their convictions and predilections on
one side and expatriation on the other side—resistance to invasion, not
secession, the issue. But four years later, when in 1865 all that they
had believed and feared in 1861 had come to pass, these men required no
drastic measures to bring them to terms. Events more potent than acts
of Congress had already reconstructed them. Lincoln with a forecast of
this had shaped his ends accordingly. Johnson, himself a Southern man,
understood it even better than Lincoln, and backed by the legacy of
Lincoln he proceeded not very skillfully to build upon it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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