have, as a nation, no conception. That they think they have, simply proves that they misapprehend the military ages and peoples of the world. Whether their unwarlike quality is a sign of progression or deterioration is not the question here. The important thing to us is the fact, as a key to the situation.
The circumstance which goes further to account for the fact than the newness of the terrain, or its isolation from the civilised world, or the heterogeneous character of the people, is the democratic form of government which the statesmen of ninety years ago ventured to inaugurate. That form of government tends to the cultivation of self-will in every shape it can assume; and an inordinate self-will is unfavourable to the military spirit in the highest degree. In every form of society, self-will must be restricted in one way or another. In the American republic, the checks in the different sections form a study in themselves: but all I can say now is that, in each, one man’s self-will is checked by the stronger will of an equal; and this check affords no hope for military discipline. The actual working in the present case has been this:
For forty years the Southern politicians have been bent upon introducing the principle of slave labour throughout the Republic; and they have put to its fullest use the three-fifths suffrage which they obtained by bribery from the North in the last century. Obtaining by it the ascendency at Washington, they overwhelmed the Northern section by audacity, and by menace grounded on their supposed military character. The unwarlike North yielded; but this was by the self-will of the most self-seeking portion of the community overpowering the patriotism of better men. The newspapers were the means by which the baser minds acted, as they have now been the fatal betrayers of the Northern cause. The peculiarity of the Southern case has been that, owing to the absence of a middle class, the self-will of the dominant order has had no check—except indeed that of assassination. Despots over a population of slaves and “mean whites,” the Southern gentry have become crazed with self-will. The last trace of true military quality disappeared when attacks upon defenceless men, broils, and a gross order of duelling were boasted of as signs of an age of chivalry. When several thousands of citizens of several States awarded honours to Preston Brooks for his assault on Mr. Sumner as something heroic, the Southern community unconsciously surrendered its last claim to the credit of any sort of military spirit. In full consistency with this state of things, the South exceeded all bounds of reason in her self-will about the government of the Republic; and at last provoked the citizens of the Free States to assert their will as the majority. It was an overwhelming majority; but the South was spoiled by long indulgence, and could not yield, according to the constitutional compact. Relying on the unwarlike character of the North, the Secessionist leaders defied opposition, and began a civil war.
By doing so, they fix attention on whatever they have done in the way of warfare. I am not going into the history here; but I may refer to the fact of the absence of discipline which has been remarkable wherever Southern troops have gone. In Mexico, they exhibited a spectacle which could be seen in no place where the military spirit existed. As Republicans, they would be bound by no compulsion to serve beyond their own voluntary promise, or mere will and pleasure; and companies, or parties, or twos and threes, were frequently seen stacking their arms and refusing to move in the crisis of some enterprise, or walking away on the eve of action. By the road side, or in some exposed place in camp, some delinquent might be seen tied neck and knees together, or somehow pilloried, for some breach of discipline,—these cruel punishments being inflicted on safe subjects, in the absence of regular penalties, which republican soldiers will not submit to. These are illustrations of a decided non-military quality in the Southern citizens, who feel as certain of being soldiers, born and bred, as of being whites. If we should be obliged to believe the stories now current of their barbarity to prisoners and wounded men last month, the evidence of their misapprehension of the military character will be complete. On the one hand, experience disposes us to disbelieve all wonderful stories told in American newspapers; and, on the other, as the habit of visiting personal passions on the bodies of slaves has led to the prevalent practice of assassination in that region of the country, it is only too probable that, after a battle and during a rout, men accustomed to strike and stab and shoot on the sly, may have perpetrated acts which soldiers in the old world would regard with loathing.
As soon as the same causes have an opportunity of operating in the North, we see the same effects produced. American sailors, like soldiers, cannot endure to be made machines of. This repugnance is a reason against military enterprise; and Northern citizens have therefore not been soldiers hitherto; but there must be sailors. This has been one of the most trying social difficulties the Republic has ever had to deal with. Naval commanders are not so happy there as in other countries, from the perplexity how to enforce discipline. The narratives of mutinies on board ship,—the few that become known,—are singularly melancholy; as, for instance, that which occurred in the Exploring Expedition under Commander Wilkes, in which it became necessary to hang at the yardarm the son of a Member of the Cabinet of that day. We see in the incessant occurrence of cruelties on board American ships,—now a stereotyped phrase in the newspapers,—the consequences of a lack of a habit of discipline, and of due provision for its enforcement. The necessary despotism under which alone the work of an army and a navy can be done, is an anomaly in a democratic republic; and there is no basis for any trustworthy understanding between commanders and the commanded. It was long experience of this, and a confirmed habit of criticism of Southern soldiering, which made the recent “uprising of the North” so interesting as it was to observers of a warlike crisis in an unmilitary country.
The self-will in the North showed itself in the newspapers before a company was on its march.