Terrible Swift Sword Read Free

the younger branch of the
British stock, for freedom, against the elder, for slavery"; he believed
that it would be dreadful, "but the end will be sure and swift." 10
    Secretary
Seward, to be sure, may have been talking through his hat. So far, revolution
was only germinating. Whatever values and perils might be added if the war
became an all-out struggle for human rights, that change had not yet been made
and there was no sure indication that it ever would be made. Congress was all
but unanimous in its declaration that the war had nothing whatever to do with
slavery, and when it spoke thus Congress unquestionably spoke for a majority.
The slavery issue, like a fulminate of mercury cap which could set off an
immense explosion, had been carefully wrapped in protective swaddling so that
it might not be jarred unduly. If the war could be fought with some restraint,
limited by the sober design of its leaders and kept always under proper control,
the disastrous shock could very likely be averted.

But the people who were fighting one
another were most unlikely to exercise much restraint or to submit to effective
discipline. They were already beginning to take the war into their own hands,
and they were so muscular, tenacious, and impatient that they might easily give
it dimensions large enough to develop any and all of its potentialities. The
pressure for action which had compelled a reluctant general to put an unready
army into the fight at Bull Run was still rising. This was a war in which
anything could happen.
    There was a young mining engineer who
raised a company of mountaineers in northern Georgia and led them off to serve
the Confederacy, only to be halted in Atlanta by the news that Georgia's quota
had been filled; the governor could not take any more recruits just now. The
mountaineers promptly mutinied—if that term can be applied to men who were not
yet members of any accredited military organization —and refused to go home. If
the governor of Georgia did not want them, they said, they would find some
other governor who did. They camped on the edge of Atlanta, a wild, spirited,
uncontrollable company which would do anything on earth but disband, and in the
fullness of time a place was found for them in an Alabama regiment; and in the
end they got, for their enthusiasm, four years of desperate fighting. After the
war their former captain wrote: "The literal truth is that the people were
leading the leaders." 11
    Behaving thus, the people were by no
means disagreeing with those leaders who wanted to conduct the war without
reference to the explosive issue of slavery. They simply wanted action,
responding to a reflex that ran from the emotions through the muscles, and they
showed what they wanted in various ways. From Charlottesville, Virginia, a
correspondent of the Charleston Mercury wrote
that "the cool western breeze which is rippling the tasselled corn into
endless waves comes laden with the hum of war from the distant
Alleghenies," and he reflected sagely: "Go where you will over this
broad land, the air is instinct with strife." A spirit less pastoral, and
also much less conventional, moved a citizen of Alabama who wrote to the
Confederate Secretary of War proposing the formation of volunteer companies of
freebooters which would make war at no cost to the Confederacy, supporting
themselves by the seizure of Yankee goods and chattels: "Such companies
propose going and fighting without restraint and under no orders, and convey
the property captured to their own private use, thereby benefiting their own
pecuniary circumstances as well as doing their country good service by
crippling the enemy." This proposal got nowhere, but the editor of the
Richmond Examiner called
for harsh measures, asserting: "The enemy must be made to feel the war.
They must be made to understand that there is a God that punishes the wicked,
and that the Southern army is His instrument." 12
    The
notion that those led might get ahead of their