Belief in secession a source of weakness.
The majority in the
South had been educated to believe that secession was the remedy to which a State might peaceably resort in the last extremity to redress actual or apparent wrongs, and that
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the time for its exercise had come.
One-half, if not two-thirds, of the
South further believed that after perhaps a skirmish or two over the forts in the
South, the
North would, as
Greeley expressed it, “permit the erring sisters to go in peace.”
We did not anticipate a war of much magnitude, and were totally unprepared for it. The arms that were moved South in
Buchanan's administration were old-fashioned guns, removed at the express request of the Ordnance Department to make room for new and better arms; and the charge that they were removed by
Secretary Floyd in anticipation of war, is as ridiculous as it is false.
The idea that we were engaged in peaceable secession was not only prevalent in the
South, but led to what will be regarded by the student of military operations as fatal and palpable military blunders.
Had we realized in the beginning that we were engaged in a great revolution, and not a peaceful effort to secede and form a new Union, we would have had no constitutional scruples about seizing or purchasing cotton, and establishing, when there was no blockade to prevent, a basis of credit in
Europe that would have given us unlimited supplies and sinews of war. But no warrant of authority could be found for such a proceeding in the constitution, which Southern men carried with them into secession as the children of Israel carried the ark of covenant into the wilderness; and statesmen, withdrawing from threatened usurpation of power in the old Union, could not begin a new Union by usurpation of power themselves.
If we had not believed in the right of peaceable secession, and had not respected the rights of States which had not declared for it, the disastrous blunder in selecting the sites of
Forts Henry and
Donelson, the key to our centre, would not have been made.
Tennessee would have been sooner occupied, and
Kentucky and
Missouri might never have been lost to our cause.
If
Mr. Davis had not believed that he was engaged in building up a new Union under all the forms of law and order, he would have been free to place himself at the head of his troops, and the briliant military genius displayed at
Buena Vista, at the head of an invading army of natural soldiers, might have won greater victories on wider fields.
Hamley, a recent writer on the operations of war, says: “Confronting all
Europe, and destitute of all the material of war except men,
France poured forth armies half clad, half fed, half armed, but filled with intelligence, valor and zeal.
Old traditions of methodical war, where troops slept under tents and were fed from magazines, were of no value to armies which possessed neither tents nor magazines. . . The old system of
Frederick met the new system of
Napoleon and was shattered to pieces.”
Southern volunteers poured forth filled with the same intelligence, valor and zeal, and surpassed the Frenchmen in this, they were trained horsemen and accustomed to firearms from their youth.
They were equally fearless and impetuous, and under a Napoleonic leader, like the
French conscripts, would have been
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veterans in the first.engagement, and the
battle of Bull Run might have been re-enacted on many fields.
But what the effect might have been of an offensive war, pushed boldly into the
Northern States, when their people were divided in sentiment, and before their armies had been trained and prepared for battle, I leave to the student of military operations to discuss and decide.
If I were called on to describe in brief our conflict, I should write thus: the
North succeeded because law and constitution were made to bend to every military necessity, while time and
West Point discipline made of Northern men the best soldiers in the world.
The South failed because the most pressing military necessities were diregarded when in conflict with constitution and law, while
West Point discipline chilled the ardor and time destroyed the advantages of the best natural soldiers that ever lived.
But I am not here to mourn over what might have been.
