The American Revolution and the Boer War, An Open Letter to Mr. Charles Francis Adams on His Pamphlet Part 2

Such a man easily dropped the contest for the confederacy when the point of scientific defeat had been reached. He fought to acquit his own honor as a man fights a duel until blood is drawn, and that done he has no more incentive for fighting.

There is also another point you have forgotten. The terms which General Grant offered Lee were of a liberality beyond the capacity of any British general or statesman. Lee's whole army was paroled and told to go home taking their horses with them to cultivate their farms. There were to be no punishments or executions for treason. Afterwards when some people in the north foolishly clamored for punishment, Grant sternly insisted on the fulfillment of every condition in the surrender.

Under such terms it was very easy and natural for Lee to ride quietly from the surrender to his own home, walk in and shut the door, and never trouble himself about the rebellion again.

You say Lee's example influenced the other southern leaders. But it was Grant's example, the fair and honorable terms, which were the real influence, the real power that was accomplis.h.i.+ng this result. It was very American and possible only among Americans. The English are too stupidly violent ever to achieve such a result as that.

You may remember that some months ago Botha and some of the Boer leaders met Lord Kitchener to discuss terms of peace. And what were the British terms? Compare them with Grant's. Lord Kitchener said that immunity would be given to certain of the leaders, but no immunity could be promised to certain others. Could honorable men consent to surrender themselves and escape on condition that certain of their a.s.sociates were to be hung?

Suppose Grant had said to Lee, "You and your officers, if you will surrender, shall be guaranteed immunity; but Jefferson Davis, and Johnston and Beauregard are to be hung." Do you suppose Lee would have surrendered? I am inclined to think that if any such British policy had been carried out there would be guerilla war and Irish rebellion in the south to this hour.

Lord Kitchener, you will also remember, would give the Boers no promise of local self-government. It was indefinitely postponed. They asked him about giving the right to vote to the black Kaffir population. But Kitchener refused to give any promise on that point.

In other words they were asked to surrender without any agreement that the lives of the rebels in Cape Colony who had been a.s.sisting them should be spared the gallows, they had no definite promise of local self-government, and so far was the possibility of self-government removed that it was left uncertain whether or not the black Kaffir population would not be used to control them and outvote them if a sham of self-government were set up.

Now let us suppose Grant offering similar terms to Lee. Let us suppose him saying that the eleven states of the confederacy would be held as crown colonies, or presidential subject colonies for an indefinite period, and that the north reserved the right to control the south by means of giving the vote to the recently freed black slaves and withholding it from the whites. Do we not all know what Lee's answer and what the answer of the whole south would have been to those terms?

We all know what happened a few years afterwards in the reconstruction period when the blacks were to a certain extent put over the whites. We all know that the south immediately turned to guerilla methods or as they were called the Ku Klux societies, societies of secret a.s.sa.s.sination and terror, methods far worse than ordinary guerillaism.

Moreover these Ku Klux methods were successful. They broke the dominion of the black man. They compelled the north to stop, to recall its carpet baggers, to reconsider its injustice; or as Mr. Page puts it the southerners reconquered their own country, and had it again under their own normal state governments. But if Lee and the other southern leaders had known all this was coming they would have begun the guerillaism at Appomatox.

The Ku Klux methods were unpleasant, atrocious, unfortunate in many ways; for as most of us can remember, they fixed upon southern life the habit of a.s.sa.s.sination, which continued for many years in a manner most revolting and shocking to northern moral sense and it has only recently begun to die out. But who was to blame? England has in the same way turned the Irish into a.s.sa.s.sins, rioters and law breakers, and then cries out that they are barbarous and uncivilized and must be "coerced"

and forced into more a.s.sa.s.sination, rioting and law breaking. I place the blame where it belongs; and I venture to predict that if England continues her inhuman, morally degrading and worse than Irish policy with the Boers she will turn them into a race of a.s.sa.s.sins or law breakers. They are now the very reverse of that. They have shown a higher regard for the sacredness of human life than we have to-day in America. They have shown more self-restraint, more respect for personal rights, have dealt more fairly with their opponents than we did in our revolution. They are the superiors of both ourselves and the English and they are inferior to us and the English only in numbers.

There is a great deal of talk of England's success in ruling dependencies. She rules no doubt successfully enough over the servile, over toadies, flunkeys and weaklings or those who have no spirit or love of independence. Wherever she has attempted to rule an independence-loving people as in the case of the Irish, ourselves or the Boers, she has made a most shocking failure of it. Few people trouble themselves to read the long history of England's dealings with the South Africans for nearly a hundred years previous to the present war. It is all detailed in Theal's admirable volumes of the history of South Africa. Theal was himself an Englishman, an official in South Africa, and he prints all doc.u.ments in full. I must confess I was astonished to read this long record of atrocious injustice, inhumanity, stupidity and cruelty which generation after generation has hammered the Boers into a separate people, given them a long list of martyrs and anniversaries of ferocity and built up in them a fell hatred of the English, which now astonishes men like yourself, who suppose this to be a mere sudden outbreak, and who have not the time, or will not take the trouble, to investigate the long chain of causes which led up to it.

With an independence loving people England has only two methods of success, extermination or banishment. She always rules with complete success over the dead. When with Martinis and Lee Metfords she has slaughtered over 27,000 black or brown men, carrying spears or old-fas.h.i.+oned guns, with a loss on her side of only 387, and with a vast crop of medals and Victoria crosses for the supposed heroes of this supposed wonderful victory, she has unquestionably solved a "problem" in her way.

When, after 700 years of conquests, "colonization," reform bills, final settlements, coercion acts, land acts, hangings, confiscations, corruptions, treachery and broken promises, a large part of the native Irish are living in the United States, where by their steadiness, industry, bright minds and success they contradict and disprove every charge and statement made against them by pottering English statesmen, England may undoubtedly be said to have successfully solved the problem of her "white man's burden" so far as concerns these Irish in the United States.

As to those who remain in Ireland we again hear of coercion, are told that there is to be some more legislation for them which is to be a "final settlement." An Englishman has just written a book to prove that all settlements with such people as the Boers and the Irish should be "finalities" and settle the question. This, he says, is very important.

I notice also that some Irish representatives arrived the other day in New York to collect from Irish-Americans subscriptions in money to enable them to discuss this "final settlement," which has been progressing for 700 years without arousing the least sense of humor in any Englishman whom I ever knew or heard of.

I know however of one settlement which is supposed to have been final.

It was a doc.u.ment signed in Paris in the year 1783, by an Englishman whose name is of no importance, but the persons who signed on the other side were Franklin, Adams and Jay. I am wrong to call this a final settlement. It gave us only independence on the land. England still ruled us on the ocean where she searched our s.h.i.+ps as she pleased and claimed a suzerainty over us as she has claimed a suzerainty over the Boers, and for the same contemptible purpose, to enable her to watch her chance to destroy our independence.

We remained semi-independent until 1812 when we fought what used to be called the Second War for Independence. There were a great many people in your part of the country who thought we ought not to fight that war.

They used your argument. They said what is the use? It will waste money and destroy valuable property, both English and American. What is the use of fighting for a mere sentiment? Let us be governed by sense rather than sentiment. Let us be content with the substantial advantage and the liberty we already have rather than risk it all, and our material interests besides. And you carried this argument so far that you threatened to secede from the Union.

England had secret emissaries here at that time to encourage secession and dissolution in the hope that at any rate she could turn New England and possibly the Middle States into dependencies again. A few years afterwards in our Civil War, she again did her utmost to dismember us; and she would to-day seize with eagerness any similar opportunity. She never gives up her purpose to destroy the political manhood of any people.

If she had the courage of her convictions and intentions and was not afraid of the outcry of the civilized world, she would be much shorter and quicker in her work with the Boers. She would surround the concentration camps of Boer women and children with machine guns and pump into the ma.s.s of humanity until that heroic race was extinct. But she prefers the safer and more veiled, but equally infamous, method of slow starvation and disease, of banishment and imprisonment in distant countries to extinguish a race which she hates because she knows she has always done them evil and wrong and because they excel her own people in morals, military intelligence and courage.

She hated our love of independence as she hated Ireland's and it was merely an accident that she did not make of us an Ireland. When she deals with an independence-loving people she makes of them either an Ireland or a United States. And that is the question in South Africa.

Shall there be an Ireland in South Africa or a United States of South Africa?

It is most dismal to read of Englishmen suggesting for the Boers the same old methods that were used in Ireland, "colonization," stamping out the native language, stamping out the love of independence, banishment, depriving of weapons, the greatest severity, no mercy. The Irish were deprived of their weapons, even of their shot guns. They were forbidden to have carving knives above a certain length or horses above a certain value. They were "colonized" and their lands taken away from them and given to Englishmen over and over again, in exactly the same manner that Cecil Rhoads now recommends for the Boers. Measures to exterminate their language and their Roman Catholic religion were taken over and over again and were of such relentless severity that no reasonable man could doubt that both the language and the religion would disappear within a generation.

Cromwell went among them with scythes, bullets and Bibles and the war cry of his soldiers was "Jesus and no quarter." The town of Drogheda surrendered to him on his promise that their lives should be spared.

"But no sooner had they laid down their arms than Cromwell took back his word and slaughtered every man, woman and child in the city, so that five days are said to have been spent in this ghastly ma.s.sacre. At Wexford the same miserable scenes of treachery and butchery were enacted." (Gregg's Irish History, p. 64.)

Very few educated people in this country read Irish history. It is a sort of forbidden subject. It might reveal too much. From what I have read of it I am free to say that for stupid injustice, blind, unreasoning, brutal cruelty, treachery and corruption on the part of England from about the middle of the 12th century down to to-night it equals if it does not exceed in atrocity the rule of the Spaniard in South America.

Yet all the wicked things that the atrocity was intended to exterminate are still alive and possibly stronger than they were in the twelfth century. Roman Catholicism is as strong as ever, the language still lives, and there has been a special revival of it within the last two years. The most wonderful part of all is that the Irishman is still alive, still an Irishman with children and grandchildren. He still loves his country, still loves independence and home rule, is still carrying on what you call guerilla tactics; and this very summer made a special outburst of guerillaism in the British parliament itself in the very heart of London.

What does all this show? Simply that the spirit of independence, the natural nation-forming instinct of human beings, when once aroused, is usually inextinguishable except by the annihilation of every individual; and that this is a provision of nature for the formation of human societies in the world. Secondly that men will fight longer and more desperately for justice or against injustice than they will fight for money.

It has been the consciousness of eternal justice that has kept the Irish and Armenians going for seven hundred years, that inspired the Netherlands to resist the Spaniard for eighty years, that kept your ancestor fighting for seven years and determined Was.h.i.+ngton to resort to "predatory" war rather than yield to the "benevolence and good government" of England.

Justice is far superior to philanthropy, charity, "the white man's burden" or any other pious hypocrisy or fraud that the villainy of man has invented. It is more important than, and it must precede both morals and good government. After you have been just to a people you may begin to preach to them. Good government as well as agricultural, commercial and industrial prosperity, have been rendered impossible in Ireland for centuries because there has been no justice to the native and patriotic party among the people. Justice can purify most of the international horrors of the world far better than "benevolence."

We are on the whole more just than other nations. We founded ourselves upon justice, upon the doctrine that a naturally separated people had a right to their independence, that all men were politically equal and equal before the law, and that no government could be just that did not rest on the consent of the governed. These doctrines are the highest development of justice that has been wrought out in the past and by that great movement called the Reformation. But England has never accepted them.

We have taught England many things. The dread of our influence compelled her to give the Canadian French liberal inst.i.tutions. Any rights the Canadians, the Australians or the East Indians enjoy are the result of our revolution and the Sepoy Mutiny. Without our example the English lower cla.s.ses would still be serfs. Real liberty and free government, the rights of the laboring man, have grown during the last century in England out of American precept and example.

We have compelled her to enlarge her elective franchise towards universal suffrage. Only a few years ago there were no cheap newspapers in England. No reform journals or periodicals favoring popular rights, could be started because there was a tax on the paper, a tax on the advertis.e.m.e.nts and a tax on each copy of the journal, so levied and manipulated that the tory aristocracy could kill at their pleasure any popular journalistic enterprise. But the example of free and cheap newspapers in America, under the guidance of a Gladstone, extinguished those taxes and from that time dates the development of popular rights in England. In the same way has England been compelled to adopt our system of the secret ballot in place of her method which placed every tenant at the mercy of the landlord and every mill hand at the mercy of the mill owner. She is now struggling in a comical way to adopt our public school system. It remains for us to teach her to be just to the Boers.

With the greatest esteem for your distinguished ancestor and yourself, I have the honor to remain,

Very truly yours, SYDNEY G. FISHER.