Confederate Military History. Robert White

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      MARYLAND

      Chapter 1: Maryland in its Origin, Progress, and eventual Relations to the Confederate Movement.

      When the New World was disclosed to the Old, the belief of all civilized people was that the heathen had no rights which Christians ought to respect —that he and his country belonged of right to the strongest taker; and it became a curious article of a more curious faith that murder and robbery were efficient means for propagating the faith of Christ and magnifying the glory of God.

      The Pope made short work of the whole matter, for he divided the new world east and west by a degree of longitude and made a present of one-half to the Spaniard and the other half to the Portuguese—‘Ad majoram gloriam Dei’—to the greater glory of God. This process of simple division was not satisfactory to the fair-haired, blue-eyed race that dominated the island in the North Sea.

      Love of enterprise, commercial daring, politics, religious conditions—all contributed to stimulate exploration and investigation. One Englishman spent his life searching for El Dorado—the land where gold abounded; a Spaniard spent his hunting the ‘Fons Vitae’—the fountain of perpetual youth, the waters of which renew forever the waning forces of vitality. But while the Spaniard ransacked two continents for silver and gold, found them and ruined his posterity, the French, actuated by no nobler ideals, made settlements in North America, the main inspiration of which was the desire to possess the great fisheries on the north-eastern coast. The English, in the main, had higher aims, and wider, larger aspirations. Political conditions at home exasperated religious differences, and the only hope of liberty seemed to be to transplant the old institutions of Britain—liberty of person, security of property, freedom of thought—to the wilderness, and there secure them forever by the ancient safeguards devised by the experience, the wisdom and the courage of their ancestors—habeas corpus, trial by jury, representative self-government. So, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, many gentlemen in England emigrated with their property and their servants to the forests of New England, then including the north continent from the lakes to the gulf. With them they carried the opinions of their time and generation. The possession of the heathen was lawful and laudable sport for Christian men, and they straightway put them to the sword, seized their lands, their wives and their children, and divided them and all prisoners taken in war as slaves of the conquerors. This was the universal rule among all the English except in Pennsylvania and in Maryland. In the first the influence of Penn, in the last that of the Jesuits, saved them from such crimes against humanity. But the necessities of the new society, the constant struggle with nature, the forest, the flood, the fire, all made involuntary and controlled labor exceedingly valuable, convenient, comfortable and necessary. And when to the captive Indians were added cargoes of savage, cannibal Africans, no man could deny that it was a Christian duty to civilize them and teach them to work. Therefore, involuntary servitude existed in all the English colonies from the very first, and it was not until the American revolution stirred up generalizings and theories about the rights of man, that the idea got abroad that slavery was wrong. In the New England States it had long ceased to be necessary, for population had increased and roads been constructed, so that society was able to protect itself. It was troublesome, annoying, unprofitable. Slaves of different races—Indian, white and negro—confused the social order, and it was best to get rid of them. But it was not as a moral question, but as an economical one, that it was dealt with.

      So when the Constitution of the United States and the Union by, through and under it were framed, formed and organized, it was silent on the subject of slavery by name, but provided for its protection by requiring that persons held to service, escaping from one State to another, should be delivered and returned to their masters on demand. Without this provision no constitution could have been adopted and no union formed

      But the cotton-gin was invented, by which the cultivation of cotton became extremely profitable and slaves became valuable property. There was a great movement of capital and population to the cotton country, and the new States rapidly grew up and demanded admission into the Union. By the gradual abolition of slavery north of the Chesapeake the free States had been approaching control of the Senate of the United States, until the cotton-gin reversed the order, and it seemed as if the slave States would secure permanent control of the Union.

      Then began an agitation in the North, superficially moral and religious, but really and substantially political; professedly to do away with the great crime of slavery, in fact to check and destroy the aggrandizement of the Southern power. The first clear issue between the forces was on the application of Missouri to be admitted as a State of the Union. Missouri was a slave State and her admission would destroy the equilibrium between the two systems in the Senate of the United States. So Missouri was kept out until a free State could be hitched to her and thus the balance of power preserved. This was in 1821. In divers ways the struggle between the powers exhibited itself. Congress for years had levied duties on imports, whereby Northern manufacturers were encouraged and protected. Northern manufacturers were enriched and the rest of the country taxed for their benefit. In 1831 a tariff law was passed which was resisted by South Carolina, and the issue of arms was only averted by the retreat of the Federal government, by concession and by compromise.

      The king of England at the beginning of the seventeenth century claimed the proprietorship of the North American continent, which claim was disputed by the Spaniard in the South and the French in the North. New England was hemmed and bounded by New Spain, New France, and the ambition and the courage and enterprise of England were roused to the conquest of the new world. The spirit that had shattered the Grand Armada and won for commerce the freedom of the seas, was directed to new countries and new States to be founded in North America, where the institutions, the habits, the sentiment and the society of their ancestors were to be transplanted, cultivated and developed, as they had been a thousand years before from the forests of Germany to the shores of Britain. The leading nobility and gentry, sailors, soldiers, and merchants of England were aroused to this great enterprise. They formed the Virginia company and received a grant from the king of that part of North America unoccupied by French or Spaniards. The enterprise of settlement, transportation and support of colonies proved too much for the company, and its grant was taken away with its charter, and the crown resumed its rights. Then grants were made to individual proprietors. Noblemen and gentlemen about the court secured these great favors, which they hoped would be the foundation of fortune to their posterity, just as the grants of the Norman conqueror had founded great houses and families which had controlled England for six centuries. Among them was Sir George Calvert, a Yorkshire knight of moderate fortune, but of an old family, whose ancestors had filled important offices in the Low Countries under the kings of СКАЧАТЬ