Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/862

 848 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

In the second place, we have stopped reading the history of the "irrepressible conflict" with the eyes of the men who were forcing or waging it. The Websterian interpretation of our national career was a magnificent theory to fight on, but it was one of the most fallacious specimens of special pleading that ever smuggled themselves into the service of a good cause. The fact that anyone competent to form historical judgments can read the original records of the period from 1775 to 1789 and retain any respect for the historical fictions resorted to for bases of operations against the doctrine of state sovereignty, remains a paradox in spite of common knowledge that sentiment is usually too much for reason. The most dispassionate statement possible of the situation in 1861 is something like this: The South contended for a constitutionality that was obsolete, obstruct- ive, immoral, and impossible. The North contended for an unconsti- tutionally that was revolutionary, progressive, expedient, and timely. The South wanted prohibition of protective tariffs, security of its slave property, equal right to migrate with property, slaves of course included, into all territories of the United States, and guarantee of the service at need of northern officials and citizens as slave-catchers. As a matter of legal archaeology these claims, the first possibly excepted, were hardly less clear than every American's legal right to change his residence or occupation. There is no valid historical sanction for belief that the constitution would have been ratified at all, if it had not been understood to contain adequate insurance of the interests which made these demands. As a mere matter of traditional legality the men of the South were as distinctly within their rights as the citizens of Nevada would be today if they should take up arms against being deprived of a state's constitutional representation in the Senate. The South fought for what had been, and its version of what had been was essentially correct. The North fought for what ought to be, and its prevision of what ought to be was wise. To people who were not old enough during the war to understand it as a clash of theories it seems futile and silly to persist in the northern interpretation of eighteenth- century history. On the other hand, the better we understand the magnanimity of southern character, the harder the task of reconciling it with uncompromising insistence upon perpetuation of slavery. Men who were born and bred on slave soil are probably as unfit to realize the distorting influence of the whole miserable business upon the social perspective of the South as the free-soil men have been to recognize the finest traits in the character of slave-holders. Even at