[From The Atlanta Journal, July 3, 1902.]

STEPHENS VS. ROOSEVELT.

WAS THE SOUTHERN CAUSE THE CAUSE OF ANARCHY, AS CHARGED BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT ?

How Alexander H. Stephens Answered the Charge and Predicted Imperialism as the Ultimate Result of the War Between the States.

Recent utterances by the President of the United States coupling the cause of the Confederate States with anarchy call to mind a discussion years ago between Alexander H. Stephens and some Northern gentlemen who were visiting him at his home, Liberty Hall, in Crawfordville.

Making speeches like some of those lately made by Mr. Roosevelt may be his way of "wiping out the last vestige of sectionalism." It was not William McKinley's way. "The last vestige," etc., has been "wiped out," and "buried" ever so many times, but it is always resurrected and wiped in again when the exigencies of the Republican party or of Republican politicians seem to require it. It will be "wiped out" again when the country becomes involved in another foreign war and soldiers are again wanted from the South. It will be carefully concealed from view then

and will remain so while the war lasts and the soldiers are wanted. There wasn't a trace of it anywhere in sight four years ago, when Confederate old Joe Wheeler was fighting Spaniards and saving the American army from disastrous retreat in Cuba, when Micah Jenkins was illustrating South Carolina there and showing that he was the worthy son of a heroic Confederate sire, when Worth Bagley, of North Carolina (the first American officer killed in the SpanishAmerican war), gave up his young life there; when Tom Brumby, of Georgia, was by Dewey's side at Manila, and Hobson, of Alabama, was daring death in Santiago bay. Nothing was too good to say of the South then, for war was on and her sons were wanted on the firing line. And they were there. The sectional hue and cry and the bloody shirt were relieved from duty and sectionalism "buried" then.

But now all is changed. Grim-visaged war has smoothed his wrinkled front and hushed his stern alarums, the piping time of peace has come, and the President of the United States, who whilom mounted the barbed steed to fright the souls of fearful adversaries, now leaps nimbly into the political arena, snatches the lately buried corpse from the grave to which (as we were told) it had been consigned forever, hugs it in his arms and warms it into strenuous. life again. For partisan purposes he fiercely fans the paling ashes and would stir the slumbering fires of

sectionalism into lurid flame once more. Ah, no, that was not William McKinley's way.

No longer need for them in the battle's van, so now, according to this president, Wheeler was an anarchist; and Bagley, Brumby, Jenkins and Hobson, sons of anarchists, for their fathers were Confederates and fought, like Wheeler, for "anarchy" in 1861. According to Theodore Roosevelt, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, Johnston, Beauregard, Hampton, and all their glorious company, were anarchists, while Jefferson Davis was the arch-anarchist of them all, and an infamous traitor-a Benedict Arnold-besides. Shades of the Mighty Dead! If this planet were still graced by your majestic presence what a pygmy in that presence would seem this ranting Rough Rider, drest by doleful chance in a little brief authority! With what ineffable derision would you regard the fantastic tricks he plays and the wild and whirling words he speaks!

The assertion that anarchy would have ensued from the success of the Southern cause in 1861-65 is common among Northern speakers and writers, most of whom, as well as the great mass of the Northern people are ill-informed about the Confederate States, as well as lamentably ignorant about American history generally. The idea that such would be the consequence of the triumph of that cause was industriously and artfully propagated by Northern political leaders with purposes of their own that could be served best by instilling it, as well as many others equally

misleading, into the minds of the multitude. The truth is, it was only by fooling and misleading the Northern people that the Northern politicians succeeded in bringing on the war between the North and South. Greg, the English author, recognized this truth, and in his history of the United States says: "The South was forced and the North tricked into war." Nearly all wars are brought on through the deceiving of the people by ambitious rulers and selfseeking politicians.

There was a time when there prevailed in the South what Mr. Lecky, the English historian, truly says was "a hideous orgie of anarchy, violence, unrestrained corruption, undisguised, ostentatious, insulting robbery, such as the world had scarcely ever seen." That was the decade immediately following 1865; but the North was the creator and promoter-its leading statesmen were the high priests-of that ten years' anarchistic orgy. It was the result of the success of the Northern-not the Southern-cause.

The visitors at Liberty Hall on the occasion to which I have referred were acquaintances and friends of Mr. Stephens in ante-bellum days, though not of like political faith with him, and that being their first meeting since those days, they were exchanging views, in a free and friendly way, about the war between the States, its causes, its character, its conduct and its results. There was, naturally, much difference of opinion between them, and there was unreserved but perfectly courteous and respectful

expression of that difference and of the reasons for it, wherever it existed. A discussion of that character under such circumstances was of course very interesting and instructive to one who had ears to hear.

As the Northerners viewed the matter the responsibility for the war rested on the South, for resisting Mr. Lincoln's acts "to maintain the government, which they termed "resisting the execution of the laws." Mr. Stephens held that the resistance was caused by the unconstitutional character of the acts, that the war was but a consequence of the unconstitutional measures adopted by Mr. Lincoln to maintain a government over the people and States of the South against their interests and against their consent; that there would have been no war, with its scenes of slaughter and carnage, its devastations and conflagrations and desolations, but for those acts on the part of Mr. Lincoln, as President of the United States-acts for which no warrant was to be found in the Constitution and laws of the country.1

To this, one of the party, a gentleman from Massachusetts, who had the Roosevelt idea, replied that he admitted that if Mr. Lincoln had not done any of the things to which Mr. Stephens had referred there

1. George Grote, the English historian-a republican in principle and strongly opposed to slavery-is quoted by his biographer (who was his wife) as follows: "He once said in conversing with myself, in 1867, about the United States, I have outlived my faith in the efficacy of republican government regarded as a check upon the vulgar passions in a nation, and I recognize the fact that supreme power lodged in their hands may be exercised quite as mischievously as by a despotic ruler like the first Napoleon. The conduct of the Northern States in the late conflict with the Southern States has led me to this conclusion, though it costs me much to avow it, even to myself." "-"Personal Life of George Grote," p. 314.