Vienna,
June 9, 1862.
My Dearest Mother:
I am pretty busy now with my “History,” and work on regularly enough, but of
course I am disturbed by perpetual thoughts about our own country. I am
convinced, however, that it is a mistake in us all to have been expecting a
premature result. It is not a war; it is not exactly a revolution; it is the
sanguinary development of great political and social problems, which it was the
will of the Great Ruler of the Universe should be reserved as the work of the
generation now on the stage and their immediate successors. The more I reflect
upon this Civil War, and try to regard it as a series of historical phenomena,
disengaging myself for the moment from all personal feelings or interests, the
more I am convinced that the conflict is the result of antagonisms the violent
collision of which could no longer be deferred, and that its duration must
necessarily be longer than most of us anticipated. In truth, it is almost
always idle to measure a sequence of great historical events by the mere lapse
of time, which does very well to mark the ordinary succession of commonplace
human affairs. The worst of it is, so far as we are all individually concerned,
that men are short-lived, while man is immortal even on the earth, for aught
that we know to the contrary. It will take half a century, perhaps, before the
necessary conclusion to the great strife in which we are all individually
concerned has been reached, and there are few of us now living destined to see
the vast result. But it is of little consequence, I suppose, to the Supreme
Disposer whether Brown, Jones, and Robinson understand now or are likely to
live long enough to learn what he means by the general scheme according to
which he governs the universe in which we play for a time our little parts. If
we do our best to find out, try to conform ourselves to the inevitable, and
walk as straight as we can by such light as we honestly can get for ourselves,
even though it be but a tallow candle, we shall escape tumbling over our noses
more than half a dozen times daily.
I look at the mass of the United States, and it seems
impossible for me to imagine for physical and geographical and ethnographical
reasons that its territory can be permanently cut up into two or more
independent governments. A thousand years ago this happened to Europe, and the
result was the parceling out of two or three hundred millions of human
creatures into fifty or five hundred (it matters not how many) different
nations, who thus came to have different languages, religions, manners,
customs, and histories. As I am not writing a historical lecture, and as I am a
wonderful son who can always astonish his mother with his wisdom, it will be
sufficient for my present audience to say that not one of the causes which ten
centuries ago disintegrated and decomposed the European world, with a territory
about the size of the United States, and with essentially the same population,
is present at this moment in America. The tendency of the age everywhere, and
the strongest instinct of the American people, is to consolidation,
unification. It is the tendency of all the great scientific discoveries and
improvements which make the age of utilitarianism at which we have arrived. I
do not believe the American people (of course I mean a large majority) will
ever make such asses of themselves as to go to work in the middle of the
nineteenth century and establish a Chinese wall of custom-houses and forts
across the widest part of the American continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific,
and keep an army of 300,000 men perpetually on foot, with a navy of
corresponding proportion, in order to watch the nation on the south side of the
said Chinese wall, and fight it every half-dozen years or so, together with its
European allies. The present war, sanguinary and expensive as it is, even if it
lasts ten years longer, is cheaper both in blood and in money than the adoption
of such a system; and I am so much of a democrat (far more now that I ever was
in my life) as to feel confident that the great mass of the people will
instinctively perceive that truth, and act in accordance with it. Therefore I
have no fear that it will ever acknowledge a rival sovereignty to its own. The
Union I do not believe can be severed. Therefore I believe the war must go on
until this great popular force has beaten down and utterly annihilated the
other force which has arranged itself in plump opposition to it. The world
moves by forces.
The popular force, where land is half a dollar an acre and
limitless in supply, for a century to come must prove irresistible. How long
the conflict will last I know not, but slavery must go down and free labor
prevail at last; but those of us whose blood is flowing or whose hearts are
aching (like Mrs. W. D 's, for instance, mother of heroes) may find it small
consolation that the United States of 1900 will be a greater and happier power
than ever existed in the world, thanks to the sacrifices of this generation.
But we have only to accept the action of great moral and political forces even
as we must instinctively those of physical nature. There, you see what I am
reduced to in the utter lack of topics. Instead of writing a letter I preach a
sermon. We are going on very quietly. There is nothing doing now. Vienna has
decanted itself into the country, and we are left like “lees for the vault to
brag of.” The summer, after much preliminary sulking and blustering, seems
willing to begin, and our garden is a great resource. There is small prospect
of a war in Europe. The poor Poles will be put down at last. What is called
moral influence will be bestowed upon them by England and France as generously
as the same commodity has been bestowed upon our slaveholders, and it will do
about as much good. Fine words have small effect on Cossacks or parsnips.
Give our love to the governor and to all the family far and
near, and with a boundless quantity for yourself,
I am, my dearest mother,
Ever your most
affectionate son,
J. L. M.
SOURCE: George William Curtis, editor, The
Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley in Two Volumes, Library Edition,
Volume 2, p. 256-9
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