From the 18 June 1902 issue of The New York Times.
THE VERDICT OF HISTORY ON SECESSION.
Good matter of controversy was provided in abundance yesterday in CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS'S oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of the University of Chicago. "Shall CROMWELL Have a Statue?" is the title chosen by Mr. ADAMS for his address; shall ROBERT E. LEE have a statue? is the question he discusses. He answer with conviction in the affirmative. "The bronze effigy of ROBERT E. LEE, mounted on his charger and with the insignia of his Confederate rank, will from its pedestal in the Nation's capital look across the Potomac at his old home at Arlington even as that of CROMWELL dominates the yard of Westminster upon which his skull once looked down."
CROMWELL, Mr. ADAMS recalls, died in 1658 in that palace of Whitehall from whose window he had sent CHARLES I. forth to execution. First buried in Westminster Abbey, the body of the Lord Protector was two years later exhumed by vote of the Convention Parliament and hanged at Tyburn, where the trunk was buried under the gallows, while the head was set on a pole above Westminster Hall. More than two hundred years later the verdict of 1661 was reversed, and "to-day the bronze effigy of OLVER CROMWELL, massive in size, rugged in feature, characteristic attitude, stands defiantly in the yard of that Westminster Hall from a pole on the top of which twelvescore years ago the flesh crumbled from its skull."
From this dramatic reversal of opinions once deemed settled and immutable Mr. ADAMS argues a like reversal of the accepted verdict upon LEE and his cause. CROMWELL was a traitor to his King, LEE to his Government. Within a few months of LEE'S death CHARLES SUMNER, describing him as one who stood high in the catalogue of those who have imbrued their hands in their country's blood, handed him over "to the avenging pen of history." Mr. ADAMS attempts his rescue. We condone and applaud the rebellion and the treason of WASHINGTON, of CROMWELL, of HAMPDEN, and of WILLIAM of Orange. We approve the acts of all reels but our own. Secession may have been a dreadful mistake, but it was honestly committed by men who sincerely believed that the Union was a compact dissoluble for cause by the States that had entered into it. Mr. ADAMS rightly characterizes all the arguments about State rights and secession, however, as quite beside the point. The appeal of the South was not to constitutional right, but to the inalienable right of revolution, to the sword. Virginia, at first refusing to secede, was swept along with the other seceding States when the first blow was struck at Sumter. LEE had opposed secession. He held a commission in the United States Army. But he was first of all a Virginian. He could not raise his hand against his relatives, his children, his home, and followed his State into rebellion. Only a few days after LINCOLN had tendered him the command of the Union Army he became the chief of the Confederate forces. With the great historic example of his grandfather present to his mind, that sturdy JOHN QUINCY ADAMS who in the days of trial which led to the war of 1812 was loyal to his Government when Massachusetts went to the very verge of disloyalty, Mr. ADAMS frankly says that he should not have made LEE'S choice. "I would have gone with the Union, and against Massachusetts."
Then, as to the broad quetion of right and wrong involved in the act of secession, Mr. ADAMS cites statements of motives that have sometimes served the purpose of Southern writers and orators. It was not intended to break up the Union, but to perpetuate it. They looked for the accession of the great bulk of Northern States to the Confederacy. "Acting on sufficient grounds," says Mr. ADAMS, "of which those acting were the sole judge, proceeding in a way indisputably legal and regular, it was proposed to reconstruct the Union in the light of experience and on a new and, as they considered, an improved basis without New England. This cannot properly be termed a conspiracy. It was a legitimate policy based on certain assumed data legal, moral, and economical." Of course Mr. ADAMS asks that the necessary premises of fact and law be conceded. In this way he builds up an academic conception of the rebellion as a phase of American history of which future generations, purged of all curren tpassion, may take so calm and lofty a view that the country will come to the point of erecting in Washington a bronze statue to the noblest man and most formidable rebel of them all, ROBERT E. LEE.
We cannot accept Mr. ADAMS'S reaoning, and we reject his conclusion altogether. His parallel between CROMWELL and LEE is purely literary, without a particle of historical sanction and devoid of moral resemblance. The foundation fact is that CROMWELL turned traitor to cure intolerable evils from which his country was suffering; to save it, not to split and destroy it. The treason of the Southern rebels in which LEE became a reluctant accomplice was entered into to defend and establish the right of secession and of slavery, twin curses to the country which could never be safe from destruction until they were destroyed. JOHN MORLEY says of OLVIER CROMWELL that his revolution was the end of the mediaeval rather than the beginning of the modern era. To end the mediaeval era was an immense benefit for England, preparing the way for the real revolution of 1688, but LEE fought in a cause which was the very essence of reaction, intended to perpetuate as a right the ancient wrong of slavery, at which even the fathers of the Republic at the time of its foundation had begun to blush. He and his associates fought to split the Union, and the success of their cause would have yielded at the very best two Nations doomed to be forever second-rate and endangered by mutual hate and jealousy. That commercial supremacy which we have won would have been made unattainable, our National destinies would have run in minor channels, and every American would have been the humbler and the meaner for what they had done.
Twenty-three years ago, upon the 22d of February, 1879, The New York World publishede at the head of its editorial page of that day this paragraph: "WASHINGTON was once a rebel brigadier." Upon the following day, Feb. 23, THE TIMES published an editorial article which we may now permit ourselves to say was from the pen of Mr. RICHARD GRANT WHITE. In considering the historical difference between WASHINGTON and the brigadiers of the rebellion Mr. WHITE wrote:
He fought against the rule of a Government in which he and his countrymen had no voice; they fought against a Government in which they had more than their just proportion of representation, and which they had controlled almost ever since it was established. He fought for principles, and upon a policy which brought about the Union of these States and the formation of the great Republic which is now one of the great powers of the world and one of the beneficent agencies of civilization and human progress; they fought to break up that Union, to destroy that Republic, and to establish a society and a Government based upon an institution accursed of GOD and man.
On that principle, on those historical distinctions, we can safely leave the case of LEE and his statue to be judged by succeeding generations, however remote.